Since You’re Talking About Cash-Strapped Municipalities Saving Money . . .

You could raise $3.4 million year by charging groups like the NYC Marathon for overtime or you could save $75 million a year by cutting back on pot arrests:

New York spends $75 million a year to lock up people caught with marijuana, a new study says, even though it’s not technically a crime.

The report by the Drug Policy Alliance says the NYPD spends that much on 50,000 annual pot arrests, in which 86% of those arrested are black or Latino.

Of course that might require a reconfiguration of the mayor’s “progressive goals,” but with his lowest approval ratings in eight years, there’s room to reconfigure.

It Feels Like Something I Saw On Web Soup; It Hurts

Kickball-snark experts at the Brooklyn Paper sound the alarm about subpar renovations at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park Kickball Fields:

Just try to imagine a summer without Brooklyn Kickball. It’s a nightmare, right?

Location Scout: McCarren Park.

Coulrophobics Beware

Good thing it’s a city that never sleeps, or clowns might eat you:

More than 200 international clowns will take the city by storm — whoopee cushions optional — for this week’s World Clown Association’s annual convention.

The five-day clown throwdown kicks off today in Queens with face-painting competitions, balloon-sculpture workshops and a session on how to make your own honker at the LaGuardia Plaza Hotel in East Elmhurst.

Trains May Suck In A Lot Of Ways But At Least They Don’t Flip Over On The Thruway

As long as the Acela remains absurdly expensive, this will continue to be one of my worst fears:

More than a dozen people were killed in a horrific crash early Saturday when a discount bus flipped on a Bronx highway and careened into a metal traffic pole, officials said.

Star Trek 2.0: Path Of Khan

How the worldwide push toward progressive transportation goals died for Bloomberg’s sins:

Connect the dots, and this becomes a much more significant story than the future of one bike lane in Brooklyn, or even the career of one official. New York City justly sees itself as the world’s greatest city: here, in some sense, people live the way everyone would live if they had the chance. How New York — the city that still has a uniquely low level of car ownership and use — manages its transport planning in the 21st century matters for the whole world: it is the template. If cycling is pushed back into the margins of that future, rather than promoted, along with efficient mass public transit and safe, pleasant pedestrianism, as a key part of that future, the consequences will be grave and grim.

[Via.]