The bike project / Why do Haredim put the brakes on pedaling?

Woo hoo! You got to be kidding me. Israel, one of the worlds most accomplished inthe area of science, actually has functioning luddites? How embarassing . . .

Wow. Kudos to Haaretz. Who else could muster up such a gleefully sarcastic anti- Haredi diatribe so soon after Yom Kippur? If you werent careful to read carefully, you might think this was an actual news report, or even just a piece of color - as opposed to a vicious streak of smug yellow slander.

Meant to put this in my previous comment: we were walking across the Williamsburg bridge and saw a middle-aged probably Satmar man and woman walking towards Manhattan in the bike lane, not the pedestrian lane. The bike traffic across the bridge is heavy, and pedestrians in that lane make it unsafe for themselves and the cyclists. I saw a cyclist very nicely mention to the man and woman that they were in the wrong lane, but the man and woman might as well have been dear, they did not acknolwedge the cyclist's presence and just kept on along their path. OK, that's just one incident, and perhaps there was a language barrier, just wanted to share...

Interesting and unfortunate! A year ago my husband and I while visiting NYC walked extensively through Williamsburg on a weekday, and in the Satmar 'hood the streets were really quiet, not that many pedestrians at all. The occasional civilian bicyclist did cycle through. I wonder at the political power of these folks that they can have public neighborhoods treated like private villages. Are ultra kids really not allowed to be kids? I really respect the discipline and sense of community, but ...