April 9, 2025 — How hard should it be to get broad agreement on “unless and until you get the rules changed, follow them”? Not very. But achieving that consensus sometimes seems an impossible dream in New York City, a place where you’re generally not doing your rule-breaking in splendid isolation but rather in ways that have real impacts on others. The double standards routinely used on both sides of the political fence – with romanticizing and idealizing the go-to indulgences on the left, and grievance and demonization the animating principles on the right — are no small part of the problem.
Bike and scooter drivers versus car drivers
Exhibit 1: “Two-wheeled vehicles bad; four-wheeled vehicles good.” “No, two-wheeled vehicles good; four-wheeled vehicles bad.” I confess that I think it’s an easy call to say that the congestion generated by all cars, and the pollution generated by gasoline-combustion cars are unequivocally bad, but here I’m addressing specifically driver behavior. The on-the-ground evidence is clear: there are lots of bicyclists and scooter operators who are a menace to pedestrians, other bikers, and to car drivers forced to swerve or jam on the brakes; likewise, car drivers who speed, fail to yield to pedestrians, or weave in and out of traffic are engaged in lawless and anti-social behavior, too. (Ditto the parking-placard abuse by police officers who openly and heedlessly block sidewalks and bike lanes, and the civilians who use “ghost” or obscured license plates to avoid paying tolls or otherwise be detected.)
So how come we’re not throwing the book at all of it? Because, on the right, it boils down to “they’re coming for our way of life,” with “our way of life” being not only many decades of automobile primacy, but a more general sense of “things have always been this way.” Our kind of rule-breaking is freedom. Cops have a hard enough time: parking anywhere they want isn’t abuse; it’s a customary fringe-benefit. Welfare cheats are bad; avoiding tolls is clever.
On the left, it’s “don’t look at what’s being done, look at who is doing it.” This has manifested in two primary ways relating to bike and scooter enforcement. The first: you shouldn’t enforce because many violators are Black or Hispanic. The second, which has played out as an archetype of romanticizing: reluctance to penalize delivery workers, or, if I were to mimic the always implicit and sometimes explicit tone of advocates and most reporters from non-legacy publications, reluctance to penalize the heroic, noble, deliveristas.
I get the point that delivery workers are pushed by their employers to make too many deliveries too fast. It would be useful to sanction the employer when a worker on duty commits a violation (just like it would be useful to impose maximum hourly mileage and delivery rules on the industry). But that does not mean that we as a city need to condone the person who is the one riding on the sidewalk, whizzing past a frightened pedestrian (or a bicyclist trying to use the bike lane in a sane manner), or going the wrong way against traffic. Just like we can’t accept lawlessness from car drivers or cops.
Covid days
The response to the Covid pandemic and its aftermath is perhaps an even more clear illustration of the problem. On the right it was, first, they’re taking away our freedom to harm ourselves and infect others; then, we need law and order except for uniformed workers who won’t comply with departmental vaccination; now, non-compliant workers need to be rehired.
On the left, vaccination resistance could be talked about if the self-destructive behavior was coming from the Hasidic community, and mandates were, in general terms, positive developments. But the prospect of serious enforcement of masking requirements on the subway yielded lots of squeamishness: too many potential targets were “black and brown.” The issues of vaccine access and vaccine uptake were conflated (including by the City’s Health Department), and strained explanations were rolled out to explain what was initially relatively low uptake among Black New Yorkers. My perverse favorite (again participated in by the Health Department): somehow the Tuskegee experiment (denying treatment) was to blame for lack of uptake, even though older Black New Yorkers who would be more likely to recall that disgraceful episode were vaccinated at rates significantly higher than younger Black New Yorkers less likely to remember Tuskegee.
Public health agencies don’t always get it right. But we don’t have a functioning society if critical public health decisions are treated as optional. We needed to (and will need again) to enforce the rules that get made universally.
Romanticizing versus demonizing everywhere
As in the context of arrests and the conditions of detention. “They did it and deserve whatever they get” juxtaposed to “they’re young, they’re innocent — any measures taken are cruel,” with a third, more sensible view (it doesn’t matter if most turn out to be guilty, everyone in the custody of the state must be protected from sexual abuse and other violence) far less frequently expressed.
Immigration. Street vending. It is a very long list where the analysis engaged in is little more than “what position does my team take?”
Another path
Conveniently, at least from my point of view, the Neanderthal right is still a distinct minority in New York City, so the more salient issue is getting those on the left or progressive camp to force themselves to do less pretending and less pandering. That’s important both as a matter of getting closer to the best solutions on the merits and in terms of not gratuitously alienating centrists. Despite the pessimistic tone with which I started, we aren’t stuck in the mud in every area. We have, for example, seen a major shift in the last few years towards accepting the (basic) idea that more housing supply at various income levels would ease our affordable housing crisis (and even some movement back towards recognizing that housing segregation is not something to celebrate, whatever its racial or ethnic flavor). How two issues play out in the citywide and Council races this Spring will tell us a lot about our short- and medium-term prospects.
The first has been largely avoided. It’s the five-alarm fire that is our public education system. Will candidates be willing and able to assess candidly the whole range of factors (governmental, neighborhood, familial, and individual) that leave so many students who do graduate not ready for college, not ready for work, and not ready for citizenship? (Uh, oh; now I’m pessimistic again.)
The second: Are there candidates willing and able to identify both the kind of things that the Police Department does well (and may need more funding for) and the kind of things that the Police Department does not do well (and either needs to improve on or, in some cases, have the function transferred away in whole or in part)? Hint: saying “always send a social worker first” doesn’t count as a productive response.
All of this is playing out at a moment of extreme risk to democracy and the rule-of-law. And, for the effective running of New York City, a moment likely to result is massive loss of federal funds. Extraordinarily hard decisions will have to be made; genuine (and painful) triage will have to be performed. Otherwise, we will wind up with everything working poorly. If we can’t do better than a politics where all the candidates still run to Al Sharpton to pay homage, where taboo and pretending continue to rule the day, we’re sunk.
Let’s try to do better.