{"id":366568,"date":"2026-10-07T04:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T04:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/366568\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T04:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T04:40:09","slug":"wednesdays-headlines-safe-kids-safe-city-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/366568\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday’s Headlines: Safe Kids, Safe City Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

We were happy to see so many street safety advocates convening on Clarkson Street to celebrate the city\u2019s first permanently gated school street, which amNY<\/a> and CBS2<\/a> covered.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re especially proud because Streetsblog\u2019s sister organization, Open Plans, led the design process (thanks to some funding from Project for Public Spaces) and worked with the Department of Transportation to set up the pilot apparatus. This is the kind of popular safety intervention that is on hundreds of streets in Paris, but is, how you say, tr\u00e8s inhabituel in New York. (Then again, only four dozen schools in the Big Apple have official \u201cschool streets\u201d with the old-style move-them-in-the-morning\/take-them-away-at-night barricades.)<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a radical idea that every school building in town \u2014\u00a0there are like 1,400 \u2014 should have at least a safe street on one side of the building where kids can play or simply enter and exit the school safely, especially given how dangerous school streets are<\/a>. Yet gated safe zones are incredibly rare, as I said in French above. And the one in front of City as School would not have even happened were it not for pushing and funding by advocacy groups.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>These are the most popular gates since Christo and Jeanne-Claude\u2019s<\/a>. Photo: Kevin Duggan<\/p>\n

So I sent Kevin Duggan to the presser to ask DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn whether this kind of thing will be expanded all over the city with public money, or will our kids have to wait for the largesse of rich people to make it happen. In other words, are we living in Louis XIV\u2019s France or Zohran Mamdani\u2019s New York?<\/p>\n

Flynn loves the gate, but was not very committal on installing them everywhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think these are the kinds of things we\u2019re looking at really closely right now,\u201d he said. \u201cAs with any sort of new approach or new program or new infrastructure, we need to kind of figure out all those dimensions. If it\u2019s the funding, if it\u2019s the maintenance, the operations. I mean, the potential is tremendous. \u2026 We know that Paris has been a leader with school streets, and we\u2019re always trying to learn from our global peers. So these are the kinds of things our public realm team and our partners are thinking about right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Think a little faster, people.<\/p>\n

In other news:<\/p>\n

Get ready for some J and M changes in Brooklyn. (Bushwick Daily<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Fish and chip paper: The Tribeca Citizen<\/a> lauded our 2022 \u201cplacard census\u201d of Lower Manhattan.<\/p>\n

A hit-and-run driver killed a man on Ocean Parkway. (ABC7<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Want better transit? Have more babies, says President Trump. (Politico<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The light\u2019s on at Wythe Avenue and N. Third Street. (Williamsburg365<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Yeah, why aren\u2019t we talking about how a school on Lafayette Avenue has taken over the brand new two-way bike lane? ()<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a horrific driver in The Bronx. (NY Post<\/a>)<\/p>\n

New bike routes planned in Throggs Neck, which we\u2019d love to read about, but suddenly The Bronx Times<\/a> has a paywall.<\/p>\n

The Mamdani administration broke ground on a key southern Brooklyn bike project that began under the previous mayor. (amNY<\/a>)<\/p>\n

And, finally, I mentioned in the headlines a few days ago<\/a> that there would be a big test of the potential of the so-called \u201cBlue Highway\u201d on Wednesday, featuring a refrigerated cargo-quad that will be hauling perishable produce from the ferry dock on E. 34th St. to a soup kitchen in Greenwich Village. Well, today, I offer an Old Man Vertical about it:<\/p>\n

Another classic Old Man Vertical (complete with khyrons that clearly want to be horizontal).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We were happy to see so many street safety advocates convening on Clarkson Street to celebrate the city\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366569,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-366568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}