Wednesday’s Headlines: Mayor Talks Traffic Safety Edition

Mayor Adams talked traffic safety during an appearance on Hot 97 Radio on Monday, but after host Funkmaster Flex complained about getting camera-issued speeding tickets, Hizzoner suggested that speed demons should have a designated track to work the reckless behavior out of their system.

“We got to find a place like Floyd Bennett Field, you know where we can have the track where people can go. … You want to drive fast, there’s an organized place,” Adams said in response to Flex’s stated preference for the West Side Highway and other “places of choice for some faster driving.”

Let’s hope the mayor was joking about converting the former landing strip into a drag strip; it’s not likely that indulging speed demons at a private track would discourage them from continuing the “fun” on public streets.

Funk Flex admitted that the speeding tickets are working as designed, saying he’s paid his fines and is “slowing it down.”

“We get a lot of traffic fatalities, man. We are losing a lot of people,” Adams told him, before insisting the radio DJ’s specific model of muscle car was his “favorite.”

“We’re going to slow it down a bit,” the mayor joked. “You can enjoy the luxury of that beautiful car.”

In other news:

• “Adams is nowhere close to meeting his bike and bus lane goals. He hasn’t said a word about funding Citi Bike or the ‘bike superhighways’ [he campaigned on], and he has gleefully taken a sledgehammer to outdoor dining sheds to make way for more car parking.” (Hell Gate)
• Speaking of which, Bronx bus riders rallied on Tuesday to voice their support for a busway on Fordham Road that Adams has so far declined to advance. (Streetsblog, Daily News, CBS New York, NY1)
• A lawsuit by retired FDNY chiefs blasts Commissioner Laura Kavanagh for being slow on the lithium-ion battery crisis — but the court papers suggest she wanted to avoid punishing low-income delivery workers. (Daily News)
• ASTM’s Penn Station proposal will give James Dolan $500 million. (NY Post)
• Development opponents ask: Is it time to kill the MTA plan once and for all? (Daily News)
• Bloomberg spoke with city Chief Public Realm Officer Ya-Ting Liu about upcoming street redesign and public space projects.
• Also moving ahead: the Newark AirTrain and the Q70 LaGuardia bus lane project, which is two or three years away from completion. (Crain’s)
• One ex-DOT Commish continues his one-man war on the city’s plan to widen the BQE… (Gothamist)
• … while another assures us that “the image people have of the highway falling to the ground is very unlikely.” (Curbed)
• Rising subsurface temperatures could be bad news for underground transit infrastructure. (NY Post)
• Metro-North Hudson and Upper Harlem service will be fully back by this morning after catastrophic storms — a very quick repair effort. (Fox 5 NY)
• And, finally, Hell Gate co-editor Christopher Robbins has created “The Williamsburg Bridge Challenge”: