Monday’s Headlines: A Big Week for Streetsblog Edition

Many of you will be distracted by some event in some courtroom in Lower Manhattan this week, but for Streetsblog, our eyes are on the prize: Today, we launch a three-part investigation into the black market for fraudulent temporary license plates by Jesse Coburn that has been seven months in the making.

Part I, today, offers a broad overview of the problem: what caused it, how dealers sell temp tags illegally, why the city’s worst drivers buy them, and how too many of these cars end up in crashes.

Our graphic designer, Angel Mendoza, even made an excellent new website to show off the excellence of Coburn’s journalism and the beauty of epic drone photographs by Johnny Milano and graphics by Martin Schapiro. It’s a package you won’t want to miss — all week in Streetsblog (no matter what happens in court).

In other news (wait, there’s other news than that?!), it was an exceptionally slow weekend on the livable streets front (which gives you even more time to read Coburn’s story). Here’s the best of what you missed:

• The Wall Street Journal jumped on the “America has too much parking” bandwagon that we’ve been driving for months.
• The Post stayed on its coverage of dismissed drunk-driving charges.
• Writer Anna Luz Fernandez ponders the age-old question of why the GOP is so pro-car even when cars violate the basic tenets of freedom — plus she puts in a nice plug for our Streetfilms colleague Clarence Eckerson Jr.! (Substack)
• Whaddya know? Albany pols are keen to help the fossil fuel industry, despite our climate goals. (Politico)
• The Coney Island Cyclone is, technically, a form of rail transit, so who better than Reddit to break a major scandal about Mayor Adams holding up the line at the famed roller coaster — and then not even riding!

• We fooled so many people with our April Fool’s Day story — published on Saturday, April 1 — that we had to put a disclaimer on it! Manhattan Council Member Erik Bottcher also got in on the shenanigans:

• Wow, following our story about an effort to pass “Sammy’s Law,” Council Member Ari Kagan, once a Democrat who changed parties to the GOP to run against Council Member Justin Brannan, had a terrible take on a simple bid to get Albany to allow the city to set its own speed limits. The bill is named after a teenager who was killed by a speeding driver, by the way, not that Kagan was in his right mind (though he may have been in his Right mind):

Kagen was promptly dunked on by Rational Twitter: