CUNY Rising #CUNYrising #CUNYstudents #CUNYneedsaraise

In recent weeks, students and faculty all over the city university have been organizing, holding conversations, talking about budgets, lobbying in Albany, testifying, meeting, and hitting the streets to speak up for education for everyone in this dynamic city.

Hanging with my old comrade Dr Hayduk.

Photo and Caption by Minister Erik R. McGregor

City University of New York workers and students rallied outside Governor Andrew Cuomo's offices in New York City protesting the funding cuts and demanding better wages and fair tuition — with Benjamin Heim Shepard and Ron Hayduk at 366 3rd Avenue, New York. Office Of Gov Cuomo.

Yesterday, we hit the streets with supporters from DC37 and NY Communities for Change, the Professional Staff Congress, and many others for the first action of CUNY Rising.

Gov. Cuomo has released plans to cut state funding to the City University of New York by $485 million, despite a $1 billion state budget surplus.

Since Gov. Cuomo took office, tuition has increased by 38 percent at four-year colleges and by 45 percent at two-year campuses. Since 2008, the state has reduced its investment in full-time-equivalent students by 17 percent in four-year colleges. Currently, Gov. Cuomo backs legislation that would increase tuition at four-year colleges by $1,500 over the next five years.

At the same time, CUNY faculty and staff have been working without a contract or salary increases for over six years.

After a rousing chapter meeting attended by Barbara Bowen, we all headed out to the rally.  Faculty and students from the SGA, Human Services, and English joined us. 

We began at Gov. Cuomo’s Manhattan office (633 Third Ave., between 40th and 41st streets) at 5 p.m.,  marching to the Community Church of New York (40 E. 35th St.) to hear about the crisis at CUNY and plan next steps.

Everyone was there tell Gov. Cuomo: CUNY students deserve a first-rate college education.... CUNY faculty and staff deserve a fair raise, invest in a strong CUNY system

"No contract no way!" everyone chanted. 

"Tax the rich, not the poor, stop the war on CUNY," Barbara Bowen screamed.

"Strike, Strike, Strike! Stop the Taylor Laws!"

"Teachers, Workers, Students!  Shut the City Down!" the crowd chanted, accompanied by a marching band. 

The spring night felt alive with promise for this pulsing city.

After the rally, Paul Krugman would write: 

"...Which brings me to Governor Cuomo’s sudden proposal, seemingly out the blue, to cut half a billion dollars in state funding for CUNY and shift the burden to the city.
Full disclosure: I am now a CUNY employee. But that’s not the reason I think this would be a terrible idea. The point is, instead, that CUNY as an institution is doing such obvious good, especially in an era of growing inequality and hardening class lines, that it’s hard to understand why anyone who isn’t the hardest of hard-line conservatives would want to undermine it."

Janette Sadik-Khan: If the Bike Wars are over how come there are so many ‪#‎copsinbikelanes?

Janette Sadik-Khan contends that the bike wars are over and cyclists have won. We applaud the  miles of bike lanes and pedestrian plazas laid out during her term as Commissioner of the Department of Transportation. But the second part of the job, the education, enforcement and implementation has yet to be addressed. There are just too many ‪#‎copsinbikelanes.

This is the experience for most cyclists.  Cars parked in their bike lanes forcing them back out into traffic.

We are two years into Vision Zero and more than 250 people are killed a year in traffic crashes.

That's far too many.

Bottom Right of Way Allison Lao memorial.

Top Families for Safer Streets

The city vision zero plan calls for increased enforcement of traffic laws.  Yet, the police, those entrusted with carrying out with implementing the laws, continue to thwart the spirit of this initiative.   Every time a policeman ignores a car parked in a bike lane, they make a choice and display their contempt for a vision of sustainable urbanism.  And sadly, JSK failed to support efforts to educate drivers or police about bike lanes. These are not texting lanes, these are spaces where cyclists are supposed to flow, instead of zigging away from double parked cars, into traffic or between turning cars.

Downtown Brooklyn, for example, is a mess.  Ride down Jay Street and you’ll find two rows of cars parked and double parked on either side of the street, impeding ambulances, cyclists, and pedestrians moving through the streets. In 2015, the police in Brooklyn went as far as to paint parking numbers over the bike lanes for their own parking spaces on Schermerhorn  Street. 

Tickets Public Space Party posted for cars in bike lanes on Schermerhorn  Street

And the problem does not just end in Brooklyn. 

Ride over the Queensborough Bridge and try to ride south and you can just about die.

Ride along the bike lane from Delancey to Houston Streets and you see if filled with double parked cars.

Ride on the bike lane along Second Avenue by the Midtown Tunnel.  And you find yourself competing with cars turning through it, making the lane obsolete.

Bike lanes are not self-regulating spaces.  They need assistance from the city and those charged with enforcing these spaces.

If New York is to be a model of sustainable urbanism, then it needs to set the lead in enforcement, making bike lanes viable models of public space, unimpinged by private cars blocking them. To do so, police must become more part of the communities they serve, not outsiders. More police on bikes would help. More community policing in which police help solve problems instead of criminalizing the use of public space.  Put down your guns police and join the police you are called to serve.

For the bike wars to be over, those in cars must learn to share the road with pedestrians, cyclists, those in skate boards, and those elders crossing slowly.

Sadly, today’s duel between Robert Moses’ vision of suburban urbanism and Jane Jacobs’ eyes on the streets see those in cars driving as if they own the roads.  In the battle between suburban   vs sustainable urbanism, cyclists are making progress.  But fossil fuel using, climate change inducing car culture looms large.  And the police encourage this. For the bike war to be won, Moses’ vision of cities as facilitators of efficient movement of automobiles must be dispelled with once and for all.

When he saw my post Janette Sadik-Khan’s contention that cyclists had won the bike wars, my  friend Keegan Stephan posted the police “Mission Accomplished” post of Bush during the Iraq War.

My friend Matthew Arnold chimed in: "Gotta love JSK's "You lose, loser haters" swagger here." And I agree.  I have always supported her.

As my friend Jessica Rechtschaffer followed, “JSK is a hero but the war against cars is far from over.”

Finally my friend Jym Dyer aptly noted: "Proper enforcement would be good, especially some that assists NYC's carfree majority rather than the other way around, but it shouldn't be the focus.

Real Vision Zero, the kind that's been a success in Sweden, doesn't use enforcement at all, it's mostly infrastructure and some education. In the U.S. we have watered the concept down and shoehorned it into "the three Es" -- environment (infrastructure), education, and enforcement. This list is supposedly in order of importance, but so far we're doing it backwards.

So we get the NYPD beating octogenarians at a jaywalking sting and calling it Vision Zero. We get another pretense for police to harass drivers of color, and Vision Zero gets blamed.

JSK's focus on infrastructure is a good one. If we keep going in that direction, it will obviate much of the role of enforcement, and all the wrong priorities that the NYPD and others bring with that role."

Back in 2000, my group reclaim the streets put up signs around New York declaring: “Reclaim the Streets for a World without Cars!”  Maybe its time to pull those signs out again. For the bike wars to be won, people need to leave their cars behind. It was part of a larger international movement that has changed cities around the world.  We changed cities, without changing the hearts or

 minds of enough drivers.