Tuesday's Headlines: NYPD Fails On Bus Speeds Edition

You know we toot our horn louder and more piercingly than most outlets, but today we rise to praise Liam Quigley’s story yesterday in Gothamist about naggingly slow bus speeds.

Sure, there’s some good news: bus speeds have “mostly improved” on the 67 total routes where the MTA equipped buses with cameras to automatically ticket bus lane blockers — with speeds increasing by 5 percent overall.

But on nine routes with camera enforcement, bus speeds actually dropped. One of the buses’ problem could be attributed to construction on its route. But one the other eight routes, we have met the enemy … and it is plate-covering scofflaws.

Quigley’s story had plenty of pictures of drivers who cover their plate or raise their trunk lids so that bus cameras can’t snap their license plates — which, if you know anything about me, people who deface or cover their plates has been a personal obsession as well.

So when automated enforcement is thwarted, who ya gonna call? It’s up to the NYPD to make sure bus routes are free of illegally parked cars and, more important, cars with unreadable plates that are willfully preventing camera enforcement.

How is the NYPD doing? Not very well. A quick search of the city’s Open Data portal showed that from fiscal year 2024 (July 2023-June 2024) to fiscal year 2026 (which just concluded), the NYPD wrote 12 percent fewer tickets in the key categories related to defacing or covering a plate. And in the fiscal year just ended, the NYPD’s massive force of officers and traffic enforcement agents wrote just 8,793 tickets for “fraudulent use of a parking permit” (also known as placard abuse).

That’s virtually none.

So the next time you’re on a bus stuck in traffic, first, blame the scofflaw driver who covered his plate to avoid getting a ticket, but also blame the NYPD for not targeting these hot spots with boots on the ground.

Oh, and speaking of buses, Dave Colon had a nifty story yesterday about how they’ll be spewing pollution for the near future.

In other news:

The Post’s gaslighting of New Yorkers continues. On Monday, Murdoch’s minions decided that the city’s long-overdue secure bike parking program is a scam because it gives cyclists something they don’t deserve in the form of “ugly” bike parking units. The paper is wrong for many reasons: 1. cyclists will pay for the parking spaces, unlike virtually all drivers, and 2. anything that encourages cycling (and lack of safe places to park is a real impediment) is actually good for drivers because it potentially takes another person out of a car. And if you want to complain about something ugly, just look out your window, where car drivers have filled both sides of every street with hulking metal cages (yes, even in “historic” districts that were settled before the advent of the car). There’s nothing uglier than our current version of Park Avenue vs. what it originally looked like.
Speaking of brain-dead newspaper coverage, Our Town was so intent on drumming jp controversy to the DOT’s Park Avenue beautification and safety plan that it had to quote a rando from Nextdoor, the toxic NIMBY-and-fearmongering website, where supposed Midtown resident Caroline Garcia posted, “Sitting in the middle of six lanes of traffic seems like a perfectly nice and healthy way to spend an afternoon. Does every bad idea come to NYC to be implemented?” We’ll tell Garcia what we always tell the Post: Park Avenue wasn’t six lanes until cars ruined it. We’re the conservatives who want it to go back to what it was.
Meanwhile, even The New Yorker knows how nice it is to get on a bike and then relax somewhere nice.
A driver killed a real estate broker out on a jog in the Hamptons. (NY Post)
Kudos to Erik Engquist at The Real Deal for championing Off Ramp NYC‘s great idea for converting the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway into a transit-way and park. No good deed goes unpunished, of course, as revanchist has-been Bob Holden tweeted his vitriol, but the former Council member clearly lacks the imagination to see the many ways to get goods around a city built on water. And he apparently wants city employees to live far from their jobs so that they have long car commutes.
The Times did some more reporting on President Trump’s decision to stiff Democrat-controlled states of their rightfully allocated transit money …
… which maybe explains part of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s outrage over Trump’s attempt to name Penn Station after his favorite president. (NYDN)
The MTA’s Park Avenue viaduct — on time and under budget. (The City Reporter; NY Post; NY Times, with surprising snark)
Mass Transit and NY1 followed our epic two-day coverage of federal Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy’s latest wrongheadedness on transit and bike lanes.
It’s like Death Race 2000, but with bikes! (Reddit)
Soon it’s gonna rain — rain pell mell (that’s a reference to a very old play, kids). (Gothamist)
On a personal note, it’s nice when people don’t give up, even in the face of impossible odds, and promise to do right by their colleagues. (amNY)
And, finally, we’re of two minds on yesterday’s photo of former Mayor Eric Adams riding a Citi Bike in Midtown. Yes, we love that ex-Hizzoner is riding a bike, which, as we’ve always said, is the best way to run quick errands or go 10 or 20 blocks. Kudos to the former mayor! But there’s a big but here (and it’s not the mayor’s): The picture showed Adams going the wrong way down a one-way street. Yes, he was going slowly and only from a Citi Bike rack to the corner — normal biking behavior — but this is the mayor who made such behavior a criminal offense. So, no, it’s not just a fun photo of the former mayor, but a snapshot of his hypocrisy: