Planes, Trains and Bicycles

NEW YORK CITY-There three things that have become major irritants in my love of everything New York: our airports, Penn Station and bicycles. What does this have to do with real estate? Plenty. It reduces the desire of businesses to rent office space in Manhattan, from which the City generates its largest amount of taxes.

First, I do a great deal of domestic and international travelling and I must confess that, except for trips to Washington and Boston, when I go to the Marine Air Terminal, my preference is using Newark airport. I cannot imagine what tourists and business people flying into LaGuardia and JFK think when their first and last experience in NYC is these two decrepit, badly managed airports. I expect flight delays as a modern inconvenience but, having to wait in a dank basement at JFK to go through customs and immigration after 10 or 12 hours in the air, the difficulty of getting taxis, or the manner in which the terminals are laid out so you have to schlep your bag from one end of a terminal to the other, makes no sense. How can Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and even Detroit get their airports to operate efficiently but the global center of business and culture cannot?

Nevertheless, there is one aspect of modern travel that is true in every airport in the US: the badly managed TSA. I recognize that we live in an unsafe world and that we need security, but how many times am I going to have to miss flights because the TSA cannot coordinate their screening procedures with flights schedules? Why at the busiest time of day for flights, are there long lines going through security and machines not being used because of a lack of screeners or not enough plastic boxes?

Second, occasionally I opt to take the train to Washington or Boston and the worst part of the trip is trying to get out of Penn Station and get a taxi, especially at night. If the government wants us to drive less and take the train, they have to reduce the difficulty of getting home from Penn Station.

Finally, bicycles. I have nothing against bicycles, but has anyone tried to cross First Avenue, an extra wide street with a bike lane on the western side and a bus lane on the eastern side, or how about trying to get to a meeting in a taxi when Broadway becomes one lane because of the bike lanes? And what is going to happen when hundreds of garbage trucks are lined up on First Avenue going to the ill conceived sewage treatment center on the East River? However, until last month, I thought my problem with bicycles was limited to the proliferation of bike lanes, but that was before I experienced the bike kiosks.

What was Citicorp thinking in underwriting this "experiment"? Three times in the last two weeks I was almost knocked over by bikes ridden by people who ignored the traffic lights. The idea of bike kiosks near parks and the rivers makes a great deal of sense, but having them in the central business district is an idea whose time will never come.

Stuart Saft is a partner at Holland & Knight. The views expressed in this column are the author's own.