Charles Komanoff

“I argue for saner rules for bikes,” tweeted traffic guru “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz yesterday, referring to a post that he and fellow former NYC DOT engineer Gerard Soffian put up on CityLand. “[F]or their own safety and for the safety of others,” bicyclists should comply with traffic laws, they wrote. In keeping with Sam’s trademark common sense and fair play, the two also said that fines for cycling through red lights and other violations should be lowered, and traffic laws changed to “permit bicyclists to make turns and other movements prohibited for motorists.”

I remember alternate side of the street parking. It was 1974, and I was underemployed and living on West 22nd Street. My tiny Renault and I were regular participants in the twice-a-week "slide" that Matt Flegenheimer described in his Monday Times story on Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez’s bill to bar police from ticketing alternate-side-parked cars once the street sweepers have passed.

That didn’t last long. Last Thursday, less than 24 hours after a mayoral spokesman floated the idea of letting owners of the city’s 68 horse carriage medallions swap them for taxi medallions, Mayor de Blasio reportedly laughed off the notion.

Today’s Times devotes two pieces to the “suburbs are out, cities are in” phenomenon that has taken root in much of the country over the past few decades -- the great inversion, urbanologist Alan Ehrenhalt has dubbed this reversal of the suburbanization wave that swept through the U.S. in the last century. Though both pieces will pretty much be old hat to Streetsblog readers, they’re interesting nonetheless, both as signposts and for what they leave out.

Whoever said that one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic, has probably been hanging out in New Jersey.

Which Chinese city will be the first to try congestion pricing? Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai — megacities whose populations are on the scale of New York’s? Or second-tier but still mighty cities (think Chicago) like Hangzhou, Nanjing, or Xi’an?

The Times’ good-news story this morning, “No Riders Killed in First 5 Months of New York City Bike-Share Program,” could almost have been written a year ago. In fact, it was, sort of, in this space. In June 2012, Streetsblog published my piece pooh-poohing predictions of looming traffic carnage. We followed that with a similar post as the curtain was going up on bike-share in May.

Pre-teen and teenager deaths are rare in New York City. Out of nearly a million city residents ages 10-19, just 226 died in 2011, the most recent data year. That’s barely more than two deaths per 10,000. Sliced a bit differently, only four to five New Yorkers age 10-19 die each week.

The latest bombshell from the horrific traffic crash that brutally injured at least three Maspeth girls walking to their middle school last week exploded this morning, with a report in DNAinfo that city education officials ordered the school principal to respond to the incident by warning students not to use electronic devices while traveling to and from school.

Just when you thought the bike-share detractors might have run out of steam — or at least taken a time-out — along comes an intellectually muddled piece in the NY Post warning of dead bike-share users littering Midtown streets.