Thursday’s Headlines: Welcome Back, Kuntzman Edition

If you've been missing the antic wit that our grizzled editor brings to these daily bulletins, rest assured: We have too — maybe more than you have missed it!

But he will be back from his end-of-summer vacation tomorrow, rescuing our slightly-less-grizzled editor from this, the herculean chore of concocting clever conceits about the day's news each night after it all finally lands (meaning, after 9 p.m.).

We're happy to return the mantle. It's been an exhausting couple of news weeks, with a sad toll of deaths and injuries locally and a buzzsaw of revelations out of Washington sucking up oxygen and eyeballs that in more normal times might accrue to our compact enterprise.

So, welcome back, Kuntzman!

And here is the news:

• Predicting carmageddon, Gov. Cuomo begged commuters to climb aboard our now-antiseptic mass transit (Gothamist).
• Amtrak is the latest transit agency to ask for emergency federal funding (NYT).
• Weekday bike ridership over the East River bridges shot up last month to the highest point in three years (TransAlt via Twitter).
• Revel riders (who have returned to the roads just in the past two weeks) still are shirking helmets, DOT chief Polly Trottenberg says (NYPost). And in the same hearing, she also said she doesn't have enough staff to roll out the legally mandated e-scooter pilot (NYDN).
• She also reported that weekend cycling has jumped a whopping 57 percent this year over last (NYPost).
• The cops draw fans bearing snacks (NYDN)
• The mayor still can't say whether the guy who drove into a crowd of protesters last week committed a crime (Gothamist).
• The mayor claimed that no child will lack a school bus when in-person classes start on Sept. 21 (NYDN).
• The "MVPs of the MTA" — the workers who rescued a delivery man who fell onto subway tracks, as Guse of the Newsuh smartly called them — got props (NYDN, NYPost).
• Finally, a sad tribute happened yesterday at the Bridges4People campaign kick off in Brooklyn (via Twitter).