brooklyn vigilantes repaint removed bike lane

Urbana's likely to get some new bike lanes soon, but if you thought that would finally make the place as hip as, oh, Brooklyn, New York, think again.

Under pressure from Hasidic Jews concerned about the steady procession of "scantily clad hipster cyclists" flaunting their one piece cranks all over colonial Williamsburg, New York City removed the bike lanes on Bedford Avenue, the most direct bike route to the Williamsburg Bridge and Manhattan.

But recently a group of vigilante cyclists, under cover of night, began repainting the Bedford Ave bike lanes.  You can read all about it here, but here's the nut graf:

Baruch Herzfeld, who has tried to bridge the gap between hipsters and Hasids with a bike-rental program, said safety is not the issue so much as xenophobia.

"They don't want the hipsters in their neighborhood," he said. "It's like in Howard Beach back in the day when they didn't want black people in the neighborhood."

(Whoops, that's not the nut graf!)

UPDATE: the New York Post reports that some of these vigilante bikers are now in the "spokey."