Well, maybe. As the already crowded streets get more crowded, things can go wrong. Deliveries are missed, parking is harder to find, babies get left in bike lanes, joggers get impaled. (Life in New York is so hard!)

Naturally, a backlash is underway. Not in Queens or Staten Island, though, but the beating heart of boho New York. Both the East Village and Park Slope are home to relatively new bike lanes -- one on First and Second avenues, the other along Prospect Park West. Apparently, some locals are not happy about the interference the new lanes are causing to their usual routine -- like double parking and standing in the middle of the street while waiting to cross it -- and so protests have been planned! As have counter-protests! Things could get ugly.

We've been here before. Last year, Councilman Alan Gerson (an elected official, for gosh sakes) led a protest of the then-new Grand Street bike lane. Which is still very much there 14 months later. Then again, a bunch of politically connected Chasidim got a lane erased in South Brooklyn, supposedly in exchange for voting for the mayor. According to an online poll from Crain's, people are overwhelmingly in favor of bike lanes. Then again, that's not the most scientific proof. For all anybody knows, those voting for bike lanes could just be a bunch of madmen.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

USA Today reports that these ubiquitous, rechargeable and sometimes impossible to remove batteries are a fairly new and serious concern for airlines. A concern that has nothing to do with possibly causing navigational woes:

FAA data show that from March 20, 1991, through Aug. 3, 2010, batteries and battery-powered devices were involved in 113 incidents with "smoke, fire, extreme heat or explosion" on passenger and cargo planes. The data are for lithium and non-lithium batteries and are not a complete list of such incidents, the agency says.

In January, the Transportation Department proposed stricter rules for companies that ship lithium batteries in cargo holds. "The frequency of incidents, combined with the difficulty in extinguishing lithium-battery fires, warrants taking strong action," Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Ill., chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, said of the Transportation Department's proposal.

An overheated lithium battery can cause a small explosion and the fire may not always be all that easy to put out. There is, however, no limit on how many of these a single passenger can carry on a given flight. Last June an American Airlines flight crew took 58 devices using these batteries from one passenger on a flight from New York to Buenos Aires.

If restrictions are passed on electronic devices using these batteries requiring their removal before boarding a flight, users of Apple devices in particular are going to find themselves with a serious problem, as many of the smaller Apple products require the battery be removed at an Apple store.