Thursday’s Headlines: Busy News Day Edition

By Streetsblog
Jan 24, 2019

What a crazy day yesterday was: A City Council Member blasted his colleagues’ hopes of legalizing e-scooters right in front of them at a press conference. Then Mayor de Blasio tossed cold water on the whole legalization thing anyway. And then we were leaked a copy of a preliminary — or “outdated,” if you believe the MTA — set of painful service adjustments that might have to be made to accommodate Gov. Cuomo’s supposedly painless L-train repair. (The Post later followed our mega-scoop above).

All this, even as we were still trying to figure out if there is a method to Cuomo’s MTA madness.

But by day’s end, we took stock and prepared our curated list of news morsels to sate your information appetite:

All of the papers had some coverage of the e-scooter/e-bike debate. The Daily News played it straight. The Wall Street Journal focused on the supposed danger of e-scooters. Soft-spoken humanist Vin Barone at amNY championed the benefit of legal e-bikes to New York’s hard-working delivery people.
Noel Hildalgo, Alex Baca and Stephen Miller collaborated on a Daily News op-ed about how New York could easily get the scooter thing right. How? More scooters. And more bike lanes!
Alec Baldwin pleaded guilty for shoving a man in a dispute over a parking space that really shouldn’t be free anyway, as Streetsblog reported last year. He’ll undergo anger management, whatever that means. (ABC7, NY Times, amNY) The Wall Street Journal had a nice detail: Apparently Baldwin has no prior criminal record. Who would have thunk it?
Gothamist did a thorough story on the cop who pushed the cyclists, lied about it, got caught after years of suppressed testimony, yet still kept his job.
Make Queens Safer’s video of school buses barreling down protected bike lanes was picked up by Fox5 News.
Care to get a whiff of how bad the MTA’s subway elevators are? The Daily News has you covered.
Get a load of the subway of the future (amNY) while still recovering from yesterday’s disaster…
Yes, the L train caught a cold on Wednesday — and the entire subway system got pneumonia. The Daily News had video of the water main break at 14th Street that led to cascading problems throughout the system. Gothamist also had pictures.
And, finally, our friends at Streetsblog USA (and at City Lab) looked once again at why pedestrians are being killed all over the place (well, not really all over the place, but mostly in the Deep South).