Friday’s Headlines: Oracle of Freight Edition

I feel unto an oracle from ancient Greek mythology — except my vision is blurry: I keep seeing the future, yet it never comes to pass.

But next week, the city will take yet another step forward in its quest to ship more goods around town on water and cargo bikes with a genuine seminal development: the deployment of the first refrigerated e-cargo bike.

I rode it on Thursday at the annual Empire Clean Vehicle Festival in Union Square. It’s a Fulpra Quatro, four-wheeled, pedal-assist electric bike, similar to the kind you see with the Amazon logos — except this one can carry 815 pounds of perishable cargo in its refrigerated payload (Fulpra U.S. consultant/adviser Paul Lipson cheerfully handed out still-cold ice cream sandwiches, making him, perhaps, the first Good Humor Man whose route is the Blue Highway).

Yesterday was just a dog-and-pony show. But on Wednesday, Fulpra will use the East River and a freight ferry called Blue Highway 1 to transport 4,000 pounds of produce from the Hunts Point Market to the NYC Ferry dock on E. 34th Street, where the pallets will be unloaded, broken down and reloaded onto Fulpra cargo quads for transport to a New York University food pantry supplied by a Hunts Point-based food rescue organization. The refrigerated bike will carry the most-perishable produce, such as fragile vegetable stuff that is stranger to my colon, while other conventional Fulpra quad bikes will handle less-perishable goods.

The small, bike-lane-width, 15 mile-per-hour max quads will replace a much bigger, much-more-dangerous truck.

Of course, this is just a test and definitely not ready for prime time … yet. What’s still needed are bike-sized shipping containers that can be hoisted from a produce wholesaler at Hunts Point onto a boat and then unloaded directly onto the chassis of a cargo bike. And more refrigerated units will be needed. And then scaled up, up and up.

But little loop around Union Square and an ice cream sandwich as a dessert shows what is possible.

In other news:

• You weren’t imagining things: Yesterday’s subway commute was a disaster. (Gothamist, NYDN)
• Gothamist followed our story about the city’s possible BQE bypass highway on top of the Brooklyn Bridge’s approach ramps, but added a nice detail: the plan will require state legislative help because some parkland will have to be alienated during construction (curiously, Department of Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn didn’t say anything about that in his recent Streetsblog op-ed).
• The New York Times’s failure to cover the human shitshow that is Canal Street created a real blindspot in the Old Gray Lady’s vision … which was filled by this puff piece about the roadway’s many shortcomings. The TL;DR? “I avoid walking down Canal Street at all costs,” said Yukie Ohta, 57, an artist who grew up nearby. “It’s treacherous, it’s a free for all. [But] I will miss it if it becomes an orderly, clean street.” Insert eye-roll here.
• Meanwhile, the Times’s Metro assignment editor seems to be a TikTok bot. (NY Times)
• Chief Justice John Roberts loves his car-free island in Maine. (NY Times)
• Want to sell cars in the United States? Make them ridiculously big. (WSJ)
• Hell Gate got a second day of coverage out of the Council’s marathon snoozefest of a hearing over e-bikes.
• A motorcyclist hit a Citi Bike rider and fled — and the victim’s friends are seeking help. (Reddit)
• Some obscure Assembly member who wants to run the Brooklyn Democratic Party has 69 moving violations, Politico reported. Sounds about the right number for a would-be party chair.
• Comic Pete Davidson continues the long tradition of celebrities not understanding anything about transportation because, like politicians, they drive or are driven everywhere. (NY Post)
• This guy makes a good point about the L train’s Third Avenue station in Manhattan. (Josh Wolk on Twitter)
• Trump’s tariffs are costing the MTA a lot more. (The City Reporter)
• A cop driving fast in supposedly car-free Central Park, pushing cyclists into the pedestrian path and saying on the loudspeaker to the bike riders, “Try not to kill anyone today” is pretty much a perfect statement on AWOL NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s commitment to Vision Zero. (Reddit)
• What do we think about this effort to gobble up public space in Herald Square for an amusement concession? (The City Reporter)
• And, finally, I hope you’ll indulge me and let me mention that my mother, Bernice Kuntzman, died earlier this week at age 90 after a life filled with joy and love and lots of blintzes. I wrote a fairly cursory obituary for her that doesn’t do justice to all of the many little things she taught me over the years (principal among them: “It’s ‘justice,’ not ‘just us'”). In any event, in tribute to her, I ran the plates on the hearse that carried her to her final resting place: 19 speed-camera and red-light tickets on its record. What’s the rush? Late for a funeral.