Media Watch

In case you missed it, the Brooklyn Paper ran a by-the-numbers NIMBY react piece on a public plaza that has been proposed for Broadway near Bedford Avenue.

Any member of AAA who is at all concerned about road safety should take note of comments made in the New York Post this weekend by AAA New York spokesperson Robert Sinclair.

A go-to NIMBY argument against safe street improvements is that bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, and ped refuge islands interfere with emergency responders.

In the last six days, five pedestrians have been killed by motorists and a sixth victim was reported "likely to die" in crashes in four boroughs.

So, Streetsblog is well past the point of bothering to rationally rebut anything that Post columnist Steve Cuozzo has to say on the subject of re-engineering streets for greater safety. The man clearly has a few screws loose, and, in the words of midtown BID impresario Dan Biederman, "He doesn’t know this field. He just loves to scream and rant about it."

Robert Kolker's New York Magazine feature on traffic deaths and injuries brings some welcome attention to NYPD's miserable enforcement record. But readers -- and the WNYC listeners who heard Kolker on the air yesterday -- will probably still come away with a warped view of what determines street safety in NYC.

In today's edition, the New York Times took a look at parking policy in Downtown Brooklyn. You wouldn't expect the Times to explore a wonky topic like parking reform with the same depth as Streetsblog's coverage of the proposal, but still, the article barely hinted at the huge costs imposed by parking minimums. Scarcely a word was devoted to the evidence that parking minimums make housing less affordable, or that they induce traffic and congestion.

Based on NYPD crash data and media reports, it appears that a toddler who was hit by a driver in the Bronx earlier this year soon died from his injuries.

Remember those wizards of counter-intuition, the Freakonomics guys? You know, the ones who told their audience that it's safer to drive drunk than to walk drunk? Well, in his latest piece for NPR's Marketplace, which ran with the headline "Save the Earth, Drive Your Car," Stephen Dubner talks to Clemson University's Eric Morris and arrives at the ridiculous conclusion that driving is greener than transit.