City To Ban Smoking In Tacky "Pedestrian Plazas"

“You can walk up and down Eighth Avenue, across 42nd Street, smoking to your heart’s content. But you can’t sit at one of those little tables right next to me at another little table and smoke, and therefore I have to ingest your smoke. The point of this bill isn’t ‘gotcha.’”
-Council Speaker Christine Quinn discusses Mayor Bloomberg’s new plan to ban smoking in “all 1,700 parks, 14 miles of beaches, city-owned golf courses and marinas, as well as pedestrian plazas like those in Times Square.” Which, you know what? Fine. Who wants to sit in your shitty little traffic island anyway? My lungs take enough of a hit every day already, I don’t need to make them struggle more by sitting in the middle of Herald Square and ingesting all the fumes from the automobiles going by. So long as I can still sit out on my fire escape and have a cigarette or ten, I’m okay with this. When my fire escape becomes the only place in New York where I can sit out and have a cigarette or ten (which policy analysts predict will occur by 2012) then I will have a problem.