Monday’s Headlines: Welcome to New York, Secretary Pete (Call Us!) Edition

Take Amtrak if you're going to interview Secretary Pete, thanks!
Take Amtrak if you're going to interview Secretary Pete, thanks!

U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will be in town today, schmoozing with Schumer and hyping the Gateway Tunnel project, unfrozen by the Biden Administration from its Trumpian deep freeze.

The fun starts at 11 a.m. in Penn Station. Kudos to Schumer’s legendary press shop for providing the details (U.S. DOT didn’t get back to us on deadline). Guse of the Newsuh also did a preview (one that referred back to our own seminal coverage of Gov. Cuomo’s game-playing). And the paper’s editorial board (which also had a head start on the competition) took a Cuomo-eye view.

Now, to get you up to speed with all the other news you missed while you were dancing in the fountain at Washington Square Park:

  • Right, speaking of dancing in the fountain in Washington Square Park, the NYPD again cracked down on largely peaceful revelers, this time celebrating Pride. Even the Post’s pro-cop coverage couldn’t cover up what happened, as much as the tabloid tried (at one point, calling park partiers “animals”). The Daily News ran an op-ed that sought a cop-free strategy.

  • In a very solid op-ed, the Times editorial board pointed out that transit improvements by the Long Island Rail Road are ultimately useless if suburban areas don’t loosen up their restrictions against building housing. You can’t have transit-oriented development without the development.
  • It’s going to be HOT this week (NY Post), but thankfully, the public pools have reopened (NY Post).
  • Maybe this thing is really over? Springsteen is back to work on Broadway (NY Times) and even the City Council is returning to in-person meetings this week. (NY Post)
  • We tweeted it last week, but Kevin Duggan of amNY focused a whole story on the DOT’s effort to solicit public comment for the Streets Master Plan, which is a big deal.
  • Speaking of fixing our streets, physicists agree that cities need to become way more car-free if they are to survive. (It’s not rocket science … or even physics. It’s basic geometry.)
  • City and State did a deep dive on the demise of state legislation over gig workers.
  • The Washington Post mentioned 34th Avenue in its roundup of ways in which cities are improving their streets post-COVID, but the Beltway Bible missed the real story: car-culture enablers like Eleanor Holmes Norton who don’t push back on behalf of their long-suffering, car-endangered constituents.
  • Bloomberg offered an analysis of why transit is struggling over the decades — it’s because of those same car-culture enablers who stood idly (or worse, encouraged it) as sprawl became national policy.
  • Friend of Streetsblog @dimpnewyork blew up the internet briefly over the weekend after a police officer (with the surname Ricotta) gave him a ticket for riding his bike through a red light but with the pedestrian signal — a legal move per city law that the NYPD officer apparently didn’t know about. He tweeted about it and the comments reveal more instances of the NYPD simply not doing its job very well (which we’ve documented repeatedly).

https://twitter.com/dimpNewYork/status/1408797995794108416

  • Also, what’s with the lack of bike parking … at the House of Representatives?!

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG