Monday’s Headlines: MLK Day Edition

We’re going to take today off to honor Martin Luther King Jr., but we’ll be back tomorrow with lots of important information, stories, pictures and other surprises.

For now, here’s what you might have missed over the weekend:

• In all our time of logging the license plate numbers of police officers’ personal vehicles, we’ve spotted cars sporting Punisher stickers as well as iconography for other hate or pro-gun or -violence groups such as the Three Percenters (right), the NRA, MAGA, and others. We’ve also documented plenty of illegal license plate covers. Well, according to the Post, NYPD’s new Chief of Patrol, Juanita Holmes, is cracking down. In a related story, she is offering a bridge for sale at a reasonable price. (Indeed, we’ve heard about these crackdowns before.) Nonetheless, for some reason, former City Hall insider Stu Loeser thinks this time, the NYPD is serious:

• The Post, being the Post, ran Jason Curtis Anderson’s far-right fever dream about New York’s decline as a front page editorial. The Wall Street Journal — no leftists, they! — ran a similar (albeit less blatantly self-serving) piece about New York’s demise. Privilege gotta privilege, we suppose.
• Gridlock Sam can’t wait for the Flushing busway to start! (NYDN)
• The bus driver who sent one of the city’s $850,000 over a guardrail on University Avenue and onto the Cross Bronx Expressway last week is pushing back on the MTA narrative that he declined a drug test and was speeding. Driver Everton Beccan said he submitted a urine sample and also that the bus “just took off” even though his foot was off the gas. (NY Post)
• Fare hikes are coming (NYDN), but no commensurate tax on billionaires.
• Curbed wrote up that restaurant on the East Side that now has cyclists worrying about getting doored by a building. (Full disclosure: We have demanded answers from the Department of Transportation, but have not gotten any.)
• The Post’s “lame duck” year assessment of Mayor de Blasio’s tenure included his failure on placard abuse and his incomplete Vision Zero program, among other alleged shortcomings of Hizzoner.
• A man who needed city help, but didn’t get it, died on the subway tracks in Harlem (NYDN, NY Post). The Post and the Daily News’s follow-up story on Malik Jackson had better be in the mayor’s press packet this morning, because someone screwed up bad.
• Ever hear of Mario Peloquin? Well, he’s the second in command at the MTA — the chief operating officer. It’s likely you never heard of him because he spent the entire fall in Canada, hiding from COVID. (NYDN)
• Opponents of the massive East Side Resiliency Project still say the plan is based on faulty studies. (NY Post)
• Citi Bike is expanding deeper into Astoria. (LIC Post)
• No one covers group sex like the New York Post, which found a COVID angle on its unique obsession.
• And, finally, new mayoral candidate Andrew Yang tweeted a video of himself on his bike — and tagged our Twitter handle, @streetsblognyc, which earned us like a zillion new followers in about 20 minutes (yes, there is a Yang Gang). But he also made some promises to our readers that we will make sure he changes if he wins: