Friday’s Headlines: Days Of Infamy Edition
Sept. 11, 2001 is a date that lives forever in infamy. But yesterday — Sept. 10, 2026 — was another day that will, in its own small and very different way, be remembered for tragedy.
Just before 11 a.m., the driver of a cartoonishly overladen truck came flying off the Manhattan Bridge onto the Bowery, jumped a curb, struck three people, killing one, before eventually crashing into another car and coming to a halt. It happened exactly where a similar fatal crash occurred last year, killing May Kwok and Kevin Cruickshank.
For those of us on the street safety beat — even those of us with the certain perspective that comes from having been in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001 as well as on Feb. 26, 1993 — dates that live in infamy are unfortunately not very rare at all.
- Oct. 8, 2013: The date that Sammy Eckstein Cohen was run down by a driver on Prospect Park West, shy of his 13th birthday.
- March 5, 2018: The date that Dorothy Bruns killed 4-year-old Abigail Blumenstein and 20-month-old Joshua Lew in Park Slope.
- July 29, 2019: The date that cyclist Em Samolewicz was doored into traffic on still-deadly Third Avenue in Brooklyn where she was fatally struck by a truck driver.
- Aug. 11, 2019: The date that cyclist Jose Alzorriz was killed on Coney Island Avenue by a reckless driver as he simply stood on his bike as he waited for a traffic signal.
- June 8, 2020: The date that delivery cyclist Ivan Morales was killed by a Lexus driver in the Bronx.
- Oct. 15, 2021: The date that pedestrian Jose Ramos was killed a block from his home on still-deadly Atlantic Avenue.
- May 1, 2023: The date that cyclist and activist Adam Uster was killed by a truck driver who cut him off as he turned.
- Dec. 4, 2023: The date that delivery worker Carlos Garcia-Ramos was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Chelsea.
- Oct. 22, 2024: The date that cyclist Amanda Servedio was killed by a driver fleeing a high-speed police chase in Astoria.
- March 29, 2025: The date that Miriam Yarimi, a driver with a long history of recklessness, killed a mother and two of her young children.
- Dec. 7, 2025: The date that Geoffrey Radbill was killed by an impatient van driver on Riverside Drive.
These are just a scant few of the dates that rend to our hearts and wound our spirit. In the 13 years since then-Mayor Bill de Blasio launched his Vision Zero initiative, more than 690,000 have been injured due to road violence and more than 3,380 New Yorkers have been killed — hundreds more than on 9/11, whose death toll, a once-wise man had rightly said, was “more than any of us can bear.”
This is not to equate road violence with global terror, or to pit one family’s tragedy against another’s. Unhappy families are mired in their own way, as Tolstoy said. But yesterday for us was just a reminder that threats come in all sizes and levels of peril. Thankfully, the big kind happen rarely. But lest we forget, the small catastrophes, the ones that paint our streets in blood and bone every single day, also live in infamy.
To the news:
- Regarding the Canal Street crash, most outlets offered coverage. (Streetsblog was definitive, but Gothamist, NY Post)
- Tesla would be violating state law if the “Cybercab” that people are seeing around town is being tested in autonomous mode, but Gothamist was a bit fuzzy on that detail. We reached out to DOT and got confirmation that the gold Teslas are not in full self-driving mode, but in a supervised mode that has a human behind the wheel. But we’ll keep our eyes on this because we don’t want the kind of shenanigans that Sam Schwartz writes about!
- Subway announcements are just noise. (NY Groove)
- So much for electric buses. (The City Reporter)
- If you’re a rising star athlete, you can make killing people with your car go away, ProPublica reports.
- Who is New Jersey’s naked e-bike rider? (NJ.com)
- The Staten Island Advance, likely pissing off its pro-car columnist Tom Wrobleski, highlighted some positive change on The Rock.
- And, finally, it’s nice to see Mayor Mamdani keeps journalist hours:
Read More:
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