Wednesday’s Headlines: Road Report Edition
We certainly won’t dwell on the snowstorm except to say that Streetsblog gets action.
In yesterday’s headlines, we pointed out the unfairness of how the Sanitation Department and its enablers in the press consistently focus only on cleared car lanes as the measure of snowstorm “success.” We begged Pat Kiernan and Jamie Stelter of NY1 to rebalance the scales a bit — and, sure enough, Stelter got back to us to say that she and her team have been “talking for a long time about how to best incorporate bike info into my traffic reports.”
The problem, as all reporters know, is that city agencies don’t exactly tell us when bike lanes are taken out of service for repairs or for special events — unlike how they treat drivers, with daily press releases about every little piece of roadway expected that day.
Still, we were excited at Stetler’s initial efforts and look forward to more.
On the plus side, it appeared that the Sanitation Department appeared to start clearing some key bike lanes well before its usual 72-hour delay. A spokesman for the agency said 300 day laborers also started working on Tuesday to clear pedestrian crossings. “By end of day [Wednesday], it’s likely every protected bike lane in the city will have been cleared once,” said Joshua Goodman. “The biggest issue we’re worried about is people pushing snow from their cars or their sidewalks back into the bike lanes. If this is widespread, many of them will require additional passes.”
Of course, nothing’s perfect, as Friend of Streetsblog Shmuli Evers pointed out:
And others sent us photos of some truly epic fails. The only possible explanation for that kind of incomplete plowing is that the Sanitation worker hit something solid, discovered that he or she had actually uncovered an ancient burial ground and decided to stop working until the department archeologist could arrive:
Plus, it’s always nice to remember how cities would plow the sidewalks first … in the days before cars:
Meanwhile, the Daily News said the storm revealed MTA failures: “Jammed up signals, track fires, and a shopping cart dumped on the tracks were just a few of the headaches thrust upon Metropolitan Transportation Authority crews during the blizzard,” the paper reported.
In other news:
- Several outlets — OK, Streetsblog, the Daily News and amNY — looked at mayoral hopeful Kathryn Garcia’s transportation plan, which Streetsblog said lacked vision and the Daily News said was amazingly visionary (SNARK). We asked StreetsPAC Executive Director Eric McClure to break the tie and he said like Garcia’s plan (point for the News!) because it shows how far even candidates without true vision have come (point for Streetsblog!). You gotta love that McClure — he’s a regular Dag Hammarskjöld.
- Families for Safe Streets leaders Amy Cohen and Rebecca Sonkin penned an op-ed in the Washington Post to urge Joe Biden — the only president to have lost a wife and child to road violence — to embrace a national Vision Zero initiative.
- The Cuomo COVID scandal grew yesterday with lawmakers calling state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker a “liar.” The Post is just loving the internecine warfare.
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