Monday’s Headlines: Whiteout Conditions Edition

Get off the road!

That was the message from Mayor Mamdani ahead of the citywide travel ban in effect from 9 p.m. on Sunday until, as of our deadline, noon on Monday.

Buses and subways were still running during the travel ban, but not without issues. Shortly after 11 p.m., MTA officials suspended J train service between 111th Street and Jamaica Center-Parsons/Archer. Several other subway lines were experiencing delays as of midnight.

On X, @WMSBG shared video of the aftermath of a crash “involving a car” and an MTA bus — a reminder of why it’s so crucial that drivers stay off the road during the storm:

The citywide travel restriction banned “most vehicle traffic — including but not limited to commercial trucks, electric bicycles, scooters, and mopeds,” with exemptions for: government and emergency response vehicles; public transit; vehicles delivering food, fuel and medical supplies; utility vehicles performing emergency repairs; transportation for essential workers traveling to workplaces; transportation to hospitals and court facilities; and nonprofit and private organizations providing emergency relief.

Those exemptions had exceptions, however: DoorDash and GrubHub reportedly suspended delivery operations for the night, while the MTA stopped taking Access-A-Ride reservations at 9 p.m. Lyft closed Citi Bike at 8 p.m. and pledged to have more crews shoveling out bikes than it had in January, City Hall said.

Streetsblog ran through the hits from the mayor’s pre-storm Sunday press conference here.

Next up: The Big Dig (not the highway boondoggle referenced below). We’ll have higher temperatures — and according to the city, more snow shovelers — this week than we had after the last storm, so hopefully that helps.

Programming alert: The City Council “deferred” its long-awaited joint Sanitation/Disabilities/Transportation committee hearing on snow removal that had been scheduled for Monday … because of the snow.

And Streetsblog, of course, offered full team coverage of the storm:

In other news:

• Alon Levy makes a strong case against free buses. (Pedestrian Observations)
• NYC’s Big Dig? A world-historical highway boondoggle is a less-than-stellar aspiration for the BQE. (Gothamist)
• “I’ve got to rep the buses”: Times transit reporter Stefanos Chen rode two buses to get to school when he was growing up in Queens. (NY Times)
• An art museum is coming to the death-trap intersection of Canal Street and Bowery. (Curbed)
• Comptroller Mark Levine apparently thinks City Hall is underestimating how much money it will have to give the MTA this year, but it’s hard to tell what the substance of the disagreement is from this Post story.
• Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg charged two NYPD cops for going to “great lengths” to cover up a third officer’s drunk car crash in Chelsea in 2024. (NY Post)
• Manhattan Community Board 2 opposes a 19-story building over a parking lot at Lafayette Street and Great Jones Street. (amNY)
• Two city residents were struck — one fatally — by two consecutive drivers, the first in a bus, the second an SUV, in a crosswalk in Amityville in Suffolk County on Friday night. (WABC-TV, News 12 Long Island, Suffolk PD)
• Hell Gate on the Center for an Urban Future’s proposal to charge more for parking to close the city’s budget gap. (Hell Gate)
• See it! Council Member Shahana Hanif launched a bike safety education campaign in her district on Thursday: