Thursday’s Headlines: ‘Pedestrians Deserve to Die’ Edition

Yep, it was your regular night at your regular pro-car Queens community meeting — regular in that Kim Ohanian, who sits on Community Board 7 thanks to Borough President Melinda Katz, lambasted Vision Zero as a "total joke" and said that "pedestrians deserve to get run over" and die in the most gruesome of fashions if they have the temerity to be talking on their cellphones while crossing a street.

The clip and full video of the May meeting was unearthed and posted by Twitter legend Diedrich vanVlissingen, the anonymous gadfly who has exposed the racial and transportation biases of Queens's most unrepresentative representative boards.

Will Katz call for Ohanian to resign? Will she fire her? We'll be asking those questions today.

In the meantime, here's the news from a slow, hot day:

• MTA layoffs are coming (NYDN, WSJ, amNY), but they won't be enough (NY Post)
• A motorcyclist is dead in Canarsie. (Bklyner)
• Bklyner's Sam Raskin also took a similar second-day angle on Citi Bike as Streetsblog (though our headline was more aggressive).
• Are you using the Reported app to hold cabbies and other drivers accountable? You must — all the cool kids are. (Reported via Twitter)
• And, finally, the New Yorker thinks it's so droll. But this is our life you're turning into cheap cover art and gifs.