Andrea Bernstein

Joe Lhota remembered his talking points in Tuesday night's debate. Unfortunately for him, he said little to fundamentally alter the trajectory of the race, where Bill de Blasio is beating him by over 40 points. And in the most raucous exchange of the campaign, de Blasio and Lhota heatedly debated the legacies of David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, harkening back to a time a dwindling number of voters remember.

WNYC, WNYC's Data News team and Transportation Nation have won one of the most prestigious awards in journalism: the Online News Association award for breaking news during storm Sandy. Other winners included the Guardian for its work covering the NSA and the Boston Globe for reporting on the Boston Marathon bombing. 

I had about as bad an experience as I've ever had docking a Citi Bike this morning -- it took nearly an hour to find a docking station in Lower Manhattan. The supervisor in the Citi Bike call center said it was an unusually busy morning, brought on, no doubt, by the picture-perfect crisp autumn weather.

New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan took a victory lap Friday at a speech at the Municipal Art Society summit, saying, "What was controversial just a few years ago, things like closing Times Square, is pretty much commonplace today."

With the government shutdown drama playing out in Washington, Republican New York City mayoral candidate Joe Lhota and New Jersey Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan faced off against Democrats with surprising results. 

An Illinois board last night approved a new 47-mile toll highway, the Illiana Expressway. The move is notable for the dissension it caused and because new highways are out-of-vogue with planners, who tend to see them as costly, environmentally destructive, and promoting inefficient, sprawling development. 

Yes, there's a strike:

Tweet from SF's Transit Service: BART can confirm its unions will go on strike after all trains have ended their runs this evening. #BARTstrike  — SFBART (@SFBART) October 18, 2013

A survey of nearly 2300 Citi Bike users by the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives finds that about two thirds  -- 64 percent -- say their biggest complaint with the system is that docks are either completely full or completely empty. But 91 percent like the bike share system and want to see it expanded.

For the third day in a row, no strike in SF Bay Area...Transit a political issue in VA Governor's Race...and Opposition Builds to Illinois Expressway.

UPDATED Male reporters were allowed to cover a Joe Lhota for Mayor tour of a Hasidic synagogue Tuesday afternoon, but a female reporter and staffers were not. It's not at all unusual for candidates for public office to court the influential orthodox community.  But meetings are usually kept private, and it's rare to invite the press along and then have women escorted out.

It's apparently worse in New York City to read from a Republican playbook than from a Marxist playbook. That's the conclusion that viewers could draw after watching the first general election debate in New York City's mayoral contest.  

Between losing his leg in WWII and his tragic suicide in 1979, Bill de Blasio's father forged a career with think tanks and multinational corporations aimed at blocking the spread of ...

Mayoral candidate Joe Lhota said this week a "Grand Canyon" separates him and Bill de Blasio in the polls.  The latest Marist poll shows more than 40 point between the candidates.  The race for New Jersey Governor has a similar, yawning gap.  But the polls are surprisingly close in the U.S. Senate race between Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan.  In this edition of "This Week in Politics," WNYC's Andrea Bernstein and Brigid Bergin, and New Jersey Public Radio's Nancy Solomon break it all down.

The MTA has gotten involved in the citywide search for an autistic boy who disappeared from his school last week. Straphangers now can hear subway announcements seeking help in finding Avonte Oquendo.

Bloomberg has maintained that it's his job us to make people healthier and safer, and he has frequently declared, “Being mayor is about saying, 'No.'”

New York City mayoral frontrunner Bill de Blasio has come a long way since his days of opposing the Prospect Park West bike lane.  At a speech Tuesday afternoon before a group of urban innovators, de Blasio said, "We see the success of the New York City’s bicycling program. Biking is up 60 percent since 2008. The designs innovated for the streets of Chelsea and the East Village are now seen in protected bike lanes on the National Mall in Washington DC, on Market Street in San Francisco and in cities across the country."

The Chair of the New York Taxi and Limousine gets it. He's out. So in an email to staff he's pretty direct: we "want to work like the dickens to finish as much of our projects as we can in the remaining 100 days."

You may think that stop and frisk as a political issue has been with us forever. But you'd be wrong.  It's only been two years since the issue has been a mainstream controversy — one that threatens to tarnish Mayor Michael Bloomberg's considerable positive achievements in reducing crime. This is the story of how that happened -- the next installment in our series "New York Remade: The Bloomberg Years"

A report by The Record is contradicting Governor Chris Christie's recent account of why NJ Transit moved hundreds of pieces of rail equipment into a flood zone prior to Sandy.  [To listen to an interview with The Record reporter Karen Rouse, click on the audio player above.]

In the New York City mayor's race, polls this week showed Republican Joe Lhota has enormous ground to make up before the November 5th election. He's trailing Democrat Bill de Blasio by a 50-point margin. Still, both candidates are employed a similar strategy this week as they tried to paint the other as a radical outside the political mainstream.

We also learned more about Bill de Blasio's family life, with a peek at his wedding video, and an exclusive interview on WNYC about his father's suicide.