Charles Schumer

WPIX Long Island Reporter Rob Hoell Eats Marcia Kramer’s Lunch

Here's the piece about the Prospect Park West bike lane that ran on the Channel 11 News last night.

By Ben Fried

1:49 PM EST on February 17, 2011

Here’s the piece about the Prospect Park West bike lane that ran on the Channel 11 News last night.

While it would have been great to see more of the data showing the success of the redesign, WPIX Long Island reporter Rob Hoell gets a lot of the good political details into the segment: The role of former DOT commissioner Iris Weinshall and involvement of Weinshall’s husband, Senator Chuck Schumer; the fact that Weinshall and Schumer live on the street that has been redesigned; the connections between Schumer and Jim Walden, the attorney at the white-shoe law firm Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher who is working “pro bono” on behalf of bike lane opponents.

It would have been a cinch to connect all these dots a week ago, before CBS2’s chief political correspondent, Marcia Kramer, filed her latest hatchet job on the PPW redesign. But not one shred of information about the political machinations behind this high-profile bike lane fight has ever made it into a Marcia Kramer segment. Why is that?

Ben Fried

Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.

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