Today’s Headlines

  • New York Electoral System as Rigged for Incumbents as You Can Get (News)
  • Andrew Cuomo Launches Campaign for Gov From the Middle of a Bike Path (NYT, Daily Politics)
  • Bike Lanes on First and Second Ave Will Transform Cycling in East Harlem (City Room)
  • Notorious Delancey and Essex Crossing Turns Into Another Bad Pun for Post Headline Writers
  • One Dead After Drunk Driving Hit-and-Run in Washington Heights (City Room, News)
  • City Chooses Temporary Design for Times Square Plazas (Transpo Nation, Post)
  • To Close Budget Gap, City Stops Yellow Bus Service for 5,000 Students (Post)
  • Parking Roulette in LIC: Drivers Leave Cars on Sidewalk, Pray Not to Get Tickets (Queens Chron)
  • Music Industry Lawsuit Could Leave Streetsblog Funder Mark Gorton With Fewer Funds (NYT)
  • NYC’s Summer Public Art Blockbuster: Street Pianos (Voice)

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

  • Larry Littlefield

    “Sue Dietrich, recording secretary for the Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher Associations, said some students would be forced to walk a mile and half to school.”

    I walked or biked a mile to middle school, and two miles to high school. My kids walked a mile to elementary and middle school.

    I spent a great deal of time training them to do so safely, crossing under Bartel Prichard Square in the subway station outside fare control when they were little.

    This doesn’t strike me as a service cut, because the kids will be better off. A bus on a route to additional stops in and out of neighborhoods will take as long as walking, and is a lot less fun.

    An all out effort to promote group walking and bicycling should be substituted.

  • Larry Littlefield

    End of a high subsidy bus for those who don’t want to ride the subway.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/nyregion/23bus.html?ref=nyregion

    This is what Mr. Liu and other mean when they say they want special buses that run over bridges, making subway transfers unneeded. Where would the money come from for such deep subsidies? From those less important, I suppose, or from the future.

    “The QM22 — which makes two round trips daily from Jackson Heights to Midtown Manhattan, with one running on Third Avenue and one on Avenue of the Americas — will make its final runs on June 25. It is being eliminated as part of a $93 million budget slashing by the financially troubled Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The authority estimates that the QM22 costs $143,000 a year.”

    “But the Bus People are not eager to go underground. There are about 40 in the group, most of them women, middle age or older, who work in offices.”

  • Westchesterite

    From: “Notorious Delancey and Essex Crossing Turns Into Another Bad Pun for Post Headline Writers”
    I like that the Post assumes only “hipsters” bike over the Williamsburg bridge. This is just another way the mainstream media marginalizes bikers as different from “real people”.

  • fdr

    Presumably the Cuomo campaign applied for a permit to use the area behind the Tweed courthouse for his announcement, and the city gave them a permit.

  • Larry Littlefield

    BP may not be capable of stopping the oil spill, which may go on indefinately.

    http://247wallst.com/2010/05/24/bp-doesnt-know-what-it-is-doing/

  • Bike-path blocking aside, do we really expect that someone who has accepted a $5,000 campaign contribution from Bruce C. Ratner is going to “remake a state mired in political scandal?”

  • “LIC: Drivers Leave Cars on Sidewalk”. The first day I began working in LIC I was shocked to see a parked car on the sidewalk. I soon discovered that parking on sidewalks is so routine and commonplace that it is completely ignored. It’s quite scary to watch a motorist drive a full block along the sidewalk to park in front of their place of business. (Or a truck!) I felt like I’d crossed the river from Manhattan and entered a foreign country with completely different traffic laws and regulations.

    Despite easy access via the 7, N, R, W, E, V and G trains, a few dozen bus lines, the LIRR, and NY Waterway, the streets in LIC are almost entirely unmetered, unsigned, parking free-for-alls that encourage people to drive to their LIC homes and workplaces. We desperately need muni-meters all over the place.

  • Bolwerk

    Regarding bikers over the Williamsburg Bridge, check out what the area used to look like a century ago: http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/abandoned/WillB.extphoto.gif. It might not have been such a bad place to bike then!

    The photo is linked from http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/abandoned/willb.html – Joseph Brennan’s rather well-known resource on abandoned stations. There’s still a little-known abandoned trolley terminal there visible from Essex Street’s J/M/Z platform.

  • Larry Littlefield

    Over in SF, at the Presido, Forest City is designing luxury apartments as a bicycle paradise, according to this article.

    http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2010/05/24/story1.html?b=1274673600^3386591&s=industry&i=commercial_real_estate