Janae Pierre: Another tech outage at Newark Airport, NYPD detains 14 people at a pro-Palestinian protest at Brooklyn College, Chinese American Railroad Workers Memorial Day, and New York City's streets plan put on hold.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Janae Pierre. We're learning more about that mess at Newark Airport. Federal aviation officials say the airport was hit with yet another tech outage Friday morning, marking the second such meltdown in as many weeks. The outage around 4:00 AM affected the Philadelphia-based air traffic control center that manages the flow of aircraft in and out of the airport. The Federal Aviation Administration says the outage lasted for 90 seconds. A similar 90-second outage occurred at the same control center on April 28. Lawmakers are calling for improved telecommunications technology and controller staffing after the previous meltdown and hundreds of recent delays and cancellations at Newark.

Brooklyn College demonstrators say they'll continue to organize against the war in Gaza. The NYPD took more than a dozen of them into custody Thursday night from campus. Videos and photos on social media show a few dozen protesters rallying, praying, and setting up several tents on the Flatbush campus's East Quad. A college spokesperson says the tents violated school policy and were removed by campus security and NYPD officers following verbal warnings. The NYPD says half of the people who were detained faced charges like trespassing and disorderly conduct. The others got summonses.

New York City will recognize the hard work of Chinese immigrants who built the transcontinental railroad. May 10th is now officially Chinese American Railroad Workers Memorial Day. WNYC's Elizabeth Shwe explains.

Elizabeth Shwe: Councilmember Susan Zhuang represents parts of Brooklyn with significant Chinese American populations. She explains why it's important now to commemorate the 12,000 or so Chinese American railroad workers who helped connect the western and eastern part of the country together in the 1860s. That was right before Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Councilmember Susan Zhuang: Today, people talk about immigrants with fear and sometimes hate. It's not new. The Chinese American railroad workers in American history had the same problems. These workers worked just for a few cents a day.

Elizabeth Shwe: Zhuang's resolution passed the City Council with a unanimous vote.

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Janae Pierre: Candidates running for mayor say the Adams administration has fallen short of the city's streets plan. Coming up, we visit a stretch of 3rd Avenue under the Gowanus Expressway that's been a point of political contention for decades. More on that after the break.

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Janae Pierre: 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn's Sunset Park is one of the busiest and most dangerous arteries for traffic in the five boroughs. A year ago, the local community board adopted a plan to redesign the street, reducing traffic and adding a protected bike lane, but they recently learned that plan is on hold. WNYC's Brigid Bergin has this report on who hit the brakes on this redesign plan.

Brigid Bergin: I'm standing on the northwest corner of 60th Street and 3rd Avenue on a recent Thursday morning. Cars, huge tractor-trailer trucks, and lots of pedestrians are all trying to navigate this busy intersection below the rumbling Gowanus Expressway.

Luis Arce: It's very scary. My wife's brother actually got hit by a car down there a long time ago. This whole 3rd Avenue, this area is very dangerous.

Brigid Bergin: That's Luis Arce, just one of the hundreds of parents rushing to drop their kids off at PS 939 on the corner behind me. He ran with his five-year-old across 3rd Avenue's nine lanes. This tension between pedestrians and cars on 3rd Avenue has been going on for more than 80 years, since Robert Moses erected what was first known as the Gowanus Parkway on top of the road in 1941, driving more trucks through what was a residential area to the industrial waterfront.

In his lauded Moses biography, The Power Broker, Robert Caro wrote, "If 3rd Avenue was the heart of the neighborhood, Moses tore it out." I came here to meet Julio Peña III, the current chair of Community Board 7. He points at the intersection.

Julio Peña III: We have nine travel lanes of traffic. We have a major entrance to the BQE towards Staten Island here, which everyone uses coming from the south, coming from the east to get onto the highway. Then if you can see, we have a broken traffic light on 4th Avenue, which even makes it even worse.

Brigid Bergin: Data from the city's Department of Transportation show 87 injuries at this intersection alone between 2018 and 2022, and 14 deaths over the same period along 3rd Avenue stretching north to Prospect Avenue. That's more than three times the number of deaths as the equivalent stretch on nearby 4th Avenue in the same time period. Peña says officials have been clamoring for a safety plan for decades.

Julio Peña III: About two years ago, DOT finally came to the table with a safety improvement study that resulted in the proposal for the reduction of the travel lane and the bike lane. The board voted overwhelmingly, almost unanimously on the proposal.

Brigid Bergin: The new bike lanes wouldn't reach this intersection, but Peña says other smaller safety improvements would, like wider medians and longer signals. After the board approved the plan, Peña says businesses began pushing back.

Julio Peña III: DOT told us that they're pausing on any work for the rest of this year and possibly until the next mayor administration.

Brigid Bergin: Mayor Adams once pledged to be the city's bike mayor, but he's faced withering criticism from street safety advocates for the delays implementing other street redesigns over the course of his three years in office. Most of his would-be successors, including City Comptroller, mayoral candidate, and fellow Brooklynite Brad Lander, say the city should be moving faster on this.

Brad Lander: The Adams administration has fallen woefully short of the NYC Streets Plan and even of their own promises for delivering on the bus and bike lanes that all New Yorkers deserve.

Brigid Bergin: The DOT says they're still collecting feedback in Sunset Park while they work on other projects in the area, like new concrete medians, curb extensions, and signal crossings along 3rd Avenue to enhance pedestrian safety and reduce crossing times. Speaking for local business leaders, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce President Randy Peers said over email that the redesign vote was premature and called the plan "a big disregard to the generational businesses that have been a part of Sunset Park longer than most of the board members themselves."

Martin Frankel: The name of my store is Frankel's.

Brigid Bergin: I found myself in one of those generational businesses during my walk.

Martin Frankel: We're on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 40th Street. I said we're here 135 years. We sell Carhartt and safety clothes, boots, and stuff like that.

Brigid Bergin: That's 84-year-old Martin Frankel. His family has owned this store since 1890, selling work clothes and now also Vietnamese coffee and tea. He says the neighborhood has changed a lot as the rents have risen.

Martin Frankel: I used to go to work here every day with two guns, a bulletproof vest, and see who got shot over the weekend. Every weekend somebody got killed in this neighborhood. Now the most dangerous thing in Sunset Park now is gluten.

Brigid Bergin: There's also traffic fatalities according to the statistics, but Frankel says he's got other concerns.

Martin Frankel: They want to take our parking away, basically. It's all about control, and it hurts.

Brigid Bergin: Another group representing other local businesses was actively part of the 3rd Avenue redesign planning process. Jesse Solomon leads the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, which is working to maintain and grow the industrial working waterfront that sits to the west of 3rd Avenue.

Jesse Solomon: I think where SBIDC stands is that it shouldn't be a zero-sum game like we desperately want and need to see safety improvements to the corridor.

Brigid Bergin: She says to keep businesses in the area, people need to get around. They want a safe bike network. She's also heard concerns about a bike lane here from businesses in the so-called IBZ, Industrial Business Zone.

Jesse Solomon: We want to see 3rd Avenue still be conducive to the movement of goods throughout the IBZ while also finding solutions for folks to get to work.

Brigid Bergin: For now, those solutions are likely on hold until after the election, which starts with the primary next month. Among the major Democratic mayoral candidates, all voiced support for the community board's redesign plan, except former governor Andrew Cuomo, who said he would come up with a plan supported by everyone.

Janae Pierre: That's WNYC's Brigid Bergin. Some sports news for the Orange and Blue. The Knicks are back at Madison Square Garden Saturday for game three of their playoff series against the Boston Celtics. The Knicks have battled their way to a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series, nearly giving myself and other fans a heart attack. The Celtics now face a pivotal contest at MSG after New York beat the defending NBA champs twice in Beantown. The Knicks are currently undefeated on the road this post-season. Tip-off at MSG is 3:30 this Saturday.

A quick note before we kick off the weekend. We're dropping another episode for you this Saturday, and it's an interesting one about a suspended Columbia University student, who created an AI-powered app that helps you, as the tagline puts it, cheat on everything. Crazy, right? Be on the lookout for that in your feed first thing Saturday morning. Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC. I'm Janae Pierre. Have a nice weekend.

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