We interrupt all this mayoral chatter and SOMOS gossip to remind you that the awesome Bike Film Festival is in town this weekend, marking its 25th year of filling the world with the joy, pathos, bathos and exhilaration of cycling.
This year's festival — running Nov. 8-9 at the Ukrainian National Home on Second Avenue in the Village — is headlined by "Changing Lanes," director Ben Wolf's documentary about the the joy, pathos, bathos and exhilaration of the McGuinness Boulevard bike lane saga. The film unspools on Saturday at 5 p.m along with two shorts.
Wolf's ripped-from-the-Streetsblog-headlines film works on two levels: it's at once a broader view of how hard it is to vanquish car culture even in a city where are majority of people don't own an automobile as well as a granular look at what happened on McGuinness, when the car culture fought back with fake grassroots groups and outright corruption.
It co-stars activists, David Byrne, Ingrid Lewis-Martin and yours truly in a cameo role as a license plate-fixing vigilante.
Check out the festival's full schedule here.
In other news:
- The City's Katie Honan chatted with incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani for 15 minutes ... and no cash-filled potato chip bags changed hands! So refreshing!
- Wired took the perfect Wired angle on the mayoral election: Mamdani is about to inherit the NYPD's excessive surveillance apparatus.
- The Hasidic anti-bike crowd is emboldened by its win on Bedford Avenue and is now targeting nearby Kent Avenue. (Williamsburg 365)
- Speaking of danger, several outlets covered yesterday's killing of a pedestrian by a reckless van driver in the West Village. (Gothamist, Streetsblog, NY Post)
- Whaddya know? Seems like NYPD Commissioner Tisch got a heads up about last month's ICE raid on Canal Street — the one that got completely out of hand because the NYPD conveniently disappeared, as Streetsblog reported. (NYDN)
- Next year's election is already heating up with upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik likely to challenge Gov. Hochul. (Politico, NY Times, Gothamist)
- In a related story, it took less than a year, but the Post has already broken with President Trump.
