Streetsblog investigative reporter Jesse Coburn has won another prestigious award, this time a Sidney for his four-part "Ghost Tags" investigation.
The Sidney Award is a monthly honor given out by the national Sidney Hillman Foundation, and the list of judges reads like a Who's Who of American letters: Jamelle Bouie, Maria Carrillo, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alix Freedman, Harold Meyerson, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and Lindsay Beyerstein.
In announcing the award, the foundation cited Coburns' series' "considerable impact," which includes efforts by lawmakers in New York City, New Jersey and Georgia to crack down on the type of sham dealerships that Coburn identified and exposed. (Read his series here.)
“The Sidney judges were impressed with the high quality and sheer tenacity of Coburn’s reporting,” said Beyerstein, “Kudos to Streetsblog for investing in local investigative reporting.”
So were we. The good news for Coburn's co-workers is that he's a generous chap with award money.
In other news from a busy day:
- Remind us again, but Alvin Bragg is in law enforcement, isn't he? Then he should stop saying he's nervous when his family members do the same thing most of us do every day (NY Post) But maybe Bragg is onto something: A new poll says 17 percent of city residents have bought guns because they're so afraid. Wait, wut?! (NYDN, amNY)
- There was a horrifying road rage incident that led to a car ending up inside a Midtown cafe, a man dead and several others injured. As always, the local papers didn't bother to run the plates on either of the cars involved, which constitutes basic reporting that they would do if the incident involved a gun. The supposed "victim" of the initial attack was driving a Jetta with Virginia plates that nonetheless has 14 camera-issued moving violations since February (NYDN, amNY). The Post couldn't even get the killer driver's state right. Reminder, reporters: run all plates through Howsmydriving.nyc.
- It's a tale of two cities — street safety edition: Apparently, the Department of Transportation went ahead and did its life-saving road diet on Wortman Avenue, despite local protest, News 12 reported. That's interesting to us because Mayor Adams KO'd a DOT plan to make McGuinness Boulevard safer after some well-heeled political donors squawked. So in Eric Adams's New York, the mayor will ignore your bike lane and parking complaints if you're from a poor neighborhood that doesn't have a power broker like Broadway Stages to get the ear of the mayor for you. Either way, the mayor doesn't seem to listen to communities — in Greenpoint, thousands of people wanted the road diet, and he ignored them, too. On the plus side, the DOT did the right thing for East New York. Here's hoping the agency does the right thing for Greenpoint, too.
- Thanks to Uber and Lyft, we now know what cops are doing all day. (Gothamist)
- Full service has been restored on Metro-North, which is nothing short of amazing. (amNY)
- Given how New Yorkers in cars don't acknowledge "no standing" zones, we're dubious about the MTA's chances with its similar signage. (NYDN)
- Meanwhile, CBS2 covered the McGuinness debacle. Activists will rally today at City Hall at 11 a.m. to demand the mayor go ahead with the safety plan that he already approved once.
- At hit-and-run suspect was finally caught after three years on the lam. (NYDN)
- Someone (someone who is our new favorite person!) is filing idling complaints against the private school buses of Boro Park. Can this become a citywide trend, please, please? (BoroPark24)
- Yes. the covered the exterior of the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch with Jay-Z lyrics. (Hell Gate)
- Maybe Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn won't flood so much anymore. (Gothamist)
- Hell Gate had a nice overview of the city's poor response to the Orange Sky Crisis last month, which reminded us of the one bit of wildfire coverage that we did: that the city has no plan for limiting driving when the air gets bad.
- Longtime British transportation reporter Carlton Reid finally got to write the headline he has long wanted to write: "Cycles Outnumber Cars In City Of London." (Forbes)
- Irony alert: Electric cars, which some people see as the silver bullet for climate change, don't perform well in the intense heat that they're supposedly helping to solve. (Bloomberg)
- And, finally, we loved seeing order restored to the chaos caused by drivers at the Queensbridge Houses, but truth be told, some of the credit needs to go to Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms:
