Daniel Varghese

@drvarg01.bsky.social

244 Followers 203 Following

🧑🏾‍💻 Menswear, gear, and urban design writer and editor 🚲 Subscribe to LEG DAY, my newsletter about the pursuit of joy as a city cyclist (https://legday.substack.com/)

There are approximately 3 million parking spots in New York City that allow people to store their vehicles overnight for absolutely no cost. Add them up, and those spaces occupy around 11,000 acres of land, or 5.6% of the city’s total area. Mini-storage is a massive business in this space-starved city, but it’s completely free for people to store one type of private good. This begs the question of why we are charging people to use environmentally friendly buses and subways, thereby discouraging their use, while providing free car storage for polluting, traffic-inducing, pedestrian-harming vehicles, thereby encouraging their use.
ut the racial breakdown of that crackdown suggests that the push for safer space for pedestrians is being carried out in a disproportionate way: Black cyclists got 37.1 percent of the sidewalk-riding tickets, but Blacks comprise just 20 percent of the city population. Hispanic cyclists got 34.4 percent of the tickets, but they comprise 28.3 percent of the population. Meanwhile, white people, and to a lesser degree, Asian people, are getting tickets at a lower rate than their portion of the population: White cyclists got 10.1 percent of the tickets in the most-recent period, even though white people comprise 31 percent of the population. And Asian cyclists got 13.6 percent of the tickets even though they comprise 15.6 percent of the population.
Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Daniel Varghese on a three-tiled Google Meet window
"I imagine this bill would make me very popular with City workers who drive into work every day from Rockland, Nassau, and Suffolk," Restler told Hell Gate sarcastically. "Fortunately, they're not my constituents."
image of a green road bike from miele, with an italian flag decal and red grip tape on the bars