Today’s Headlines

Wow, what a day. We got to watch the mayor get chauffeured from the Upper East Side to his Park Slope gym, then watch him walk two blocks to the subway (while someone else drove his car to City Hall), then watch him pitch his congestion pricing-MTA restructuring plan to straphangers, then be asked a softball question that only ended up revealing how rarely the mayor rides the subway, and then receive kudos from Streetsblog for finally getting on board with tolling drivers. Good times!

Yesterday was the much-loved busy news day, with the mayor begrudgingly admitting he supports congestion pricing, the governor unveiling an entirely new level of bureaucracy to run the MTA that he's run so poorly the last eight years, and Council Member Jumaane Williams finally earning his rising star status by winning the Public Advocate special election.

Vote today as if your life depended on it because, you never know, it may. Like, say your life depends on congestion pricing becoming a reality, you probably shouldn't vote for Eric Ulrich, who declined through a spokesperson to even fill out Streetsblog's candidate questionnaire ("Councilman Ulrich has been clear throughout this campaign that he is against congestion pricing because it would be a backdoor commuter tax on outer borough residents," the spokesperson said.)

On Sunday, the Daily News double-barreled the pain with Clayton Guse's story about declining ridership (prompting a solid Aaron Gordon tweet) and Dan Rivoli's exclusive about how the MTA is already backtracking on the number of stations it says it can make handicapped-accessible — which advocates predicted last month would happen. And the paper's op-ed section doubled-down on its support for congestion pricing, with an editorial and a column by Gov. Cuomo's budget director Robert Mujica that called on legislators to stop pretending.

The story of the day was Mayor de Blasio's non-crackdown crackdown on placards, which David Meyer of Streetsblog exposed for the sham it is. The Times's Winnie Hu broke the details of the new strategy a few hours before it was announced, but the Metro section never updated the story to emphasize how little de Blasio was actually committing to — and how glowingly he spoke of cars and city workers who "need" to commute to their jobs in them.

So our friends at Transportation Alternatives walked alongside a 14th Street bus yesterday — and the bus won by just five seconds, as Gothamist reported. The goal was to show that 14th Street still needs a dedicated bus lane and car-free conditions that were promised as a mitigation during the now-scrubbed L-train shutdown.

It's a busy night in the Streetsblog world tonight, what with dueling events. At 6 p.m., Friend of Streetsblog Charles Komanoff will participate in a panel discussion on congestion pricing with fellow FOS Jon Orcutt and Nicole Gelinas at the Center for Architecture. RSVP here.

The mayor will be in Bay Ridge at noon today to announce the 2019 Borough Pedestrian Safety Plans.

In case you missed it or simply decided to take a few well-deserved days off, Mayor de Blasio moved quickly to distance himself from the Cuomo clown car from which he had been forcibly expelled when the Amazon deal exploded last week.