Man, cyclists are getting it from all sides these days.
The Brooklyn Paper reported yesterday on an alleged scuffle between some in the Hasidic community and a Brooklyn cyclist:
A bus driver…trapped cyclist Christine Sandoval against a parked car near Flushing Avenue as she was commuting to work on April 15.
But the blowhard screamed at the cyclist, even kicking her bike in anger.
“The driver and another man grabbed my arm and masses of Hasidic people started to gather around,” said Sandoval. “I needed to flee. I was in a lot of danger.”
Three days later, her husband saw a cyclist get hit by a car on Bedford Avenue, and a day later, she saw another confrontation between Hasidic residents and cyclists.
This recent event, which sounds a lot worse than it probably was, combined with The Posts’ ongoing hatred of bike lanes, cops ticketing every cyclist who farts too loud, and everyone’s new-found freedom to call out all that self-righteous entitlement displayed by one out of two people on two wheels has lead to a rather pooh-pooh energetic field for our bicycling mates.
In typical NYC fashion, one of the most visible fronts of the battle over bike rights has been taking place not in the courts, but in the Hasidic neighborhood of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where last year the Hasidic community rallied to get a bike lane removed, siting the influx of scantily clad women taking advantage of said lanes, as reason to have them erased.
So far, it seems there is no silver bullet for this situation. Hasids have every right to determine the environment in which they live and have lived for so many years, while at the same time, city laws (rightfully so) allow women to dress more or less however they want, and since the streets are city property, the city-sanctioned “dress code,” or lack there of, applies.
That’s the cool-headed response. My knee-jerk response has a lot more to do with loving the self-negating display of self-obsessed privileged white fauxhemian hipsters who replicate every imperialist and colonialist agenda known to humankind whenever deciding to move to a new “undiscovered” neighborhood, pretending to be be poor, but really just too ashamed to call their parents to get a little of that early inheritance in order to live in Fort Green get pushed around by old-school New Yorkers.
Categories: Brooklyn, Judaism, MAJOR RELIGIONS