Why someone is pasting the face of poor lil’ dead Jon-Bennet on the parking meters around here is your guess as good as mine.

I had my camera ready all the way from one hundredth street on the West Side to my Lower East Side neighborhood. The streets are empty of all but tourists, especially above Fourteenth Street. Many times in my neighborhood, I’ve just gone to the grocery store and back and filled up m’blog with pix. But today otherwise, slim pickings. Here I’ve traveled more than 60 blocks, just above the Empire State Building, before I got a photo I liked.

I thought I had a good shot of a cop patrolling the runner’s/biker’s path in Central Park on a Segway, but it didn’t come out. (Maybe Kamen includes reverse engineered alien technology that keeps it from being photographed).

This was a very mellow, jovial crowd of bikers. Most of the pedestrian/spectators, who indicated anything, seemed to enjoy the spectacle. Even most of the cars appeared either supportive or at least tolerant. I did talk to one older woman who told me that you "can’t go back five hundred years." But mostly they smiled and cheered.

I did witness a couple of incidents where SUV owners tried to break through the bicycles. In one instance I saw contact made between a Jeep bumper and a starting to squish bike tire. But a quick surround by a large numbers of bikers pointedly cajoled them into relaxing their foot from their pedals, while we fairly quickly passed, and no damage was done. I think the idea is to have the streets to ourselves for once, but to not linger obnoxiously.