Today’s Headlines

Cuomo Combatively Begins Negotiating With Feds Over Paying for Hudson Rail Tunnels (NYT, SAS)
Thanks to Christie, a Billion Dollars for Trans-Hudson Rail Has Gone Down the Drain (Record)
Q Poll: More NYC Voters Support Move NY Toll Plan Than Uber Cap (via Observer)
26-Year-Old Driver Kills 66-Year-Old Man Crossing Atlantic Ave; Cops Blame Victim (News, Post)
Cyclist Kevin Lopez Dies From Injuries Inflicted By Driver at Queens Plaza (DNA)
SUV Driver Crashes in Southeast Queens, Killing His Passenger (News)
How Changing One Word in a Bill Could Make a Big Difference to Port Authority Reform (PoliticoNY)
One-Way Car-Share Company Car2Go Expanding to Queens (Crain’s, News)
Crain’s Swallows the Cuomo Line on How to Fill the MTA Capital Plan Gap
Post Tries to Drum Up Motorist Resentment Over Red Light Cams

More headlines at Streetsblog USA

Wilfried84

From this morning’s Marketplace Morning Report:

“As you stand on Magazine Street in New Orleans, a commercial corridor filled with retail shops, it’s hard to spot many recognizable brands. Roberta Brandes Gratz, an urban planning expert and author of ‘We’re Still Here Ya Bastards: How the People of New Orleans Rebuilt Their City,’ says this comes from under- rather than over-planning. It’s a miracle in its own way,” Gratz says. ‘Not planned on any planning board, just sort of emerged organically, a mixture of small business, local ones, big ones and some chains.’ For such a dense commercial strip, planners didn’t push suburban-style parking lots and shoppers make do with the street parking or walk.”

So, lack of parking made possible independent businesses, which contributed to New Orleans’ resilience after Katrina.

The transcript misses the best line in the audio, “There are three great cities in the United States, New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everything else is Cleveland.”

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/10-years-after-katrina/how-independent-businesses-kept-new-orleans-afloat
KeNYC2030

Re: Atlantic Ave. death: Post says “Police said the driver had the right of way.” Case closed, right? It’s this mentality that is killing people, more than anything. Imagine if we lived in a city where if you strike a vulnerable street user, you’re responsible. Period. Imagine how carefully people would drive.
Reader

This “not in the crosswalk” BS needs to end. That fact alone shouldn’t exonerate anyone, especially since the cops are likely getting that information from the motorist. In this case, the victim had just left the Key Food at Atlantic and Clinton, which has its main door right on the corner. The chances are very high that “not in the crosswalk” means “just out of it by no more than a foot or two.”

Drivers need to slow down. And the police need to stop getting out the tape measure every time a victim is hit perhaps inches from some faded white paint!
Simon Phearson

The Post story is almost certainly incorrect in a couple of respects. Impressive for a four-graf piece.

First: the NYDN reported that the driver was heading east on Atlantic. It also shows that the pedestrian ultimately landed on Atlantic. He couldn’t have been crossing Clinton, as the Post reports.

Second: the NYDN doesn’t state that the driver had the “right of way.” It reports, rather, that the pedestrian was “outside the crosswalk,” though it’s clear from every image that he couldn’t have been more than a few feet outside of it. It appears that, in the Post’s view, “outside the crosswalk” actually means that some other road user has the “right of way.”

Of course, the NYDN piece verges on the cruelly callous, spending more time writing about the pedestrian’s “ice cream treat” than about his death. Nauseating.

There is a real story here about how the NYPD shades facts and misreports details in order to get drivers off the hook. Why are they doing it? How often are they doing it? But it seems that the tabs are convinced that New York Jaywalkers have a thirst for taking suicidal risks. Here, believing either tabs’ depiction requires believing that this neighborhood resident safely crossed two lanes of traffic only to put himself in the path of this luxury vehicle driven by a young driver driving through a fully-green light. More likely? The driver stepped on the gas to make a yellow light, which the pedestrian had every reason to expect him to stop for – since that’s what the law actually requires.
Alexander Vucelic

90% chance driver was exceeding 25 MPH speed limit
Mark Walker

I could go either way on Cuomo’s Gateway tunnel negotiating tactics. Why should NY fund a Manhattan-to-Jersey paycheck conduit whose sole users are NJ Transit and Amtrak (as opposed to the MTA)? On the other hand, Amtrak needs it to connect NY to points south, and it would be good for the whole region. NY will probably end up contributing anyway through our half of the Port Authority.
Komanoff

“Homegirl in a Hijab” was the headline of the Sunday NYT Metro Section portrait of Arab American Assocation of NY director Linda Sarsour: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/nyregion/linda-sarsour-is-a-brooklyn-homegirl-in-a-hijab.html. Maybe “Homegirl in an Uber” would have been more apt. Judging from this article, Sarsour seems to spend half her time in Uber cars traveling between Brooklyn and Manahttan (with the occasional inadvertent “wrong turn to New Jersey”). Head-spinning.
Bolwerk

What is really amazing is how uncritical The New York Times can be. I mean, how many billions of regional money have been blown, or at least got earmarked to be blown, on airports (one in Atlantic fucking City, BTW) and roads in both states since Christie took office?

Now in his fifth year in office, the NYT goes and portrays Cuomo has some smart, tough negotiator who is putting his foot down to Get Stuff Done. This was a problem before Sandy. Sandy only elevated problem to crisis.
com63

If a car hits you in the crosswalk and you land outside the crosswalk, I think the NYPD counts that as crossing outside of the crosswalk. Case closed!
Bolwerk

Given that Port Authority money is by right at least 50% New York’s, it seems fair to me to say that a large contribution through the Port Authority should count as New York’s contribution. That is actually a quite generous position, if anything.
Simon Phearson

It certainly is starting to seem that way. It’s uncanny how each and every pedestrian killed by a driver is crossing “outside the crosswalk,” as though crosswalks in fact have this magical protection power.
JoshNY

NY should fund a cross-Hudson rail tunnel because a functioning rail link improves New Yorkers’ lives. (NJ should also fund it for the same reason.)
rao

Given the states’ and nation’s disinterest in infrastructure investment, the railroads are going to have to start thinking about running ferries across the Hudson again. No rail tunnels + collapsing bus terminal puts us right back where we were 110 years ago. But this time there is no Pennsylvania Railroad to bail us out.
rao

Since many drivers here probably learned in suburbia, here’s a tip for them: when in NYC, drive as if you are in a crowded parking lot. Because that’s what the streets here basically are. And forget about getting anywhere in a hurry unless on a highway.
AnoNYC

W 33rd St pedestrianization is live.
J

Have you seen the way drivers behave in parking lots, though? Speeding down the aisle, double parking to wait for a car parked in a convenient spot to pull out, honking at said double parked cars, failing to see if pedestrians are walking behind them when backing out of a spot, etc. Not sure how much of an improvement this would be. Barely-trained humans just suck at operating two ton vehicles, whatever the context.