Ben Fried

Doug Gordon of Brooklyn Spoke fame reports that NYPD sent a battalion of bike enforcers out to the intersection of Chrystie Street and Rivington Street on the Lower East Side this morning. This is a T-intersection where no motorized traffic conflicts with the path of northbound cyclists. If you're biking north on Chrystie, it makes a lot of sense to treat a red light here as a "yield to pedestrians and cyclists" sign. That does happen to be against the letter of the law, however, and police were taking full advantage, handing out $190 tickets. (Meanwhile, the maximum fine for drivers caught speeding in Albany's proposed automated enforcement bill is $50.)

The viral video of the day, courtesy of Dan Amira at New York Mag, is this bout over a free parking space on the Upper East Side. It's got all the hallmarks of NYC street dysfunction -- traffic backups, aggressive use of motor vehicles, honking, road rage, left jabs.

Turn up the volume and listen for the sociopathic pacesetter about halfway through this clip. This is southbound Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, recorded with my bike-mounted camera at the intersection with Dean Street at about 9:40 p.m. last night.

Over the weekend, Ted Mann and Josh Barbanel at the Wall Street Journal wrote a great piece about what it will take to expand NYC's bike-share system to the city's less affluent neighborhoods, and how the Bloomberg administration's decision to forgo public funding affected the system map. Then came a silly Ginia Bellafante piece in the Times that completely muddled the issues at play, mixing up free helmet-fittings with bike-share access and misleading readers about why stations were chosen for particular neighborhoods.

Reader Liz Patek sends in these photos of a crash at 71st and Broadway last night. According to witnesses she spoke to, the driver of the car with the smashed-up front T-boned the ambulance. It seems that, miraculously, no one was seriously hurt. NYPD's public information office had no information on the crash, but it appears as though the ambulance driver was traveling northbound on Broadway or Amsterdam and struck by the SUV driver heading westbound on 71st.

While parents and kids were out celebrating three years of safe, all-ages cycling at the Prospect Park West Family Bike Ride last week, the remnants of NBBL were apparently scouring their Rolodex for media contacts who still take them seriously.

Streetsblog's spring pledge drive will end tonight at midnight and we need to go out with a bang. Please contribute today to support journalism and commentary that makes New York City streets safer and more sustainable. Just 60 more donations today and we'll hit our target.

We're extending our spring pledge drive til the end of the week to reach our target of $40,000 in reader donations. If you haven't given already, please make a tax-free gift today and help keep Streetsblog and Streetfilms going strong this year.

The Wall Street Journal schooled the world on how to generate pageviews with this instant classic of anti-bike insanity starring editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz. Approximately 3.4 million websites embedded this video before Streetsblog got around to it, and "Dorothy Rabinowitz" is still rocketing up the Twitter trend chart. Meanwhile, the Daily News posted an addled anti-bike conspiracy theory last night by someone named Jack Brown, and hardly anyone noticed.