Charles Komanoff

Assembly Member Richard Brodsky, archenemy of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan, is urging the mayor to seek a carbon tax instead. So he said, following Monday's meeting of the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission, as reported by Streetsblog and confirmed by at least one other observer.

A dozen or so years ago, back when congestion pricing was a distant dream and New York City's number one transportation priority was to squeeze more transit funding from government, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign commissioned me to determine which was greater: the dollars that New York State governments took in from drivers, or the dollars spent on drivers' behalf. I spent months immersed in bookkeeping arcana, parsing revenue pots like the statewide Petroleum Business Tax and expenses like fire department equipment for prying crash victims from mangled vehicles, before I emerged with an answer.

Chad Rachman / S.I. Advance Police view Honda in which Michelle Arout, 17, died in Veterans Road drag race.

Matt Rainey / Star-Ledger

Fatal Crashes (12 Killed This Week; 345 Killed This Year)

Samantha Foster / The Journal News

Long Island is safe. So safe that police recruits are flocking to the island's two counties, according to an article in last Tuesday's New York Times:

The streets of Soho, where trucks roam free

Here's an editorial one wouldn't expect to see in The Times: An unabashedly pro-bicycle manifesto anointing cycling as "the cheap, green answer to so many contemporary troubles" and urging city authorities to use congestion-charging revenues to create a first-class cycling infrastructure.

Two pedestrians were killed in New York City last December by private sanitation trucks, one on Park Avenue South in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn Heights. Both deaths followed the most common pattern of pedestrian death in New York -- the peds were crossing the street, in the crosswalk, with the light, and a turning vehicle ran over them.