Transportation Alternatives Denounces Tomorrow's Naked Bedford Bike Ride
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The spectacle is meant to draw attention to the bikers' plight in Williamsburg, where the city scrubbed the Bedford Avenue bike lake, leading to a guerrilla hipster repainting, arrests, and fun press coverage. "New Bedford bike protest will keep cops abreast," har-de-hars the Brooklyn Paper.
But Transportation Alternatives, the bike and pedestrian advocate group, is not laughing, and not supportive.
"A bike lane on Bedford Avenue is about transportation and road safety. Rhetoric or acts that pit neighbors against one another are not just irrelevant to this discussion, they are flat-out offensive," reads the statement they sent us today.
"A bike ride of people in provocative undress," the statement continues, "doesn't make Bedford any safer, and undermines efforts to bring north Brooklynites together to solve this problem."
The nudity is thought a challenge, or perhaps just a twit, directed at the Hasidic community, which has problems with scantily clad bikers offending their godly sight.
TransAlt's statement is expected to neither decrease nor increase interest in, nor the efficacy of, Saturday's naked outrage, but it does enhance TransAlt's traditional position as grownups looking to be serious about biker safety, so good for them. NBC says the protesters "believe it's important to stand up -- and they're calling all cyclists to do the same." They also point out that the bike lane "cost $11,000 to install and $15,000 to tear up." Maybe the cops should have just looked away when the guerrillas repainted it; the city can't possibly match their economy, and we expect the lanes will eventually return.
It's hard to find details on the protest, even from major media, but if you turn on the internet tomorrow morning you'll probably find a start time. Adding to the fun: the possibility of snow.
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