Wednesday’s Headlines: Mr. Mayor, This Needs to Stop Edition

Have you been loving how we have been bashing Mayor de Blasio for four straight days? It all started when the mayor came up with this crazy plan to curb placard abuse by building more free parking for cops, which we thought was dumb because we all know that free parking dramatically increases the chance that someone will drive to work — which is bad.

So we started running the license plates of police officers' private cars, first in Carroll Gardens, then at eight other Brooklyn precincts and then yesterday at a bunch more in Manhattan. We found that roughly 40 percent of cops are have two or more tickets for speeding or running red lights. That's also bad.

We asked the mayor why he would want to encourage bad drivers to drive more, but he blew us off. So we started running more plates. And we found some really serious stuff, which we reported today. And we'll have more tomorrow. Which means this story isn't going away any time soon, Mr. Mayor.

Now, the news:

• Remember Brooklyn pedestrian Evaristo Mercado, who was run down and killed the other day? Well, it turns out the driver, Mark Smith, tried to pass himself off as a witness to the crime, not the perpetrator, the Daily News reported. The plan didn't work, and Smith was arrested.
• Don't click on this unless you want to see a rat stuck inside a MetroCard vending machine. Well, click on it to read Max Jaeger's great lede. (NY Post) Gothamist's story did not beat the Jaegermeister.
• Lots of outlets covered the big underwhelming appearance of track legend Usain Bolt pitching a new scooter company that has the same name as him. (NY Post, amNY, NY1) Our story mostly focused on the scooters themselves.
• President Trump's failure to fund the Gateway tunnel project is a really bad thing. (NY1)
• Damn that humble humanist Vin Barone at amNY — he beat us to a story we were about to get to: How the Financial District wants Mayor de Blasio to limit cars in Lower Manhattan.
• Gov. Cuomo doesn't only want congestion pricing — he also wants to tax second homes in New York City to fund transit. As people with only one home, we think that's great. (Curbed, NY Times)
• Thanks to the growing popularity of e-bikes, which need to be charged, the future of bike-share is likely a hybrid of docked and dockless. (Forbes)

And, finally, here's a bonus photo of Friend of Streetsblog Vin Barone heading off to his next assignment on his Motobecane.