Media Watch

Today's Times editorial on cycling enforcement (the kicker: a few more tickets for bicyclists "would certainly calm traffic in New York City") is generating a stir. What I want to know is this: Why did the Times editorial writers choose to pipe up about this particular aspect of street safety? Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, the Times has not seen fit to print an editorial about traffic enforcement for at least as long as Streetsblog has been publishing.

The Times devoted a feature story today to NYC's new bike lanes and the people who dislike them. Hard to argue with the timing of the piece. The separated lanes that went in on the East Side, Park Slope, and the Upper West Side this year are highly visible, they shake up the way the street works, and people have opinions about them.

Streetsblog contributor Charles Komanoff wrote this letter to New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo yesterday morning. At the time we posted it, he had yet to receive a reply.

I had to pull this Marcia Kramer segment out of the headline stack and post it, because you've got to see it to believe it.

This poll on the Crain's site has been tearing through the Twitterverse rather ferociously this afternoon:

Earlier this week the Downtown Express injected some common sense into the public discussion about the value of bike lanes. With protected lanes on Ninth and Eighth Avenue now a valued safety improvement after facing some pushback at first, the paper predicted that initial complaints about the new lanes on the East Side will subside once people get used to them:

Recession or depression? Estate taxes or death taxes? How events or policies are named, or “framed,” has become crucial to their viability. Indeed, the ascendancy of the right wing in the U.S. in recent decades is attributed in part to the Right’s mastery of political phraseology to demonize leftist and even centrist policies.

Editor's note: Streetsblog has retracted this post. The information on bike-on-ped crashes is not accurate. Read the full correction for an explanation of how we acquired the erroneous data and how we determined it was incorrect.

Regrettably, the embed code for the opening volleys in CBS2's "bike bedlam" series is busted, so you'll have to actually visit the CBS2 site to watch the three-minute segments that ran in between Volkswagen and Hyundai spots the last two nights.