Thursday’s Headlines: De Blasio’s Big Dig Edition

The big news yesterday was broken by Dana Rubinstein at Politico: Mayor de Blasio had thrown out his own Department of Transportation’s plan for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in favor of creating a panel of experts to come up with something better. We likened it to what Gov. Cuomo did with his own experts’ plan for the L train fix. For a split second, we worried if we’d gone too far. And then the Twittersphere confirmed that maybe we didn’t go far enough!

Other coverage was provided by Gothamist (which led with the Cuomo reference), Curbed (which put the Cuomo reference in the fourth graph), the Daily News (which really led with the Cuomo thing), Patch (which only evoked Cuomo in a tweet!), and the Wall Street Journal (no Cuomo!).

The issue was discussed at length at a Town Hall meeting in Brooklyn Heights last night. Brian Howald has a must-read Twitter stream.

In other news:

• Congrats to the non-profit The City, which launched yesterday with three good stories, a great newsroom, lots of gumption and a heckuva pigeon logo. And great news for the Brooklyn Eagle, which has a new editor, Ned Berke.
• Comptroller Scott Stringer, who has been tweaking Mayor de Blasio a lot lately, now says the Department of Transportation, not the Economic Development Corporation, should be running the city’s highly subsidized ferry system. (Stringer)
• Gov. Cuomo is bolstering support for congestion pricing in the best possible way: offering LIRR discounts to people in “transit deserts” not served by the subway. Two Queens Assembly Members said the move cemented their “yes” vote. (NY Post)
• The War on Cars podcast has a new episode up — and it features Streetsblog’s Vision Zero Hero of 2018 Corey Johnson.
• The Times did a nice look at the coming carveout crisis, which Streetsblog examined earlier in the week.
• You know things are going in the right direction when people on Staten Island are arguing for more bike share. (Advance)
• The Daily News’s Clayton Guse channeled Streetsblog’s David Meyer in his story about New York City Transit President Andy Byford complaining about community boards.
• Former Streetsblog reporter Brad Aaron took a deep dive on the city’s Dyckman Street debacle (as Streetsblog did here in September), but also found himself stonewalled by City Hall — which simply refuses to say what will happen to the protected bike lanes that were hastily removed last year. (Gothamist)
• And, finally, you have to hand it to The Villager. It’s one thing to oppose bike lanes, but it’s another to publish an article that called bike lanes “a bad case of herpes picked up in the back room of a Patpong dive bar.” Carl Rosenstein’s pro-car article also likened Transportation Alternatives to “a Thai prostitute” and suggested that Council Speaker Corey Johnson could never be effective as a leader because he “never cheered for Reggie, Jeter, Doc, Clyde or L.T.” (Fact check: Mets, Jets and Nets fans never cheered for those bums, either!).