We're not particularly religious over here, so we'll spend Monday's Yom Kippur holiday doing what we always do: demanding that our public officials atone for their sins of not designing, maintaining and enforcing safe streets through our most-vulnerable communities.
We'll keep at it. Meanwhile, here's the news you might have missed from the weekend:
- The winter open dining story broke only on Friday, so some papers didn't get around to it until we were already at Happy Hour:
- Attorney General Letitia James is the latest public official to call for the NYPD to get out of the business of making traffic stops. (AP, NY Post)
- A few days after we reported on the MTA's new harsh rules against homeless riders, the Daily News offered more details on Anthony Williams, a victim of the crackdown. "Williams estimates he’s received more than 100 tickets from subway cops over the years, and said he’s been arrested at least 20 times on warrants after he failed to pay them," Clayton Guse's story said.
- The Daily News also had a touching story about Mariano Canales, a delivery worker from Woodside who was killed in a crash as he did his job: rushing to and from his restaurant to deliver food. What a fucking world this is.
- Cops were caught — again — on videotape behaving completely inappropriately at the Celebration of Art of Protest rally in the Village on Saturday night. It's must-see TV. (Freedom News TV, NY Post, NY Times)
- The City covered last week's Riders Alliance rally for better transit service in Staten Island and got a nifty scoop: The MTA has bailed on its own busway plan to aid riders on the Rock.
- A drunk driver killed his passenger after going nearly 100 miles per hour in Queens. Interesting detail in this story: the car's "crash data recorder" told cops how fast the driver was going. It's interesting how the NYPD never gives us that data — or, frankly, any data — after cyclists are hit. (NYDN)
- Even as the de Blasio administration denies it, the state comptroller says New York City streets are filthy. (NY Post)
- Besides Streetsblog, only amNY published anything about the #MoreSpaceQBB rally on Sunday, which featured a panoply of pols (many singing Streetsblog's praises for keeping the issue on the DOT agenda).
- WPIX had a great story about "guerrilla gardening" in the Queensbridge Houses. Imagine if the city actually encouraged residents to be empowered to improve their communities instead of discouraging it!
- Retired federal transit man Larry Penner had a busy week (even for him):
- He decried the shrinking of oversight capacity of the Federal Transit Administration, which sounds in the weeds, but is really critical. (Railway Age)
- In Mass Transit, he argued pretty convincingly that MTA CEO Pat Foye is overstating how bad the situation is.
- And he was quoted in a Railway Age piece about Los Angeles's transit woes in a way that might be interesting to New Yorkers (whose transit agency is also experiencing such woes).
- And, finally, remember when a guy who later became president proudly declared, "I am not a crook"? Yeah, well, that can't be said of the current POTUS. (NY Times)
