Congestion pricing is dead

 The Village Sun

 Bowing to political pressure and in the face of numerous lawsuits, Governor Hochul on Wednesday declared that the Manhattan congestion pricing plan is on an “indefinite pause.”

“After careful consideration I have come to the difficult decision that implementing the planned congestion pricing system risks too many unintended consequences,” Hochul said. “I have directed the M.T.A. to indefinitely pause the program.”

The Metropolitan Transportation’s traffic-tolling plan was set to start later this month on June 30. It would have walloped car drivers with a $15 once-a-day fee for driving into Manhattan south of 60th Street ($3.75 during off-peak hours) — and trucks with repeated fees of $24 to $36 for each time they entered the zone.

However, the scheme faced eight lawsuits, with plaintiffs ranging from New Jersey, to the teachers union to Chinatown merchants and Lower East Side residents, all of whom said the plan’s financial impact would be unfair and onerous. Among the top arguments was that a comprehensive environmental impact statement, or E.I.S., for the sweeping, first-in-the-nation plan was shockingly never done.

Retired judge and former Councilmember Kathryn Freed, who lives on the Lower East Side and is a plaintiff on a class-action lawsuit against congestion pricing, has become a sort of poster person for the opposition. Yet, she described her reaction to the plan’s shelving as “mixed.”

“I’m not one of the people who’s crazy pro-car or whatever,” she said. “The whole thing is a mess. I don’t know what Hochul was waiting for — it was massively unpopular.”

Indeed, according to a recent Siena College survey, 63 percent of New Yorkers statewide and 64 percent of Big Apple residents oppose the Manhattan congestion pricing plan, with opposition in the suburbs even higher at 72 percent. Fourteen percent said they would not come to Manhattan as often due to the toll.

At the urging of then-Governor Cuomo, the state Legislature passed congestion pricing into law five years ago, with the target of raising a total of $15 billion — at a clip of $1 billion per year — for the constantly cash-poor transit agency.

 

Jeni from the block holds fundraiser in Manhattan with the Mayor

 

 City And State

Assembly Member Jenifer Rajkumar threw a fundraiser at midtown Manhattan’s Hunt & Fish Club last night, asking attendants to donate $3,000 for a night of open bar, food and access to New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Aside from the mayor’s appearance and remarks, the event at the Times Square venue drew other well-known Rajkumar supporters, including Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City. “Jenifer is very thoughtful. She’s very consultative. She represents a very diverse community and does it in a way that’s very balanced, where she pays attention to the concerns of business, residents and puts that all together. Jenifer is a terrific asset in the Assembly.”

Rajkumar, in her signature red dress, struck a pose as she addressed a crowd of supporters at the exclusive Midtown club. She credited Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech for inspiring her commitment to making a difference as a politician.

“I’m going to change it,” she said of the Roosevelt speech from 1910. “I’m going to change it and I’m going to call it, ‘The Woman in the Arena.’ And it is not the critics that count. Not the man who points out how the strong woman stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. It belongs to the woman who is actually in the arena.”

Adams also spoke, throwing his support behind the candidate who made history as the first Indian American woman elected to state office. Rajkumar appeared on stage with Adams and proclaimed herself the first politician out of Queens to endorse the mayor for his 2025 reelection bid.

The mayor posed for several photos with supporters, asking at one point to make sure Rajkumar was included. He left shortly after the pair made remarks on stage, giving Rajkumar a warm hug and kiss on the cheek. City & State caught up with the mayor as he got into his Chevy Suburban outside on West 44th Street, a commercial strip known for its busy nightlife scene. The mayor was asked about his thoughts after Gov. Kathy Hochul’s State of the State address on Tuesday, a speech that hinted at little progress in solving the migrant crisis and other issues impacting the city.

“Without a doubt. I’ve been talking cannabis initiatives, I’ve been talking about housing initiatives, I’ve been talking about what we’re going to do about moving forward with so many other agendas, (from) the environment to all those things I’ve been talking about, which is really exciting,” he said as he entered the SUV, a rack of designer and tailored suits visible inside.

 So the governor is still not going to help us with the migrant dystopia. Thanks Kathy Clown.

 

Viva la congestion pricing resistance

 

NY Daliy News 

 The knives are out for New York’s congestion pricing plan, and loads of motorists want a carveout.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is moving ahead with the scheme, which aims to toll motorists who drive in Manhattan south of 60th St., not including the West Side Highway and FDR Drive.

Taxi drivers held a protest in Manhattan on Wednesday pushing for exemptions to the tolls, which could cost anywhere from $9 to $23 during the day for most cars.

A group including Uber and Lyft on Thursday sent a letter to Gov. Hochul asking that for-hire vehicles get a break. And trucking industry lobbyists have also called for discounts to the tolls, which could range from $12 to $82 per crossing for the largest carriers.

 Another public pushback against the plan came Thursday evening as droves of drivers jammed an online MTA hearing to rail against the planned tolls. The hearing — held over Zoom — drew 391 attendees, each of whom were given three minutes to speak.

“If you guys tell me that’s $23 every day I need to take my car out of my driveway, that is outrageous,” testified Colette Vogell, who lives on Manhattan’s East Side, within the congestion zone. “People like me are going to move out of Manhattan.”

Exemptions are already planned for emergency vehicles, those transporting people with disabilities, and residents of the congestion zone who earn $60,000 or less annually.

But MTA officials have warned that exemptions for some motorists could lead to higher toll prices for everyone else.

The plan is required by a state law passed in 2019 to raise $1 billion a year for the MTA, enough for the agency to finance $15 billion worth of upgrades to the agency’s dilapidated transit infrastructure.

Thursday’s hearing was the first of six the MTA is to hold on the program over the next week. The hearings come after the agency released a draft environmental assessment on the scheme, a key step to gain federal approval before the tolls can launch, which isn’t expected to happen until 2024.

Other opponents of the program are less concerned about exemptions, and want congestion pricing to be delayed or nixed altogether.

Passengers United has a poll you can take to stop the congestion tax.

 

Economic morbidity takes Manhattan

 

THE CITY

 Simply put, the rents are too damn high,” said Jason Hairston, explaining on Thursday why he’d closed his popular 14th St. eatery, The Nugget Spot, in September of 2020. 

“I was on the way,” Hairston recalled. “I had spent money on a logo and redesigning my store. I was getting ready to open another location in Columbus Circle [in the new Turnstyle Underground Market] and to be in Citifield for the 2020 season. I’d been open for seven years and I was getting ready, getting my sauce made, my flour made — things were lining up and falling into place and then we had to shut our doors.”

In a business with thin margins to begin with — and uncertainty about how long the pandemic, and the city’s shutdown, would last — “there was no way I was going to make money,” said Hairston, a lifelong New Yorker who’s now living in New Jersey while consulting for a Korean hot dog franchise.

“The only reason I would be there would be to support my landlord,” he added.

 The Nugget Spot was one of the 4,040 private establishments the city lost between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the fourth quarter of 2021, according to a new report from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, as huge losses in Manhattan wiped out gains in Brooklyn. Over the same two-year pandemic stretch, “jobs in New York City fell by approximately 295,000, or 7 percent,” as THE CITY previously reported.

 he rare citywide drop in the number of private establishments since 2019 — including a loss of 2,023 retail locations along with 2,482 private household employers, as families let go of on-the-books nannies and maids during the pandemic — was easily the biggest recorded at least since the feds implemented their current counting system in 1990. 

Since then, the number had steadily gone up except during the recession in the early 1990s and the years just after the 9/11 attacks. 

Manhattan’s share of the city’s private establishments dropped below 50% for the first time, according to Lander’s report, as Brooklyn gained 1,267 over the same period — continuing a 30-year growth trend in which the borough has surged from 17.8% of the city’s total in 1990 to 24.4% in 2021. (The Bronx gained 109 private establishments and Staten Island eight between 2019 and 2021, while Queens lost 158.)

Congestion tax remains in limbo

 

THE CITY

A day after Gov. Kathy Hochul said “now is not the right time” for congestion pricing, she reaffirmed her support for implementing the long-delayed plan to toll vehicles entering Manhattan — eventually.

Hochul scrambled to emphasize Wednesday that she stands behind a program designed to fund mass transit upgrades and reduce traffic after saying at a Democratic gubernatorial debate the night before that it is “not going to happen over the next year under any circumstances.”

MTA officials, who previously acknowledged a potential two-year delay until 2023 and last month blamed federal nitpicking for a slowdown, said they are “fully committed” to congestion and are “aggressively working” through the process.

“While extensive questions from the federal government are causing delays, the governor directed her team to work closely with the federal government to provide responses as quickly as possible and keep the process moving forward,” Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokesperson for Hochul, said Wednesday.

The state legislature approved congestion pricing in 2019 — after a 2008 push by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg failed in Albany — but the rollout has been slowed repeatedly, with Hochul and her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, pinning the problems on Washington.

The vehicle-tolling plan is being counted on by the MTA to help fund a significant chunk of the agency’s ambitious 2020-2024 Capital Program to maintain and expand the sprawling transit system.

But the delays are “unacceptable,” said Hayley Richardson of TransitCenter, a research and advocacy organization.

“It’s become increasingly clear to us that the delay has to do with Governor Hochul’s concerns about being elected,” Richardson said. “There’s a lot of sentiments out there that this is policial suicide, and that is incorrect. 

“Congestion pricing is unpopular when you look at it before implementation,” she added. “When it is implemented, things turn dramatically around.”

8

 

NY Daily News

New York City’s post-pandemic recovery has slowed as just a small fraction of Manhattan’s office workers have returned to work in-person, according to a survey published Monday.

The findings — compiled by the Partnership for New York City, which represents the Big Apple’s largest employers — estimated 62% of Manhattan’s office employees worked remotely during a typical weekday in late April. And just 8% — or one in 12 — showed up to work in-person five days per week, the report shows.

“The longer people worked remotely, the longer they wanted to continue to work remotely,” said Kathy Wylde, the CEO of the Partnership for New York City. “It’s called inertia. The longer people are doing one thing, the harder it is to get them to change.”

It’s a far more sluggish return to in-person work than the organization projected before the omicron variant of COVID-19 first swept through the city. A survey conducted in late October found nearly half of Manhattan’s office workers expected to be in the office by the end of January.

Predictions of a return to normalcy have proved inaccurate for more than a year. A March 2021 survey found employers expected about half of the borough’s office workers to be back in-person by last September.

About 78% of the city’s major employers expect a combination of remote and in-person work is here to stay, the survey found.

 

The NYC Open Restaurants Clustershanty Of Koreatown

Impunity City

 It wasn’t much long ago when yours truly did a expansive on the street eyewitness story about the much ballyhooed NYC Open Restaurants program (albeit ballyhooed by our feckless and bought elected officials in NYC Council, former mayor Bill de Blasio and current Mayor Eric Adams) and what an actual clusterfuck it was and making a case out it shouldn’t exist anymore. Now thanks to a judge’s recent decision to order the city to make a thorough environmental review of the restaurant shanties all over the five boroughs, it has thankfully put a pounding kibosh on the City Council Cronies plan to make these unsafe, blighted, filthy, ugly and traffic congesting eyesores a permanent part of the street infrastructure which the restaurants have been using for free for the last two years.

 

But before the Council Cronies begin their study, I would like to present exhibit A on why every public space these restaurants has usurped must cease to exist and that’s the massive triple cluster shanty on the southwest corner of 32nd St. and 5th Ave, just two blocks away from the Empire State Building.

This is truly the tipping point of public space misuse and the heinous blight that has befouled the streets in the last year, which continues unencumbered because of the willful obliviousness of elected officials and the persistent bickering demands of the hospitality industrial complex lobby, represented by some neoliberal runt named Andrew Rigie.

Behold.

 

 

 

Impunity City 

Manhattan penis extension proposal

 

New York Times

On Jan. 1, Eric Adams was sworn in as New York’s 110th mayor. He is now in charge of the city’s response to big, and growing, problems. One is a housing affordability crisis. Another concerns the ravages of climate change: sea level rise, flooding and storm surges.

There is a way to help tackle both issues in one bold policy stroke: expand Manhattan Island into the harbor.

Last September, after witnessing unprecedented flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida, Mr. Adams said that it was “a real wake-up call to all of us how we must understand how this climate change is impacting us.” This realization should spur him to pursue aggressive measures to mitigate climate change’s devastation.

Both Mayors Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg offered climate-change plans that included extending the shoreline along the East River in Lower Manhattan. But these proposals, while admirable, would be small steps and would hardly make a dent with problems of such big scale.

This new proposal offers significant protection against surges while also creating new housing. To do this, it extends Manhattan into New York Harbor by 1,760 acres. This landfill development, like many others in the city’s past, would reshape the southern Manhattan shoreline. We can call the created area New Mannahatta (drawn from the name the Lenape gave to Manhattan).

A neighborhood of that size is bigger than the Upper West Side (Community District 7), which is 1,220 acres. Imagine replicating from scratch a diverse neighborhood that contains housing in all shapes and sizes, from traditional brownstones to five-story apartment buildings to high-rise towers. If New Mannahatta is built with a density and style similar to the Upper West Side’s, it could have nearly 180,000 new housing units.

Opinion Conversation The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?

 

This is deBlastopia

 

 Impunity City

 The Blaz era is finally and mercifully over but his contribution to the New Bad Days will go down in history as the greatest regression of New York City in 50 years and will surely continue to plague this town for years to come.

 

The de Blasio Chainsaw Massacre

Impunity City 

 While there was an original plan to improve the park to keep the water level from overflowing that caused major damage to NYCHA buildings across the FDR drive that was done in coordination of the community concerns by placing berns against the highway’s path, The Blaz abruptly threw that plan in the garbage and memory holed it, then his minion city planners at the Dept Design and Construction came up with an entirely new plan that warranted the leveling of 1,000 trees and construction of a 10 ft platform of where the current park stands at a cost of 1.45 billion dollars. As expected, this did not go over well with the residents and community activists who have been adamantly demanding to stick with the original, less destructive and  less expensive plan. 

Compounding this situation even further was East River Park activists were trying to get FOIL documents to see who was behind the new project and what they received was full of redactions just like every other FOIL de Blasio and his crack team of narrative control minions released in the last 8 years.

When the day came to announce the NYC’s new East River Coastal Resiliency plan in April on his variety show press briefing, The Blaz read from his dais of cheat sheets and his honeypot fauxgressive council crony Carlina Rivera read from her laptop all the wonderful improvements the new plan was going to bring to the community that used the park, even though it will not be ready for over a half decade, which was another sticking point for residents and activists. After many months of protests by activist groups East River Park Action and 1000 People for 1,000 Trees, they managed to get a stay on the demolition in November, but it was instantly overturned by a city judge with close ties to the Blaz and his Brooklyn Machine political allies.

Shockingly, right when the contractors and the chainsaws started chopping the first of the parks trees, a state appeals judge ruled another stay maintaining the legal suspension of the demolition. At least it was supposed to, because despite the best efforts of the protestors and their attorney Arthur Schwartz, the contractor boss of the resiliency demolition took the court order and threw it on the ground like it was garbage right in front of the protesters and the cops.

 

de Blasio autocratically defies judge's stop work order for East River Park

 Village Sun

On Wednesday morning, opponents fighting the East Side Coastal Resiliency project cheered as their attorney obtained a stay blocking further work on the contentious project.

The day before, though, park activists had watched in horror as workers either cut or “dismembered” 13 trees in East River Park, felling some completely while shearing the branches off others, leaving them ghostly, ruined trunks.

Early Wednesday morning, the workers were right back at it, lopping the branches off of six-more adult trees, a combination of London planes and locust trees, that the Parks Department has likely earmarked to be made into planks for park benches.

But around 9:30 a.m., Judge Rowan D. Wilson of the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, granted a stay on the lifting of a restraining order against the work by the Appellate Division, First Department, from Nov. 30, when the lower court had ruled against a community lawsuit against the project.

Village Sun 

 To park activists’ horror, workers began cutting down trees in East River Park again early Friday morning, just two days after the Court of Appeals had seemingly issued a stay to stop the destruction.

About five hours later, at 11:30 a.m., protesters clashed with police at the new fence blocking off the work zone in a wild video posted to Twitter. Police are seen trying to close the gate while shoving away a swarm of protesters.

Around 8:30 a.m. an incredulous Tommy Loeb, a member of East River Park ACTION, who could see the destruction playing out from his windows, fumed, “They’re in contempt of court!”

Kathryn Freed, a former judge who is a co-counsel on the community lawsuit against the East Side Coastal Resiliency project, said Mayor de Blasio’s Law Department unilaterally decided there is no stay in effect to stop them from destroying the park.

Basically, as she explained it, the Court of Appeals itself cannot issue a stay, although, this Wednesday, it did stay the actual previous decision from Nov. 30 by the Appellate Division (a lower court) against the community lawsuit.

Friday morning, Freed and her co-counsel Arthur Schwartz, who are doing the case pro bono, were scrambling to have the Appellate Division clarify that its Nov. 30 decision against the lawsuit has been stayed by the Court of Appeals — which would mean a temporary restraining order (T.R.O.) that the Appellate Division had issued while it considered the case should still be in effect, the attorneys argue. Freed said they hoped to be in court at 9:30, virtually, to get a clarification.

She said a city attorney had called Schwartz at 6 p.m. the previous day to say the workers would be restarting the tree-cutting.

While the legal technicalities are confusing, the reality of trees being cut in the park once again on Friday was starkly clear.

Yes I know "it's not a Queens story", but this is a dangerous precedent the Blaz is setting here. Imagine if Eric Adams can cite what's going here to do something to Forest Park, Flushing Meadows or your local playground. Hell just imagine if Adams can do anything on a whim in spite of a court order.

 

Public hearings for congestion austerity tax against drivers are coming soon

 

 CBS New York 

  Public meetings on New York City’s congestion pricing plan will begin in September.

The MTA, along with the state and city transportation departments, announced they will hold 13 virtual meetings between Sept. 23 and Oct. 13.

They will target 28 counties in the Tri-State Area to educate commuters about congestion pricing and allow them to voice their opinions.

Each meeting will focus on a different part of the Tri-State Area.

The meetings will take place at the following dates and times:

• Thursday, Sept. 23, 10 a.m. to noon: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island
• Thursday, Sept. 23, 6-8 p.m.: Manhattan Central Business District (60th Street and below)
• Friday, Sept. 24, 10 a.m. to noon: New Jersey
• Wednesday, Sept. 29, 10 a.m. to noon: Northern New York City Suburbs
• Wednesday, Sept. 29, 6-8 p.m.: Long Island
• Thursday, Sept. 30, 6-8 p.m.: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island
• Friday, Oct. 1, 1-3 p.m.: Connecticut
• Monday, Oct. 4, 6-8 p.m.: New Jersey
• Tuesday, Oct. 5, 6-8 p.m.: Northern New York City Suburbs
• Wednesday, Oct. 6, 6-8 p.m.: Manhattan Outside the Central Business District (61st Street and above)

There will also be three other public meetings for individuals and stakeholder groups in identified environmental justice communities in the Tri-State Area.

New York’s meeting will be held on Oct. 7, New Jersey’s meeting will be held on Oct. 12, and Connecticut’s meeting will be held on Oct. 13. All three meetings will take place from 6-8 p.m.

Manhattan's open restaurants shanties inspired by Queens Crap

These look like Fedders apartments!

Great job #OpenRestaurantsNYC!!! https://t.co/hUNoXdB6dv pic.twitter.com/zXmfYacygy

— This is JQ LLC (@ImpunityCity) August 19, 2021

Fearless girl, chicken investors

 

 NY Daily News

 Fearless Girl’s backers seem a little scared of COVID’s effect on business in the Big Apple.

State Street Global Advisors — the financial mega-firm that set up the symbol of women’s empowerment in the heart of the Financial District — is reportedly closing its two New York City offices.

The Boston-headquartered company recently told about 500 employees they won’t be going back to Midtown offices that have been mostly shut since the start of the pandemic, according to the Wall Street Journal.

State Street reportedly plans to lease its offices, located near the Rockefeller Center, to other companies.

It made headlines in 2017 for installing a four-foot-tall bronze stall of a girl in a defiant pose just steps away from the Wall Street Bull. The work was later moved to Broad St., across from the New York Stock Exchange.

 

5 WTC needs to make it 100

  

 

THE CITY

 Two decades after Sept. 11, 2001, the last re-building block of the World Trade Center is coming together.

A proposal for a 900-foot residential skyscraper on “Site 5”, formerly home to the Deutsche Bank Building, is in the works. It will include 1,325 apartments, a quarter of which will be so-called affordable, or rented below market rate.

But as the 20th anniversary of the attacks arrives, some locals are pushing for something different: Why not make the building a place where survivors and their families can live, with all of the units set at income-adjusted, affordable rents?

To Mariama James, a longtime downtown resident who said she struggles with 9/11-related health issues and lost her father to a related cancer, taking that course is the right thing to do.

It would represent a recognition of the residents who made Lower Manhattan a “phenomenal” place to live after the attacks, she said.

“It’s the people who were asked to stay here, not to leave, and to live, basically, through a war zone — to move here in the aftermath of that, or to return to their homes that had been destroyed, and rebuild them. We did it. You asked, and we did it,” she said. “And there’s been no compensation for that. There’s been no thanks.”

James is a co-founder of a new coalition of Lower Manhattan residents and housing advocates rallying to push multiple public agencies and two mega-developers, Brookfield Properties and Silverstein Properties, to change course on the Site 5 plan. 

 The building is set to be the first residential property within the downtown complex, and the last major site to be redeveloped there since the 2001 attacks.

 The current plan for the site calls for about 995 market-rate apartments and 330 affordable-housing units, also known as income-restricted apartments because they are rented to families within specific household earning categories.

The affordable units will be reserved for families making up to 50% of the area median income. With a local AMI of $107,400, a three-person family making only about $53,000 annually could secure a spot in the tower.

 

Communties are sick of the restaurant shanties

 

 

 CBS New York

 The city’s plan to make outdoor dining permanent is meeting a lot of resistance from local residents.

They say noise, rats and lack of space are just some of the problems, CBS2’s Aundrea Cline-Thomas reported Monday.

Residents in the West Village sounded off to the community board that is tasked with providing input on what will be the regulations for the new law. They said they want to support their local businesses, but when the pandemic is over the outdoor dining structures should be gone, too.

The structures have been a lifesaver for restaurants. They are so popular, the city is making the pandemic additions permanent.

But some residents say they have become a nuisance.

“These sheds are creating a vermin habitat like we’ve never seen before,” Lee Arntzen said.

“Noise comes with this and it shouldn’t be on this street, certainly not on a narrow residential street,” Stu Waldman said.

“It’s like a bandshell pointing at your bedroom. That’s the kind of noise,” Leslie Clark added.

Cellphone video shows how the neighborhood transforms, especially on the weekends — music blasting as large crowds dance outside, structures leaving little room to walk on the sidewalk, and the mounds of trash left behind that residents say attract rats.

“I have to walk on the subway grates and with my cane it makes me fearful,” Dorothy Green said.

In a statement, the mayor’s office said in part, “Outdoor dining saved 100,000 jobs. A stance against outdoor dining is a stance against this city’s recovery. It’s here to stay.”

That’s a sentiment city leaders tried to reinforce during Monday’s presentation to Community Board 2.

“The program has been a massive success and in April the City Council voted overwhelmingly in favor of the bill to make it permanent,” the Department of Transportation’s Judy Chang said to boos from the crowd.

de Blasio beggingly calls for congestion pricing tax to be implemented

 

 Queens Post

Mayor Bill de Blasio called on state officials Thursday to enact congestion pricing by next year.

He urged the MTA to put its long-delayed plan to charge drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street in place by July 2022.

“It’s time for the state to get in gear, get congestion pricing done,” de Blasio said during a morning press conference.

The new tolls were slated to go into effect in January 2021, but the plan was held up by the Trump administration and delayed by COVID-19. The Biden administration has since given the MTA the go-ahead to conduct an environmental assessment of the plan.

The agency must complete this assessment before the plan can move forward and de Blasio said it has been dragging its feet. He wants the MTA to expedite the assessment.

The congestion pricing plan could generate $15 billion over four years for much-needed capital improvements to the New York transit system.

The fees to enter the congestion pricing zone could be around $11 to $14 for cars and $25 for trucks during peak business hours, state leaders previously told the New York Times. However, the actual figures will be set by the Traffic Mobility Review Board, a six-person panel created in 2019.

De Blasio, on Thursday, announced the he had appointed Sherif Soliman, the Department of Finance Commissioner, to that board. The board members are officially appointed by the MTA, with the requirement that one member is recommended by the mayor, one member resides in the Long Island Rail Road region, and one member resides in the Metro North region.

The mayor said the subway system desperately needs the money for repairs and upgrades as people begin to return to their workplace and school this fall.

“We cannot have a full recovery without the MTA getting stronger,” he said. “The MTA needs to get it together because right now we’re seeing too many problems.”

 The program would also help reduce traffic congestion in busy sections of Manhattan, improve air quality and boost public transit ridership.

“The pandemic caused a different problem — lots of people turning back to their cars,” de Blasio said. “We’ve got to stop that because that’s caused congestion on the streets, more pollution, it’s bad for the climate.”

 There have also been too many car crashes as well, he added.

“We’ve got to get people out of the cars,” de Blasio said. “Again, the solution [is to] get people back to mass transit, to make mass transit better — that means congestion pricing.”

 

Congregate Entrepreneur Shelter

pic.twitter.com/I884nNV9fp

— Current American Citizen (@CurrentCitizen) July 8, 2021

High End Ghetto Manhattan

New Bad Days: The Boroughs Are Bleeding

 

Impunity City

 New Yorkers are vaccinated in record numbers. The Summer of NYC is here; there’s no better time to visit, and we’ll continue to cheer on our city’s recovery”

                                                        Deputy Press Secretary for Bill de Blasio, Mitch Schwartz

Here we go again, Mitch. Stupid asshole.

 In Mount Eden, a man chased another man with a gun on the sidewalk in a gang related attack. While being goaded by his fellow gangbangers to slay him in broad daylight, the gunman’s target ran directly into a 13-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy as they were about to enter a bodega to buy candy as he tried to find a place to hide and then he fell on top of them, causing them to fall on the pavement with him. Then the gunman circled around and stood over the man and the two kids and shot at him 12 times while trying to shoot around the children as if he was doing heart surgery. Then he ran away and got on the back of a scooter and rode away with an accomplice after he emptied his clip. The gangbanger managed to hit his target on both legs and plugged him on the back. The victim was brought to a hospital by his allies in a stolen car with temp plates.

 

In Times Square, a man with a gun ran down the sidewalk and shot at a group of men and missed, causing the bullet to ricochet off a building wall and hit a man in the arm who was standing outside of a hotel with his wife and relatives.

Because the unwitting victim is a Marine and the son of a retired military officer/intelligence official and being that it was the second shooting incident in less than a month in the Square, The Blaz and Chief Harrison wasted no time and decided to “flood the zone” with another deployment of 50 cops in the biggest and most precious tourist attraction in the world. 

Despite the bigger and redundant police presence, tourists are cognizant of the predominant crime wave and even more wary of walking on the streets in the vicinity. Although if there’s any consolation for the Blaz, some tourists seem to find the disturbing rise of violent criminal activity as a new novelty attraction.