Friday’s Headlines: You Deserve a Long Weekend Edition

What a busy news day Thursday was! With our old man editor flat on his back from his latest Covid booster, the Department of Transportation decided to start making announcements like Prince Charles on the day he finally gets the throne.

Let’s run it down:

  • The city said its speed cameras will go to 24-7 mode on Aug. 1 to provide a month of warning to reckless drivers to get their act together. (DOT via Twitter, NYDN)
  • The agency presented three options to fix McGuinness Boulevard to Community Board 1.
  • And just as that meeting was on its fifth hour, the agency unveiled plans for a bike boulevard on Berry Street (we’ll have full coverage soon).
  • Meanwhile, Dave Colon was covering a lengthy meeting about maybe making Flatbush Avenue suck less for bus riders. (Brooklyn Paper had it, too.)
  • And we learned that DOT’s special Covid health worker parking placards have finally expired. So if you see one, grumble to yourself knowingly.

So we’re really looking forward to the holiday weekend. But first, in other news:

  • It was another bloody day on New York City streets, with two e-bike riders killed in separate crashes. (NYDN)
  • No wonder Friend of Streetsblog Doug Gordon wrote about banning cars for Jalopnik.
  • After reading Julianne Cuba’s story on the coming carmageddon stemming from nights and weekend repairs of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Assembly Member Bobby Carroll fired off an angry letter to DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez. (Carroll via Twitter)
  • More lifeguards are on the way! (Gothamist, The City)
  • Back in the theater, we used to say that satire opens on Friday and closes on Saturday. But that didn’t stop Hell Gate from satirizing Mayor Adams’s call for more exemptions to congestion pricing. Read the website’s funny list of everyone who should get exempted from the tolls.
  • The U.S. Supreme Court really threw some gasoline on the planetary fire with that EPA ruling. (NY Times)
  • Meanwhile, Gothamist and Streetsblog did local angles on the ruling.
  • ICYMI, the LIC Post has details of the coming protected bike network for Long Island City.
  • And, finally, the Daily News back page violated our old man editor’s rule when he was running the Brooklyn Paper of never referring to “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” in any headline or lede. But the news was just so devastating that we’re willing to allow it:

Filed Under: DOT

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

DOT Makes the Case for Bike Routes Parallel to W. Houston St.

By Aaron Naparstek |
Last Tuesday night Ryan Russo and Josh Benson from the Department of Transportation presented a plan to Manhattan’s Community Board 2 to create a safer east-west bike route across Lower Manhattan. With three cyclists having been killed on Houston Street over the last two years and major reconstruction of the street currently underway, members of […]

Highlights From Today’s Vision Zero Symposium Panels

By Stephen Miller |
Street safety professionals, elected officials, and advocates from cities around the world gathered in New York today for the Vision Zero for Cities Symposium, a conference organized by Transportation Alternatives to examine New York’s street safety approach and share best practices for eliminating traffic fatalities. The morning panels featured Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, TLC Commissioner […]

This Week: 14th Street PeopleWay, Remembering Asif Rahman

By Streetsblog |
A very busy week on the Streetsblog calendar starts off with a memorial ride later today for Asif Rahman, who was killed by a truck driver while biking on Queens Boulevard eight years ago and would have turned 31 today. Queens Boulevard is getting safer thanks in large part to the advocacy of Asif’s mother […]