What does Green(e) Street mean?

I was just up in the city of New Amsterdam with a couple of ne’er-do-wells of mutual acquaintance. We were staying on a street that featured an interesting configuration of pavement designs.

2008_11_grandagain

That’s Grand Street. The arrows denote the bike lanes and the tourist buses that are now impaired from criss-crossing SoHo because of said bike lanes. Also offended: trucks of all kinds. It’s a one-way, with a line of parking separating the bike lanes from traffic – an excellent safety and alt transportation feature that snakes through SoHo, Chinatown and Little Italy and has upset all kinds of other users. Bloomberg wanted 1,800 miles of bike lanes in the city and this is what that kind of conflict thinking looks like. Definitely still a work in progress.

Sharing the road is difficult, but not impossible, especially if the number of combustion-engine vehicles remains the same. Taking some number of C-E vehicles off the road: also very difficult.