Ray Kelly

The Post ran a damning article last weekend on reckless yellow cab drivers. Armed with a radar gun, a reporter clocked cabbies regularly exceeding the city's 30 mph speed limit by as much as 20 mph. An unnamed NYPD commander also said that cab drivers are responsible for over half of all crashes in Midtown.

We couldn't help notice that, while police information czar Paul Browne was seemingly chatting up every media outlet in town about his boss coming to the aid of a fallen pedestrian this week, we were adding two letters to our stack of NYPD freedom of information rejections. 

Over an 11-day span in February, three off-duty NYPD officers were arrested for driving under the influence. One was nabbed as he sat behind the wheel of a double-parked car in Harlem. The other two were involved in serious crashes, one of which ended with the officer's car overturned on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk. It's of little comfort that the resulting injuries -- to four people in all -- were limited to those inside the vehicles, when the casualty count could just as easily have included an innocent victim.

Since taking office late last year, the new chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Charlie Beck, has taken several steps toward making conditions more tolerable for local cyclists. The most notable to this point is probably the formation of a cycling task force to address issues including traffic laws and bike theft. As reported by Damien Newton of Streetsblog LA, last week Beck fielded questions at a city council committee meeting, during which he referred to cycling as "an admirable form of transportation" and called cyclists "our most vulnerable commuters."

In what has become an all-too-familiar scene, NYPD is denying reports that a police chase led to the death of a pedestrian after an incident of petty theft on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

When it comes to the perils of distracted driving, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly seems to get it. The Post reported yesterday that Kelly plans to "urge" the DMV to attach license points to tickets for driving while using a cell phone. The violation currently carries a $130 fine, but comes with no points, regardless of the number of infractions.

Last week brought another prime example of Bloomberg administration schizophrenia on urban sustainability. After his flight back from the Copenhagen climate summit, the mayor's first stop was a former auto pound in College Point, Queens, where he met up with NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to break ground on the city's new $750 million police academy.

In handing down a prison term of 20-to-life for Auvryn Scarlett, the garbage hauler who had stopped taking his epilepsy medication before suffering a seizure behind the wheel and killing two pedestrians last year, Justice Richard Carruthers described the convicted as "a time bomb ready to explode at any moment on the streets of New York." The same could be said of the countless number of motorists roaming the city at any given moment though their licenses have been suspended or revoked due to a history of recklessness. Two such drivers killed three people in separate crashes over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Mayor Bloomberg has already shown how much his administration can accomplish in just a few years. Since Janette Sadik-Khan's appointment to head the DOT in 2007, the city has striped hundreds of miles of bike lanes, reclaimed acres of street space for pedestrians and improved bus travel for tens of thousands of New Yorkers. "More of the same" is no longer a dirty phrase when it comes to local transportation policy. During the next four years, the mayor needs to accelerate this progress, and introduce a few key innovations to maximize the value New Yorkers get from their new streets.