Friday’s Headlines: Chi-Town Edition

They love congestion pricing — and they’re beefing over the Svengali of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s congestion pricing “pause.”

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Brooklyn Council Member Chi Ossé turned their friendship into a defining image of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. The duo gained the support of street safety advocates across the city, given their support of congestion pricing, bike lanes, and other improvements.

But the two politicians are on the outs after Mamdani discouraged Ossé from primarying House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who persuaded Hochul to indefinitely delay the long-awaited implementation of congestion pricing last year.

Mamdani reiterated his opposition this week when the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America hosted a closed-door forum to vote on whether the organization should endorse Ossé for Congress. Both Mamdani and his well-regarded field director, Tascha Van Auken, implored their fellow socialists not to endorse one of their campaign’s earliest and most visible surrogates.

We hope they can work out their differences and focus on more important matters such as the 34th Street Busway, the Queens waterfront greenway, the Bedford Avenue bike lane in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the 31st Street bike lane in Astoria, and permanently ending traffic violence in New York City — for starters.

And now, your hotly anticipated end-of-the-workweek headlines:

• Speaking of Congress, first it was Jerry Nadler, but now 16-term Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez has shown Chuck Schumer the way. (NY Times)
• Streetsblog alum Jesse Coburn investigated the federal Department of Transportation’s campaign to eliminate dozens of regulations designed to protect human life. (ProPublica)
• The U.S. Border Patrol is surveilling car drivers and arresting those it deems “suspicious.” (Associated Press)
• Clifford “Buzz” Grambo chases ICE agents around Baltimore on an electric scooter. (Mother Jones)
• Nighttime New York City will begin to look very different in 2027, thanks to new streetlight standards. (Inside Lighting)
• Albanians advocate for pedestrian safety. (WAMC)
• Three different drivers killed a single pedestrian in Nassau County. (Daily Voice)
• A Forest Hills homeowners association is riven over concert noise at the Forest Hill Stadium. (Queens Daily Eagle)
• The city Department of Transportation told Queens residents that it can’t install Citi Bike docks within Flushing Meadows Corona Park because “they can only be in areas that are accessible 24/7, which parks are not.” (Queens Chronicle)
• Bath & Body Works has turned a subway platform at Grand Central Terminal into a holiday-themed olfactory experience. (Associated Press)
• Harvard’s Gloria Gong has some suggestions for the mayor-elect’s plan for a Department of Community Safety (Vital City)
• The developers of the long-delayed Haven Green housing development in Nolita sued the Adams administration for classifying the development’s location as parkland. (The City)
• New infrastructure may not be enough to protect Red Hook from catastrophic flooding (Amsterdam News)
• And, finally, here's the new political bromance in town — and it's trying to get Brooklyn judges from ceasing their practice of stealing a park for their cars.