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Gale Brewer’s bill is well intentioned but should be opposed by pedestrian and biking advocates. It raises the cost of installing and maintaining plazas and bike lanes without any demonstrable benefit commensurate with the cost? If textured pavement is such a lifesaver, why not also require textured sidewalks at all curb cuts and driveways? Cars coming out of a midblock parking garage are a hell of a lot more dangerous than the edges of pedestrian plazas. Why isn’t this being proposed? It’s because the real estate industry will crush a bill mandating costly retrofitting of thousands of driveways and curb cuts.

It is bad policy to make the cost of proven safety improvements more expensive while doing nothing about proven dangers. Brewer is usually smarter than this.

“It’s just another barbaric act of Americans against Iraqis,” al-Dulaimi told The Associated Press. “They spill the blood of Iraqis and get this worthless sentence for the savage crime against innocent civilians.”

Do we think we can condone war crimes without anyone noticing? Without paying for it later?

But if Park Slope gets a slow zone before Greenwood Heights, or if Greenwood Heights gets a slow zone before Park Slope, research suggests both neighborhoods will still be better off.

Streetsblog and the New Yorker are debunking the same bad assumptions this week. Whether it’s speeding in a car, or mugging, or selling bad investments, preventing a crime from happening does not mean it will just happen somewhere else.

Crime and traffic are not “like water”, as sometimes claimed. If you make speeding and robbery difficult, people will do less of those things.

Water has different properties.

The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

And unfortunately the logic is only used to keep white collar criminals out of jail.

In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.