Take a picture, save the city.
This just in from our friends at CHEKPEDS (which sort of stands for the Clinton-Hell's Kitchen-Chelsea Coalition for Pedestrian Safety): a new app that you need now more than ever.
The same people who created the indepensible Crashmapper are back with "Walkmapper," which allows you to snap a picture of a streetscape defect and report it directly to the city and the elected official in that neighborhood. Manhattan Community Board 4 used it recently to report more than 200 missing pedestrian ramps! (It's also great for reporting a missing bike rack, a broken streetlight, or an ill-timed crosswalk light.)
Instead of using the 311 app, and hunting through menus or sometimes being bounced off the app and to a website, "Walkmapper" streamlines and automates what shouldn't be such a damn complex process of helping the city help itself.
To download the loooong-needed app, you should click here — and get started on making the city a better place.
In other news from a fairly quiet weekend:
- Gothamist did the exact story that we need right now (and which I alluded to last week, to brickbats from some of our former friends): The issue in New York City is not the existence of e-bikes, but that some e-bikes are actually high-powered motorcycles that the Adams administration has failed to keep off the streets.
- There are no accidents: A woman was killed because someone didn't properly batten down a solar panel in Brooklyn. (NY Post)
- An 11-year-old boy was critically injured by a hit-and-run driver in Brooklyn. (NYDN)
- In my early days as a tabloid reporter, I once wrote a story about an enraged bovine that escaped a slaughterhouse that ran under the headline, "Cow With Beef on Lam in Bronx." So if you like the punchy cadence of that, you'll love this one: "Baldwin slammed Range Rover into tree in the Hamptons." (NY Post)
- More than a dozen people were hurt when buses crashed in Flushing. (ABC7, Gothamist, QNS)
- Welcome to the war on cars, The Economist.
- The other day, we mentioned a West Side Rag story about bus lines with automated cameras in that neighborhood, but now amNY found two more.
- And, finally, Streetsblog's house band, Jimmy and the Jaywalkers, spent a lot of time in the studio this weekend:
