Good morning. It is Wednesday. We will take a quick look at limits – speed limits and time limits – which are dictated by the extensive operation of speed cameras in the city. We’ll also look at a book that can finally be read in the place it’s about, except for two pages.
There’s an intriguing fact behind the city’s roughly 2,000 speed cameras, which began operating around the clock on Monday: To get a ticket, a car must be seen traveling at least 18 miles per hour above the speed limit.
On most streets in New York City, the speed limit is 25 mph, so there is room between 25 mph and 36 mph. you a $50 ticket.
That made us wonder: how is that different in a time-oriented city like New York? Just how elastic are limits – or how absolute? What can you get away with?
This soon became a short history of a short time.
“We see time differently,” said Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy. “Half the time I don’t know why, but we’re in a hurry. When you cross the street and it counts down and it’s at zero, you know you’ve got a few seconds before the light really turns green.” She said she raced across because “you have at least two seconds left.”
What counts as late?
Commuter railroads such as the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North have five minutes and 59 seconds of leeway. A train is not considered late until it arrives at least six minutes after its scheduled time, said a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates both lines.
Amtrak has more leeway, subways less. Intercity passenger trains are not considered late, according to the Federal Railroad Administration, unless they arrive 15 minutes after their scheduled arrival time. But a metro is considered late if it does not reach the end of the line within 5 minutes of the scheduled time.
New York City has had a five-minute parking grace period since 2010. That gave drivers an extra five minutes to move their cars after regulations on the other side went into effect (9:05 a.m. when the times on the no-parking sign start at 9 a.m., for example.).
In zones where drivers have to get a parking ticket from a machine on the street and place it on the dashboard, the city gives them an extra five minutes to find the machine and return the ticket. The city council approved the postponement after complaints were made about traffic cops watching too much and drivers not paying enough.
What time can a student be without being assessed late? The lateness policy is set by each school: the city’s Department of Education does not have a system-wide approach.
Some private schools, such as SAR High School in the Riverdale portion of the Bronx, have experimented. In the past, SAR gave students five minutes of leeway at the start of the school day.
“What happened with that was students interpreted it in their heads as the school day starting at 8:05 AM,” said Rivka Press Schwartz, the associate principal. “If they arrived at 8:06 AM and we marked them late, the response was, ‘Are you really going to mark me late? I’m only a minute late.’ We had to remind the students that they were six minutes late, not one. So we removed the grace period.”
She said there was a “natural tendency to push things to the limit that you could get away with.”
“What will happen with the speed cameras, I’m sure, is everyone will define the speed limit as 35, not 25,” she said. “In general, we follow the rules that we have to follow. Anyone who drives on the highway with what seems to be the usual norm knows that.”
Weather
Expect a sunny day, with a maximum of around 90. In the evenings you can expect mostly clear skies, with temperatures dropping to the mid-70s.
ALTERNATE SIDE PARKING
Valid until August 15 (Feast of the Ascension).
There are 10 places where the definitive history of the deadly revolt at Attica Prison in 1971 was long banned — New York state prisons, including Attica.
Now, in response to a First Amendment lawsuit from the author, the ban has been lifted, save for two pages of a map of the Attica Correctional Facility. Prison officials cut the map from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Blood in the Water” by Heather Ann Thompson, above, a professor at the University of Michigan.
They also include a photocopy of what was written on the back of one of the two pages – a list of the 43 people who died during the uprising at the New York state maximum security prison. The dead included 10 guards and civilian prison workers who were held hostage by inmates for four days.
The state attorney general’s office wrote to Manhattan federal court judge Edgardo Ramos last week that the lawsuit should be dismissed. The letter stated that corrections officers had concluded that New York’s “captive population” could see the paperback edition of “Blood in the Water” except for the map. The hardcover edition, with the card on the back, is still not allowed, but prison officials will replace the paperback for anyone who receives a hardcover copy.
My colleague Benjamin Weiser says the dispute arose when book bans became a problem for libraries and school curricula across the country. Officials have tried to justify book bans in prisons by saying that some information can be legitimately denied — instructions for building a weapon or planning an escape, for example.
Thompson’s lawyers wrote to Judge Ramos on Monday, arguing that the lawsuit should not be dismissed. Thompson is demanding an injunction banning the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision from blocking the book’s distribution.
Thompson, whose lawsuit also seeks a system to notify her if the agency censors copies she sends to inmates, noted that one of the problems caused the uprising in Attica was censorship by correction officers.
“The men in Attica were often not allowed to read the letters sent to them,” she said. “They were often not allowed to read the books that would come to them in the mail. And one of the things they just asked for was a fundamental acknowledgment that they were human, and that they had the right to read.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Hung up
Dear Diary:
Last summer I expected a friend to visit me on my fourth floor walk-up in Manhattan. In the old New York City fashion, when she called to say she had arrived, I opened my window and threw a package with the front door key in it at her.
Unfortunately, the package in all its full-leaf glory has become entangled in the branch of a tree. My friend, Jocelyn, asked two women walking by to help untie the package.
The three of them grabbed the trunk and tried to shake it, but the tree wouldn’t move. One of the women took off one of her new white sneakers and threw it several times at the package. On the fourth attempt, the shoelace caught on a twig.
The other woman, hoping to knock over the shoe, threw her cane at the tree. A few throws later, the stick caught on a branch. They staggered down Ninth Avenue without saying hello or waving.
Winter came and all the leaves fell from the tree. The shoe was still there. The pack and walking stick were nowhere to be seen.
— Shela Xoregos
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send entries here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — JB
PS Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Game match. Here you will find all our puzzles.
Melissa Guerrero, Jeffrey Furticella, Rick Martinez and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday..
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