NYC’s War On Cars Speeds Up

Thanks to a last-minute injunction issued Friday, 14th Street won’t be closed to normal crosstown traffic Monday.

But the fix is in: Soon enough, one of the city’s major crosstown arteries will be shut down as part of the progressive war on cars.

Officially, the 14th Street closure is part of a pilot plan aimed at boosting bus speeds between Third and Ninth avenues from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Yet officials barely conceal the real motive: making the cars go away.

We’ve seen “incredible competition for the streets,” says Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner, and “dedicated bus lanes are among the best ways to use that space as efficiently as possible.”

Maybe, but that doesn’t justify forcing drivers not in a bus lane to turn off within a block.

Time and again, Trottenberg and the other car-haters pretend that the enemy is “congestion,” even as they insist that all the turf taken by pedestrian plazas, dedicated bicycle lanes, CitiBike installations and so on somehow don’t boost congestion.

As will the 14th Street plan, notes lawyer Arthur Schwartz, the point man for neighborhood opposition and resident of 12th Street who argues that the change “simply shuffles cars on to the side streets.”

For the record, everyone on the Post-Editorial Board takes mass transit to work, as do most of our colleagues. But we can still recognize the ideological war on motorists for what it is.

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