Thursday’s Headlines: Mayor Adams’s Less-Heralded News Edition

Mayor Adams had his first Tin Cup Day in Albany, rattling his coin box for state legislatures to give the city more money in the budget. Everyone covered that.

But less heralded was Adams’s strong support for one of the top items on the street safety agenda: a demand that Albany allow New York to set speed limits in the city below 25 miles per hour. It sounds like common sense that a city, whether suburban Ardsley or the great Gotham, should be allowed to assess its own streets and set car speeds accordingly. But they can’t.

Earlier this year, we caught a rumor that Adams’s interest in home rule was waning, so we asked Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez about it, but he gave us the standard, “Stay tuned.”

So on Wednesday, people were excited that Mayor Adams’s budget testimony included these words, “I would urge the state to transfer home rule to New York City to manage the city’s camera enforcement programs in addition to empowering cities to control speed limits on their streets. Doing so will allow us to rapidly respond to public safety crises on our roadways, reduce reckless driving, and keep private automobiles out of bus lanes.”

He also called for “making the bus lane photo monitoring program permanent to ensure that we keep our bus lanes clear and our riders on time.” And he reiterated his support for a proposal by Gov. Hochul to increase density in the city.

In other news:

• Another driver has hit and critically wounded another child, this time in Midwood. (NYDN, Brooklyn Paper)
• What’s with the NYC Ferry system’s broken boarding ramps? (amNY)
• One of the city’s great bridges will be closed for a while longer. (Brooklyn Paper)
• Subway ridership reached a post-Omicron high. (Second Ave Sagas)
• In case you missed it, our top story yesterday was about how a man started receiving mysterious death threats on his phone after reporting an illegally parked pickup truck to 311 and the NYPD (and after watching two cops chat with the driver).
• Finally, check out the bollard saving a pedestrian’s life the other day: