Thursday’s Headlines: Having a Cow Edition

NY1 statehouse reporter Bernadette Hogan sent shockwaves through the Empire State — and both of Streetsblog’s insurance-obsessed newsrooms — with a late afternoon tweet that suggested, dare we say it, that Gov. Hochul had blinked?

Hogan reported that Gov. Hochul offered the state Legislature a deal: In return for lawmakers’ support on the bulk of her car insurance premium cut proposal, the governor would drop her proposed changes to joint and several liability. Why did Hochul want to gut joint and several liability? Well, it requires all responsible parties in a crash to pay their proportional share of damages — but it also sometimes leads to public agencies like the MTA to pay more than their share if the other party doesn’t have any money.

After all, who’s going to pay the victim? The victim?!

Our Albany Bureau Chief Austin C. Jefferson says he’s hearing that lawmakers see Hochul’s latest negotiating effort as a good jumping off point, given that the governor had previously rebuffed any alterations to her plan. But pols still retain concerns about whether any reforms will actually deliver savings and whether crash victims will retain their ability to get all the compensation they deserve for catastrophic, life-altering injuries.

We’ll have more later today.

In other news:

• Earlier in the day, NY1 had reported on how Gov. Hochul and state legislators were in their own trenches looking across a budgetary No Man’s Land, as neither side wanted to wave the white flag on insurance premiums. We call that the Streetsblog Effect, given our intense coverage of the issue.
• News12 had more details about that fatal crash in Co-op City.
• Yesterday was Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso’s media blitz for his race to succeed Rep. Nydia Velazquez in her Brooklyn-Queens congressional district. He took a bike ride with Miser and penned an op-ed for Streetsblog.
• Time Out New York focused on the right thing for Earth Day: car-free streets.
• More trucks coming for Staten Island. (Advance)
• The bikelash is coming for the DOT’s generally excellent road diet, pedestrian and bike plan for W. 72nd Street. (West Side Rag)
• Big school bus crash in Queens. (NYDN)
• A Long Island woman keeps getting tickets even though her plate was stolen years ago. (WABC7)
• Look out, PATH customers. (NYDN)
• The Post had more on killer driver Miriam Yarimi’s effort to claim she’s not guilty.
• For the record, I like the new MTA app. Find out more in Vital City.
• We’re excited to see more outlets covering autonomous vehicles, but our friend Erik Engquist’s piece in the Real Deal didn’t dig deep enough on the very problem he identified with AVs: When they’re not occupied, they will either park somewhere (taking up valuable public space) or they will keep driving around waiting for a fare (wasting fuel, causing congestion, raising the risk of crashes).
• Stop whining, Americans — your gas is cheap by worldwide standards. (Wall Street Journal)