Streetsies 2025: Revisit Our Most-Read Stories of the Year

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What’s orange and black and read all over: Streetsblog!

As we continue our annual December Donation Drive with our also annual Year-in-Review series, we thought we’d offer a roundup of all our most-read stories from the year — you know, the kind of thing that isn’t merely self-congratulatory clickbait but actual reminder of the great work we’ve done this year.

So without further ado:

Congestion pricing

Our top story of the year was, fittingly, connected to the top story of the year: Dave Colon’s congestion pricing “explainer” — which went live seconds after the central business district tolls went into effect early on Jan. 5 2025.

We spent the rest of the year covering congestion pricing from all angles — highlighting, for example, the Trump administration’s fruitless lawsuits; reporting that the new toll had not negatively affected Broadway ticket sales nor the economy in general nor the Bronx specifically; and how traffic was down in the city and in New Jersey.

All that coverage culminated in our seventh-most-read story of the year: How congestion pricing had a prominent booster in the form of Knicks legend Walt “Clyde” Frazier!

The war on cyclists

No reporter was more dogged than our Kevin Duggan in pointing out the lies and exaggerations that characterized NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s decision to change policy and have cops write criminal summonses to cyclists for minor infractions to writing criminal summonses — a policy with broad implications for the criminal justice system.

Duggan’s story revealing the policy was our second-most-read story of the year. But his coverage didn’t stop there. Over the next two months, he wrote dozens of pieces that revealed the policy’s hypocrisy and flaws.

They’re all archived here.

The myopic mayor

The mayor’s decision to remove a part of the Bedford Avenue bike lane was not only our third-most-read story of the year, but fueled our journalistic fires. In short order, we revealed how the new unprotected bike lane was less safe and become a new chore for the NYPD.

Horror of horrors

Our fourth-most-read story was the one we wish we hadn’t written: A breaking-news post after a driver with a long record of recklessness and non-payment of tickets was charged for killing a mother and two of her kids on Ocean Parkway.

As horrified as we were, we put our backs into our subsequent coverage, highlighting the ineffectiveness of our political elite, and our law enforcement, in confronting such horrors.

Never again.

A bizarre death

Our fifth-most-viewed story was a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie: How did a police officer driving a squad car through Flushing Meadows Corona Park fatally strike a man in broad daylight?

Turns out, it’s not much of a mystery: Witnesses says the officer was not even looking at the road while driving on the usually car-free path when he killed Erasmo Huerta Gonzalez.

How did this happen?

Why are we doing so well? In short, the audience engagement team led by Emily Lipstein is doing a bang-up job: Year to date, Streetsblog NYC got 1.4 million “new users” (up 22.4 percent from last year) and 194,000 “returning users” (up 32 percent).

In total, Streetsblog NYC has served 4.1 million page views this year, an increase of 5 percent.

And we’re booming on social: Our Instagram profile was viewed two million times this year — and 80 percent of the visits were by non-followers. They came for the good stuff, such as our video about the various mayoral candidates’ stances on e-bikes or our coverage of a Council member’s son harassing volunteers working for her challenger.

We now have 12,781 followers on Instagram, which is up 2030 percent from June 2024.

And we had 9.1 million views on our YouTube channel this year.