Wednesday’s Headlines: Dueling Rallies Edition

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Astoria was ground zero in the fight for safe streets yesterday, with dueling rallies over the 31st Street protected bike lane.

First, business owners and their political enablers cheered a judge’s flawed decision that requires the Department of Transportation to remove the bike lane, as QNS reported. Joseph Mirabella, president of the street’s business association, called the misguided ruling a “victory for the residents and businesses of Astoria” (though he obviously left out the hundreds of people who live in the neighborhood and shop in those businesses … and signed the petition to support of the bike lane).

Those people, the ones on the right side of the city’s epic and ongoing fight for safety, rallied to demand that the city appeal Judge Cheree Buggs’s ruling, which seems likely, but is never assured.

Council Member Tiffany Caban pointed out that every elected official in the neighborhood, including the Assembly member who is about to become mayor, called for just such a plan for 31st Street “because each one of our offices were getting calls overwhelmingly about street safety.” “

“It is the number one constituent call that we get consistently since the day I took office, and the 31st Street corridor, was a really important part of the plan,” she added.

She demanded the Adams administration file an appeal on the grounds that Judge Buggs’s ruling was just so flawed, as Streetsblog reported. “Appeals are an important part of our judicial process because, guess what, judges get it wrong more often than you might think,” she said. “And in this case, you can see just how flawed the rationale that was used by this judge was.”

Joining the crowd of about 100 activists was young mom Diana Moreno, who is running to succeed Zohran Mamdani in Astoria’s seat in the state Assembly.

The crowd left the gathering place and rode en masse to the intersection of 31st Street and 31st Avenue for a die-in to symbolize the lack of safety along the corridor. Activists painted a silhouette of a dead person.

An hour before the rally, former FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh backed the street safety effort and accused the judge of an overreach.

In other news:

• We like to start the morning during our December Donation Drive with a roll call of all the heroes who donated in the previous 24 hours. The list from yesterday: Thanks, Cecil! Thanks, A.D.! Thanks, Nikhil! Thanks, Charles (now we’re square)! And one of those donors took advantage of our special benefit to big machers this year. Join him!
• Lots of outlets covered the Transportation Alternatives/Open Plans announcement on Tuesday of the most dangerous intersections in the city. (NY Post, amNY) We went with a broader angle about Speaker Adrienne Adams’s effort to kill the universal daylighting bill.
• A senior citizen was killed by a driver on the stretch of Broadway between Columbus Circle and Times Square that should be pedestrianized, not that the Daily News nor Gothamist took that angle.
• Rhode Island rocker Roderick MacLeod was killed by a recidivist scofflaw as he walked his dog on the side of an Ocean State road. It was so appalling that even the Post was upset.
• As if you needed another reason to be suspicious of Instacart, the company may be inflating your bill, thanks to AI. (Consumer Reports)
• It’s on: Comptroller Brad Lander is taking on Rep. Dan Goldman in the exceptionally liberal Park Slope-Lower Manhattan congressional district with which Goldman is decidedly out of step. (Politico, NYDN)
• No surprise here: Kathryn Garcia will head the Port Authority. (Politico, NY Times)