They tore up the lane-marking paint on JFK Promenade.
Years back, JFK Promena Drive was open to cars six days a week, so it made sense to have lanes.
Later, JFK was closed to cars all week temporarily so that folks could get exercise without swapping air inside, dangerous due to the then-new COVID-19 pandemic.
But surely a cure was just around the corner, so it made sense to leave the lanes in place.
About a year ago, JFK was closed to cars permanently.
The lanes stayed in place; I'm not sure why.
Maybe removing them would have been expensive?
Maybe politicians still hoping to re-open the Driv Promenade to cars screamed if anyone started to scrape that paint?
That lingering lane paint caused a couple of problems.
First, bicycling tourists, not knowing the history of that paint, got annoyed at swarms of pedestrians walking in the bike lanes. 99.9% of bicyclists figured out the situation. But occasionally a bicyclist assumed they were still restricted to those painted bike lanes and yelled at pedestrians who "blocked" it. A bicyclist yelled at me once; a couple of times, I saw bicyclists yelling at other folks. If it happened more often, it would have been annoying; as it was, it was just funny. I had a fun mini-conversation joking with some yelled-at folks. "You didn't leave him enough roOoOom," I said, while spinning around in the road with my arms flung out. Good times.
More importantly: That lane-paint was bad for the art. When the park folks were thinking of closing JFK permanently, they brought in some artists to decorate the roadway by painting it. The artists painted over the lane paint; why wouldn't they? But it turns out that road paint is kind of amazing. It's not just laying on the road surface; it's kind of embedded in the road. And it's made to repel dirt; after all, if traffic-directing paint is obscured by dirt, it's not safe. So that paint is tough to grip; dirt doesn't stick to it. Art-paint doesn't stick to the road-paint, either.
Some weeks after the road mural "Laberinto Verde: floreciendo" went in, I snapped a photo. Zooming in, you can already see where the mural-paint on top of the road-paint has worn away. Wow, those bike lanes were really durable. (No wonder a few tourists thought those lanes must be important.)
Now the lane paint has been scraped off. The scrapers had to really go at it; there are shallow grooves in the road where that special heavy-duty lane paint used to be. It's left behind some voids in the road murals; gray asphalt stripes crossing the art. (But it's no great loss; there used to be white line-paint stripes crossing the art there.) Now if we can just lure back the artists to repair their murals, their work won't wear away again in just a few weeks.
