Damned if you walk, damned if you don’t!
City lawmakers and street safety advocates assailed Mayor Bill de Blasio for pulling the plug on his small-bore street closure program because of low usage — after he spent days dragging his feet on the initiative, complaining about possible crowds.
City Hall on Monday axed the program — which closed a few blocks along a single street in four of the boroughs — saying that it was a waste of the city’s depleted reserve of badly-needed cops.
“The brave men and women of the NYPD never back away from a challenge when the safety of New Yorkers is at stake,” said City Hall spokeswoman Jane Meyer in a statement. “We are suspending this pilot because we must protect them like they are protecting us, and not enough New Yorkers are utilizing this program to justify its continuation at this point in time.”
The city admitted they had more than 80 police officers policing fewer than 30 blocks — an average of 3 cops per intersection.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Council Speaker Corey Johnson called for the street closures to make more space for pedestrians and bikers in this age of social distancing — as traffic plunged around the city.
De Blasio, however, insisted on heavy police enforcement as a condition for the pilot, which he reluctantly announced after days of pressure from advocates and elected officials who wanted to open up miles of streets.
The NPYD has struggled to maintain full force during the pandemic. As of Saturday, 18 percent of uniformed officers — around 6,700 total — were out sick due to either viral symptoms or exposure to the virus.
“As the weather gets nicer it is critically important that we don’t force New Yorkers to jam themselves into overcrowded parks and too narrow sidewalks. We need to open more streets to pedestrians ASAP,” Johnson tweeted after City Hall axed the program.
One top street safety group, Transit Alternatives, which pushed for the street closures, blasted de Blasio’s insistence they be policed like a parade route.
“They need to design the streets with temporary design measures so they are more self-reinforcing. That can be with barricades, it can be with temporary street furniture like large planters,” said the group’s spokesman, Marco Conner DiAquoi.
“Obviously enforcement or monitoring is needed, but that doesn’t have to be the high-level personnel that they’ve been using. They don’t need armed police officers doing that.”