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1,251 pedestrians were injured or killed in December 2011, and NYPD reports show that 89 percent of crashes that month were caused by careless or illegal driving. Yet in all of 2011, citations under VTL 1146 were made in less than one percent of crashes caused by careless or illegal driving in which a pedestrian was injured or killed.

When Lappin asked why NYPD is releasing data in PDF form — and only after the council adopted legislation forcing the department to do so — Petito replied that the department is “concerned with the integrity of the data itself.” Petito said NYPD believes data released on a spreadsheet could be manipulated by people who want “to make a point of some sort.”

Uhh… you’re fired?

soaring private debts and the associated surge of tax revenues were part of the reason the federal government was able to balance its books in the late 1990s. President Clinton became more and more popular as total debt went higher and higher, was re-elected in 1996, and was very popular as he left office in 2000.

This, of course, is no secret for many of us. We’ve bemoaned the dollars to be sunk into Moynihan will little to no upgrade to train capacity. It’s a similar story at Fulton Street where the headhouse represents a large chunk of an expensive project and sits a block away from a $4 billion PATH hub that also won’t increase capacity.

It is harder to criticize auto boondoggles like the Tappan Zee for increasing capacity in the wrong way when some transit boondoggles do not increase capacity in any way.

When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge.

This is how you get to the astounding fact that a majority of “liberals” now support drone executions without trial. It is right because we’re doing it.

Obama promised change, and he has delivered.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

This is really outrageous. DOT hired a corps of pedestrian safety managers in response to one politically motivated Daily News editorial about “pedestrian perdition” on the Manhattan Bridge, even though there had been no deaths, just the random complaint of an editor who got yelled at by a cyclist one day.

But a little girl died crossing the street and there’s no response to Silver and no pedestrian safety managers deployed to keep people alive? How tone deaf can the DOT be?

If the DOT wants to disprove the meme that it does not listen to the community, this is not helping.

Hiring those $80k / month “pedestrian safety managers” to loaf around on cycling paths that demonstrated no safety problem was a low point for the DOT, if not the human race generally.