Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.
Ben Fried
Recent Posts
If You Were Thinking of Sitting Out Tonight’s Clinton Ave Bikeway Meeting…
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…you may want to reconsider. DOT will present a plan for a two-way protected bike lane on Clinton Avenue between Flushing Avenue and Gates Avenue, which would create shorter pedestrian crossings and serve as a useful spur in the bike network for people heading to/from the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway. The southbound traffic lane would be […]
Melinda Katz Tries to Kill Queens Blvd Bike Lane in the Name of “Community”
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This was the community’s reaction to the @NYC_DOT proposal @MelindaKatz @StreetsblogNYC pic.twitter.com/JyyXFroWwK — Jaime Andrés (@jaimeamonc) May 12, 2016 Tuesday night’s meeting on the redesign of Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst was one of the uglier exercises in petty community board obstructionism in recent memory. Queens Community Board 4 District Manager Christian Cassagnol said the safety of cyclists […]
Red Light Runner Who Killed Cyclist in Midwood Charged With Drugged Driving
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The driver who ran a red light and killed a cyclist in Midwood last night has been charged for driving while impaired by drugs. It’s not clear yet whether NYPD and DA Ken Thompson will file additional charges. At around 10 p.m., Eduard Nikhman, 26, drove his Honda Accord through a steady red light heading westbound on Avenue […]
All of DOT’s Bike Metrics Should Be Published on NYC’s Open Data Portal
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Biking in New York City has been rising at a steady clip, according to a new report from NYC DOT, increasing about 50 percent between 2010 and 2014 — maybe more, depending on the metric you look at. What’s not so clear is how things changed in 2015, because the report lacks key information about bike traffic on the […]
Thank God for Jane Jacobs the Highway Slayer
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Jane Jacobs’ legacy is so broad and complex I’m not going to attempt a big thinkpiece to mark her 100th birthday. In lieu of something long and wordy, I’ve got two short paragraphs and some images of the Robert Moses road monsters she slew in the 1960s. Car-centric planning was inimical to the things Jacobs valued most […]
After Countings Cars for Ages, Dallas Starts to Count Walkers and Bikers
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They say “what you measure is what you get,” and for the first time, the North Central Texas Council of Governments is measuring walking and biking activity in the Dallas region, reports Brandon Formby at the Dallas Morning News’ Transportation Blog. It’s an important precedent for an agency that historically has concerned itself with the movement of cars. Planners […]
Streetfilms Flashback: The Bad Old Days of the Pulaski Bridge
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Later this morning, officials will cut the ribbon on the long-awaited Pulaski Bridge bikeway. Pretty soon, it will be tough to remember the claustrophobic anxiety of navigating the narrow path — just 8.5 feet wide, and even less at pinch points — that pedestrians and cyclists made do with before today. So here’s some footage for posterity that Clarence […]
Car-Free Day Doesn’t Mean Much Without New Policies to Reduce Traffic
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New York City is America’s car-free capital, home to eight and half million people, most of whom get around without owning a car. When so many of us already live car-free, what more can come out of an event like last Friday’s Car-Free Day? There are basically two ways an awareness-raising event like Car-Free Day can go. It can […]
Witness: Lauren Davis Was Biking With Traffic, Not Against, as NYPD Claimed
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A witness who was biking behind Lauren Davis at the time she was struck and killed by a turning driver on the morning of April 15 says she is “absolutely sure [Davis] was not biking against traffic.” The eyewitness account directly contradicts the version of events police have propagated since the immediate aftermath of the crash, when NYPD […]
Pat Lynch Makes the Case for Automated Traffic Enforcement
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If there’s one thing to glean from the story of Joseph Spina — the NYPD officer who got caught on tape telling a motorist, “Mayor de Blasio wants us to give out summonses, okay?” — it’s that NYC needs more automated traffic enforcement. Whatever you think of NYPD’s decision to suspend Spina without pay, the incident has brought to the surface the […]
Andrew Cuomo, City Builder
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The headline is no joke. In his sixth year governing the state of New York, Andrew Cuomo is on a bit of a roll when it comes to urban planning and city-based economic development. Cuomo and his administration have announced or budgeted for multiple projects over the past few months that promise to heal urban neighborhoods by repairing the damage inflicted […]
Cuomo’s MTA Debt Bomb: How the Pieces Fit Together
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NY1’s Zack Fink reports that last week’s Albany budget deal raised the MTA’s debt ceiling to $55 billion (about one-third higher than the previous cap of $41 billion). That’s $14 billion more in potential borrowing that, in all likelihood, straphangers will pay off in the form of higher fares. The increase in the debt ceiling wasn’t […]