It may just be a small footnote to Friday's disastrous flooding and transit disaster — the second "100-year flood" in as many years, thanks to climate change — but it's worth dwelling for a second on Mayor Adams's thin skin ... and the liberal Council member who seems to have a unique (and seemingly unwitting) ability to get under it.
By the time Hizzoner got around to holding a crisis press conference on Friday, he was characteristically flinty, what with everyone (including the public advocate) having criticized him for not doing enough to prepare New Yorkers before the latest storm or to help them deal with it after (and it was a mess).
Nonetheless, the mayor found a familiar target of his wrath: Williamsburg/Downtown Brooklyn Council Member Lincoln Restler:
"Whenever you talk about a lot of opinions, you start with Lincoln Restler," Adams says, adding that his critics "should have been answering the calls of constituents."
"This is not the time to be sending out a tweet. It's time to be out on the streets," he concluded.
Oops. It turns out that as Adams was slamming Restler, the rookie lawmaker was, in fact, on the streets ... answering the calls of constituents.
And people loved posting pictures:
We weren't surprised at the mayor's thin skin, nor were we all that surprised that he took it out on Restler. He did the same petty thing over the summer when we asked him at a press conference why he said a proposed safety improvement on McGuinness didn't have community support when the local Council member actually supported it
"Who is the Council member over there?" the mayor asked, knowing fully well that it is Restler.
"Who? OK," the mayor responded before breaking into a laugh and moving onto the next reporter's question (jump to 39:05 in the video below).
In other news:
- Cops have ID'd the Citi Bike rider who killed Priscilla Loke in that Chinatown crash last month, the Village Sun reported — before also concluding that the cyclist ran a red light, which is not certain.
- In a related story, the increasingly illogical paper also editorialized in support of registering electric bikes to rein in the "Wild West" that the streets have become. I say "illogical" because the paper said it supports a City Council bill that requires said registration of legal e-bikes, yet does nothing about illegal mopeds. And the editorial, purportedly about street safety, doesn't even mention the greatest threat to pedestrians: car and truck drivers. (TL;DR: I know Streetsblog is constantly being pilloried for "always" screaming "What about cars?" but anyone who is truly serious about street safety needs to address all the threats to vulnerable road users, not merely blame the shiniest, newest object.)
- On the plus side, the paper did also focus some attention on George Bliss's fight against illegal mopeds.
- In case you missed it, our reporter Dave Colon (aka "The Bard of the Busways") was on WNYC on Friday talking about Mayor Adams's "betrayal" on creating bus improvements on Fordham Road. It's worth a listen!
- Speaking of Colon, he'll be at today's meeting of the Traffic Mobility Review Board, the weird and politically suspect six-member panel that is trying to figure out the tolling structure for congestion pricing. The meeting is at 3:30 p.m. — one of the many great events on the Streetsblog calendar.
- Speaking of the TMRB, I couldn't help but notice that two great men with the initials C.K. have been sidelined in the last few weeks — one is Colin Kaepernick, a star quarterback who couldn't even get a tryout from the hapless Jets after Aaron Rodgers was injured because the NFL has colluded against him. The other is Charles Komanoff, who has a great congestion pricing pricing plan (as Streetsblog reported) that the TMRB seems to be ignoring. Never mind that Kaepernick is an icon of civil and free speech rights and Komanoff is, well, Komanoff — they both deserve to be in the mix right now.
- ...certainly more than paid lobbyists, that's for sure. (Crain's)
- Also in case you missed it, former federal transit man Larry Penner offers advice for incoming LIRR President Robert Free. (Mass Transit)
- The sky will be, to paraphrase Paul Simon, a hazy shade of ... Canadian wildfires today. (NYDN)
- Bill and Hillary Clinton have donated to the medical fund for Jacob Priley, injured in a Citi Bike crash last month (NYDN). That's nice, but it reminds me: the GoFundMe page for the struggling family of delivery man, Carlos Garcia-Ramos, remains stagnant. Garcia-Ramos was killed by a hit-and-run driver last December. Have a heart.
- Finally, a car company stopped ignoring the traffic that its products cause ... yet somehow Hyundai turned that into a good thing!
