By Emily Sachar
Newsday, February 10, 1987

Messenger Louis Perez had delivered his package and was walking on Lexington Avenue, near 44th Street, back to his office when a motorist zipped past him yesterday, nearly knocking him over.

Perez, 19, had been forced to walk part of his route in the street because of construction that made the sidewalk impassable.

"There's a lot of these construction things going on," Perez said yesterday. "You've always got to be walking in the streets and things like that. That's dangerous."

That danger is just one of the hazards pedestrians face day in and out as they wind their way through the city. For most pedestrians, construction activity was the number one complaint, followed by the fear of bicyclists, according to an informal [informal = biased and prejudiced - M] survey.

"There is nothing you can do about it," said Rick Cerrone, 32, executive producer of a sports talk show on WNEW Radio. "In the last two weeks I've seen about five incidents where people either had to rush back to get out of the way or were almost hit (by bikes). That's a big problem."

Cerrone said he was not convinced that the task force formed yesterday by Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins to make things easier for pedestrians would make walking any safer.

"What is needed is creating laws or stricter enforcement of those laws, because in my opinion it's like a free-for-all," he said.

Sandy Gilinson, 31, said that people passing out literature and sidewalk peddlers were her major sources of discomfort. "I don't run into too many bicycles. I run into a lot of delinquent people that are hanging out on the street," she said. "I consider that a problem."

Standing in the middle of Times Square passing out leaflets for the Church of Scientology was Eric Zimmer, 30, who said, "I hadn't heard there was a problem."

Roy Cross, 22, a messenger, said pedestrians should not view his bicycling through mid-Manhattan as a problem.

"The people have got to understand that we're not out there to hurt nobody or hit nobody," he said. "Sometimes people walk and they don't look where they're going."