Local businesses urge guv to approve e-bikes
BY VINCENT BARONE
Delivery workers and advocates
are urging Gov. Andrew Cuomo
to fi nally sign a bill legalizing
e-bikes and e-scooters before its
too late.
The bill would in part create a legal
three-class system for e-bikes operated
with throttle controls—bikes already
popular among low-income, immigrant
delivery workers in the city who
have faced targeted police crackdowns.
There was strong support for the legislation
when it passed six months ago,
but it has since languished.
If Cuomo fails to sign the bill by Dec.
31, it would have to be re-passed next
legislative session.
“Even now after the bill was passed
delivery workers still receive a lot of
tickets,” said De Quan Lu, president
of the Chinese Mutual Support Labor
Union, through a translator at a rally in
Downtown Brooklyn Friday. “They’re
still concerned,—they worry a lot on
their daily job. In the morning when
the start their work they worry about
tickets.”
Workers said the bikes have helped
ease what is a grueling job that sends
them biking tens of miles each day.
Advocates support the bikes as a safer
and more energy-effi cient alternative to
cars as well as an option to make cycling
De Quan Lu, president of the Chinese Mutual Support Labor Union,
speaks at a rally on Friday with Delivery workers and advocates to
urge Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign a bill legalizing e-bikes and e-scooters
on Friday, Dec. 6, 2019.
more accessible to a wider population
of New Yorkers.
“E-bikes make it a lot…easier for a
lot more people to be able to make that
PHOTO BY VINCENT BARONE
choice to commute by bike, to do their
everyday errands by bike,” said Patrick
McClellan, state policy director at the
New York League of Conservation Voters.
“So this is a very important justice
issue for delivery workers but it’s also a
very serious environmental issue.”
The governor in June mentioned
vague hangups involving safety regulation
and helmet use around the bicycles
and scooters. His offi ce Friday only said
that it is still wading through hundreds
of bills that were passed last session.
“There were more than 900 bills
that passed both houses at the end of
session and over 200 bills remain under
review by Counsel’s Offi ce and
the Division of the Budget,” said Jason
Conwall, spokesman for the governor.
“It is our responsibility to ensure that
the bills, as written, are responsible,
enforceable and accomplish their intended
purpose.”
Marco Conner, deputy director at
Transportation Alternatives, said a helmet
requirement would be “well-intentioned,
but misguided” in that it could
deter cycling and cripple Citi Bike’s
own pedal-assist e-bike fl eet.
“The current enforcement against
delivery workers causes hardship.
Their e-bikes are confi scated and they
are fi ned up to $1,000 per incident;
this is devastating and far out of proportion
for the alleged harm and risk
they cause.”
Last year, e-bikes caused .05% of all
reported traffi c injuries in the city, according
to an analysis from advocates.
LES gallery shows exhibit on death of a mall
BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Yearning to see Santa? Want to
avoid the crowds? Questions
about the North Pole? Santa
will answer them when he (re)appears
at the Front Room Gallery on Saturday,
Dec. 14.
He was there last Saturday sitting
amidst photos of the ruins of Wayne
Hills Mall, his former staging area
where he greeted delighted children
from 1998-2006.
Santa is a special guest at the exhibit
“Mallrat to Snapchat: The End of the
Third Place,” with images by Phillip
Buehler whose photos document the
death of Wayne Hills Mall in Wayne,
New Jersey.
Large photographs of derelict storefronts
and even larger ones of shattered,
plaster-fi lled interiors are the main element
of Buehler’s exhibit, which is part
photography and part cultural critic.
Part installation, a bin of vinyl LP’s of
music popular in 1973 when the mall
opened welcomes visitors to play their
selections on the vintage turntable.
Buehler has genuine nostalgia and
affection for “this very American economical
and sociological experiment.”
At the gallery last Saturday, Buehler,
Phillip Buehler at the Front Room Gallery.
wearing his Sam Goody tee shirt, posed
in front of his photo of the ruins of the
Sam Goody store, where he spent a lot
of money.
The exhibit’s subtitle: “End of the
Third Place,” a term coined by urban
sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s in 1989,
refers to places where people spend
time outside of home and work, hence
their third place. The American mall
was among many other public gathering
PHOTO BY TEQUILA MINSKY
spaces, essential to community and
public life.
To a packed reception, this exhibition
opened on Black Friday, a wink and nod
toward what the mall represented and
presumably where the suburban shopping
public may have been that day.
The years between 1970 and 2010
saw the burgeoning growth of shopping
malls in America. There were fi lms set
in malls. But most recently retail has
changed dramatically leading to the
“slow death of indoor shopping malls.”
Buehler’s photos of iconic hangouts
and teenage meeting places, so familiar,
are now ravaged and destroyed. The
photographer doesn’t see what he does
as “ruins porn,” a genre of documenting
beauty in decrepitude and debris. He is
hanging onto a sort of last respects, to
the spirit of what was.
This Bushwick-based photographer
has a number of other photography
projects documenting deterioration
and remnants of neglected architecture
constructed in the recent past, of places
that have or will disappear.
The installation includes some pages
from a 1973 local newspaper supplement—
the year the Wayne Hills Mall
opened. “It was a time just before the
Nixon impeachment hearings,” says
Buehler, recognizing the historical irony.
By 2006 so many of the mall’s stores
had closed or moved and the very last
ones left in 2014. By 2019, demolition
was underway.
Front Room Gallery’s very experienced
Santa —played by Dave Conley—
will be on site chatting with kids and
handing out candy canes at 48 Hester
St., from 1-4pm on Saturday.
4 December 12, 2019 Schneps Media