The New York Post

By FRANKIE EDOZIEN Post Correspondent

PARIS - On the first stop of a European tour to discuss environmentally friendly solutions to urban traffic, Mayor Bloomberg hinted that a pick-up-and-drop-off bike rental program might be imported from the City of Lights to the City That Never Sleeps.

“It’s fascinating,” Bloomberg said of Paris’ popular bicycle program. “It seems to be a success . . . I think it’s one of those things we should look at.”

Under the program, Parisians can pick up a bike at one location, using an E-ZPass type of pay system, and then return it at a drop-off spot nearest their destination.

“You have to hand it to the people of Paris,” the mayor said. “They are willing to try new things. Some will work and some won’t. This obviously has worked, and we have to do the same thing.”

Bloomberg also toured a steel and oak pedestrian-and-bike-only crossing over the River Seine that’s helped revitalize a formerly industrial neighborhood.

“We have terrible traffic problems, Paris and New York, and they are strangling our economic growth,” Bloomberg lamented, promising to swap New York’s transit success stories with the Parisian government.

Bloomberg also shared a fish-and-wine lunch with the popular, openly gay mayor Betrand Delanoe, declaring the wine so good that he had two glasses. The pair ate, drank and talked about environmental issues at the opulent Hotel de Ville, or City Hall.

Accompanying the mayor on the tour are Kevin Sheekey, his top political guru, and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris, as well as his girlfriend, Diana Taylor.

The Bloomberg entourage heads tomorrow to London to try out the new hybrid double-decker buses and the mechanics of the city’s congestion pricing. The mayor returns home Tuesday.

 

The New York Post

By FRANKIE EDOZIEN

The City Council overwhelmingly voted yesterday to override Mayor Bloomberg’s veto of a bill lifting the cellphone ban in public schools.

“No rule trumps my child’s safety,” said Lew Fidler (D-Brooklyn), the prime sponsor of the measure, which passed 46-2.

Fidler said his son takes two buses to school each morning and carries a mobile phone in case of an emergency.

“We want to know if he’s late, why he’s late,” he added.

Other council members argued that a cellphone that is out of sight and turned off isn’t a problem in class.

Last July, the council voted to give parents the right to send their kids to school with phones and made it illegal to interfere with that right.

The city’s 1.1-million-student school system has prohibited electronic devices like phones and pagers since the late 1980s.

But many schools chose not to confiscate phones if they were kept hidden in bags.

In recent times, metal detectors installed in schools to ferret out weapons have forced the issue to the forefront, as phones were being detected and confiscated as students entered school.

Furious parents flooded lawmakers with calls and held rallies leading to the law passed over the summer.

Aides to Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have repeatedly said phones interrupt teaching, even if they’re used for text messaging or browsing the Web.

Yesterday, when Bloomberg was asked if he would go to court to keep from implementing the law, he said there’d be no legal action to take because the bill was essentially symbolic.

“This is a bill that doesn’t change anything. You just don’t have the right to bring it into the school, and that’s not changing. Our teachers have a tough enough job,” the mayor said.

But Fidler said the new law was for more than show.

“It’s an expression of exasperation of tens of thousands of parents,” Fidler said. “If the mayor thinks it’s symbolic, he will be very much mistaken in 90 days when the bill goes into effect.”

Oliver Koppell (D-Bronx), who joined James Sanders (D-Queens) in voting against the override, said the law is impractical and would lead to cheating.

“Now the proctor is going to have to figure out whether [a phone is] on or not on,” Koppell fumed.

“We all know that cellphones can be used for text messaging . . . to watch movies, to access the Internet.

“We don’t need to make the teacher or the proctor a policeman to make sure that the cellphone is off.”

Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens) said recently his daughter called him because her bus driver got lost and that another child called her parents because she got on the wrong bus.

“You do not punish the good kids and tell them you cannot be as safe as you can be because you cannot control the bad kids,” he said.

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Class rings

Under the new cellphone law:

* Parents have right to send kids to school with cellphones.

* Phones will be stored and not used during school day.

* Teachers can confiscate any phone used to disrupt class.

* Seized phones must be returned when kids go home.