Friday’s Headlines: Eric Adams’s New Jersey Problem Edition
The big story yesterday was New Jersey — and why leading mayoral candidate Eric Adams goes there so often in his city-issued car and why he owns a co-op there.
The whole saga began two days ago with Politico’s fascinating story about Adams’s real-estate portfolio and his eyebrow-raising yarns about where he’s been sleeping. That led the Adams campaign to put out the E-ZPass records from his official city-issued car (but not any other vehicles that the Brooklyn Borough President might be smart enough to use when driving to Jersey; Adams’s campaign said he doesn’t have another car).
Everyone covered the E-ZPass release (NYDN, NY Post, NY Post again, NY Times), but no matter how many times we advise city reporters on how to use Howsmydriving to look up camera-issued tickets, only Streetsblog’s Christopher Robbins got the real story: Adams’s city-issued car has racked up 20 serious moving violations since his term as borough president began in 2014 – and 15 of them came since 2019.
Why don’t other city reporters ever run the plates?!
In other news:
- Gov. Cuomo’s change of governance at the MTA is back on the table as the state legislature played lapdog to the Big Dog. (NYDN, WSJ)
- The Daily News had a lot more details on Darwin Durazno, the teenager killed by a reckless hit-and-run driver whom we wrote about on Thursday morning.
- The bus lodged into the Prospect Lefferts Gardens home has become a tourist attraction. (NY Post)
- Like Streetsblog, amNY covered the improvement made on Battery Place by the Department of Transportation for Staten Island bus commuters.
- And, finally, our staff at Streetsblog has gotten so large (and has now added super-intern Henry Beers Shenk!), that our old man editor wants us to end each week with a roundup of all the amazing stories you might have missed:
- Did you see Jesse Coburn’s deep dive on how Eric Adams is the car-culture candidate?
- What about Dave Colon’s piece about what happened when a business improvement district asked cops for “help” with cyclists?
- Eve Kessler gave you the latest ask — Public Space Management — from Streetsblog Publisher Mark Gorton.
- The old man broke the news that Kathryn Garcia had won the coveted StreetsPAC endorsement.
- Julianne Cuba wrote about a Harvard study that quantified just how much car pollution is killing us.
- Kessler previewed two City Council races in Upper Manhattan.
- Yet another resident of 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights demanded that the city create a linear park.
- Christopher Robbins looked at the impact of policing and public space on the mayor’s race.
- An Upper West Side community board again reacted negatively to bikes.
What a busy week — but that’s what weekends are for (meaning we’ll spend the weekend checking out open streets, like the “superblock” that the Meatpacking BID is going to unveil this weekend). There are no days off on the street beat.
