Media Watch

One of the enduring mysteries of the NYC transportation media landscape is how the Daily News opinion page can be so on-target with its transit pieces, and so far off the mark when the topic turns to bicycling.

Say what you will about yesterday's Corey Kilgannon piece extolling the "guilty pleasure" of driving on the Central Park loop, it's refreshing to see the New York Times veil of objectivity stripped away, revealing the naked windshield perspective beneath.

Well it finally happened. Steve "Quixote" Cuozzo has conceded that the Times Square pedestrian plazas, the project to which he has devoted two years of relentless tilting, are a hit.

Given enough time, the theory goes, a thousand monkeys banging away at a thousand typewriters will eventually compose the complete works of Shakespeare. But Marcia Kramer and the crack news writers at CBS2 only needed a couple of hours, maybe less, to come up with last night’s masterpiece about the extension of the First and Second Avenue bike lanes.

The Times called some attention to New York City's cycling gender gap this weekend with a feature titled "Women, Uneasy, Still Lag as Cyclists in New York City." Judging from Christine Haughney's write-up, the gender imbalance among NYC cyclists is immutable and impervious to policies that seek to shake up the status quo on the streets:

If you're looking for further evidence to support Jason Gay's "the bikes have won" theory -- that the anti-bike bile-fest of last winter was so much sound and fury signifying nothing more than the windshield perspectives of the city's intransigent political and media elites -- we present the latest, and perhaps lamest, salvo from the metro desk of the New York Times.

Here are a dozen questions pertaining to the crash that took the life of 16-year-old Stuyvesant H.S. student Aileen Chen as she rode her bicycle last Saturday a block from her home in Borough Park at around 6 p.m.

In its apparently boundless desire to see transportation innovation fail in New York City, the Times ran a remarkably shoddy and one-sided piece over the weekend on the city's developing bike-share plans. Perhaps having realized that successful bike-share systems are cropping up in too many cities to keep on referring to the same image of Parisian public bikes "hanging from tree limbs or floating in the Seine" (Washington, Denver, and Minneapolis have had almost no problems with theft and vandalism), the Times is sowing doubt in other ways.

Last night Marcia Kramer served up more of her unique brand of public service journalism, triumphantly reporting that the city will remove pedestrian safety measures designed to prevent seniors from getting killed and maimed in Borough Park traffic. Touring Fort Hamilton Parkway with Dov Hikind, the State Assembly rep who threatened last month to sue NYC DOT over the recently-installed pedestrian islands, Kramer reported that the city has agreed to remove what she called "the offending barricades." But it seems like in their zeal to run up the score against pedestrian safety improvements, Kramer and Hikind overstated the extent of the changes in store for the street.