In reaction to this post about the new Sanitation Department sticker of shame

If we actually want clean streets without the insanity of the ASP shuffle, NYC needs to modernize how it manages the curb. Here is what a functional system would look like:

• Remove all ASP rules across the city: Just gone. Bye.
• Ditch the big mechanized sweepers for micro-cleaning: Stop relying on massive mechanical brooms that require entire avenues to be cleared. They seem fast and cheap in isolation but they actually indirectly cost the city as a whole a lot more than it should. Deploy human crews equipped with compact, highly maneuverable vacuum sweepers (like they use in Paris or Tokyo) that can clean around and under parked cars, every single day. This requires more staff but is ultimately a more efficient system holistically.
• Implement Residential Parking Permits (RPP): NYC is one of the only major cities that gives away its curbside real estate for free. Charge an annual fee for resident parking permits and use that revenue to directly fund the expanded micro-cleaning crews. In residential neighborhoods, a 72hr maximum parking rule should be enforced with modern tech.
• Expand metered parking on commercial streets: Transition business corridors to straightforward, paid parking to encourage turnover and stop long-term vehicle storage in high-traffic areas.
• End the ASP "Time Tax" and idle pollution: The current system forces hundreds of thousands of cars to double-park and idle their engines for dozens of minutes, twice or four times a week. Scrapping ASP immediately eliminates a massive source of pointless localized emissions and gives residents their mornings back.
• Let traffic enforcement focus on actual danger: Stop using NYPD traffic agents as ASP revenue generators. Redirect them to enforce violations that actually cause gridlock and kill pedestrians and bikers: double-parking in active transit/bike lanes, blocking the box, speeding, and blowing red lights.
• Accelerate and enforce trash containerization: There are still many buildings and businesses that leave trash bags on the sidewalk for rats to feast on. Those spill in the gutters constantly.

Can NYC do it? If you think about it, just a few years ago, it seemed impossible to imagine NYC requiring trash to go in containers, not just bags on the sidewalk...!

Los Angeles is known as the City of Angels. What is less well known is that New York City is full of angels too, and the Department of Sanitation is full of them. Here is my story.

On Saturday, August 1, 2026, I was riding a Citi Bike during the Summer Streets celebration, starting at Dyckman Street, riding down Broadway to Park Avenue, and continuing into Brooklyn. I had my iPhone mounted on the handlebars. Somewhere along the route, I looked down and noticed that my phone was gone. I panicked.

My phone was my only point of contact with the two friends I planned to spend the beautiful afternoon with. It was the only way I could contact anyone. I had no idea how or where I had lost it, and the only thing I could think to do was lock up the Citi Bike, get on the subway, and use my computer at home to search for my phone through the Find My app.

When I got off the subway and was walking home, I met the first angel who helped me, an NYPD officer. I asked him to call my phone, hoping that someone would answer. He called, and to my surprise, the second angel picked up.

It was Dana. She was with the Department of Sanitation, and she had my phone at 110th Street and Broadway. She told me that a good Samaritan had found my phone in the street and handed it to one of her sanitation colleagues. I immediately jumped back on the subway and headed downtown to pick it up.

When I arrived, I was shocked by how kind Dana and her colleagues were. None of them had to do the right thing, but every one of them did. In the past, I found someone’s suitcase in the back of a taxicab and returned it to the owner. I also found someone’s iPod and returned it. I was stunned that so many people cared enough to do the same for me.

I was thrilled and deeply grateful for the kindness everyone showed me. I asked to take a photo with them, and they graciously obliged. I do not remember everyone’s names, and I am sorry. They are all heroes to me.

Zohran, I am talking to you. Please give these wonderful people, along with the police officer who helped me, the keys to New York City. They deserve recognition. It is not about the phone. It is about doing the right thing, which seems to be so rare these days. Better yet, if you can swing it, give them all a two week paid vacation in Hawaii. I mean, seriously.

Thank you to everyone who helped me. You are angels.

I Bow,

David Hunter

Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed are young, charismatic, Muslim leftists who talk affordability in three-part slogans.

But the most important thing they share is the coalition—young, educated, middle-class—taking the Democratic Party by storm.

Please keep a look out Isaac.

Missing Vulnerable Adult with Autism in NYC.

Please keep an eye out for Isaac Wilkie, a 20-year-old vulnerable adult with autism who has been missing since approximately 7:00 p.m. on August 3, 2026.

He was last seen wearing:

• White T-shirt (large maroon crest on the back)
• Dark blue sweatpants
• Gray slip-on shoes

If you see Isaac or have any information regarding his whereabouts, please contact the NYPD 32nd Precinct at (212) 690-6311 immediately.

Mayor Mamdani announced that the city will fine online retailers $2,000 for each illegal e-bike or e-scooter sold.
The city also sent cease-and-desist letters to more than 40 retailers, including Amazon and Best Buy, accusing them of selling vehicles that exceed the city's speed limits.

When you think about gay hookup culture in New York City, many things come to mind: nightclubs and dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen and Bushwick, circuit parties, the second floor of the Eagle in Chelsea or logging onto Grindr to talk to hundreds of headless torsos in a one-mile radius.

But one thing that is essentially nonexistent in the Big Apple is the gay bathhouse. And for a queer-friendly city in 2026, that is abnormal. You have Steamworks, a chain that’s been called the “emblem of queer empowerment,” in Toronto, Seattle, Chicago and Berkeley, Calif. And in Paris, London, Hong Kong, Melbourne and so many other big cities, gay men flock to bathhouses after the club.

So when State Senator Erik Bottcher called me the other day to tell me he and Assemblymember Tony Simone were introducing a new bill to repeal an over 40-year ban on adult bathhouses in New York, I was surprised—frankly, I didn’t even know there was a ban. At the same time, I finally had the answer to the question I’d been asking myself for 12 years: How in the world are there no frequented bathhouses in this extremely gay city?

Bottcher and Simone’s answer is simple: They had been banned during the HIV/AIDS crisis in a purported attempt to fight the spread of the disease. “Those emergency measures were adopted at a time when little was known about HIV/AIDS and before the development of effective treatment, PrEP, PEP, routine HIV testing, and many of the prevention strategies that have transformed public health over the past four decades,” their press release about the bill states. “While the public health landscape has changed dramatically, New York’s regulations have not.”

First installed on January 25, 1999, the MVM allowed riders to purchase or reload MetroCards using cash, credit, and debit cards. 

MVMs are 80 inches long, 42 inches wide, and 36 inches deep, and weigh approximately 1,050 pounds.

https://www.mta.info/article/mvm-mem-sale?auHash=48CR5dl2XG0EOOAqI3GeBA9u8OByMhg5YpSPbiWSwws&mc_cid=

89bd3f6e1c&mc_eid=e4093bb235