Wednesday’s Headlines: Safe Kids, Safe City Edition

We were happy to see so many street safety advocates convening on Clarkson Street to celebrate the city’s first permanently gated school street, which amNY and CBS2 covered.

We’re especially proud because Streetsblog’s sister organization, Open Plans, led the design process (thanks to some funding from Project for Public Spaces) and worked with the Department of Transportation to set up the pilot apparatus. This is the kind of popular safety intervention that is on hundreds of streets in Paris, but is, how you say, très inhabituel in New York. (Then again, only four dozen schools in the Big Apple have official “school streets” with the old-style move-them-in-the-morning/take-them-away-at-night barricades.)

I don’t think it’s a radical idea that every school building in town — there are like 1,400 — should have at least a safe street on one side of the building where kids can play or simply enter and exit the school safely, especially given how dangerous school streets are. Yet gated safe zones are incredibly rare, as I said in French above. And the one in front of City as School would not have even happened were it not for pushing and funding by advocacy groups.

So I sent Kevin Duggan to the presser to ask DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn whether this kind of thing will be expanded all over the city with public money, or will our kids have to wait for the largesse of rich people to make it happen. In other words, are we living in Louis XIV’s France or Zohran Mamdani’s New York?

Flynn loves the gate, but was not very committal on installing them everywhere.

“I think these are the kinds of things we’re looking at really closely right now,” he said. “As with any sort of new approach or new program or new infrastructure, we need to kind of figure out all those dimensions. If it’s the funding, if it’s the maintenance, the operations. I mean, the potential is tremendous. … We know that Paris has been a leader with school streets, and we’re always trying to learn from our global peers. So these are the kinds of things our public realm team and our partners are thinking about right now.”

Think a little faster, people.

In other news:

• Get ready for some J and M changes in Brooklyn. (Bushwick Daily)
• Fish and chip paper: The Tribeca Citizen lauded our 2022 “placard census” of Lower Manhattan.
• A hit-and-run driver killed a man on Ocean Parkway. (ABC7)
• Want better transit? Have more babies, says President Trump. (Politico)
• The light’s on at Wythe Avenue and N. Third Street. (Williamsburg365)
• Yeah, why aren’t we talking about how a school on Lafayette Avenue has taken over the brand new two-way bike lane? (Reddit)
• Here’s a horrific driver in The Bronx. (NY Post)
• New bike routes planned in Throggs Neck, which we’d love to read about, but suddenly The Bronx Times has a paywall.
• The Mamdani administration broke ground on a key southern Brooklyn bike project that began under the previous mayor. (amNY)
• And, finally, I mentioned in the headlines a few days ago that there would be a big test of the potential of the so-called “Blue Highway” on Wednesday, featuring a refrigerated cargo-quad that will be hauling perishable produce from the ferry dock on E. 34th St. to a soup kitchen in Greenwich Village. Well, today, I offer an Old Man Vertical about it: