Like many, whenever we traverse any streets along Grand Army Plaza, we basically run (or bike) for our lives. more ›

This Sunday, the Mayor will formally unveil more PlaNYC details (though the website has been up for a while now). He'll give the speech at the American Museum of Natural History, to which New York Mag says, "while we're excited to see the plan, we confess the museum's symbolism is making us nervous: dinosaurs … carcasses … oy." more ›

Last night's Department of Transportation presentation to Park Slope's Community Board 6 brought out hundreds of residents. Streetsblog has excellent coverage, noting that CB6 rejected the plan to turn Sixth and Seventh Avenues into one-way streets and residents want comprehensive planning, versus "secretive, top-down, traffic engineer-driven planning." Streetsblog also has a bootlegged copy of the presentation that lacks many details.

In this plan you will find nothing about traffic calming, pedestrian counts the numerous activities that take place on the streetscape beyond the movement and storage of motor vehicles. You will find no attempt to measure street performance and neighborhood impact beyond the counting of cars and trucks. You will find no discussion of the transformative development curently underway in and around Downtown Brooklyn and the goals of the Bloomberg Administration's Long-Term Planning and Sustainability initiative. And if you are looking for any response to long-standing community concerns or acknowledgement of the forward-thinking, pro-active planning that our community has undertaken over the last couple of years, you won't find that either. All you will find here is a traffic engineer's monomaniacal focus on moving motor vehicles through a dense urban environment.

Newsday reports that NYPD Assistant Chief Bruce Smolka is retiring. While many officers Newsday spoke to love Smolka, he leaves behind an interesting legacy. Let's paraphrase Aaron Naparstek's 2005 piece about Smolka for the NY Press' 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers issue:

...Smolka was the commanding officer of the NYPD’s infamous Street Crimes Unit. It was his officers who, in February 1999, pumped 41 bullets into Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant guilty of nothing more than standing in the hallway of his own apartment building.... more ›