NYC NOW - Morning Headlines: Law Enforcement Unions Back Mayor Adams, Mosquito Surge in the City, Subway Theft in Queens, and How the MTA is Responding to Recent Rainfall

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Several law enforcement unions, including those representing NYPD lieutenants, detectives, and sergeants, have endorsed Mayor Adams’ reelection bid during an event outside City Hall Thursday. Meanwhile, mosquitoes are swarming across New York City this summer amid hot and wet weather. Police are also searching for a woman accused of taking a subway train for a joyride in Queens early Thursday. Plus, the MTA is responding to near historic rainfall this week, proposed ferry service route changes, and updates on a controversial bike lane in South Williamsburg.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Friday, July 18th. Here's the morning headlines from Tiffany Hanson. Several law enforcement unions in the city are throwing their support behind Mayor Adams' re-election campaign. The unions include those representing lieutenants, detectives, and sergeants in the NYPD, formerly endorsed the mayor at an event in front of City Hall yesterday afternoon. Lou Turco heads the lieutenant's benevolent association. He says Adams' track record on public safety set him apart. So everybody's running for office right now from the mayor. They all have a plan on how they're going to do public safety. They all have plans how they're going to reduce crime. Those are plans. We have action that has been working.

Adams has campaigned on his public safety record and is running for re-election as an independent after skipping the Democratic primary. He'll face Republicans Curtis Slewa, fellow independent Andrew. Cuomo and Democrats are on Mamdani in November's general election. Mosquitoes are swarming New York City this summer. Hot, humid, and wet weather are ideal conditions for mosquitoes, and the summer is shaping up to be much wetter than last year. Even a puddle with a quarter inch of water can breed thousands of larva. Jeffrey Schaman is an environmental health sciences professor at Columbia University.

The fact that we've seen a lot of mosquitoes now is not really a surprise to me, considering how much rain we've had and they'll get into your house. They can bite you in your yard. They can bite you in the parks. Mosquito season lasts through October, but if the warm weather continues, they could stay longer while environmental officials say the overall mosquito population is up in New York and New Jersey. Cases of mosquito-borne illnesses are down so far this year. Police are looking for a woman, they say, took a subway train for a joy ride in Queens. Early yesterday morning, the woman allegedly broke into a parked in train at the Broadway station in Astoria and drove at one stop to the 36th Street Station. Police say they don't know who she is or how she got into the locked train. The MTA says that only

train service that only says that train service was not interrupted. Transit officials have previously promised to set up security measures that would prevent this kind of subway jacking. Weather-wise, a little less humid today, a high of 86 degrees tonight, partly cloudy, and a low of 71. Right now we have a fair sky here in Soho with 76 degrees. It's Friday. That means it's time for our weekly segment of On the Way. Covering all things transportation, that's after the break. NYC. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. It's time for On the Way, our weekly segment on all things considered, breaking down the week's transit news. Joining us is WNYC's transportation reporters Ramsey Caliphay and Stephen Nesson and editor Clayton.

in Goosa. All right, as folks know, this week saw a near historic rainfall in the city three inches an hour indidated parts of Manhattan leading to flooding in the transit system. The most stunning site probably was this manhole at 28th Street. Folks probably saw this on social media. It was spewing water like a geyser. Not really a reassuring site when you're trying to get home to your family. That said, though, this isn't the first time we've seen this site. So the MTA obviously has got to be aware that this is a thing that happens during heavy rainfall. And I think a question a lot of folks have is, hello, anybody doing anything about this? Well, Sean, this is actually the second time in recent years. You could see the 28th Street geyser. Same thing happened during Ida. And there's a reason it always happens there.

I spoke with Eric Anderson. He's an ecologist who says the station sits in what was historically a marsh before Manhattan was developed. And there's a series of streams that flow right smack dab, where 28th Street Station is now. Interesting. So Anderson says there really isn't much you can do to prevent water from flowing in that direction. Our storm drains just can't handle it. Storm drains we have now, particularly in this part of the city,

were put in in the late 19th, early 20th century, and so they were adapted for the climate of the time. So you'd have to tear them out, putting them larger, guess what the climate of the future is going to be and hope it's big enough. And quite honestly, we really haven't heard anything from the MTA about what it would do at the station. And even the city acknowledges it doesn't have plans to expand the sewer pipes there. Right. And there's a lot of finger pointing about the cause of

this. You know, the city's sewer system can handle 1.5, 1.7 inches of rain per hour. Yeah. There was more than two inches of rain in a single hour. It's happened before. It just gets backed up. It's inadequate. To handle it, the water has to go somewhere. You know, the MTA has done a lot of work in recent years to declog its drain, but the water has to flow somewhere. And it's because this city is unnatural. It is, it laughs in the face of God. We have built and elevated and paved over paradise, right, of Manhattan. We're effectively prodding the heavens and daring them. And sometimes our societal hubris is met with biblical rainfall, which of course is becoming more frequent from climate change. And that's what we saw this week on Monday. Yeah. And it gets really bad

on other parts of the one line, especially flooding uptown in uptown Manhattan. So while we did see those viral moments at 28th Street that took the attention to many New Yorkers. Rainwater also badly hit Hamilton Heights. The 145th Street Station in particular is positioned in an area with also an unlucky topography. It sits on Broadway between Riverside Drive and Amsterdam Ave. So from east to west, rainwater flows downwards. And that really creates some woes for the station, especially for the staircases.

A lot of water goes down there, not like the geyser thing that we saw at 28th Street. Right. So I spent some time there a day after the storm, and the neighborhood. always expects bad flooding when a heavy storm passes by. So here's 53-year-old Nicholas Cabot. He's lived in Hamilton Heights for more than a dozen years. You know, most of us who live in the neighborhood when it really does rain like that, will move stuff out of the drain because otherwise it's going to flood into the stores.

So there are stores on every corner of that intersection, which sit right in front of those sewer drains. Cabot also told me that the station just floods really bad because those sewers can't handle the capacity when there's really heavy rainfall. Yeah, and it's something to, the way that's true. Storms happen is kind of interesting. After Sandy, with all the storm surds, the city invested a lot into coastal resiliency. Yeah. But what we're seeing now is not coastal storm surge that's causing a lot of flooding. It's coming from the sky, which is creating a whole different sort of infrastructure problems. And it's really showing how vulnerable a different kind of parts of our city is to flooding. Yeah. So the city's Economic Development Corporation is proposing a change to the NYC Ferry Service routes. Ramsey, can you tell us what some of those changes are? there's a lot of exciting proposals here, and the first one that really jumped out for us was this proposal to merge the soundview route and the Rockway route. So that means a one-seat ride could take you from Throg's Neck in the Bronx all the way to the Rockways in Queens.

That's approximately 34 miles and would take a total of two hours. But now instead of transferring to a new boat on Wall Street, fair riders could save up to 30 minutes without having to wait for the next ferry and all that. Another proposal would connect Staten Island to Brooklyn through the St. George route, making stops at Bay Ridge, Sunset Park, and Atlantic Avenue. And the last proposal I can share, it would split the East River route into two routes, each stopping in different areas of Brooklyn and Queens. It just gives riders more options. So the EDC says it's the first time since they launched in 2017 that they're reconfiguring these routes. And throughout the summer, they're going to go through this public comment period, pick final routes in September, hopefully have these implemented by the end of the year. You know, it's kind of all, the goal is to increase ridership on the ferry system.

The ferry system carried about 7 million riders last year, which is a lot, but it's also what the subway does in about a day and a half. And the ferry system has gotten a lot of criticism since it launched under de Blasio in 2018 in part because of the per rider subsidy. That's kind of a nerdy way to say, you know, we pay the fare for all of our transit systems, but it doesn't cover all the costs of the maintenance and the staff. The taxpayers are on the hook for the rest of that. In the ferry system, we pay, still pay upwards of $8, the taxpayers on top of what the fair riders pay. You, me, everyone pays $8 for every ride. On the subway, it's less than two. And it's, you know, the goal is to get more riders on so that subsidy goes down.

It's kind of been this constant criticism of the ferry. Who does it serve? Why are we subsidizing waterfront people who often can afford, you know, other forms of transportation? It's kind of an interesting thing. the city economic development corporation argues that the ferry system has some of the lowest subsidies in the country. That's a little dubious. We haven't audited it,

but I'd be surprised if that were the case. Okay. Well, from ferries to bikes, we've been reporting on a controversial bike lane in South Williamsburg that Mayor Adams wants to remove. It's turned into the juiciest transit, legal drama, maybe since congestion pricing, right? Judges have gone back and forth on this. Stephen, what is the latest?

Just a quick reminder of what we're talking about here. This is Bedford Avenue, and it's really just three blocks of a protected bike lane that went in last year. And the context for this is in May. A little girl was crossing the middle of the street and was hit and injured by an e-bike and members of the Orthodox Jewish community there complained to the mayor. And then he ordered the bike lane removed. Advocates sued to stop the mayor.

They lost, but it was appealed. And this week a judge ordered the city not remove the lane for now. And for Mayor Adams, though, this is really a hallmark of his administration that is a key constituent or a community or a donor or a well-connected business opposes a transit project. Adams reconsiders it, kills it, or ultimately alters it. In this case, it comes during an election, and he's trying to win votes, perhaps, from the Orthodox Jewish community. That's what more than one person has told me.

But Chris Coffey, a political consultant with Tusk strategy, says removing the lane is a risky move. There have been folks that have been complaining about bike lanes for a long time. Also in Williamsburg, there are folks who are, you know, sort of young hipster types who want more and more bike lanes. And I think striking the right balance is not always easy. And yeah, we'll see how that plays out in the election this fall. Yeah, I mean, let's just let's just say it like it is. South Williamsburg is an insular community in the middle of Brooklyn. There's a hole in the city bike network. There's a hole in the bike lane network. It has, it's a, it's a population that has a high voter turnout that is politically powerful that often doesn't want bike cyclists going through.

It's been a hot button issue for a long time. But Adams, as he tries to build this a coalition, some kind of coalition to run as an independent successfully in November. He's looking to this community and many others as he tries to kind of cobble together enough votes so they could even be competitive this fall. Okay. All right. Let's do it. Keep this tight here. Every week in our on the way newsletter, we answer a question from a curious commuter. This one is from Michael in Queens, who asks, with the rollout of the first part of New Queens bus routes and schedules, I see a lot of buses that say rush. What does this mean? So Michael is talking about the rush routes in a part of the new Queens Bus redesign of the Queens Bus Network. That's pretty much going to be routes that better serve communities who live farther away,

transit deserts, bring them from residential neighborhoods to transit hubs to subway stations, stopping at many places in the residential area and not stopping in downtown, busy areas, just pretty much to get people from those neighborhoods to transit hubs. So you can think of eastern Queens, southeast Queens, The full redesign started in June, it's going to be completed by August 31st. So those are those new rush rounds. And everyone gets to say rush bus. Well, thanks to Michael for the question.

And thanks to WNYC Transportation Reporters, Ramsey Kleefei and Stephen Nesson and editor Clayton Gooseley from the Paradise that is Manhattan. You can stay in the know on all things transit or ask a question of your own by signing up for our weekly newsletter at Gothamist.com slash on the way, my friends. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC.

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