Good News if You’re Addicted to Texting

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/nyregion/texting-walking-study.html

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It’s Monday. New York’s new license plates will feature the Statue of Liberty and Niagara Falls, but not the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge.

Weather: Partly cloudy and cool, high in the mid-70s.

Alternate-side parking: In effect until Sept. 30 (Rosh Hashana).

For years, distracted walking has been considered an unavoidable reality in New York.

Texting while walking absent-mindedly is an “epidemic, which needs to end,” Gothamist declared in 2012. A year later, a video on YouTube showed pranksters, wearing orange “Seeing Eye Person” vests, leading avid texters around the streets of Manhattan.

In 2016, when the Pokémon Go virtual reality game was released for smartphones, young players were so enthralled that they turned into “walking zombies,” said Bill Bratton, the city’s police commissioner at the time.

Concerns peaked in 2017, when New York State lawmakers ordered the city to study “the dangers of being a distracted pedestrian.”

The results from that study are in.

As my colleague Michael Gold reports, texting while walking will most likely not get you killed, according to the report, released by the city’s Transportation Department.

[Yes, texting while walking is relatively safe. (But it’s still annoying.)]

The report, which you can read here, analyzed an array of data and concluded that cars pose a far greater danger to pedestrian safety than mobile devices.

In New York City, traffic deaths fell to their lowest levels in more than a century, even though pedestrian deaths rose last year to 114 from 107. But the city’s report found that phone use was not a contributing factor.

The report cited one study of fatal crash reports from 2014 to 2017. It found just two cases where devices were involved.

“Distracted walking is a minor contributor to pedestrian death,” the study said.

Danny Harris, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a bicycle and pedestrian safety advocacy group, said the focus on distracted walking was misplaced.

“This is about victim-blaming,” Mr. Harris told my colleague. “People get hit by cars, and you hear this narrative play out everywhere.”

One philosophical passage from the report noted, “Human distraction has always and will always exist in some form, and is difficult, if not impossible, to entirely change.”

Want more news? Check out our full coverage.

The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.

Record-high number of complaints. Helicopter noise is getting on more people’s nerves. [Wall Street Journal]

No debate at Hofstra University. After hosting presidential debates in 2008, 2012 and 2016, the university decided not to host a debate in 2020. [Newsday]

Labor Day airport panic. Two Chinese men said racial profiling led to the chaos at Newark Liberty International Airport. [BuzzFeed News]

Join “A Country for Brown Kids,” a talk with the authors Tina Chang and Mira Jacob, with Sonya Posmentier, at the Mid-Manhattan Library at 42nd Street in Manhattan. 6:30 p.m. [Free with R.S.V.P.]

Attend a talk about fashion, war and gender politics in France during World War I at the National Arts Club in Manhattan. 6 p.m. [Free with R.S.V.P.]

Watch the classic movie “The Princess Bride” on the roof at Our Wicked Lady in Brooklyn. 8 p.m. [Free with R.S.V.P.]

— Melissa Guerrero

Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times’s culture pages.

Aaron Reiss reports:

The process of making tofu has remained largely unchanged throughout history. Tofu recipes, on the other hand, are ripe for an upgrade.

Just ask Paul Eng, whose parents ran Fong Inn Too, a popular tofu shop in Chinatown, for decades. When Mr. Eng’s parents closed the shop in 2017, the recipes, never written down, disappeared with it.

That created a quandary for Mr. Eng, who wanted to jump into the family business. But without the family recipes, how? Mr. Eng, who was born in New York in 1966, turned to YouTube.

Voilà, sort of.

[The heir to a tofu dynasty finally learns to make tofu.]

It has been two years of trial and error — hunched over a counter trying different concentrations of soybean solids in his soy milk, comparing spec sheets on various brands of baking powder, fine-tuning temperatures and timings until things tasted like they used to in the glory days of the shop.

It paid off. Last month, he opened Fong On, a tofu shop on Division Street.

“My parents made products for people like themselves — older immigrants who were looking for the kinds of things they had back home,” Mr. Eng explained. “My demographic now is the younger generation, the millennials, the non-Chinese market.”

Mr. Eng is marketing to vegans, to hipsters, to foodies, “to anyone who has an open mind to try new things from different cultures.”

Fong On includes a tofu pudding topping bar, with sweet and savory options, and a refashioned version of his family’s old-school tofu pudding (doufu fa) as a trendy, Instagrammable dessert — and it seems to be working.

Recently, several longtime residents said they were happy to see the shop open. “I used to love it, and I am happy they are back,” said Esther Ku, 83. “The tofu in a box is convenient. But if you really like good tofu, you have to get it fresh.”

It’s Monday — city public schools are meatless today. Are you?

Dear Diary:

On a warm Saturday evening, I took a folding chair, a book and a glass of wine to the roof of my six-story Kips Bay walk-up while my dinner sat in the oven.

When it was time to check on my chicken 30 minutes later, I discovered that a new roof door that locked automatically had been installed. I was trapped on the roof with the daylight dwindling and my meal about to be ruined.

I called my super. No answer. I banged desperately on the door. No response.

Panicking, I called the only person I knew nearby: the wonderful woman who runs the laundromat next door. She was moments from closing for the night when she answered the phone.

After we had clumsily navigated a bit of a language barrier, she walked outside, caught my keys when I threw them down and disappeared into my building.

A few minutes later, she emerged on the roof, smiling and catching her breath.

“Next time,” she said, “prop the door.”

— Jack Coster

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