Thursday’s Headlines: Joking Around Edition

Our annual April Fools’ Day stories were abnormally successful this year, tricking journalists and our future artificial overseers.

It’s no surprise that an AI slop site was fooled by our fake story that Mayor Mamdani intended to create Rome-style piazzas by eliminating space for cars in the districts of two of his greatest critics, Queens Council members Vickie Paladino and Joann Ariola.

The bigger surprise came when our friends at City and State fell for our much more subtle — and, frankly, far more believable — yarn about how those same aforementioned Council members had formed a new caucus called DRIVE. It all sounded so plausible — the keening over Mayor Mamdani’s supposed “war on cars,” the mourning over lost “parking spaces. But the tip-off should have been what the DRIVE caucus acronym stands for: Develop Roads in Virtually Everyplace. Hmmm.

Well, the City and State newsletter bought it (see photo, above right). Later, in a subsequent post, City and State’s Sophie Krichevsky good-naturedly owned up to falling for our comic deception.

Next year, maybe we’ll get gotten.

We certainly weren’t fooled by the Department of Transportation’s joke, which was actually a bit of a self-own, if you’re a DOT opponent (fortunately, the “Bye Bye Bikes” website gave up the joke):

In other news:

• We hope you voted in our March (Parking) Madness Final Four battles pitting the 120th Precinct against the 123rd Precinct and the 121st Precinct against the 122nd Precinct in our first-ever all-Staten Island competition. In case you missed it, the winners losers were the 120th Precinct of Richmond Terrace and the 122nd Precinct in Grant City. Those two finalists will battle later today (shh, don’t tell the cops we’re coming!).
• The Post followed Sophia Lebowitz’s investigation into Grubhub — and, unlike the Times, credited us nicely.
• Former Taxi Commissioner Lucius Riccio supports creating more pedestrian plazas, built through new regulations against Ubers. (NYDN)
• Linden Boulevard is the new “Boulevard of Death,” Gothamist reports.
• The New Yorker took a ride on the Blue Highway.
• The Daily News had more details about the woman who was killed by a garbage truck driver earlier this week in Queens.
• The MTA is making good on its clean-air investments in the South Bronx, thanks to congestion pricing revenue. (amNY)
• The transit union’s fight to retain two-person train crews has been joined. (NYDN)
• Seder on a subway! Don’t forget, we were strangers once. (ScooterCasterNY)
• The Council wants free transit for the poorest New Yorkers. (NYDN)
• Please set your calendar for the evening of May 6, when Streetsblog Editor Gersh Kuntzman will join “War on Cars” hosts Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear for a panel discussion loosely organized around the pair’s new book, “Life After Cars.” It’s at the New York Public Library’s Midtown Manhattan branch, which the kids today call the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. (Info here)
• Here’s one of the great photos of all time.

• And, finally, Clarence Eckerson is right … again: