Streetsblog is a COVID-era telecommunications scandal-free zone. If you want to read about that, click here, here or here. Suffice it to say, we all live in glass houses, so it’s best not to throw stones.

Besides, if you want to fiddle with a screen, the best one is the MTA’s new digital subway map. Curbed covered the breakthrough reveal. We’ll be busy with it all day.

Now, for the real news, yesterday was a big day:

• Everyone was obsessed with the temporary shut down of the mayor’s signature transportation initiative — the highly subsidized, water-borne rich person’s ferry — in a weird, totally avoidable snafu with a new property owner (which was fixed by close of business anyway). Yes, Streetsblog covered it, but so did Guse at the Newsuh, a full team of Posties, the Brooklyn Paper and Gothamist. But Shabazz Stuart pointed out on Twitter that everyone missed the point: If we devoted even a tiny fraction of our energy and concern towards real transit — like buses, which disappoint hundreds of thousands of people every day — maybe we could improve the city.
• You gotta love the new New Yorker cover (below right)! Here’s an interview on cycling with the creator, R. Kikuo Johnson. That said, more and more publications are selling the biking lifestyle — so it’s becoming more and more important for the de Blasio administration to do more. And Johnson could have been more accurate if he’d set his image on the Queensboro Bridge, where cyclists and pedestrians crash daily because the city has not created enough space for the glorious image in Johnson’s head.

• Former federal transit man Larry Penner breaks down the LIRR’s $2.6-billion Main Line Third Track project — and has some nice things to say. (Mass Transit)
• Meanwhile, the MTA is going to save a tiny amount of money doing something it probably should have done years ago. (NY Post)
• A woman was critically injured when she was run down by a van driver in Brooklyn. (Twist: It was a Citi Bike van.) (NY Post)
• Here’s one way to boost transit: The city is working on a plan to bring muncipal employees back to their offices (WSJ). Another way, of course, is for the mayor to ride the bus or subway in a show of solidarity, but he long ago called that “cheap symbolism.”
• What’s it like to drive the biggest Cadillac Escalade ever? The Verge tells all — and it’s chilling.
• In case you missed it, someone turned the “Keep Six Feet Away” signs in Tompkins Square Park into something far more meaningful. (Village Sun)
• And, finally, rapper Wiz Khalifa is sick and tired of you buzzing him when he’s on his bike!

If I’m ridin my bike wit my kid please slow tf down. Matter fact, park bitch.

— Taylor Gang World Leader (@wizkhalifa) October 18, 2020