Janette Sadik-Khan is the Commissioner of Transportation in America’s largest city. She happens to be very easy on the eyes. But she’s also a pro-bicyclist radical and her crazy agenda is probably going to incite a vicious civil war in NYC between the “elitists” (who like her) and the “little people” (who don’t) when she shuts down Broadway to cars later this week as part of secret master plan to turn it into a park for high falutin’ types.
Anyway, that’s pretty much what New York magazine says about her in a lengthy profile this week. Here’s a more thorough summary of the article:
Transportation commissioner has always been a job about as glamorous as a case of head lice. The last person to hold it was Chuck Schumer’s wife and she was a dreary bureaucrat who had no interest in using her power to do anything creative or original. To her cars were like sewage (in a good way) and the streets like plumbing that shouldn’t get blocked up. But then Bloomberg, who is rumored to loathe cyclists because they remind him of the Chinese food deliverymen who sometimes frighten him on the sidewalks of his beloved Upper East Side, for some crazy reason decided to hire Sadik Khan who is equal parts hippie and transport nerd, but also one of those supremely genetically gifted people who make all the rest of us feel lame and inferior. Hmm, maybe Bloomberg had a crush on her. After all, she is idealistic and knowledgeable enough to swap ideas with the engineers, but she also hangs with Jay-Z and Diane von Furstenberg in her spare time and wears short skirts that look great on her.
