Inside Baseball: Kuntzman To Step Down At Streetsblog; David Meyer To Take Over

It’s time to give you an update on what’s going on at your favorite website.

On Jan. 1, I’ll step down as editor in chief of Streetsblog and hand the reins (and reign) to David Meyer, whose talent and experience make him perfectly suited for this moment. David will be just the fourth editor in chief in our 20 years (following me, Ben Fried and founding editor Aaron “Honku” Naparstek).

I’m not doing the full George Washington — I’m not departing to my vine and fig tree. In fact, I’ll remain on hand as senior editor for as long as people think I can help make this city a better place, one street at a time. I know, some of you feel I’ve never helped do that, but we’ll have to agree to disagree.

But one thing we can all agree on is David Meyer, who was a reporter for Streetsblog under Fried and in my early days, and returned in 2023 as managing editor. In between, David worked as a reporter at the New York Post, which is certainly not our favorite paper ideologically, but we have long respected how Post reporters turn in clean, tight copy with a strong point of view.

And that’s Streetsblog’s MO: aggressive, in-the-moment, challenging, bold, and, most important, narrow and visionary at the same time. I’ve played a role in that, but thanks to his two tenures, David has been a major reason why we have become such a crucial part of the media landscape. We’ve also won many awards and broken many important stories, attesting to the importance of the work that reporters Dave Colon, Kevin Duggan, Sophia Lebowitz, Sammy Sussman and Henry Beebe-Center, and editors J.K. Trotter, Emily Lipstein and Kea Wilson have done and are doing.

We won a freakin’ Polk Award, for Pete’s sake!

That was fun, but Streetsblog needs to keep that momentum going, and David Meyer is the ideal person for the trask. He needs no introduction to the scope of the road violence problem in our supposedly great city, where road fatalities remain a nearly daily occurrence; injuries from crashes are in the tens of thousands per year; and there are roughly 220 reported crashes every day. The numbers are simultaneously mind-boggling and also barely a blip on the frenzied radar screen of New York life.

The livable streets movement is, again, at a crossroads: despite New York City’s reputation as a progressive Mecca, our civic life is dominated by revanchists who fight all improvements, whether it is a simple bike lane to keep kids safe, a bus lane to speed the commutes of thousands of working people, a new residential development to house our neighbors, or even a train line to bring hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers closer to jobs that they can access without the debt cancer of car ownership.

The movement for safe streets is winning — there are open streets, there are school streets, there are investments in our buses and subways, there are more and more bike lanes — but two steps of progress are often accompanied by one step backwards.

With David in charge, Streetsblog will re-energize the movement against that sclerotic status quo. He will bring fresh strategies and energy to a movement whose arc of history definitely does not always bend towards bike lanes. Unlike my aging brain, David’s is nimble, savvy and strategic — far better able to respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow (looking at you, robo-cars).

So please welcome him to his new position by extending all courtesies — and emails and late-night texts — to him. With your help, dear readers, he’s going to do great.

Streetsblog!