Staten Island

While transportation issues are clearly not very high up on Mayor Bloomberg's agenda, at least one New York elected official is acknowledging that the city has major traffic problems in need of big solutions. At last week's Staten Island Chamber of Commerce breakfast, Clinton focused almost exclusively on transportation issues, according to the Advance:

Last night's public hearing on the proposed NASCAR track on Staten Island turned into a melee. Union members, many of whom were apparently shipped in by the developer, shouted down and physically intimidated community people who had come out to voice concerns about the project. New York 1 showed video last night of one particularly huge union guy throwing Staten Island Councilmember Andrew Lanza into a headlock and wrestling the microphone out of his hands. The scene looked more like a drunken bar fight than a community meeting. NY1 hasn't put the video on its web site [Update: Here is the NY1 footage. Pretty incredible], but ABC 7 caught some of the action and put it online. The NYPD rolled in and shut down the meeting after just a half an hour.

Oil Drum points to a recent spike in motorist insanity on Staten Island this week: A retired Port Authority cop out with his wife, pulls in to a strip mall to pick up some Chinese food. An ex-NYPD detective jumps out of his car and guns the guy down in a barrage of 17 bullets. Why? He had been driving too slowly. Add to that, a crash on the Brooklyn-bound side of the Verrazano backing up traffic for miles and a car plowing into the front of a house, and it's just another day in Shaolin.