Wednesday’s Headlines: The Phantom Menin Edition

We’re all still waiting for the Council to vote on the so-called “Delivery Protection Act,” which could dramatically alter Amazon’s business model here in the city. Streetsblog’s Sophia Lebowitz has covered the bill nine ways to Sunday, but the long and short of it is that proposal has the support of a majority of the Council and would likely pass if Council Speaker Julie Menin would let it come to a vote.

Not much happened yesterday except dueling social media posts by Mayor Mandani (on the pro side) and Council Member Vickie Paladino, who never met a street safety improvement she could love.

First, the mayor put out another of his glitzy videos, pointing out that the bill, Intro 518, would simply require Amazon to actually hire the workers wearing their branded vests, delivering their branded packages and driving around in their branded vehicles.

“Companies like amazon have built business models around denying workers their fundamental rights,” the mayor says on the video.

The mayor’s video prompted the Queens Republican to call supporters of the bill “lunatics” and claim that same-day deliveries is some kind of birthright for New York consumers, no matter how exploitive the business model that makes such deliveries possible.

“People need to see socialists actively breaking the things that work,” Paladino said of Amazon’s delivery model — which simply does not “work” for street safety, air quality, or congestion.

But to listen to the Council member, if her constituents can’t get their hemorrhoid cream delivered in six hours, the world is coming to an end.

Meanwhile, the National Urban League took a more measured tone in an amNY op-ed.

What will happen next? It’s all up to the Speaker, who is, as Streetsblog has reported many times, is still deliberating — a phantom Menin, if you will.

In other news:

• We haven’t written much on Streetsblog NYC about Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s revanchist crusade against bike lanes in Toronto, but Momentum Magazine brings you up to speed with a pitch-perfect petition by pro-bike forces to require the removal of car lanes on the streets in question.
• NY1 is already trashing a still-unfinished street safety improvement in Queens — and the reporter in question boasts of her suburban-eye view of things.
• Xenophobia alert: Council Member Joann Ariola (R-Queens) would rather have no parking rather than metered parking on Shore Front Drive in the Rockaways. (The Wave)
• A hit-and-run driver injured a scooter rider in Williamsburg. (Williamsburg 365)
• Do you live or work in Tribeca? Fill in the local survey (hint: and demand more public space and fewer cars).
• Road rage on the Rock. (ABC7)
• Welcome to the Wednesday Night Skate. (NY Times)
• A pedestrian was badly injured by a driver at a notorious Chinatown intersection. Of course, if amNY had run the plates on the car, the paper would have found that its driver(s) have 15 speed-camera and three red-light tickets, which most news outlets would consider relevant information after a crash.
• The MTA’s EAGLE team will fly high again … after some retraining, the agency says. (amNY)
• Clarence Eckerson Jr. shares his joy at the reception of his feature-length documentary, “Close Encounters of the 34th Avenue Kind.” (Streetfilms)
• On a personal note, no one needs this Wikipedia “NYC journalism edit-a-thon” on Dec. 3 more then I do: no one has updated my Wikipedia page for years — and whoever is doing it is a relentless troll and possible anti-Semite. Help, please!