LIVE BLOG ARCHIVED: Streetsblog’s Day in Central Park Revealed Joy, Challenges

This concludes our Central Park live blog! Thanks for everyone who followed along.

Our staff wrapped up the day as journalists often do: with a drink at Siberia, a bar inside the Columbus Circle subway station.

Don’t miss out on all our Central Park Week content (and more to come!):

Sammy Sussman on Central Park’s “strange” NYPD precinct.

Dave Colon on the city’s failure to surround the park with protected bike lanes.

Sophia Lebowitz on the city’s failure to implement safety recommendations for the park put forward by the Central Park Conservancy in 2024.

Yorkville resident Brennan Carley on the need to implement those recommendations now.

For months, I’ve been keeping tabs on what New Yorkers are saying about the state of Central Park on social media — particularly about how the drives have become an overcrowded cauldron of danger, ready to explode.

That view of the park bore out, in some respects, with the recent deaths of pedestrian Richie O’Brien and cyclist Douglas Adams. As a part of our reporting on O’Brien’s death, I spoke extensively with eyewitness Laura Sackler, a longtime Central Park runner who helped Richie as he lay bleeding on the pavement, and also consoled the despondent cyclist who hit him.

Then, days later, a different cyclist (near the same location) crashed when he swerved to avoid an off-leash dog that ran onto the drive. I was out of town on a three-day bike trip, and sat on the train back from Long Island reading horrific comments like “good boy,” praising the dog for what it did.

Consuming (and occasionally being the target of) such vitriol around using our shared recreational spaces has had an impact on me. I go to the park, and can only see “accidents” waiting to happen. The specter of societal degradation force-fed by the social media algorithm feels ever-present . It’s maddening, it weighs on you. All you can see is the harm that’s been done and the harm that’s lurking around the corner and think, well no one cares, so we’re all doomed.

But riding through this chilly October morning and arriving in Central Park pushed that away. I saw well-organized groups of cyclists shouting loud to communicate to one another, keeping the peloton safe. I saw pairs of joggers running their laps as construction crews prepared for the Marathon. I saw packs of dogs and their owners laughing and playing together. I saw the stars blinking down from above the buildings on 59th Street.

At 6:30 a.m., I met up with Sackler at Tavern on the Green as she finished her early morning run. We talked for a bit, and she offered to let me come by her apartment if I needed a break while in the park for the long haul, one of the kindest gestures I’ve gotten from a near-stranger in this city in a long time.

There are physical things that can be done in Central Park to make it safer for everyone — we ran an op-ed this morning that named a shortlist that could do a world of difference. But so much of that relies on New Yorkers putting their trust in others, and seeing the people around them as community and not foe.

Everyone should be able to recreate in Central Park and enjoy this gem we’re lucky enough to have. But that can only happen if we agree that it does, rightfully, belong to everyone. That consideration for lives outside our own is essential to the social aspect of safety: The belief that we all have a role to play in a stranger making it home to their loved ones — cyclists, pedestrians, dog owners, you name it.

Gersh came across a bench in the park today with an inscription that got me thinking about all of this, and I’ll leave this as our parting missive from the week.

I spent about four hours on the East Drive where the two recent deadly crashes happened.

It’s a busy and winding section with climbs and drops, so sight lines can be tricky at times for people, especially when some riders go at high speeds.

Overall, I was struck by how well everything works. I saw people of all ages and abilities walking and riding here, and largely everyone was able to cooperate.

Some people should be better at yielding to pedestrians, and some more signage pointing to that would probably help.

But at the end of the day, the Central Park Drives show how intuitively people are able to navigate roads once you take two-ton vehicles largely out of the equation.

The NYPD appears to be escorting some sort of Knicks-related bus out of Grand Army Plaza.

Here are some photos of people biking and scootering on 59th Street.

I spent most of the day in the park around the Central Park Precinct. I saw lots of police presence — lots of loud, flashing lights, speeding motorcycle presence — but I saw little evidence that the park was more safe, or even that New Yorkers felt more safe.

It’s pretty clear that the Central Park Precinct is a relic of an era when there were hundreds of major crimes in the park each year and dozens of arrests to make each month. But that era ended a decade ago, and it seems like no one is asking what the role of the precinct in the park should be.

As I’m leaving the park, I wonder if everyone would be safer if there were truly no vehicles in the park: No patrol cars on the Drives, no Parks vehicles on gravel paths and no personal vehicles parked wherever there’s space. What if the NYPD navigated the park like everyone else — either on foot or on a bike? How would enforcement efforts change if they experienced street safety like we all experience street safety?

This driver with more than two dozen violations just drove through the park.

I just talked to Russian or Eastern European woman waiting for the bus who told me the big problem with the city in general was the bikes.

She took my last and only business card, I think she won’t like the site if she visits.

This MTA truck has been parked illegally in the Central Park West bike lane all day and has not been ticketed.

A pair of Citi Bike riders (on non-e-bikes) were going the wrong way on the drive, so several people were telling them to turn around, including one woman who shouted “You’re killing people, you’re murderers.”

The two cyclists seemed to debate what to do for a few seconds before heeding the calls and turning back and going the right way.

In general, the people on the drive seem to be pretty self-policing.

Central Park South has bike traffic, but tourists on their way to dropping off their bikes or scooters (they’re charged by the hour after all) don’t seem put off but the traffic conditions.

A pair of Canadians I ran into at Central Park South and Seventh Avenue summed it up when they told me they’d been riding their rented e-scooters all over the city.

“I’m naive though, because I’m from Canada” one of them told me laughing.

I hadn’t spent a full day in Central Park in probably 30 years before today. And I get that there are conflicts between cyclists, horses, pedicab drivers, pedestrians, runners and tourists on the Central Park Drives. Those Drives must be redesigned.

But lest we forget: Central Park is FREAKIN’ AWESOME! Let’s set aside the constant drumbeat of negativity that living in New York produces in our brains and acknowledge how lucky we are that this park is as great as it is.

There’s a reason people come from all over the world to enjoy it. So let’s not lose sight of that in our petty daily squabbles. Kuntzman out!

I ran into Harry Levy and his wing man Cooper. We started chatting about the park. He’s really upset at the upcoming ban on carriage horses.

“My wife has a horse so I know something about this. The horses are not abused. They love to work and they’re well treated,” Levy said.

Agree or not, Harry Levy, 82, is a real New York legend. A former doctor, he now keeps busy advising patients (the word is kibbutzing, I think!), making Prosecco out of apples with his friend Fritz, and writing.

“Have you read my mystery, ‘Chain of Custody,’ which Random House published in 1996,” he asked me. I was ashamed to say I hadn’t … yet walked away thinking that not only will I soon be reading this book (and love it) but I now have a new doctor.

A cyclist explained to a group of French tourists that they’re going the wrong way.

The visitors turned around and rode in the right direction.

Sophia M., a 26-year-old Brooklynite was on her way to an appointment when she crossed the busy crosswalk of the drive near 86th Street just now.

She thinks about the recent fatal crashes a lot and crosses the drive more carefully.

“I try to go to where the crosswalk is,” she said. “I look one million times before I cross.”

She has noticed more cyclists respecting the light at this intersection, though, but she said the city should still add speed bumps to slow faster moving vehicles.

“Especially with e-bikes, they really fly,” she said.

We heard a LOT of varied feedback from park goers about the recent redesign of the lane markings on the Central Park drives.

Streetsblog reporter Sophia Lebowitz explained the design in the video below.

You run into all sorts of people at the park.

Marjorie Miller was sprinting in the horse lane, with a camera man at her tail filming her for a brand. Miller was in town from Seattle, but this was hardly her first visit to Central Park.

“Usually you have lots of places to run, that’s why you’re in Central Park, so you wouldn’t really think about running in on the street here,” she said. “We are running here just because we want some taxis in the background. We wanted to see the taxis, like the New York vibe. But I’ll usually run in the park.”

I’m ending my day lying under my favorite tree in the park, which is in Sheep Meadow.

I remember when I had a job in the Lincoln Center area I would come sit here every day, it was amazing … Central Park is an amazing thing!

My main takeaway after spending the last few hours and days here is that the issues in the park are mostly a product of its success and its status as a one of a kind oasis in the middle of Manhattan. With a little more education and some design tweaks, I think the Park Drive will feel safer for everyone.

I ran in Joe and Agnes Horowitz and their dogs Mocha and Toffee, who live at 96th and Columbus and love the park! Agnes said she wishes cyclists would go a little slower but she feels grateful every day to have the park in their lives. “It’s just so beautiful and calming,” Agnes said.

I passed by the 86th Street transverse and was struck by the amount of single occupancy private cars that buses have to contend with.

I just ran into my cousins from City Island? Who were double parked in front of The Ritz-Carlton?

Gersh Kuntzman reporting live from the 96th Street transverse.

As I mentioned earlier in this living blog, I walked the 66th Street transverse to see if it could support a bike lane (it could, obvs). Now, with Streetsblog’s Henry Beebe-Center, I just biked the 96th Street transverse from west to east. Here is my report:

1. Before setting out, I made Henry record me channeling David Bowie and telling my wife I love her very much (she knows!). I was worried that I might not make it across, remembering my old family friend Dr. Daniel Cammerman, who was killed biking on this very transverse in 2019.

2. Here’s the thing no one talks about about the transverses: The East Side and West Side roadways that feed them become traffic choked hellscapes — basically like the residents are being punished for living next to the nicest park in the world. Here’s E. 97th Street where it feeds into the park.

3. So, my ride. Seriously, my heart was in my throttle, let me tell you. Fortunately, I had picked out a Citi Bike electric bike, which gave me the torque, stability and confidence I needed for this four-minute ride. But it turns out, there’s not only enough room for cyclists, but because the city just repaved the roadway yet not installed the lines yet, drivers are chill and don’t panic when they pass out of a fear of crossing a double-yellow. Here we see a cyclist with plenty of room followed by a cyclist with less room, but still more or less safe.

4. The sidewalk on the 96th Street transverse (which is on the south side of the west-to-east branch) are awful and a constant trip, mud and water hazard (see pics). It’s also not accessible for someone using a wheelchair.

5. But here’s some “good” news: there’s no sidewalk on the westbound roadway (which is accessible for cars from E. 97th Street). The absence of the sidewalk means that the city could easily put a bike lane on this roadway without even taking space away from walkers.

The bottom lime: Gersh Kuntzman survived a date with destiny … and lived to tell the entire city a story: There is room for bike lanes on these transverses!

The first person I encountered at the southern section of the park was Paul Behan, who was in town from Waterford, Ireland.

Paul, who has great taste in city apparel — let’s go Rangers — had just finished a lap in the park on a rented bike.

“I think it’s pretty cool when you come up, you can see the trees from a distance. So you know the park’s there. So it’s lovely the way you can just walk right into it then,” he said about getting to the park from 59th Street.

“There’s a lot of traffic here, you just get used to it, I suppose. So it didn’t really bother me.”

What did throw Paul for a loop was the one-way nature of the park.

“I didn’t realize it was one way until I started seeing the signs and I seen all bikes going in one direction and so I went “Okay I’ll follow this along.”

Another pair of tourists, in town from Germany, conquered 59th Street the same way the locals do.

“We just try to follow what most other people here do, just cross the street without looking much or caring much about the street signs or the street lights,” Max Linta told me as he and a companion sipped ice coffees. “I guess we just try to blend in, but I think because there are so many people, we definitely feel safe.”

It’s Gersh Oldman reporting from the tennis area just east of the West Drive, perfectly located for when I needed another of my many bathroom breaks. Word of warning: the Tennis House bathroom is nothing to live blog about!

Streetsblog Engagement Editor Emily Lipstein was up early in the park with her bike this morning.

Here’s what she saw, plus some footage from reporters Sam Brule and Sophia Lebowitz.

When you’re reporting all day in Central Park, you get emails from our beloved readers to meet up. Well, here’s Gersh Kuntzman with our most loyal reader (and best volunteer copy editor) David Plump. Memo to reporters about town: read Plump’s emails; he always finds mistakes in your (read: my) copy!

Midtown West resident Kin Lane, 54, and his Rottweiler Poppy ride and walk in the park every day. Lane, who works in tech and writes a newsletter about the park at centralpark.guide, was at the scene of the crash with the dog 10 minutes after it happened. He said there are bad dog owners who don’t watch their dog properly.

“A lot of them are on their cell phone,” he said. “You’re in Central Park, it’s beautiful, put away your phone.”

This Public Theater truck is slowly moving south on the Park Drive — a good reminder that the car-free park still isn’t totally car free. The NYPD fleet is seemingly totally electrified. This truck is the first loud engine that I’ve heard all day!

Two officers on motorcycles just passed me on the Drive. The officers ignored two pedestrians waiting to cross — and their decision to ride motorcycles side-by-side forced a few cyclists to the side.

I’ve seen people repeatedly use the outer (fast) bike lane for walking, which indicates demand for a pedestrian strip on both sides of the path.

The Central Park Conservancy’s 2024 study of safety on the Central Park Drive broke down the mode-share there.

Of course, cyclists and pedestrians make up the majority of users.

An Upper East Side dog owner, who just gave her name as MJ, said she doesn’t let her goldendoodle Teddy off leash anymore in the park, given the heavy bike traffic on the drive near where a dog ran in front of a cyclist.

“I just get nervous, I don’t really do it anymore,” she said.

She said the city should install more signage telling cyclists to yield to pedestrians, especially since many riders are from out of town and don’t know the rules of the park.

“This is everyone’s backyard” she said.An Upper East Side dog owner, who just gave her name as MJ, said she doesn’t let her goldendoodle Teddy off leash anymore in the park, given the heavy bike traffic on the drive near where a dog ran in front of a cyclist.

“I just get nervous, I don’t really do it anymore,” she said.

She said the city should install more signage telling cyclists to yield to pedestrians, especially since many riders are from out of town and don’t know the rules of the park.

“This is everyone’s backyard” she said.

Gersh Kuntzman reporting live from the Central Park West bike lane. I mentioned earlier that it’s not perfect because the “protection” consists of paint and some flexi-posts. When truckers want to pull over for a nap or a snack, they just do, which forced us dangerously into traffic at 96th St., which is a particularly dangerous spot because it’s where demonic car drivers as speeding into the transverse — some having to make left turns across car and pedestrian traffic to enter.

Two cops in the Central Park Precinct seemingly routinely violate parking laws — the driver of one car parked in the precinct’s personal car parking lot has received 97 parking tickets since 2021; another driver has received 75 parking tickets and 10 bus lane tickets since 2025. There are no police placards in either vehicle, so it seems that the lack of enforcement around placard use in this lot has led traffic enforcement agents to ignore the badge and repeatedly ticket these officers’ cars.

Earlier this year, Streetsblog spent a cold winter day in the park with legendary safe streets activist Hindy Schachter.

Back in 2014, a cyclist killed Schacher’s late husband Irv as he jogged around the park. But rather than turning her ire towards cyclists, Hindy made it her life’s mission to advocate for better street design in the park and its surrounding neighborhood.

As a cyclist and runner herself, Hindy doesn’t see an e-bike ban or speed limit as the way to make the park safer — instead, she advocates for a better design that works for everyone.

Watch our video from February below:

A family of French tourists wielding Trader Joe’s bags seemed very confused by the traffic on the Drive near the 79th Street Transverse. A young French child started to cross as a cyclist flew past, with the child’s parents pulling him back. The child’s parents tried to ask me when they could cross, but I’m not sure that they understood my response. (An older sibling, meanwhile, watched videos on their phone of the family’s pedicab ride through Times Square earlier that day.)

An NYPD officer in a smart car just veered into the pedestrian lane to bypass cyclists and came fairly close to me.

We found our second super-speeder in the park! There’s a vehicle in the Parks Department lots whose driver has gotten 34 speeding tickets and 8 red light tickets 2021, including 17 from July 2021 to June 2022. Maybe the city should stop giving drivers like this free parking in the almost-car-free park?

I’m on the drive near E. 84th Street where a 71-year-old cyclist fell off his bike and died after a dog ran out in front of him. Tourists stop their bikes at one of the lights that still goes red. The shade from the trees could conceivably make a dog harder to spot.

I’m at the part of the drive where pedestrian Richard O’Brien was fatally struck by a cyclist a few weeks ago.

There’s a steady stream of cyclists, e-bike riders, pedicabs, runners and walkers.

There’s a pickup truck blocking what is already a low visibility corner where riders come downhill fast.

There’s also some confusing signage behind that car that says “No Riding.”

What strikes me, as someone who spends a lot of time in Prospect Park, is that the Central Park Drive’s pedestrian path is just on one side. In Prospect, there’s a slim second path on the other side, which makes it easier to cross the cycling lanes at any point.

When you spend a day in Central Park, you’re going to randomly run into some great New Yorkers, as well as some reporters.

Here’s Gersh Kuntzman needing a park bench and finding reporters Henry Beebe-Center and Sophia Lebowitz.

I ran into Steve Vaccaro, a bike lawyer and cycling advocate, who makes content for social media filming his own videos in the park. Vaccaro films videos as he’s riding in part, he said, to “normalize biking as not an ultra hazardous activity.”

After a day of running to appointments, heading to the park to film, and then heading back to his office to finish up work, the attorney said cycling in the park between daily tasks makes him feel like a New Yorker. Vaccaro and his group the New York Cycle Club are suing the city over a proposed 15 mile per hour speed limit on the park drive, which he says would essentially kick racing cyclists, who train at faster speeds in the early morning, out of the park.

“If you’re trying to maintain a certain level of fitness, if you’re trying to develop your skills on the bike for riding at faster speeds, certainly if you’re training to become a serious amateur athlete, you need to go faster,” he said.

Upper West Sider Ned Marcus, 92, was out for a walk around noon on the east side of the park near E. 77th Street.

Marcus said he bikes in the park daily and has been riding around the city for decades, starting when there was a transit strike years ago.

“I think it is enjoyable and has become more so ever since they got the cars out of the park,” Marcus said. “It is one of the best places to bike in the world in an urban setting.”

Marcus heard about the recent crashes on the nearby drive, but it hasn’t taken away from his joy of cycling here.

“It can be hazardous, but it is good for your health,” he said.

He didn’t really have any improvements to suggest to city officials, but said turning the traffic lights to flashing yellow was a good move and reduced confusion among tourists who would often stop at a red while no one else would.

The Columbus Circle entrance is filled with pedicab drivers hoping to get picked by the various tourists and park visitors.

Mamadou Diallo, who is from Senegal, has been giving tours in the park for five years. He works for a company where he gets 60 percent of what he makes on the bike. He said some days he doesn’t get any rides but some he gets two or three.

For Diallo, the recent changes to the traffic signals are “problem,” and he finds the blinking yellow lights confusing. As two tourists rode by on rented electric stand-up scooters, he told me those are the most dangerous things in the park.

“The scooters they’re not safe at all. The park is up and down hill, they hit the break and then they fall over,” he said. But even so, he thinks there is enough space in the park for everyone.

There’s a crossing at around 65th St. in the park where two drives come together. It’s pretty chill but there is a lot of possible conflict: the light (installed for cars long ago) blinks yellow on both roads. As long as people see each other — and the visibility is very good here — it’s ok. But some vehicles — empty pedicabs and a small number of exercising cyclists — are moving a bit quickly, giving pedestrians pause. Most of the cyclists right now are tourists who are super chill and loving our park.

There’s a certain whimsy to Central Park. Here, tourists and even reporters gather at the famous statue of Balto, the hero dog that was part of the team of mushers who saved Nome from diphtheria in 1935, back when diphtheria was a thing (thank you, science).

The plaque honors those American dog traits of “endurance, fidelity and intelligence,” yet today’s dogs don’t even gaze at the statue of the hero in their midsts. Are today’s dogs just soft? Does every one of them still have their day? These are questions for another time, we suppose. But Balto lives, Virgina, as long as there is hope and integrity, he lifts his vaccine-filled lamp!

And we found our first super-speeder! There’s a vehicle with Virginia plates in the Parks Department’s parking lot with a yellow vest on the dash. The vehicle received 22 speeding tickets and three red light tickets over the past two years, including 18 speeding tickets from July 2024 to June 2025, according to publicly available data.

The vehicle has no placard — which makes sense, since the owner is not just endangering city-dwellers with their reckless driving but also committing insurance fraud and robbing New York taxpayers by registering their car in Virginia. (I doubt the cops across the street would have much trouble spotting this. The car has no front plate after all!)

It’s Gersh Kuntzman reporting live from the belly of the beast: The 66th Street transverse, which I have just walked.

Here are my field notes:

1. Lots of cyclists indeed use the transverse and, when drivers behave, there is certainly enough room. Except check out this e-Citi Bike rider being chased — yes, I watched the entire transaction, he was being chased! — by this truck driver even though there is clearly room for both:

2. The pedestrian experience (three pics) is awful. The sidewalk is cracked and filthy, plus there are muddy patches in the tunnels:

3. There are four tunnels along the transverse where the roadway does narrow a bit, but not so much that a bike lane could not be installed. Even when a bus passes, there’s room. In fact, one of the tunnels has a pedestrian barrier, which takes up some of the room.

4. A few pedestrians end up on the transverses, most of whom appear to be tourists because they are looking at their phone and staring around, as if perplexed how they ended up in the worst part of Central Park. Two women declined to talk to me because, I think, they thought I was trying to sell them something (which I was: safety).

5. One man decided that biking on the sidewalk was much safer. He was right:

The Central Park Precinct could boost their arrest numbers, which are lower than any other precinct in the city, by cracking down on cars with altered or missing license plates in the placard lot outside their front door! I’ve seen three vehicles missing front plates in my survey of the lot, including this vehicle that was parked by someone who walked into the precinct and refused to identify themself to Streetsblog.

It’s Gersh Kuntzman live from Central Park. I’m on Central Park West between 66th and 67th streets, and I’m thinking about Madison Lyden, an Australian tourist whom a truck driver killed on this spot in August 2018.

The horrific crash — which happened after Lyden was forced to swerve around an illegally parked car in those pre-bike-lane days — prompted massive protests demanding safety. Eventually, the Central Park West protected bike lane was built, albeit on the caustic ashes of tragedy.

Is the lane perfect? No. On this block, to preserve two northbound lanes of car traffic, the DOT “protected” cyclists with a few flex posts. And there’s a bus stop that forces cyclists into traffic whenever a bus shows up (the one pictured fortunately did not pull over for a passenger) or when workmen need the space.

I think of Madison Lyden every time I am on Central Park West, and I think of the tragic sacrifice she unwittingly made to make our city marginally safer.

Here’s a vehicle parked in marked Parks Dept parking — around 150 feet from the NYPD precinct — with no plates on the vehicle whatsoever. The vehicle had a NYS registration, which was removed at some point; it currently has a green non-NY plate on the dash. The car’s Parks-issued parking placard is associated with license plate LZR8550, which has three recent speeding tickets.

Where Sixth Avenue intersects with the park, pedicab drivers wait and attempt to lure interested tourists onto their bikes. One driver, who manages the company Central Park Ride but did not want to publish his name, said he has been giving tourists pedicab rides since 2008. He said the park is safer now “because back then they used to allow cars inside.”

The driver is from Tajikistan and commutes to the park everyday from Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. He said he can get 3-4 rides a day and each costs somewhere between $80 and $100, Christmas is the busy season. He notices that “some bikers” cycle too fast and supports a 15 mile per hour speed limit.

Gersh Kuntzman just spoke to an e-bike user named Shek who told Streetsblog that he always uses the 66th St. Transverse to go east to west. He says he wouldn’t do it on a regular bike but he feels that the stability and the speed of the e-bike give him confidence. He also said — if any DOT planners are listening — that there is plenty of room to add a bike lane. He said even when buses pass him, there’s room.

Here we see him pushing his bike, whose battery ran out just as we saw him.

It’s worth noting that he is a rarely on this transverse, but other e-bike delivery workers are using it. This is not a good plan for safety, DOT.

Three lanes of westbound traffic empty out onto Central Park West at the butt end of the 66th St. Transverse, an awful car sewer.

It’s very difficult for cyclists to see pedestrians if people ruin the DOT’s design by parking illegally. Here are two drivers whose selfishness trump visibility at W. 62nd St. The second car driver has gotten three camera-issued speeding tickets this year.

And here’s the opening of the eastbound transverse at W. 65th St. It’s a car sewer grate that not many pedestrians use, though clearly some do.

Bike rental companies at Central Park don’t just rent bikes, they also host bike tours through the park. Streetsblog saw one of these tours kicking off at 10:15 am by the Jose Marti statue. The park entrance by the statue is a popular spot for carriage drivers to find customers for their own Central Park tours, though city lawmakers plan to ban the practice soon.

It’s Gersh Kuntzman reporting live from the NYPD parking area opposite the gilded Trump International Hotel.

There are four police officers’ personal vehicles parked on Central Park West between 60th and 61st streets, three of which have multiple camera-issued tickets for reckless driving:

1. A White Infiniti with five speed-camera tickets and one red-light ticket.

2. A gray Hyundai with six camera tickets.

3. And a black Nissan with 45 speed-camera tickets including 19 in one year, meaning that this cop is a super speeder, whose car will have to get a speed-limiting device if he keeps this up.

Also there is a mound of human feces directly across from the Trump-branded hotel. Statement?

Bike rental are a booming business in Central Park, offering traditional and e-bikes to out-of-towners at hourly rates.

“Central Park is easy, it’s only dangerous when you’re on the streets,” said Nicole L., 56, a tourist from the San Francisco area, as she was getting directions before hopping on her rental bike. Her bike came from Bike Rent NYC, which had a group of tourists looking for bikes of their own.

Among them were Chloe Chisnall, 30, and Josh Roberts, 33, both from England, who came looking to rent scooters.

“It’s a faster way to see the park and it was included in our Go City app as well,” said Chisnall. (Go City is a service that groups separate activity passes together into one.)

“In England, its actually illegal to ride them in the street where we live, so you’re always looking over your shoulder to not get them confiscated,” said Roberts, as to why he’s not nervous to bike in the park. “So it’s actually nice to relax and ride around.”

Central Park West’s protected bike lane is the kind of success the Department of Transportation should brag about every single day. And as car-free Central Park gets more and more crowded with pedestrians and cyclists, the seven-year-old CPW bike lane sticks out as the one and only safe route for cyclists around the perimeter of the park.

Streetsblog took a ride around Central Park last week — experiencing the comfort of the the north-bound CPW bike lane, and discomfort of everywhere else.

Read the full story here.

The Great Hill, near west 105th Street, becomes a dog hotspot during off-leash hours, where dogs and their owners use the time to socialize with their respective friends.

“When I’m running with Coco, I avoid the central park loop,” said Sebastian Soto, 32, who was playing with his dog Coco at Great Hill. Sebastian and Coco come to the park everyday during off-leash hours to hang out in the Great Hill area, in which almost no joggers were at 8:00 am.

“There’s a lot of people riding super fast. They cross from the bike lane to the walk lane,” Soto said, about why he avoids West Drive when he has his dog.

This is Monika, who lives in Sheepshead Bay and has been training (running) in the park since the early 1980s.

Yes, she still treks all the way here and up to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx on the weekends to run with a club. She takes the train or Access-A-Ride to get there.

Monika told me she thinks there should be more cops in the park for enforcement and visibility, and that it’s more dangerous than ever with the recent crashes because nobody respects anyone else’s space. Because no rules are enforced, there are no rules for anyone, she said.

At around 8:30 a.m., I noticed a very striking dog with bright purple hair.

Oatmeal, and her mom Anastasia Smith, enjoy the park’s off leash hours every morning. Smith uses a “clicker collar” for Oatmeal so she said never worries that he will run into the Drive, which is just up the hill behind them.

Chatting with Smith was Jessica Kaplan, who is also a daily park user with her pup, Val. Both Smith and Kaplan said the community of dog owners near the W. 63rd street park entrance have things on lock, but that every area of the park has a different culture.

Kaplan said that it frustrates her when people act like the park is a chaotic mess, considering it has come so far since cars used to speed through the Drive.

“I don’t know why people aren’t grateful there are no cars anymore. It’s really good, I think this is amazing and a real blessing,” she said.

We discussed the new design of the Central Park Drive and what it was like to cross the road now that many of the lights were changed to blinking yellow. Kaplan said she thinks people can be impatient when waiting to cross, considering how many people are using the drive in the early mornings, and that looking both ways and finding your moment usually works well for her and Val.

“People are impatient wanting to cross,” Kaplan said. “I enter at 63rd, you have runners, cyclists, e-bikes, pedi cabs, park workers in cars, horse carriages, you have to just be patient. People are a little extreme with their feelings about crossing the road.”

For a park with so many cyclists, there’s a real lack of bike parking in Central Park. Luckily I found this sign to lock my bike to when I got here in the early morning. There are some new bike racks in the uptown section of the park near the newly renovated Davis Center and Gottesman skating rink, but the rest of the park has almost nothing.

Let an old man provide a little perspective on Central Park as he heads to the transverse roads for some reporting:

It’s interesting that we talk of conflicts in the park today, but let’s not forget that Central Park was forged in a crucible of conflict. In 1853, when the city started raising money for the park, there were 1,600 people living inside what we now know as Central Park. Before construction could begin, 561 owners of the more than seven thousand lots had to be compensated financially, though it’s difficult to put a price on eviction to make way for a huge green lawn for what were becoming wealthy neighborhoods.

Those residents were long forgotten by the time the Board of Commissioners issued an update on construction in 1861 in the New York Times (which printed press releases in those days).

The board declared that the Park would be “chiefly valuable as furnishing a place for agreeable exercise (or as the phrase is, ‘taking the air’), as a relief from the confinement of houses and streets. This will be obtained by … riding, driving or walking, as best suits the inclination or means of each individual.”

The passage went on to say that in order for everyone to enjoy the park, “each needs to be pursued in a great degree separately from the others.”

“A carriage coming directly upon the course of a pedestrian or of a man on horseback is often an annoyance, sometimes positively dangerous,” the statement said. “A horseman riding close upon a man on foot on the same path will unpleasantly disturb him, even without coming in direct contact. … The sunken and tunneled street thoroughfares across the park [will] remove what would otherwise have been a ceaseless annoyance.”

Don’t we know it. More later.

Just off of the drive near W. 63rd Street, there’s a baseball field a tight knit group of dog walkers call “the sand.” As dogs rolled and wrestled on Tuesday, their owners discussed the recent fatal collision between a cyclist and dog in the park.

Kari S., who wanted her last name withheld because of the contentious relationship between cyclists and dog walkers, was playing fetch with her spunky dog Molly at around 7:30, their daily ritual.

Kari said she has a lot of thoughts about the current state of the park. For one, she doesn’t like the new blinking yellow lights DOT implemented at signalized crossings.

“They make us play frogger to cross the road, and now [the cyclists] just yell at us,” she said. “Cyclists, I mean, it’s like they’re racing and they never stop.”

Kari, who is at the park every morning with Molly, said her group of dog owners never got any outreach to inform them of the new design. As for solutions, she said if she had her way there would be no “speed cyclists” in the park.

As we were chatting, Matt Allen and his dog Banjo came over. Allen told Streetsbog he doesn’t share Kari’s negative view of the new traffic signals. For him, the new lights do a better job managing expectations.

“I think it’s a more accurate representation of what’s happening,” he said.

The two agreed that while tensions may surface, things at the park are mostly good.

“As dog owners, we are a community of people that think the park is only for us. Everyone who uses the park thinks it’s their park and everyone else is the problem,” Allen said.

We’ve witnessed our first (known) crash of the day: A cyclist heading downhill at 83rd Street on the West Drive lost his hat and fell as he tried to grab it. Police are on the scene of the 8 a.m. crash.

We’ll be staying on this for now and will have more soon.

Along the West Drive in the northwest corner of the park, Joggers and cyclists braced themselves for Harlem Hill’s steep climb.

Joggers Ben Buffumi, 28, and Nick Layski, 29 stepped off of the road to hydrate before the incline.

Buffumi said the park feels hectic after “you pass 70th street.”

“That’s when I’m more on high alert,” he said, adding that the northern end of the park is usually calmer and less busy.

“North of 72nd Street it seems way chiller,” Layski said in agreement. Throughout the park, he said, “some of the crossings are a little more blind, so people can get surprised by something darting out.”

That’s how a 71-year-old cyclist died on the drive earlier this month —after colliding with an off-leash dog.

But Layski, like many Central Park users, isn’t just a runner. He also takes his dog in the park.

“I have a dog as well and we sometimes do off-leash with her during off-leash hours,” he said. “I see both sides of the coin.”

Hey, it’s Gersh Kuntzman.

I’m going to be reporting later this morning from the Central Park transverses, the four crosstown roadways that pass under the park and serve bus riders, car drivers, some pedestrians, and a few cyclists who brave the traffic on the narrow roadways.

Many people don’t realize this, but the transverses were part of the park’s design long before there were even cars.

Our Fall Specialist Sam Brule did some digging for us the other day and discovered that when a state-appointed Board of Commissioners announced a formal design competition in October 1857, anyone hoping to win the design was required to include at least four transverse roads (plus parky things like a parade ground for military drills, a formal flower garden, three playgrounds for “healthful exercise,” a site for concerts and exhibitions, a prominent fountain, an observation tower, a winter skating area, and “at least one institution of cultural uplift or practical knowledge”).

Olmsted and Vaux famously won the commission, and even though we have issues with it today, their traffic circulation system, which separated walkers, horseback riders, and carriages — and sunk the transverse roads below grade — is considered their most innovative concepts.

I’ll see you later on the transverses!

The city’s failure to fully implement a comprehensive redesign of the drives in Central Park as proposed in 2024 has left park users struggling as the formerly car-choked path has boomed with a wide variety of recreational uses, we reported on Monday.

In 2024, the departments of Transportation and Parks, plus the Central Park Conservancy released a comprehensive study and redesign proposals conducted by the consulting firm TYLin (where current DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn worked). The study outlined a set of near-, middle-, and long-term recommendations that would reorganize and simplify the park Drives.

But these changes were not implemented by the city’s transportation and park officials, who at the time were DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez and Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue, both appointed by then-Mayor Eric Adams.

Click here for the full story.

Just after 7 a.m. near the Wollman Rink, a few dog parents were letting their pets greet each other.

Fabio Granato, who lives on 61st Street, told Streetsblog he walks his pup here every morning. Granato said his main complaint about the park is that it has been dirtier recently.

As far as coexisting with cyclist and pedestrians on the drive, he doesn’t see it as an issue.

“I don’t feel nervous,” he said. “It’s the most beautiful park in the world.”

A few delivery workers are out on their e-bikes. There are some people on city bikes, and a lot of people out walking dogs.

The park at this hour feels like a well-oiled machine. Everybody knows where they’re supposed to be and what they should be doing.

Good morning from Tavern on the Green!

Central Park bustled with runners and cyclists at 6:30 this morning. When I got to the park, the stars were out and the air is peaceful. Why don’t I do this more often? (Answer: I woke up at 4:30 today.)