Wednesday’s Headlines: ‘Choose Life’ Edition

3:30 AM EDT on September 11, 2019

Thanks to cars, children in New York are never really safe. And that is the mayor’s fault, advocates say. File photo: Bess Adler

"Be very careful about your lives."

We thought of that Torah commandment yesterday when we were editing the story out of Midwood, where the driver of an SUV jumped a curb, mowing down a 10-year-old boy, Enzo Farachio, who was waiting at a bus stop. (Streetsblog covered it, as did many others.)

It kind of popped into our head — like a mantra — and, like a mantra, it began repeating.

"Be very careful about your lives."

In Midwood — like in many city neighborhoods — the streets teem with children. The area is home to many families with school-age children — and school is back in session (as Streetsblog noted in a photo essay about kids and cars last week).

Children are walking to and from schools. Children are waiting at bus stops — like the poor child who was killed.

"Be very careful about your lives."

One day, we hope, New Yorkers will marvel that they or anyone ever thought it safe or sane to drive 6,00o-pound SUVs through streets teeming with children — so inimical is that behavior to the notion that we "be very careful" about our lives, as most faith traditions teach.

"Be very careful about your lives."

That should be basic — even if we don't believe, as some of us do, that those are the words of the living God who commands us to "choose life, so that you and your children shall live."

In other news yesterday:

A coalition of 17 safe-streets groups called on the mayor to drop the helmet-law nonsense and focus on street safety. (Streetsblog)
Federal prosecutors in New York have opened an investigation into loan fraud in the taxi industry. (NYT)
Today some streets in lower Manhattan will be closed to cars in commemoration of 9/11. Why only today? Lower Manhattan streets weren't built for cars, and should be closed to them permanently. (AMNY)
The Post sympathized with Governor Cuomo on subway poop and other quality-of-life questions. The City also covered.
In a further dispatch from the bupke beat, the "F" in "F Train" stands for "feces," did you know? (NYP)
ExpoNJ produced an epic post about the Port Authority Bus Station and the NJ Transit buses — which are held together by duct tape in some cases.
A cop in the Bronx does not like kids on bikes, to put it mildly. (Streetsblog)
A hit-and-run-driver killed a 72-year-old woman in Queens. (Gothamist, Streetsblog)
NY1 found a bunch of young people making homes in vans.
And, finally, a Staten Island school-bus company is being hit with a $1 million negligence lawsuit over an incident last year in which a student was left for hours on an empty bus. (SILive)