John Liu

State Senator John Liu is bloodied — but unbowed.

An upstate lawmaker appears ready to stop a bill that no real New Yorker would ever have introduced — Queens Senator John Liu's absurd bill to empower the NYPD to write tickets to "distracted" pedestrians.

John Liu's office recently published a brief analysis of the newly-expanded NYPD Collision Investigation Squad. Liu has already proposed increasing the number of NYPD crash investigators, and now Doug Giuliano, senior policy analyst for the comptroller's office, has put up some more numbers that illustrate how woefully inadequate CIS staffing is.

At a mayoral forum on transportation this morning, the first since a February event hosted by Transport Workers Union Local 100, eight candidates offered ideas on how they would improve the city's road and transit network. For the most part, the candidates were eager to support buses, quick to get agitated about bike lanes, and short on realistic ideas for how to fund their plans.

Last month, mayoral candidate and Comptroller John Liu released a series of proposals to show what his office believes should be included in the city's final Fiscal Year 2014 budget. It included some bad ideas, such as exempting city residents from East River bridge tolls, and a few good ones, like dramatically increasing the size of NYPD's Collision Investigation Squad.

Buried in Comptroller John Liu's "People's Budget" proposal released last week (way below the part about bridge tolls that New Yorkers don't have to pay) is an interesting proposal about NYPD's crash investigation staffing.

What does John Liu think of bikes in NYC? That's hard to say, and it's not clear that Liu knows either.

So John Liu has managed to take an excellent idea -- tolling the East River bridges -- and turn it into a policy disaster.

Gothamist has been following the case of Ryo Oyamada, the Japanese student who was struck and killed by an NYPD officer near his Queensbridge home in the early hours of February 21. The department claims the cruiser was moving at 35 to 39 mph on 40th Avenue, with lights on, as officers responded to a call, and that Oyamada stepped in front of the cruiser mid-block. But multiple witnesses say there were no lights or sirens, and that the officer was driving at 70 mph when Oyamada, 24, was hit near 10th Street.