Janette Sadik-Kahn

Everybody else hates her.

Cindy Adams, the doyenne of New York Post columnists, calls her “the wacko nutso bike commissioner.” (This is especially nefarious since Sadik-Khan’s mother was herself a Post reporter.) A group in Brooklyn is suing her over the bike lane she put on Prospect Park West. She gets routinely booed at town hall meetings. City Hall people who have clashed with her call her “Chaka Khan,” and they definitely don’t mean the “I Feel For You” Chaka Khan, so you have to wonder if they really mean Genghis Khan. Mayor Bloomberg constantly gets buttonholed by people demanding an explanation as to why there’s so many friggin’ bike lanes everywhere and what’s he gonna do to control his transportation commissioner.

Why the heck do people hate bicycle lanes so much? I’ve been asking random people this question for a week, and you get the impression that a lot of folks who have never navigated a bike through the city consider the bike lanes elitist, hipsterish, and just fruity in general. The average man on the street gets especially annoyed by cycling gear, like pointy orange DayGlo helmets and purple thigh-enhancing spandex pants, as though the bike lane is some kind of Easter Parade for Tour de France wannabes named Esteban.

I think you have to be insane to ride one of those skinny-wheeled racing bikes on Manhattan’s streets, especially if you’re hunched down over handlebars set lower than your ankles, but people do it and if one of ’em got bird-dogged by a lead-foot Yemeni car-service terrorist, I would be the first to ride up and tap the guy’s side mirror and get him to back the frack off. But the new bike lanes make that unnecessary. We don’t have to go vigilante on these people anymore. If you put your big yellow ass in that bike lane, you’ve already got a major fine and a possible loss of your taxi-driver license.

So that’s not the real reason people don’t like the bicyclists. The real reason is that the guy on the bike is going faster than you. He doesn’t have to stop for anything. Some of the best bike lanes are right up against the curb and protected from auto traffic by a row of parked cars. This was an innovation dreamed up by Jan Gehl, the city of Copenhagen’s former master planner and now consultant to Janette Sadik-Khan.

Which only reinforces my opinion that she’s a genius. When I was a 19-year-old college student, I used to bike 22 miles roundtrip from Albertslund, Denmark, where I lived, to downtown Copenhagen, where the university was, without ever riding on a public street or—get this—even crossing a street with automobiles. In the greater Copenhagen area they have dedicated bike interstates. These roads are about 15 feet wide and they go under and over the automobile roads. So Janette Sadik-Khan went and found the guy that designed that system, gave him a consulting deal, and now they’re finding all these new ways to separate cars from bicycles.

Result: Bicycle ridership has doubled in four years, and pedestrian deaths are lower than at any period in a century.

I’m not saying that Janette Sadik-Khan is not a hipster. She’s also the person who closed down five blocks in Times Square and put out lawn chairs. She commissioned nine bike racks that were designed by—OK, this is embarrassing—David Byrne. She’s a big fan of those giant rocks that look like granite Wonderbras; they’re called bollards, and they block off streets with them and use them for anti-terrorism security around important buildings. She likes to close streets around the Broadway plazas (Madison Square, Herald Square) and put out epoxy gravel and metal chairs like we all live in the friggin’ Jardin des Tuileries.

So OK, yeah, she’s a yuppie and a hipster. I still love her. She’s not afraid to mess with the delivery-truck drivers, who are second only to cabbies as the bicyclist’s natural enemies. She understands the simple principle that the average bike weighs 20 pounds and the average car weighs four THOUSAND pounds. That’s 4,000 pounds of metal that mangles the bicyclist at the same time it’s protecting the automobile driver. So I don’t care if that bicycle guy is doing headstands on his seat and bouncing his bike off the hood of your car—you’re still flat wrong if you get even remotely aggressive toward him while safely ensconced in your armored attack vehicle.

In the old days, if you messed with us and we had to chase you down, we would have just broken off your antenna. But now Janette is gonna get all Chaka Khan on your ass, and she’s bringing the Talking Heads.