Why Do Some People Still Hate Citibike?
Citibike has been in operation for about a month now and, just like many people predicted, it has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of tourists, the mass exodus of New Yorkers from neighborhoods with bike share stations, and the implementation of Bloomberg’s nefarious communist plan to ban all cars from New York City forever. It’s been madness, I tell you—MADNESS!
Or, you know, none of those things have happened and the bike apocalypse that was predicted by such New York luminaries as the editorial board at The New York Observer and The Wall Street Journal and a bunch of people on Facebook who you went to high school with and who now live in Murray Hill. God, high school was awful.
Anyway. The launch of Citibike has not been without its minor flaws, namely docking stations that seem to be available on the Citibike app, only to actually be full, and, uh, that’s kind of it? Yet people still continue to hate on it. George Gurley interviews notorious Citibike hater and WSJ writer and editor, Dorothy Rabinowitz, in New York Magazine, and tries to get at the root of her Citibike animosity. It’s simple really. Rabinowitz thinks the bikes portend the end of humanity. Well, that’s rational, right? Allow her to explain, “I realized it was like some science-fiction thing. The pods have landed, only they’ve landed with the racks, and they’re coming with allies called bicyclists. The activating force behind all of the fury was the racks, instruments of aesthetic torture…I was thinking, No one is going to live with it. I literally thought that. And then when I saw the bicycles on top of it, I realized this is the stuff of your darkest aesthetic dreams. There is nothing human about the racks. Not even when people get on the bikes.”
