According to a 2005 NYC Housing and Vacancy survey, 40 percent of Big Apple citizens live in one-bedrooms or studios. While there’s no breakdown of how many of those dwellings house kids, anecdotal evidence indicates that a lot of families are making do — and making whoopee — in uncomfortably close quarters.

It happened again — this time, leaving horrific images of the consequences.

But despite the grim photos of a jaywalker pinned beneath a double-decker tour bus, New Yorkers’ death-defying habit of darting into traffic against the light is unlikely to ever be broken.

While technically against the law, law-enforcement officials determined long ago that writing tickets does little to stop such a widespread practice. Some veteran cops say they have never issued a single jaywalking ticket.

“Jaywalking is an urban cultural issue. There are certain cities where jaywalking has been accepted for 50 years or more, so to stop it is like trying to stop the tide from coming in,” said one ex-cop familiar with transportation issues. “You can’t address the whole culture through policing.”

In fact, one source conceded, “There’s no one person assigned to give jaywalking tickets in a precinct.” A recently retired cop with 25 years on the job said he “wouldn’t know how to write a jaywalking ticket.”

For at least five years, Muslim families originally from Beirut and Bangladesh to Khartoum and Kuala Lumpur have flocked to Chuck E. Cheese on Eid, which marks the end of the month-long Ramadan fast. The tradition has spread from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bay Ridge entirely by word-of-mouth.

Jessica Weinschenk and her boyfriend Justin Urra, 24, woke up at 3 pm and were shocked to learn that Mormons had briefly descended on their neighborhood.

“Really? Mormons?” asked 22-year-old Jessica Weinschenk. “I guess it’s not that weird because religious people do stuff like that. And hey, it’s cool if someone wants to clean our park for us. But why Williamsburg?”

. . .

The act of largesse confused Weinschenk, who said she had not volunteered since high school. Urra has never done community service and even chose to go to jail rather than do a court-mandated subway cleanup.

“I threw my bike through some guy’s window who hit me and they ordered me to clean-up the Houston street station. I got the date, and went there, and some guy handed me cleaning stuff,” he said. “I sat down for a minute, thought about it, and was like, ‘I’m out of here.’ So I went to brunch at Café Colonial.”

One recent afternoon, the writer Amy Sohn sat at the Third Street Playground in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, a few blocks from her apartment, and explained the central paradox of her neighborhood. “Every mother knows what a Park Slope Mother is, but no one thinks she is one,” she said.

. . .

Ms. Sohn and Mr. Miller moved to Park Slope in 2005, paying around $600,000 for a two-bedroom third-floor walk-up in a co-op on a block between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West — prime north Slope territory, though Ms. Sohn prefers not to reveal the exact street.

. . .

The apartment has a graceful layout, and the sort of prewar details sought after by the characters that populate “Prospect Park West,” like a working fireplace and an antique wood radiator cover in the living room. The kitchen was recently renovated because Mr. Miller likes to cook. The walls are covered with his paintings — striking portraits of old-time boxers. A pair of boxing gloves dangles from the fireplace mantel.

It’s a masculine look for a home where a 4-year-old girl is often running the floors. “I like the fact that it doesn’t feel like a day care center,” Ms. Sohn said. It’s difficult to be totally chic with a toddler, however. Asked about the peculiar, low-rise coffee table, Ms. Sohn explained that it has a chalk surface, which is used by the youngest in-house artist.

That Ms. Sohn has such concerns might come as a surprise to people who remember her “Female Trouble” column from the late-’90s in New York Press. In sexually explicit language, she chronicled her escapades as a single woman in New York — dates and dalliances with a litany of pale, wispy, downtown artist-types. One reader, in a letter to the newspaper, likened her writing to Penthouse Forum in that “I can’t believe it’s true, but I can’t stop reading, either.”

Ms. Sohn was a literary girl-about-town, but she said that even then she wanted a family. “When I was 25, I felt like a spinster,” she said. “That was where a lot of the comedy from my column came from — I wanted to marry every guy I met.”

In the span of two dizzying years, Ms. Sohn met and married Mr. Miller and became pregnant. Asked if she misses her old life, she said: “I don’t miss the anxiety. My joke is that the conversations around infant sleep are like the conversations around when-should-I-call. It’s like, ‘Last night he slept from 9 to 12, and then he woke up at 12.’ It’s the same as: ‘He said he’d call on Thursday. Then Friday came. By Saturday I called him.’ It’s ultimately very boring.”

It’s an impressive space they live in, and one that is decidedly “grown-up” for a neighborhood teeming with party-loving youths who share messy apartments four or five to a lease. They have two floors. High ceilings. Terrace off the master bedroom. Brand-new everything, including granite countertops in the kitchen. By any measure, their domestic life is one that any young couple living in New York City would envy, with the exception, perhaps, of one small detail: They have a roommate.

His name is Juan Carlos “J. C.” Villars, and he was sitting on an adjacent couch with his legs kicked up on an oak-colored coffee table, a stubbly faced fellow in a dark blue dress shirt and jeans fiddling alternately with a set of hex head wrenches and a controller for the Nintendo Wii.

Mr. Bronstein, 31, a marketing consultant in dark-rimmed glasses (you might also remember him as a former editor-at-large at FHM magazine, or from Road Rules season four), and Ms. Hoge, 27, a pretty event manager for Lincoln Center who wore her brown hair clipped up, said that they couldn’t imagine ever not living with Mr. Villars, 32, an engineering project manager — even if, one day in the not-so-immediate future, marriage and kids entered the picture.

“We talk about not moving, and we talk about not imagining J. C. leaving,” said Mr. [Jake] Bronstein, who’s been close friends with Mr. Villars for more than three years, longer than he and Ms. [Kristina] Hoge have been dating. “So I think, by transitive property, that all adds up to getting married and still staying with J. C.”

“We’ve joked about it, and none of those things seem like a reason why we’d wanna get rid of him,” Ms. Hoge said with a laugh.

“I can’t even imagine how I’ll ever get there, quite honestly,” Mr. Bronstein said. “How I’ll ever get beyond . . . this.”

Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.

The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.

. . .

Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.

And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.

Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.

Flint Rasmussen is more than a rodeo clown.

As the barrelsman for the Professional Bull Riders, Rasmussen, 40, fills gaps in the competition by singing, cracking jokes, heckling the audience, running, jumping, tumbling, hurling T-shirts and souvenirs into the crowd, and dancing to “Thriller” and “Sexyback.”

“You’re in Madison Square Garden and you’re expecting all these cowboys,” says Rasmussen, “and I’m out here doing Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake.”

The riders are wrangling bulls at the Garden through today, so I donned one of Rasmussen’s spare cowboy hats to learn his act. He spared me the bulls, not the workout.

On the packed dirt trucked onto the arena floor, I fumbled my way through a series of jumps and a kickin’ cowboy dance that Rasmussen seamlessly segued into a moonwalk.

“Anybody can do moonwalk in slick shoes on a stage,” he told me, “but not in soccer shoes on the dirt.”

In Rasmussen’s act, the arena becomes an obstacle course. The obstacles are the bulls, barrels, the riding area’s 7-foot fences and even audience members. Rasmussen has even been known to leap the fence and sprint up through the Garden’s stands – a trip that left me winded by the second tier.

Last year, he says, a wayward fan tried to tackle him, but most of the danger is bovine. “I’m having fun in a place where everything else that’s going on is very dangerous and very serious,” says Rasmussen.

Community Board 11 district manager John Fratta explained the call for action saying, “We’ve been getting complaints about the shoes on the telephone wires.”

More than a street-beautification effort, Fratta said area residents are deeply concerned with the connotations, false as they may be, the hanging footwear represents.

While no one really knows the reason behind the telephone line-sneaker trick, numerous theories have come to pass.

Most widely believed to be the sign of gang activity or site of street drug sales, folklore also denotes the sneaker sling as a celebration for men who lost their virginity.

Though more than a dozen explanations continue to claim the reasoning behind the obscure act, all continue to remain inconclusive.

. . .

Not knowing where else to turn, he said he looked to Councilman Jimmy Vacca for some needed assistance.

Though eager to get involved, Nivardo Lopez, constituent liaison in Vacca’s office, said their immediate response for involvement quickly turned into a drawn out investigation.

With Cable Vision, Verizon and FDNY wires, among others, creating a web of unmarked territory over the neighborhood, Lopez said determining which company owned the wire that coordinated with the hanging footwear was an increasingly difficult task.

Then, to his great luck and appreciation, Cable Vision stepped in.

“They took care of theirs right away,” Lopez explained about their cooperative efforts to remove the sneakers.

Lopez further explained the company took initiative to compile a master list that clearly identified which line was which company’s responsibility.

From then on, they soared.

“We’ve gotten a good response from the different utilities about removing the sneakers,” Lopez commented, pleased with results of the unique initiative.

See also: Hanging Sneakers.

They are off into the night as another group of revelers — mostly young ladies — comes off the 10:32 from Mineola. They don’t want to give their names, but one is glad to share the recipe for the cocktail she is sipping from a plastic Starbucks cup on the sly: Smirnoff Blue (100 proof), a little 7 Up and cranberry juice.

These must be the “beauties” that a Long Island Rail Road engineer speaks of a little later at Tracks Bar & Grill, where he is convening with two other co-workers at the end of a shift. They would only talk if their names weren’t used.

“It’s beauty coming in and the beast coming home,” the train engineer says of the transformation partying commuters make when they come in fresh and leave haggard.

The engineer and his conductor buddies know too well the iniquities of the weekend ride, a shift usually reserved for rookies.

“At the 12 o’clock hour, there are a lot of fights. At the one o’clock hour, it’s the ‘vomit comet,’” one of the conductor says.

“And by 2 or 3, they’re zombies; the leftovers that couldn’t make the ‘vomit comet.’”

Fabio Bari and Phillip Prado, both 23, are familiar with the weekend routine. It’s barely 1 a.m. and they are making sure to hit the 1:19 a.m. to Manhasset, which if they miss leaves them only with the 3:19. Not an option. “It’s full of drunken animals,” Bari says.

There are worse possibilities, however, than missing the 1:19: “God forbid you miss the 3:19. You’ll be contemplating all the wrong directions you took throughout the night and your life,” Bari says.

Location Scout: Penn Station.