Friday’s Headlines: Parking Madness Edition

Longtime readers of Streetsblog are no doubt familiar with Astoria’s 114th Precinct.

The “winner” of Streetsblog’s 2021 Parking Madness bracket for worst illegal and unsafe parking behavior by an NYPD precinct, the 114th also featured prominently our video earlier this year about the Biden Justice Department’s brief foray into investigating placard abuse and unsafe parking around precincts.

Someone at the Department of Transportation is clearly fed-up with the precinct’s insistence on combat-parking on several blocks worth of neighborhood sidewalks, though. On one block of 35th Street over I-278, cops who previously merely illegally straddled the sidewalk are now also illegally parked in a green-painted bike lane. The city installed the “Fresh Kermit” sometime in recent weeks, according to locals.

Streetsblog ventured to the 114th to check out the new bike lane on Wednesday. While there’ve been reports on social media of illegal parking in the bike lane, it was clear when we visited.

Astorians who stopped to chat expressed their displeasure — anonymously.

“Sanitation cannot clean the street,” said one older woman. “The police don’t have to pay parking tickets, but meanwhile we pay a lot of tax, and we don’t get our streets cleaned. It’s crazy.”

Remarked one cyclist: “I was going to go in to report the illegal parking, but I was worried they were gonna arrest me.”

In other news:

• A Sanitation truck driver injured himself and another driver on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills. (QNS)
• Take a ride on a Queens express bus with amNewYork.
• Ingrid Lewis-Martin is hardly the first Big Apple politico with a film cameo. (City & State)
• Indicted Adams official Jesse Hamilton lasted longer than other allegedly corrupt City Hall hacks. (The City)
• Flushing Meadows Corona Park is “underfunded and under-used,” according to a new report. (Queens Eagle)