Here Comes the Pun

“The ambulance couldn’t even come up to the building,” Lee Liss, the victim’s wife, told the tabloid. “The ambulance couldn’t get to him. These bike racks are a detriment.”

“With great difficulty they managed to get the guy out,” said Dave Marcus, vice president of the Cambridge co-op board, adding that the racks formed none other than an “impregnable wall.”

But a quick call to the fire department revealed that this simply wasn’t the case—not by a long shot, said Frank Gribbon, an FDNY spokesperson.

“The fire units on scene had absolutely no problem accessing this building,” he said. Well, surely paramedics have had trouble maneuvering around other Citi Bike kiosks?

“There have been no problems,” Gribbon said, exasperated. “None.”

Case closed.

I’m waiting with bated breath for the Post’s follow-up.

[URL redacted, because I do not give the scumbags at the New York Post the pleasure of a link.]

A Greenwich Village co-op board that has sued the city for blocking its entrance with bike-share racks nearly saw its worst fears realized Sunday when emergency responders had trouble getting to a 92-year-old resident in distress.

I can’t even anymore.

The Post is now using people’s lives as pawns in their anti-bike crusade.

The picture in the article says it all: the perfectly able-bodied EMS workers wheeled a gurney a whopping 30 feet around a bike share rack to get between a building entrance and an ambulance parked on the street.

Never mind that cars could legally park in the same space for 14 hours each day before the bike racks were installed and could just as easily block the building entrance, which never resulted in a lawsuit or an alarmist “news” report like this.

Never mind that the article says the ambulance had to park “three doors down” when it was actually parked in front of the building directly next door.

Never mind that they quote a neighbor who calls the rack, which like every other installed in the city has many, many spaces between bikes, “an impregnable wall.”

Never mind that the city says the EMTs had no problems responding to the call, yet the Post makes the absurd accusation that because he wasn’t taken to the hospital for an hour (gee, I don’t know, maybe they could have been treating him on-scene?), that’s somehow the fault of a single set of bike racks.

Never mind the pending lawsuit against the city by this building’s co-op board, the already cozy relationship between the litigants and the Post from when they first reported on the lawsuit, and the fact that the photo in the article of EMTs very easily wheeling the man off the sidewalk (conveniently framed in the edge of the photo with the bike racks front-and-center) was taken by the co-op board’s vice president.

And never mind that the guy who was wheeled out had “an undisclosed medical emergency,” survived, and was recovering yesterday at the hospital.

There’s a reason this article was tagged “exclusive.” Nobody else at any other paper in this town would stoop so low as to write something so pathetic.