Friday’s Headlines: ‘And the Winners Are…’ Edition

And the Streetsie goes to…

As in year’s past, we asked our readers to vote for the best campaign, the best project and the biggest disappointment of the previous year. So now it’s time to announce the “winners.”

And the 2024 Streetsie Award for best campaign of the year goes to: Daylighting!

Our own Kevin Duggan crafted a great list of nominations that included multiple efforts to make roads safer (with red light cameras, lower speed limits and a bike lane on Bedford), but the winner, by a wide margin, was Open Plans’s citywide effort to force the city to follow state law and restrict parking at intersections, a practice known as “daylighting.”

Here’s how the final voting looked:

The biggest failures of 2024

Our own Sophia Lebowitz wrote up the nominees for the biggest disappointments of the year, a list that included Mayor Adams’s failure to build the required number of bike and bus lanes this year and the massive uptick in police chases. But by a large margin, the failure of the city to make the outdoor dining a year-round program was Streetsblog readers’ biggest disappointment, as you can see from the voting:

The best project of 2024

Double-duty Duggan offered a full list of nominees for best project of the year, highlighted by some truly good work by the city Department of Transportation, such as the e-scooter pilot in Queens and new charging stations to keep e-bike riders safe. But the winner, with an almost clear majority, was wider bike lanes (which really are great).

Congrats to the winners. etc

In other news:

• Suburban car-brained news outlet Newsday did an entire story about why there were so many crashes in Suffolk County last year … yet never mentioned that the county allowed its red-light camera program to lapse.
• We were happy to see Hell Gate join our outrage over recent Council measures to make it harder for the Department of Transportation to do its job. “If you had to choose a single entity that consistently sucked the most tailpipe in 2024, it would probably be the New York City Council,” reporter Chris Robbins wrote.
• A woman was struck and killed by a bus driver in Queens. (Astoria Post)
• New Jersey’s last gasp to stop congestion pricing will take place today in a Garden State courtroom. Reminder: New Jersey residents already pay a sizable toll to enter Midtown, so it remains unfathomable why a slightly higher one has become a federal case. (NYDN, NY Post)
• Speaking of desperation, now the Post is getting transit workers to complain about congestion pricing because it’s not fair to make drivers pay a toll when the subways (their workplace!) are supposedly so unsafe.
• Now, not that the subway is completely safe, but the Times’s attempt to understand what’s going on ended with some very solid perspective and context from a Mr. Cian Genaro, a 23-year-old actor: “He said that to make the subways feel truly secure would require solving seemingly intractable social problems: homelessness, the lack of affordable housing, holes in the mental health safety net,” reporters Andy Newman and Wesley Parnell wrote. “All the same, Mr. Genaro said, ‘I’m way more worried about getting in a car and driving in New Jersey than being on the subway.’” Give that man an Oscar for Best Understanding of the Broader Issue.
• The real crime? Bad express bus service from Staten Island. (amNY)
• Bay Ridge subway riders can’t catch a break. (Gothamist)
• Mary Anne Krupsak — whose clean government political slogan was, “Not just one of the boys” — is dead. (NY Times)
• And finally, here’s the NYPD in a nutshell: Lecturing cyclists on how to be safe while cops park on a daylighting zone that the DOT installed to … help cyclists be safe: