Welcome to the War on Cars, New Yorker – Streetsblog New York City

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Yesterday’s big news was The must-read 6,000-word New Yorker story for the epic battle for street safety.

Danyoung Kim’s play certainly got into all the right notes, giving voice and moral megaphone to the small army of Safe Street Families volunteers in our city. And we certainly appreciated the rapier’s quote from our founding editor, Aaron Naparstek: “No one ever looks at a car as a weapon. The basic rule I’ve discovered over the years is, if you ever want to kill someone in New York, do it by car.

But allow us a story? In an effort to document the history of the safe street movement, Kim has somehow managed to separate her reporting from one of the main pillars of journalism: current events. Yes, the article was clearly focused on the norms that need to be slowly weaned off the centuries-old Stockholm-based car syndrome, but people who spend their days and nights in real trenches will not learn much from history. In fact, it may be more dignified to look ahead than to look back – there are many battles going on in the state legislature and in the meeting rooms of car companies, battles that will determine whether our planet will win or lose the car war. .

Our glass is half empty on this issue, sometimes. In fact, if our state leaders can’t even agree that insurance companies need to be informed when their customers receive repeated speeding complaints through school areas and our federal leaders themselves race to green electric cars, in the end there will be none. to be better than the valiant activists who took over the car companies in the early days of the automotive era. (Reminder: They lost.)

In other news from a slow day:

  • Speaking to state lawmakers, Deborah Glick tweeted late Thursday to say that she and Senator Andrew Gunardes had a speed camera bill (diluted, mentioned above) that the Assembly had indeed passed. We will have a full overview of the session in Albany on Monday.
  • Two board members made some bold promises on Streetsblog on Thursday, with Education Committee Chair Rita Joseph saying she wanted to explore school streets without cars and Transport Committee member Lincoln Wrestler vowing to deal with the posters, which was our lead. story for yesterday. (Meanwhile, Daily News and the message make a story on Wrestler’s account.)
  • You can’t write the fires of hell without el. (NY Post, amNY, Gotamist)
  • The message received a second day at the latte-gate, thanks to the MTA’s insistence that the paper pay for public records, which must be free of charge in a FOIL application.
  • Queens board member Bob Holden wants car dealerships and rental companies to stop stealing everyone’s free parking. (NY Post)
  • Times columnist Farhad Manju continues to receive it, this time focusing on all (except) the free parking we provide: “You can argue that this whole parking space is necessary – how else do people in a car-dependent metropolis like Los Angeles go to get to Disney Hall without driving and parking there? But by requiring parking spaces in every house, office and shopping center – while not requiring new bike lanes, bus routes or train stations near any major development – urban planning rules give drivers an advantage in terms of cost and convenience over any other way to get around the city. We need all this parking, because thanks to all this parking, we made driving the default way to go anywhere in the city. ”
  • Senator Brad Hoyleman and Assembly member Zohran Mamdani want to use cameras to keep cars out of bike lanes. (NY Post)
  • Do you remember this shortage of staff at the MTA? Continues. (The city)
  • The MTA has released its preliminary schedules for the opening of the new LIRR terminal “Grand Central Madison”. On Monday we will do a full analysis, but amNY took the first pass according to officials, it will be the largest increase in service in the history of the railway.
  • Finally, Jesse Singer made a delicious download of Governor Hochul’s self-aggrandizing tweet in the holiday gas tax: