Ydanis Rodriguez

Nearly 100 people gathered yesterday afternoon on the steps of City Hall to launch Families for Safe Streets, a group of New Yorkers who have lost loved ones to traffic violence. Families for Safe Streets are demanding an accelerated timetable for the Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic fatalities within a decade.

A group of uptown elected officials, including City Council Transportation Committee Chair Ydanis Rodriguez, sent a letter today to Governor Andrew Cuomo asking him to include dedicated funds for bicycle and pedestrian projects in his executive budget [PDF]. The request echoes a call from street safety advocates and comes as the de Blasio administration must marshal resources to implement its Vision Zero agenda, set to be released in days.

Today's transportation committee meeting, the first chaired by Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, was short and sweet. The new chair opened with a statement outlining his goals for the 13-member committee, which minutes later unanimously passed an override of Mayor Bloomberg's veto of a bill that would give the council more information about NYPD's hit-and-run investigations.

It's official: Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez is chair of the transportation committee, and Council Member David Greenfield will head up the powerful land use committee. While Rodriguez's appointment has been greeted mostly with optimism by street safety advocates, Greenfield's ascendance raises flags about whether the city will be able to get much-needed parking reforms through the council.

Politicker is reporting that Upper Manhattan Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez has the inside track on securing the transportation committee chairmanship, which multiple sources have corroborated with Streetsblog. While the final decision won't be announced until next week, sources say that council leadership will finalize the choice sooner than that, perhaps as early as today. The immediate question, then, is whether Rodriguez is the right person for the job at a time when the mayor is committed to comprehensively addressing traffic violence and reallocating street space to transit.

Three people were killed by motorists in NYC since last Friday, including two hit-and-run victims. Two of the victims were also senior citizens.

Call it the case of the missing demagoguery. Yesterday's City Council transportation budget hearing was less notable for what was said than what wasn't. Attacks on the city's proposed parking meter rate increase were largely absent, and the scapegoating of bike lanes and pedestrian plazas that has dominated recent hearings in James Vacca's committee failed to materialize. Mostly, council members just talked about potholes.

Following a series of public workshops going back to 2008, DOT has put forward some big plans for Manhattan's traffic-clogged 181st Street. Over the next few months, the department will choose one of three options to ease traffic and improve safety on the street. While every option offers some significant benefits for Washington Heights pedestrians, one keeps traffic patterns largely unchanged while the other two would truly transform the corridor.