Wednesdays Headlines: The Boulevard of Bus Edition

We were happy to hear yesterday (thanks to Gothamist’s exclusive) that the Mamdani administration is planning a major street safety and bus lane project on the easternmost highway-like stretch of Linden Boulevard – aka “The New Boulevard of Death.”

The roadway is unsafe: there have been two fatalities already this year and 330 injuries between 2019 and 2023, with two fatalities, just between Fountain Avenue and 79th Street. But the Department of Transportation’s design won’t just make it safer, but also help improve bus speeds.

And that’s also urgent. When the DOT first presented a variety of proposals to Brooklyn Community Board 5 in January 2025, bus speeds were as low as 6 miles per hour. By the time the DOT presented its bus lane plan to the same panel on Monday, those buses were bottoming out at 4 miles per hour.

We did ask DOT why it couldn’t find room for a bike lane on a roadway with three lanes in each direction and, like the original Boulevard of Death in Queens, a service road, but the agency said it didn’t want to get over its skis. DOT already installed protected bike lanes on Cozine and Wortman avenues nearby, but also intends to roll out more bike lanes in the future, when Conduit Boulevard is re-imagined.

OK, we won’t be impatient. Here’s hoping that when you bike over there, you won’t become a patient.

In other news: – The big story yesterday: Speaker Carl Heastie remains the Assembly’s greatest impediment to safe streets. Hell Gate, building on where Streetsblog left off last year, reported that the Bronx Democrat just can’t seem to understand the unique threat posed by drivers who rack up 16 school zone speed-camera tickets in any 12-month period. He should: Last year in his tiny north Bronx district, there were 880 reported crashes, injuring 599 people. And since he took office in February 2015, there have been 19,820 reported crashes, injuring 8,351 people and killing 34. – ICE is looking for parking spaces. – Bizarre carnage in Queens. – Horrifying carnage in The Bronx. – The feds are starting to cough up some – but not enough – money for the Penn Station renovation. – Cops seized two vehicles that were allegedly involved in last week’s fiery rampage in Queens, and Nicole Gelinas promptly reported that the owner of one of the vehicles appears to be committing insurance fraud, which we’ve been covering closely. – There’s a GoFundMe page for the family of Jenny Sánchez, the Ridgewood woman who was killed by a truck driver last week. – Jalopnik picked up our story about the cop who won’t be charged for driving over a man in Queens even though she was caught on camera applying lip gloss. – The Post, which never saw a car crash it couldn’t ignore, is the latest outlet to selectively cover an NYU study about brain injuries and e-mobility. – There was a crazy crash involving an either deranged or asleep MTA bus driver on the East Side. – Killer driver Miriam Yarimi pleaded guilty after she killed three members of a Brooklyn family last year on Ocean Parkway. But now she’s changing her tune in a civil suit stemming from the same crash. My legal sources say her new profession of innocence won’t blow up her plea deal, but her guilty plea will come back to haunt her in the civil case. – A hit-and-run driver hit a school bus. – And, finally, Mayor Mamdani is totally legit as a Citi Bike rider (he has me beat by almost 100 hours and 1,000 miles!). Check out this charming exchange with We Outside NYC.