Today’s Headlines

The sugary deal between Amazon and the city and state dominated Tuesday's coverage, with most wags (including Streetsblog) casting a dubious eye on how much money Gov. Cuomo is spending to lure 25,000 jobs to Long Island City. We defy you to find a better curated list of coverage of the Amazon-sized Amazon announcement. Here's our rundown:

Exciting news out of southern Brooklyn: The Board of Elections will start counting absentee ballots to figure out if Democrat Andrew Gounardes actually beat eight-term incumbent and street safety pariah Marty Golden. Election Day ended with Gounardes up by 1,100-plus votes, but there are about 1,400 absentee ballots to be counted. We'll be on hand to make sure all those signatures collected from old people at senior centers match up to the buff cards on file. (Update: This will be Thursday, we are told.)

Today is Veterans Day, which commemorates the end of World War I (once known as The World War until they went and had another one). Take a moment today to honor those who sacrificed — and then take another moment to do something — anything — to end war.

OK, so maybe it won't be a gorgeous weekend, but at least the kids have off from school on Monday.

It was  a big day in transportation news, capped by State Sen. Marty Golden slayer Andrew Gounardes thanking livable streets advocates from StreetsPAC and Families for Safe Streets for putting him over the top against the eight-term incumbent and street safety pariah.

You may have heard that there's an election coming up. Well, it's today. Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., so get it done, people. At Streetsblog, we've certainly given you the tools, what with our relentless election coverage, archived here, plus our seemingly daily coverage of street safety pariah Marty Golden, who is facing a challenge from Democrat Andrew Gounardes (who got help from Ben Stiller and Andrew Cuomo on Monday).

We felt like we were reading a Steve Cuozzo piece when we saw Rachel Premack's story in Business Insider about how tough it is to be a delivery truck driver in New York City because all of the bike lanes have ruined everything! Here's another way of looking at it: if you want to show sympathy for hard-working delivery truck drivers, advocate for more loading zones so they can safely do their work and other road users can safely get to theirs. Road safety is not a zero sum game pitting cyclists against truck drivers in a war for limited space. In fact, the real villains are illegal parkers and a city that allows drivers to store their cars in the public right of way when that space would be much more useful for buses, bikes and, yes, delivery trucks.

Thursday is like Super Bowl Sunday for Streetsblog, as DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg and elusive NYPD Transportation Chief Thomas Chan will made a big not so big announcement this morning in Times Square urging drivers to drive better (press release here). And Mayor de Blasio will have a rare press avail at 11 a.m. So we'll be on hand at both events to grill the officials about such things as Wild West private carters, FedEx trucks in bike lanes, why the final phase of the Queens Boulevard bike lane appears to be stalled and, yes, why cops insist on parking illegally. In short, a great morning.

Streetsblog did its own coverage of how the NYPD's bollard-buying spree has made the Brooklyn Bridge even worse, but here's a hat tip to transportation reporter Aaron Gordon for choosing the right words in his Tuesday article for Gothamist for the big cement blocks: "expensive, clumsy, and sometimes nonsensical."