Today’s Headlines

  • Safety in Numbers: TA Finds Cyclist Injuries Down for Fifth Straight Year (WSJ)
  • Paterson Threatens to Shut Down State Government in Lieu of Budget Deal (NYT)
  • Albany AWOL on Funds for Station Agents (AMNY); New Signs Tell Riders Not to Expect Bus (SAS)
  • Bruce Schaller Says Road Pricing Campaigns Must Appeal to Motorist Selfishness (Planetizen)
  • Denny Farrell, Foe of Pricing and Bus Cams, Draws First Primary Challenge in 18 Years (SOP)
  • WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein Files a Nice Little Piece on Performance Parking (@ 3:00 Mark)
  • Hothead Monserrate Aide Caught With Fake Placard, Without License (City Room, News, Post)
  • Bronx Merchants Up in Arms Over Space-Hogging Parking Agents (News)
  • Maniac Drivers Terrorize Residents of Springfield Gardens, On and Off the Street (News)
  • No Place to Park Bikes at "Green" Downtown Brooklyn Condo Tower (Fifty Car Pileup)
  • No End in Sight to Gulf Oil Spill; Friedman Says Mother Nature Is Watching (NYT)

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

  • Larry Littlefield

    RE Motor selfishness. One possiblity that “Gridlock Sam” has alluded to is to reduce the tolls on non-CBD crossings as part of the plan to toll all those entering Manhattan south of (say) 110th Street.

    One could argue that those driving between Staten Island and Brooklyn or the Bronx and Queens should not cross-subsidize the transit system to the same extent as those driving into Manhattan. This is the opposite of the Shelly Silver plan to make Brooklyn residents pay more to drive to Staten Island than to Manhattan.

    The problem, at this point, is that any such congestion pricing proposal would first be used to repeal the wage tax, and there is not enough money to go around. They’ve pretty much boxed us in. Perhaps what has to change is the fact that “a small minority of drivers” can block anything politically in Albany.

    We have a bunch of small minorities with very good deals, and an increasingly less well off majority.

  • Bolwerk

    I found this on Slate, tying Jane Jacobs’ views on street safety to the recent attempted terrorist attack (“Cheney’s Wrong, Jacobs Was Right, and Cameras Do Work: Three lessons from the Times Square bomb.”):

    In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, self-taught urban scholar and activist Jane Jacobs observed that sidewalks and their users are “active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism” (by “barbarism,” she meant crime) and that a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there—”the natural proprietors of the street”—provide “eyes upon the street.”

    Jacobs, who died in 2006, would not have been surprised to learn that it was two street vendors who first notified police of the suspicious Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just off Broadway.