A different world, 5 blocks away

I typically turn my evening 3.6 mile commute home to a 12 mile training
ride by going around the circumference of Manhattan instead of straight
through. Manhattan comes to a point at the bottom, the Battery, and from
there uptown routes radiate. When it's light out at night, I would take
the easternmost route (South Street Seaport & East River Park) up to my
house, but it's not a good night time route -- fish guts at the
seaport, construction debris and deadfall in the park, illiterate
amblers on the bike path. So in the winter I cheat and take an uptown
street route.

Usually, I take the Trinity Place - Greenwich St - Church St stretch, a
fabuolous high-speed 2-mile street sprint into Greenwich Village. A few
years ago, some sand rats had blown up the nabe, and now the
reconstructed parts seem a lot easier to bike on. Almost all of the
transportation is foot to train or express bus, with a few lost
tourists, some cabs, trucks, and official vehicles. I don't think
there's a better ratio of bicycle speed to worker density area anywhere.

But the other day I decided to save time by picking an eastern uptown
street -- Water Street -- so I wouldn't have a wasted crawl eastward
from Canal Street on the West Side to the East Village. What a
different world! Every other vehicle within a mile of Wall Street was a
stretch limo, and all of the drivers knowing their livelihoods depended
on getting through the traffic faster than the other guy. The streets
haven't been fixed or redone in years, and they were a mess, and it may
be topologically impossible to time the traffic lights there. It took
me 20 minutes sucking exhaust to save 10 minutes going cross town.

Now here's the odd thing. Even accounting for the bombed out parts, why
should the west side of the financial district be so ammenable to
pedestrians, buses, and bikes, while the east side, just a few blocks
away, is the realm of limos? Trillions of dollars change hands on each
side every day. The only possible difference is that the people on the
east side generally are trading different kinds of money around, but on
the west side they trade money for paper representing stuff like cocoa
butter and heating oil and pork bellies. Anyone else have any
neighborhoods where the biking goes from wonderful to miserable by
crossing a street?

--ag
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