Friday’s Headlines: Intersection Fixes Edition

It was a super-slow news day on Thursday, so we'll lead with what's happening today: the Department of Transportation will host a presser "celebrate the completion of a major intersection redesign at Highland Boulevard and Vermont Place" near the Ridgewood Reservoir along the Brooklyn-Queens border.

That's an interesting intersection to choose for a redesign; according to the city's own stats, there hasn't been a single reported crash there dating back to August 2011. By comparison, the notorious intersection of Cypress and Cooper avenues, just a few blocks away, experienced 206 reported crashes over the same period, injuring seven cyclists, 15 pedestrians and 66 motorists — including the pedestrian viciously struck by two cars back in February.

In any event, we'll be asking Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez about the redesign — and for an update on the 1,000 intersections that Mayor Adams promised in January would be redesigned by the end of the year. Given that it's almost August, we're hoping the DOT is up to 700 or so.

The presser is at 1 p.m. Until then, here's all that happened yesterday:

• Mayor Adams's crackdown on ghost cars now includes the arrest of a Staten Island cop who was caught using fake paper plates. (Gothamist)
• Christopher Robbins did a nice roundup of the MTA's woes for The Hell Gate.
• The Post covered the case of the Jersey City lawmaker who struck a cyclist and then fled. Video shows the cyclist running a red light — but also shows Council Member Amy DeGise fleeing the scene after the crash.
• The Times (following The Knockturnal) covered the long-awaited return of the Berkshire Flyer — an Amtrak train that travels between New York and Pittsfield. Given that we have much-richer friends (one of whom has a house in the Berkshires), we've been waiting for the return of train travel to Western Massachusetts for years. Except the Flyer isn't what we poor pixel-pocked wretches wanted; we want the return of the Housatonic Line, as the Berkshire Edge and The Train Campaign have been fighting for. It's a much better route than taking an existing Amtrak train out of the way to Albany just to catch the Flyer to Pittsfield.
• Here's an interesting piece from the right-leaning City Journal about the conflict between "green" energy ambitions and the reality of mining (albeit one that basically glosses over the reality of mining to score some cheap points against progressives, but still...).