Tuesday’s Headlines: Oprah Winfrey Edition

Who did we elect, Mayor Mamdani or Mayor Winfrey?

City and State deserves huge kudos for its story on Monday that released — for the first time, as far as we know — the full list of hard-working city officials tax-payer funded elites in the city government who are ferried around 24 hours a day, seven days a week in chauffeured, city-owned cars.

The list had some obvious names — commissioners and deputy mayors — but also some head-scratchers (two people in the City Hall press shop? A chief of staff to a deputy mayor?). Reset the needle because we’re a broken record, but shouldn’t the people helping to inform policy in this city be getting to work the same way that the vast majority of New Yorkers do — via the subway, the bus, on foot or on a ferry?

And not for nothing, as much as we love Press Secretary and Chicago transplant Joe Calvello, shouldn’t he be experiencing his new city (and informing city policy?) on the street, not in the back of an SUV bubble?

The best part of the City and State story was the manner in which the city elite defended the perk and their frenzied 24-7 lifestyles. You know what? New York might be a lot better served if the mayor’s chief of staff wasn’t working 24-7 from the back seat of a limo, but was stuck on the F train at 1:30 a.m. and had a random conversation with a constituent who had an insight that seems to only happen at 1:30 a.m. between Fort Hamilton Parkway and Church Avenue.

And as good as the City and State story was, it failed to notice the elephant in the room: The thousands of other city elite — er, sorry, workers — who are given “take-home cars,” which is actually even more egregious than the chauffeured city car availed to the elite of the elite.

In 2019, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he would cut, by 500, the number of take-home cars. Who knows what happened to that promise? (We asked the Department of Citywide Administrative Services about it, plus a raft of other questions, and the agency said it would get back to us today.)

I’m off the rest of the week for a little R&R (and some serious PT on my still-lame shoulder), so Managing Editor David Meyer and Associate Editor JK Trotter are in charge … and on it.

In other news:

• Speaking of outrages, the New York Post is at it again, this time in an editorial from the weekend that we missed (forgive us for forgetting to check Rupert’s op-ed page, given that his news stories are more or less editorials anyway). In this piece, the Post’s vaunted editorial board complains about “e-bikes,” but then makes the classic mistake of conflating legal, safe and regulated electric bicycles with the current scourge of already illegal, mini-motorcycles that we and others call “e-motos” or “motorbikes.” That’s a pretty common, and intentional, mistake of the anti-bike crowd, and it’s goal is to create more confusion among the public so that all bikes — the good slow ones, the legal slightly faster ones and the illegal menaces — are lumped into one in the public mind. That’s bad enough, but like the Daily News recently, The Post is simply lying, writing that “e-bikes” have “injured over 17,000 people in the city since 2019, including more than 1,500 pedestrians.” Those injury numbers are not accurate — but even if they were, those 1,500 pedestrians represent 2.5 percent of the 58,250 pedestrians, and 0.4 percent of the 365,500 people injured over the same period. We abhor all injuries — but unlike the Post, our focus is the cause of virtually all roadway injuries: car and truck drivers.
• The Daily News editorial board opined on subway elevators.
• Bus fare evasion is a thing. (Gothamist, NY Post)
• We’ve been covering the Flock camera issue over on our USA site (definitively, I might add), but now everyone’s jumping on the fake hysteria whipped up by Murdoch’s minions and the libertarian right. (NY Post, Wired, Washington Post)
• Suffolk County capitulates to the aggrieved driver class. (Newsday)
• It was really smart to add street safety infrastructure during the pandemic. (Momentum)
• What’s with OMNY? Tish James is asking. (NY Post)