I hear the weather's lovely in Hong Kong this time of year. (Getty)

With Jay Walder hopping the express to Hong Kong this October, the city's transit junkies are stunned and saddened by the loss of one of the most highly regarded transportation directors in the business.

"It's a great opportunity for Jay and a real loss for New York," Regional Plan Association president Robert Yaro told The Observer. Mr. Walder will be leaving behind a cash-strapped agency for a publicly traded company that operates the Hong Kong metro as well as rail lines throughout the world. And while the pay at the MTA is one of the highest in state government ($350,000 a year for Mr. Walder), many point out he will be making a good deal more on the other side of the world.

"Jay has a global network to play with, one several times the size of New York's," Mr. Yaro said. "He has been a very steadying hand at the M.T.A., but since he got here, it had its financial problems. I think he came with the promise of stable finances, but it's been anything but that."

Transportation Alternatives' director Paul Steely White echoed these feelings in a statement:

Jay Walder steered the MTA through its toughest challenges since the bad old days of the 70s. Facing a daunting fiscal situation brought on by the governor and state legislature’s repeated budget raids, Walder kept our trains and buses serving millions of New Yorkers 24 hours every day. His work to bring Select Bus Service and Real-Time updates to transit riders is bringing New York City’s transit system into the 21st Century and will help keep the city and region competitive with other global leaders vying for business, talent and capital.

Experts are nervous about the future of such programs now that the tech-savvy Mr. Walder—who implemented magnetic toll cards, 21st-century doubledeckers and congestion pricing in London—is departing. From M.T.A. blogger extraordinaire Ben Kabak:

As the news sinks in, I’m finding little good in this announcement. The next few months are going to be of paramount importance for the MTA as it must figure out how to close a $10 billion capital funding gap and negotiate a new contract with the Transport Workers Union Local 100. Walder had been a vocal part of both of those efforts, and it appears as though he likely won’t be around to see either through. Gov. Andrew Cuomo will likely appoint an interim CEO at a time when the authority can ill afford to suffer through turmoil at the top.

I also can’t help but feel as though Walder is leaving before the job is done. The MTA is very much in transition as it has tried to cope with an austerity budget, major capital projects and technological innovation. The job isn’t done yet though as funding isn’t in place and projects are in flux. Will the next leader push through countdown clocks and better fare payment technologies? What will happen with the bus tracking projects and the authority’s commitment to providing datasets for developers? What happens with the labor negotiations and the capital budget wrangling?

Mr. Kabak also points out that Mr. Walder will not be taking his controversial golden parachute, valued in 2009 at $850,000.

Governor Andrew Cuomo wished him well:

For nearly two years, Jay Walder has shown true leadership at the helm of the MTA and been a fiscally responsible manager during these difficult financial times. Riders of the MTA are better off today because of Jay’s expertise and the reforms he initiated will benefit all for years to come. Jay’s departure is a loss for the MTA and for the state, but I thank him for his service and wish him the best in his future endeavors.

One thing's for sure: They don't have Shake Shack at the stations in Hong Kong.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

During half that decade, the Bloomberg administration laid down roughly 250 miles of dedicated bike lanes. That is, generously speaking, less than 1 percent of the city's roadways, but it remains one of the myriad ways the administration has subtly re-engineered the five boroughs, from the posting of calorie counts to the widespread banning of smoking.

Four of those boroughs have the worst commute times in the country, according to the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, MetroCards have surpassed $100 a month as service is curtailed. Bridge tolls have jumped to boot. And yet here comes the mayor and his men (and, in this case, one particular woman), painting green stripes all over town, promoting what many see as little more than a children's toy.

"I think many motorists are mad," said James Vacca, chairman of the City Council's Transportation Committee and a representative of the car-heavy Bronx neighborhoods of Throgs Neck and City Island. "They feel under siege, and in many ways I don't blame them. Gas is $3.59. They see the mayor proposing increasing parking-meter fees. They were hit with registration and licensing increases from the state. Insurance rates are higher. The parking ticket phenomenon. The blitz is unbelievable, and of much frustration. Add bike lanes to that, and it's the straw that broke the camel's back."

In a city where the teachers are already seen as terrible, where most people rent and do not personally pay property taxes, where public health care has long been as close as a ride to Bellevue, in this moment of national angst, New Yorkers need something to rally against. They have settled on bike lanes. Welcome to New York's last culture war.

Four days after the shootings at Kent State in May 1970, more than 1,000 hippies rallied on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street. Construction workers at the nearby World Trade Center site, fed up with these longhaired shenanigans, stormed across Broadway and set upon the rally. It was Nixon's silent majority rising up against the counterculture that had gone and changed everything.

The event became known as the Hard Hat Riot. It lasted for two hours and ended with the workers nearly seizing City Hall. "This has always been going on in New York," Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said. "Back in the '60s, it was between the beatniks and the longhairs and the people who went around in suits. It's always been about that tension, and it's a good tension. You want that next generation to push."

Riots of a nonviolent sort began sweeping the city last fall in response to the spread of bike lanes, mostly in more liberal redoubts--the Upper West Side, the East Village and that most progressive principality, Park Slope, where even avid cyclist Chuck Schumer is said to oppose a new bike highway along his home street of Prospect Park West. Yet this time it was the hippies in the role of the hard hats, backed by the longhairs in suits at City Hall. As for the silent majority, they were stuck on a broken down F train.

The Abbie--make that Abigail--Hoffman of this group is Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. Opponents have called her Janette Sadistic Khan and Roberta Moses, as well as much worse, and there is some truth to the latter. Long ago, Ms. Sadik-Khan realized that her agency was not subject to the city's land-use review, with its divisive politicking and City Council votes. If the DOT wanted to close a corner of Dumbo, say, and turn it into a public plaza, all her department had to do was throw up traffic cones and slap down paint. This led to ever-more-ambitious projects, such as the closure of Broadway, first in Times and Herald squares, though now the closure stretches from Union Square north to Columbus Circle.

The acrimony between the red-sauce set and the truffled mac-and-cheese crowd followed, quickly framed around the larger question of what kind of city New York should be. And much like other culture wars--gay marriage, Hollywood ratings, the president's birth certificate--bike lanes became a convenient punching bag for larger concerns.

To bike-lane foes, the socialists seem to be on every corner, plotting. "I don't want to get into aesthetic arguments, but would you put a bike lane on the Champs Élysées?" asked Norman Steisel, a former deputy mayor who wrote the original bike master plan with Ms. Sadik-Khan during the Dinkins administration--and who was unaware Paris had actually approved such lanes last fall. He is now one of the chief opponents of the Prospect Park West lane, citing safety concerns to pedestrians and cars.

Somewhat odd, given that many of the bike lanes are being built in the name of "traffic calming," an effort to slow vehicles and thus save lives. Studies show that the slower the traffic, the safer the streets. On stretches such as Prospect Park West, Grand Street in Chinatown and Eighth and Ninth avenues in Chelsea, incidents are down 50 percent since bike lanes were installed, according to the DOT. (Mr. Steisel and his cohort in Brooklyn filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to remove the lane on the basis that these numbers are fabricated.)

Traffic calming sounds nice. But since when has anything about New York ever been calm? "It's part of this weird, misplaced nostalgia for a New York that was much rougher and more crime-ridden," said Tom Vanderbilt, author of the book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). "Someone was saying, 'Well, you know, Janette Sadik-Khan is trying to domesticate the city.' As though being run over by a taxi was a sign of New York's urban vitality."

Eben Weiss grew up in the Rockaways, and like many suburban kids, he misspent his youth riding bikes, BMX in particular. He still rides in road races, and did a stint as a bike messenger in Manhattan, but he also has a healthy appreciation for cars, having come of age a New York driver.

"Some people may say, 'Oh, bike lanes, they want to sissify the city, you can't handle it, and all these transplants are coming,'" Mr. Weiss said. "For all of that, I'm sure you have people who just don't want people coming into their neighborhood and messing around with it."

Mr. Weiss has been chronicling the foibles of the city's cycling culture for the past four years at Bike Snob NYC, an anonymous blog up until last year, when he outed himself to promote a book of the same name. He believes a good deal of the responsibility lies with cyclists, especially for doing a poor job of selling themselves, not only to others but to each other.

"The mistake the cycling advocates make is pushing the fact that cycling is green," Mr. Weiss said. "And the problem with that is during a time like now, when there are much more pressing concerns, like people are out of work and all this stuff, the last thing you want to worry about is being green. Being green is sort of a luxury.

"Or David Byrne," he continued. "I have huge respect for him, but he's become like the poster child for cycling in New York. I'm a writer for a living, and an English major in college. And I look at David Byrne as the example I should follow? I can't relate to this guy. He lives in a loft on the West Side and bikes to a studio he works in on the West Side and he can cycle back and forth. Good for him."

As for Mr. Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman
and longtime New Yorker, he is happy to be lumped in with the Lycra-wearing masses.

"Yeah," he emailed, "riding a bike as a way of getting around isn't a super-macho thing, is it? Other cities around the world have absorbed it into their culture--and I dare anyone to call the Vikings and the Latin-Americans sissies."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

But much of the conversation, which was moderated by Henry Stern—a former councilman and parks commissioner who leads the museum’s Civic Talk series—centered on the past. For example: the lack of city tax revenues devoted to transit, how years of underfunding and subsequent borrowing put the M.T.A. tens of billions of dollars in debt, and—as the most vocal of the panelists put it—the failure of past leaders to “stand up” to the people who gave them their jobs.

“One of the things we need to consider as the new C.E.O. of the M.T.A. takes his position is: What are the fiduciary obligations—that is the duty to the system—of the leadership of the M.T.A.? As opposed to their duty to the people who appoint them—the mayor and the governor,” said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat who was perhaps the most outspoken political opponent of the mayor’s congestion-pricing plan in 2007.

“That independence will be at the heart of whether Mr. Walder is able to succeed in bringing reform to the M.T.A.,” Mr. Brodsky said. “The law gives Mr. Walder a clear defense for the next time the mayor says, ‘Go build me a subway line to nowhere.’ Whether he will use that defense will become the chief measurement of his success or his failure.”

Read more here.

Mr. White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a pedestrian and bike advocacy group, was loping down Mott Street in Soho in a cold January drizzle on a single-speed 1971 Schwinn, weaving in between cars trying to find their way onto the Williamsburg Bridge—a bakery van pulling suddenly over to the curb, a truck snorting forth.

The 36-year-old Mr. White was on his way to a community-board meeting in Park Slope to ask its support for Intro 199, a City Council bill that would require the city to track traffic patterns around New York and set goals for reducing auto use.

It is, he explained, a necessary step toward any sort of congestion pricing—the system, devised in London, whereby drivers would pay for the privilege of driving into the central business districts of New York City.

(The fee wouldn’t be collected at booths like tolls, but rather ­indirectly, through EZ-Pass trans­ponders or through monthly bills that would be sent to drivers who had tripped a camera taking photographs of license plates.)

Once the domain of traffic nerds, congestion pricing has taken hold here recently like never before. Both the Partnership for New York City, a prominent group of business executives, and the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank, endorsed or re-endorsed it in December, joining a list of longstanding proponents such as the Regional Plan Association.

Mr. White represents the left flank, then, of a set of strange bedfellows. Founded by radical bicyclists in the 1970’s, Transportation Alternatives comes across as a sort of alterna-elite group of forward-thinking urban planners.

About half of its 5,500 members are from Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, and its 18 full- and part-time employees are generally white, well-educated twentysomethings who ride their bikes to work. Many of its largest donors are Wall Street types, and its largest individual funder is Mark Gorton, the high-tech entrepreneur who founded LimeWire. To them, Mr. White says, “Biking is the new golf.”

But T.A., as it’s called, has long tried to project itself as a generally pro-person, anti-traffic group. The city Department of Transportation ended up copying Safe Routes to Schools, a program established by Mr. White’s predecessor, John Kaehny, which seeks improvements to streets near schools. A similar program, Safe Routes for Seniors, is next in line for adoption, Mr. White hopes.

And the group regularly submits suggestions for traffic improvements throughout the city, sponsors bike rides, and gives away helmets in poor neighborhoods.

The potential constituency for this tiny, million-dollar-a-year organization headquartered in a Chelsea loft is quite large. Everybody has a gripe about traffic, after all, and it’s only going to get worse.

“If you go up to the South Bronx, they really love T.A. there,” said Aaron Naparstek, a former T.A. employee who now edits Streetsblog, a Web site promoting the “livable streets” movement. “They used to think, ‘This is the way New York City is.’ And then this young kid from T.A., with maybe an Ivy League degree, comes in and says there’s a whole set of traffic-calming tools that you can use to change that.”

THERE TO BRIDGE THE WORLDS OF WALL STREET and the South Bronx, lefty advocacy and Republican-controlled City Hall, is Paul Steely White, a blond-haired, blue-eyed surfer dude who has a touch of the aristocrat about him. He uses his middle name a lot, because it was his grandfather’s and it makes it easier for people to Google him, he said; and, in casual conversation, he favors old-fashioned words like “alighting” and “thoroughfares.” Somehow, it works.

“He understands what our world is and brings a real constituency with him,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. “When he came to us about closing Central Park to traffic, he had gathered thousands of signatures from people and politicians and laid out all of the arguments.”

Born in Utah to Mormon parents (they soon left the church and divorced), Mr. White was raised in New Orleans and in Rockford, Ill. He came to New York City in 1997 after graduate school in environmental science to direct overseas projects at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, an organization allied with Transportation Alternatives. When T.A. was looking to replace Mr. Kaehny, who left to become a consultant to nonprofits, Mr. White already was a known entity whose experience dealing with foreign governments proved his ability to present and persuade.

The idea of charging people to come into Manhattan had been around for a long time before Mr. White came onto the scene.

Mayor John Lindsay proposed tolls on the East River bridges in the 1970’s. In the 1990’s, the then president of the Partnership for New York City, Robert Kiley, mentioned it. Mayor Bloomberg floated the idea early in his term. In each case, the plan failed because it came across as a tax on the outer boroughs as opposed to a traffic solution.

Then, four years ago, London instituted its congestion-pricing system. Traffic has fallen by one-fifth, and the revenue gets pumped back into the mass-transit system.

London has demonstrated to business leaders who traveled there the quality-of-life benefits of traffic reduction, who in turn have tapped into New York’s fear of losing ground in the battle for global commerce. In December, the Partnership for New York City released a report stating that traffic congestion was costing New York City businesses and consumers $13 billion annually.

“The common ground is that traffic creates a whole series of problems for the city from the standpoint of business,” said Kathryn Wylde, Mr. Kiley’s successor at the partnership. “The cost and inefficiency created by the loss of mobility is a huge expense and means the loss of revenue. When people don’t have easy access to business locations, when employees are delayed in getting to appointments, when you have to leave work an hour early to get to the airport, those costs are all absorbed by business and are often passed on to consumers.”

Instituting congestion pricing in New York will be a lot harder than in London, where it took but 18 months. London has control over its mass-transit system, while here the Mayor would have to spend his political capital to get it passed, only to then see the revenue flow to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state entity.

Any proposal would need support from the State Legislature and the City Council, where outer-borough politicians play a decisive role.

“Ultimately, the city of New York has to be a livable city for all New Yorkers,” said Walter McCaffrey, a former Queens City Council member who is the director of an organization called Keep New York City Congestion Tax Free, founded by the Queens Chamber of Commerce last year. “If you have a system in place where the rich would no longer have to contend with other vehicles blocking their vehicles, that would end traffic congestion. They’ve tried to make it seem like if you are not in favor of congestion pricing, then you have given up on the problem of congestion. But that’s not true.”

Mayor Bloomberg has been cool to the idea, but his aides have said that congestion pricing is still under consideration for the N.Y.C. 2030 report—a set of policy recommendations to make the city more environmentally sustainable, due out in March.

“It’s very clear that we have to begin to shift more cars, more people who are coming into this city for whatever reason, to mass transit,” said Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, Mr. Bloomberg’s right hand on development, speaking to The Observer on Jan. 30. “That requires both getting them off of the roads, to the extent that it’s possible, but it also requires significant investments in expanding the mass-transit system.”

THE COMMUNITY BOARD IN PARK SLOPE ended up refusing to endorse Intro 199, complaining that it was too much “nibbling.”

Afterward, Mr. White headed to a barbecue joint close by, which also happens to be near his home. Wearing burgundy clogs, jeans and a brown canvas jacket that somehow passed as a sport coat, Mr. White launched into his vision of congestion pricing.

The point would be to devise a system that would make the public see it differently than it saw East River tolls. So, for one thing, he says, it would not just be weekday traffic in Manhattan south of 60th Street that would be charged a fee, but cars in downtown Brooklyn and in Long Island City as well.

And the charge—somewhere around $6 or $8 daily—would somehow fluctuate, depending on how congested the city is on any one day.

“Any solution that is brought to bear on New York’s traffic problem, the pain has to be applied equitably and geographically. Otherwise, it is going to fall victim to the borough-versus-borough thing, where it will just be perceived as a craven tax ploy,” Mr. White said.

As he went on, it became clear that Mr. White didn’t think congestion pricing would become policy any time soon—maybe under Mayor Bloomberg, more likely under his successor. T.A. will use that time to build the case for congestion pricing, and to introduce a list of initiatives that will reduce traffic.

As his argument unfolded, Mr. White turned out to be not just a guy concerned with painting bike lanes on streets, but someone concerned with the very nature of civilization itself.

“If you look at how much public space there is in cities—you know, the space between buildings—how is that space programmed? What’s it used for? Is it used for the benefit of everyone living in the city, or is it used for a relative minority, their parking or driving?

“If you think about cities,” he continued, “like why did they exist in the first place, they existed because of transportation—concentrating the destinations, services, goods, ideas. That’s what makes New York so great—right?—is it’s density.

“But then you have the lowest-density mode of transportation taking up so much of this public space. So few cities have been minimizing automobile use, but now cities that are doing this are really gaining.

“There are tremendous returns. They are investing the political capital and the capital capital to reprogram the public space for people traveling by bus, bikes or walking.”

Mr. White warmed further to the topic.

“Part of what fires me up, and what fires other people up, is: There is dysfunction now, but there is really opportunity by reorganizing cities. We can not only make cities more livable, but we can dramatically reduce our dependence on oil, we can go a long way to curb global warming, and—guess what?—we may improve democracy, and ourselves, in the process.”

It is hard to imagine exactly what a simple car owner from Queens would say to that.