Friday’s Headlines: Just the News Edition

It was a slow news days, so rather than bore you with our copious opinions, we’ll cut to the chase:

• Like Streetsblog, amNY covered the arraignment on new charges of accused babykiller Tyrik Mott.
• Gov. Hochul pandered to building-trades-donors plumped for Cuomo-era transit megaprojects at an industry breakfast yesterday. She touted, in particular, the (relatively modestly priced and much-needed $10 billion) rebuild of the Port Authority’s Midtown bus terminal and the (exorbitant and over-the-top $306 billion redevelopment) of Penn Station, the skyscraper-orgy otherwise known as the Empire Station Complex. After Hochul pulled the plug on the boondoggle LaGuardia AirTrain, you didn’t think she would empty the construction and real-estate feed trough completely, did you? She wants to stay governor! (amNY)
• Speaking of the little-loved AirTrain, its anticipated construction ended up delaying by more than five years a project to make the Willet’s Point LIRR station accessible. (TheCity)
• Department of Investigation Commissioner Margaret Garnett, who lately was dogging Mayor de Blasio about using his police drivers for errands, is leaving to become a federal prosecutor. Garnett was too much of a pussycat for our taste on city employees’ placard abuse, which flourished on her watch. In truth, however, placard abuse is so endemic at city agencies (lookin’ at you, NYPD) that it qualifies as normative behavior. The only way to tame such systemic corruption is to extirpate it root and branch – by abolishing placards.
• We admire the efforts of “citizen scientists” to map urban heat islands in order to combat climate change — but couldn’t the sensors be strapped onto bikes? (Gothamist)
• Hizzoner was crowing yesterday about the more than 50,000 blocks that were hand swept by the City Cleanup Corps, but apparently nobody covered it. (nyc.gov)
• This is what passes for intrigue on the LIRR. (amNY)
• ICYMI: City Limits did the Bronx angle on TransAlt’s Open Street report.
• The NYPD — with seven cars and a dozen cops — conducted a traffic sting on West Broadway and Warren Street yesterday morning, supposedly to check for seat-belt use on account of a rash of crashes there recently, the Tribeca Citizen reported. It would be unbelievably stupid if it weren’t NYPD, which makes it believably stupid. Rather than stopping drivers from putting themselves in possible danger by not wearing seatbelts, how about stopping drivers who put everyone else in danger through visibly reckless driving?
• Hear, hear to an NYPD foot chase that caught two suspects who allegedly robbed a teen in Manhattan. See, officers, good things happen when you climb out of the cars. (Via Twitter)
• Open Culture on the move: Three DOT plazas — one each in Manhattan, The Bronx and Brooklyn — will host “City Artist Corps Public Space Showcases” on Saturdays and Sundays for the rest of the month, for “five full days of free performances and presentations.” (Opencultureworks)
• Nicholas Kristof has surrendered his column as he contemplates a run for governor in his home state of Oregon. It’s a big loss to journalism, but maybe as governor, he can direct some of his humanitarianism toward the epidemic of road violence, which never made it into his Times columns (although he did write about biking in China early in his career).
• Finally, we like our trains with sexy headlight eyes. That’s the holiday spirit! (ViaTwitter)