Columbus Ave Between 90th St and 92nd St

    

Venturing northward, watching as the Upper West Side very slowly transitions from Juilliard classrooms and Lincoln Center halls to community centers and housing projects, it's actually easy to lose track of just how far north you are. (Speaking of community centers – is there are rule that they all have to be really run-down and missing letters in their signage? It's a nearly universal truth that all community centers are labeled as "C  m  unity   Cen  ers" thanks either to neglect, vandalism or both.) Unlike other neighborhoods around Manhattan, the UWS is far more subtle in its variations. Perhaps this is why there aren't more sub-neighborhoods like those posses by the Upper East Side or downtown regions.

Columbus Avenue is the proud recipient of a recent lane reorganization which has created a protected bike route with a floating parking lane. The past few years has seen an explosion of bikeways, pedestrian plazas and crosswalk islands the likes of which this city has never experienced.

This continued marginalization of the automobile is very much the inverse of what Robert Moses was doing in the middle of the 20th Century. While he arguably ruined many sections of New York with his sweeping plans (Cross Bronx Expressway is a particularly brutal example), Moses saw the city as a car-centric town, pushing pedestrians out to Long Island and the borough's public parks. The results were mixed at best. While segregating people from cars by funneling folks in the city's green spaces wasn't necessarily radical, it did destroy the iconic downtown street life once enjoyed by kids and adults-alike decades earlier. However now we have the opposite problem. Traffic patterns which for decades have run without change now have to maneuver around arbitrarily reorganized lanes which, amongst other things, force delivery trucks to park in the middle of the street, or worse in the fancy new bike lanes. Politicians never seem so happy as when they're randomly changing something. Can't we have a few years of someone who just likes to keep the status quo?