Gov. Hochul signaled her support on Thursday for reauthorizing the city’s tiny red light camera program — but stopped short of calling for an expansion of the decades-old program. “As a parent who sent my children to schools, watched them graduate, I don’t understand why there’s any controversy around allowing localities to make that decision whether or not they want to have red-light cameras and speed zones,” Hochul told reporters in a response to a question from Streetsblog about whether she supported renewing and expanding the program. The city’s three-decade-old traffic cameras are set to ..read more

The road to more housing is paved with lots of people who want parking. The first community board to take up a crucial mayoral zoning initiative to increase the housing supply was so divisive that members were forced to table a discussion of the part of the plan that would reduce the construction of unnecessary parking. A few days later, members of another community board, also in Brooklyn, dismissed the mayor’s City of Yes for Housing Opportunity proposal out of fear that it would lead to more carmageddon, rather than, as experts say, reduce it. Meanwhile, members of a community board in a pr ..read more

Gov. Hochul signed Sammy’s Law on Thursday. Click here for our coverage of the governor’s appearance in Brooklyn to sign the bill, in which she endorsed extending the city’s red light camera program — but did not say whether she also supports expanding it to more locations. Mayor Adams appeared at the bill signing, but once again hedged on how much he plans to take advantage of the authority vested in him by the new law to make speed limits on certain city streets as low as 20 miles per hour. “All streets are not the same and we should not have speed limits within the entire city based on the ..read more

A top city official used tortured logic on Wednesday to justify the city’s move to siphon curbside road space for electric vehicle charging — claiming the existence of on-street car storage in the city means EV drivers “need” permanently reserved space to recharge their batteries. “Unlike most places in the country, half of our vehicles are stored on the street overnight,” Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner Eric Beaton testified at a City Council budget hearing. “They don’t necessarily have a place to charge in their own garage, and that’s why we need to provide both on-street, o ..read more

State Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Brooklyn) introduced a bill last year to allow the state to require the installation of speed-limiting devices in the cars of repeat reckless drivers. Gounardes’s bill would force drivers with at least six speeding tickets in a single year to install the tech, which he demo’d up in Albany on Tuesday. The tech would prevent the driver from going more than 5 mph over the speed limit. You can watch the senator in action behind the wheel of a speed-limited vehicle below. Today I joined @NYC_SafeStreets to test drive a car with ISA speed-limiting tech. The drive was ..read more

Your bike may finally get a roof over its head. The Department of Transportation will invite vendors to apply to operate secure bike parking facilities with a goal of 500 hubs by 2029, Streetsblog has learned. DOT’s long-awaited effort to provide indoor bike parking on the street will finally get off the ground on Thursday when the agency announces a request for proposals for vendors to win the right to run the program, according to two sources with knowledge of the plans. Bike parking stations on city streets would mark major milestone in making New York City more bike-friendly, culminating y ..read more

New York City drivers “need to slow down,” Mayor Adams said on Tuesday in comments foreshadowing a potential push by his administration to lower speed limits to 20 miles per hour on some city streets — while hedging on how widespread those changes will actually be and repeatedly calling preventable traffic crashes “accidents.” Recently passed state legislation allowed the city to lower speed limits to 20 mph on most roads, but the power ultimately falls to city lawmakers to set a new citywide minimum limit and to the Department of Transportation to make changes on specific streets. Asked durin ..read more

Congestion pricing has entered the Donald Trump social media universe. The former president — whose ongoing trial is a blemish on safe biking and walking in Lower Manhattan — took to his Truth Social platform early Tuesday to condemn New York’s plan to toll drivers entering Manhattan’s busy Central Business District below 60th Street. Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Transportation refused to give the MTA guidance on how to advance the tolls, effectively delaying them more than three years. In his post, Trump claimed the $15 toll on drivers amounts to a policy “where everyone has to pay a f ..read more

Commercial waste haulers selected to collect trash under the city’s Commercial Waste Zones program, including at least one with a deadly track record, will have to submit crash and driving data under a proposed amendment to the long-awaited reforms — information the city should have been considered before it awarded contracts, the plan’s legislative architect told Streetsblog. Action Carting is one of 18 companies officials chose to service 20 designated waste zones starting this September — despite the company’s involvement in at least five traffic deaths, including that of 27-year-old cyclis ..read more

It’s a good kind of tunnel vision! The city wants to permanently reroute the First Avenue protected bike lane through the underground tunnel between E. 40th Street and E. 49th Street this summer before September’s UN General Assembly, officials revealed Monday. Department of Transportation officials hope to get moving on the project before the General Assembly convenes, but have yet to finalize designs to reconfigure the tunnel’s entrance and exit, they told a Manhattan civic panel. Even then, the underground bikeway concept received the full endorsement of Manhattan Community Board 6’s Transp ..read more