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
Chris Quinn: “I Don’t Anticipate Congestion Pricing Coming Back Around”
| | 4 Comments
Dana Rubinstein reports that City Council speaker and current mayoral front-runner Christine Quinn is bearish on congestion pricing’s political prospects: “I don’t anticipate congestion pricing coming back around,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn told an audience at New York Law School today, when asked about its near-term future. “It didn’t do well and I don’t […]
Bloomberg’s Final State of the City Captures the Contradictions of His Legacy
| | 9 Comments
Michael Bloomberg’s twelfth and final State of the City address neatly encapsulated the internal contradictions of his transportation and planning policies. In his prepared remarks, the mayor called the impending launch of bike-share “the biggest change to our transportation network in ages,” but the speech was also peppered with boasts about stadium-related mega-projects that are […]
How the Mayoral Candidates Stack Up on Safe Streets for Biking, So Far
| | 16 Comments
Matt Flegenheimer got five leading mayoral candidates on the record about bike lanes for a story in the Times today, and one of the encouraging things about it is that you can start to see the candidates running against each other (and not just the three-term, lame duck incumbent) on bike policy. It’s still early […]
Paging James Vacca: Curb-Jumper Injures Senior Citizen on 5th Ave Sidewalk
| | 13 Comments
Can we get a James Vacca City Council hearing on this? A man in his eighties was seriously injured today when an SUV driver jumped the curb and slammed into Saks Fifth Avenue in Midtown a little before 11 a.m. Gothamist reports that the victim was walking by the store at the time and was […]
Wayback Machine: A Deeper Look at Ed Koch’s Livable Streets Legacy
| | 7 Comments
Our post last Friday about Ed Koch’s transportation legacy inspired a flood of Koch-related reader email. From his days as an upstart Democratic district leader in the 1960s through his career in Congress and his early years as NYC mayor, Koch was, in many ways, ahead of his time on transit, bicycling, and reclaiming street […]
Eyes on the Street: How About a Slow Zone for Prince Street?
| | 8 Comments
Brooklyn Spoke’s Doug Gordon tweeted this photo Wednesday morning. This crash happened at the intersection of Prince and Crosby in Soho, which gets a ton of foot traffic and sees some of the highest bike counts in the city. It’s only random chance that someone didn’t get hit. One change that would help regulate drivers’ […]
TSTC: Cuomo Budget Would Raid $20 Million From the MTA
| | 6 Comments
If you thought Albany had gotten over the habit of raiding the MTA for cash, think again. Nadine Lemmon at the Tri-State Transportation Campaign reports that there’s a $20 million transit raid lurking in Governor Cuomo’s 2013 executive budget: This $20 million diversion of funds comes from a pot of money that is statutorily dedicated […]
Caption Contest: Customize This NYPost.com Bike Ad
| | 13 Comments
Transportation Alternatives’ Noah Budnick sends along this screen grab of a Linus Bikes ad recently served up to him on the New York Post’s website. It’s a testament to someone’s ad placement algorithms that this puppy can find its intended audience even on the site of a bike-hating rag like the Post. Here’s a thought […]
Ed Koch, 1973: The Bicycle “Must Be Included” in NYC Transpo System
| | 16 Comments
Thanks to reader Peter Frishauf for passing on this 1973 constituent letter he received from Ed Koch, who represented New York’s 18th Congressional District at the time. Forty years ago, Koch was putting out a more progressive message on bike policy than what we heard in 2011 from another U.S. Representative who had his eye […]
A Year Later, How’s James Vacca Doing on His Pledge to Protect Pedestrians?
| | 11 Comments
Today NYC DOT announced its progress on a series of measures designed to promote safer riding habits among commercial cyclists. The agency has held 17 multi-lingual forums around the city to educate businesses and commercial cyclists about how to ride safely, and distributed kits with reflective vests, bells, and lights to 1,500 commercial cyclists through […]
The Hypocrisy of Denis Hamill’s Blind Road Rage
| | 31 Comments
How’s this for some cognitive dissonance? Daily News columnist Denis Hamill, whose stock-in-trade is bitter nostalgia, went off yesterday on the city’s efforts to make streets safer for biking. The rant is straight out of the John Cassidy mold — basically, Hamill wants you to know that cyclists today have it easy because, unlike himself, […]
Can’t Wait for Bike-Share? Tide Yourself Over With Citi Bike Marketing
| | 22 Comments
A reader sends in this sign of the impending arrival of New York City bike-share, currently scheduled to launch in May. This text ad is running at the top of some Gmail accounts, with a rotating tag line. Our source says the others include: “Unlock New York City with Citi Bike” “Citi Bike makes moving […]