Friday’s Headlines: It Never Ends Edition

It seems like we’re always writing the same story, so we were pleased to see our friends at Hell Gate report on Thursday about yet another way that entitled drivers are stealing from us and how the city isn’t doing anything about it.

As the worker-owned outlet reported, according to a city law passed in 2019, drivers are supposed to get escalating fines if they are caught using a fake parking placard. But, of course, they don’t. In fact, Hell Gate could not find a single instance where repeat offenders who were ticketed were slapped with the higher fines.

“It’s outrageous,” Manhattan Council Member Gale Brewer told Hell Gate. “I know about the problem but I didn’t know how extensive it is.”

Well, now she does.

In other news:

• Entitlement on display: Let’s play the world’s smallest violin for the New Jersey drivers complaining how hard it is to store their cars for free all day in Manhattan now that congestion pricing has started. Hey, Garden Staters, that’s a feature, not a bug (and tell Josh Gottheimer we say hi). (Gothamist)
• Janno Lieber’s tin-cup trip to Albany began with Gothamist’s curtain-raiser on the MTA’s high construction costs and ongoing debt problems and ended with his demand that the legislature look to its own dysfunctions (Streetsblog, NYDN, NY Post, Gothamist).
• Vacant lot or housing? A Harlem community board chose the former. (The City)
• Another senior was killed by a reckless driver, this time a 90-year-old woman on the Upper East Side. (Patch, NY Post)
• Speaking of reckless drivers, Williamsburg365 — the house organ of the opponents of the Bedford Avenue bike lane — reported about a driver who slammed his car into a McDonald’s restaurant on that very same avenue. Because no one could blame the bike lane, it wasn’t mentioned. But what should have been mentioned is that the car in question has 91 violations on its record!
• Like Streetsblog, amNY covered the damning Independent Budget Office audit of Mayor Adams’s failed bus lane efforts.