Elections

In anticipation of primary day on September 10, we continue our series on City Council candidates with a Q&A with civil rights lawyer Yetta Kurland, who's running to represent District 3. The district covers Midtown, Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea, and the West Village, and it's currently represented by Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Yesterday we posted responses from District 3 candidate Corey Johnson. A third candidate, Alexander Meadows, did not respond.

Campaign season in New York is already well underway. And when New Yorkers vote in the primary election on September 10, it won't just be for the next mayor. They'll also be choosing City Council members, borough presidents, the comptroller, and the public advocate.

At its annual membership meeting last night, Transportation Alternatives unveiled its transportation policy platform heading into the thick of this year's election cycle. Primary day -- September 10 -- is less than six months away, and TA is calling on candidates in the mayoral and City Council races to include these principles in their campaign platforms:

Four of the Democratic mayoral candidates appeared on MSNBC with Chris Hayes Sunday morning, and for a short while the subject turned to transit. About two minutes into this segment, Hayes prompted former City Council member Sal Albanese to discuss his proposal to band together with other mayors to lobby Washington for more transit funding. John Liu, Bill Thompson, and Bill de Blasio then took turns discussing their various ideas for getting the feds and/or Albany to direct more funding to the city's transit system.

Friday's transit forum hosted by Transit Workers Union Local 100 and a coalition of rider advocacy groups offered an opportunity for a more more detailed discussion of transit policy than this year's mayoral race has seen so far. While the candidates offered few specifics about how they would improve transit for the millions of New Yorkers who depend on trains and buses, clear differences emerged, especially on the question of how to increase funding for the debt-ridden MTA.

Via the Kansas Cyclist, here's a campaign ad from St. Louis mayoral hopeful Lewis Reed that would seem strangely inconceivable in NYC's current political climate.

Matt Flegenheimer got five leading mayoral candidates on the record about bike lanes for a story in the Times today, and one of the encouraging things about it is that you can start to see the candidates running against each other (and not just the three-term, lame duck incumbent) on bike policy.

A few quick thoughts on the news that MTA Chair Joe Lhota is going to leave the agency at the end of week to clear the way for a mayoral run...

Public interest journalist Stuart Silverstein at FairWarning.org has uncovered the fact that red states (defined as those that went for Mitt Romney in the last election) have higher traffic fatality rates than blue states (those that went for Barack Obama). The correlation is striking, Silverstein says, but he's at a loss to explain it: