Joe Lhota would like you to get off his lawn, please. At a candidates forum this week, the Republican mayoral candidate and former MTA chair and Giuliani lieutenant governor took a host of positions at stark odds with the city’s quickly growing demographic of meddling kids.
Enjoy living in a converted warehouse space in East Williamsburg, Bushwick, Greenpoint, or Red Hook? Lhota would like to see your digs converted back into industrial space.
Fan of food trucks, or, for that matter, Twitter? Lhota responds: “They send you a Tweet and let you know what corner they’ll be at. It’s part of their business model. They’re parked all over the streets, on every corner of the city, and they cause congestion.”
What about bike lanes, or the city’s long-awaited new bike share program? Lhota likes neither, faulting bike lanes for getting in the way of cop cars, fire engines, and ambulances (but it’s much easier for a bike to get out of the way of a speeding emergency vehicle than a car, no?), and lamenting the placement of certain bike share stations.
And as Brooklyn Paper points out, the mayoral hopeful took inexplicable aim at another apparent h-word favorite: typewriters. “It’s not about repairing the typewriters,” he said, referencing a bid by Bloomberg to have city-owned typewriters fixed. “It’s about throwing them out, replacing them, and coming into the 21st Century.” Okay, I’m with you on that one, Joe.
With any luck, Lhota will make this guy a lieutenant governor.
(Photo: MTAPhotos/Flickr)
