Friday, August 28, 2015

William F. Buckley's Aboveground Bike Lane Proposal

Conservative pundit and National Review founder and editor William F. Buckley, Jr. unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York City in 1965. Kevin M. Schultz in his riveting book, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties (W.W. Norton, 2015), writes that Buckley "proposed cutting down traffic by building a huge aerial bike lane twenty feet above the ground and twenty feet wide, above Second Avenue from First Street all the way to One Hundred Twenty-Fifth. All this biking would cut down traffic and get New Yorkers healthy."

Today there are bike lanes throughout the five boroughs as well as bike rentals made available via CitiBikes. So Buckley was about fifty years ahead of his time. The proposed aerial bike lane on Second Avenue, however, seems a bit preposterous.

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