Tuesday’s Headlines: Hot Weather, Sluggish Cops Edition
It’s a big city. And there are lots of cops. And there are millions of cars moving around on any given day.
Yet somehow, the NYPD’s tens of thousands of uniformed officers, patrolling 6,000 miles of streets, managed to write just nine tickets to drivers parked in a bus lane in the seven days between July 27 and Aug. 2. (I uploaded the data here and posted it to the right because the NYPD deletes one week’s stats when it posts the next week’s, a record-keeping technique popular in the 1950s.)
Nine tickets is downright abysmal, and it follows law enforcement reporter Sammy Sussman’s report that cops wrote just 10 bus lane tickets in the previous seven days, July 20 to 26. Those 10 tickets were part of an “effort” that resulted in just 32 tickets total to drivers blocking bus lanes, bus stops and bike lanes. (We asked the NYPD about it, but after requesting more time to give us a full answer, the agency didn’t bother providing one.)
Last week, bike lane and bus stop tickets rose a bit (still off from the same period last year), but those nine bus lane tickets are a true head-scratcher.
In fact, we were scratching our heads so long about it yesterday that Sussman came up with a great idea: “I wonder how quickly I could find nine cars blocking a bus lane,” Sussman said at our weekly planning meeting. “I’m sure it wouldn’t take me an hour, let alone a week!”
You’re on, kid. Let’s have that story for Wednesday.
In other news:
- Hat tip to “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz for turning our nation’s obsession with, and fear of, technology into a novel about a killer autonomous vehicle. (NY Times)
- The Guardian likes our new rat-proof garbage bins.
- It was nice to see the Times cover Mayor Mamdani’s support for the Council’s “Delivery Protection Act,” which our Sophia Lebowitz has been covering more or less alone for about a year. The mayor himself also joined the Lebowitz-created fray with a very well-made video in support of the bill, which amNY covered:
- It looks like the fabled Hipster Triple Crown — Brooklyn Kickball, the Idiotirod and Santa Con — has a fourth leg: The Willy B Marathon. (NY Post)
- Lots of outlets covered the MTA and Mamdani administration’s announcement that hot subway platforms could end up warming cold buildings, thanks to some new tech that, I promise you, is being oversold. Plus Pool, anyone? (NY1, Gothamist, NYDN, amNY, Hell Gate)
- Max Headroom: Check out the moment when a tractor-trailer driver slams into a Thruway overpass. (News12, NY Post)
- Patch got a second-day story out of the lawsuit challenging the Adams administration’s high-speed chase policy.
- The Mamdani administration has not pulled the plug on former Mayor Eric Adams’s sleazy deal for a skate park in Brooklyn. (Brooklyn Eagle)
- The Daily News had more on the victim of the weekend’s hit-and-run in Hells Kitchen, Chet Mazur, who was a fixture in New York’s music scene.
- Carnage on Long Island. (Gothamist)
- Finally, we were happy to see that the mayor was looking forward to reading Jason Froimowitz’s op-ed about Summer Streets that we published yesterday. Here’s Hizzoner’s exchange with Dave Colon at a presser yesterday:
