A walk on the safe side

We know the drill: When it snows, the city clears the streets and property owners shovel their own bit of sidewalk. And then there’s that mountain of plow-packed snow piled at the end of the block.

Unless you don’t mind teetering on the crusty pile or sinking in snow up to your knees, blocked crosswalks leave sidewalks all but impassable. When that happens, pedestrians — an elderly neighbor on the way to the store, teens headed to school, a parent with small kids — end up walking in the street.

Albany has launched a pilot program to remove snow from the crosswalks at major intersections. This is something to cheer: It acknowledges that Albany is a pedestrian city, and that getting people back to life after a big snowfall means making the city not only drivable but walkable. It makes the city friendlier for people in wheelchairs, too.

The city should prioritize neighborhoods where fewer households have cars. We’d love to see this pilot program expand to open up as many blocks as possible — and make sure folks on foot aren’t left in the slush.

A push for science over spin

U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko has reintroduced his Scientific Integrity Act, and it’s just the kind of legislation that post-Trump America needs.

The measure aims to prevent partisan meddling in government policy by setting baseline standards for scientific integrity policies at nearly two dozen federal agencies. It comes as a federal judge nixed the Trump administration’s restriction on what types of scientific studies the Environmental Protection Agency can use in setting public health rules. That policy tried to freeze out studies for which underlying raw data is not publicly available — for example, those that rely on confidential medical histories, exactly the type of studies that trace the effect of a potentially toxic substance. The result: The EPA would have a harder time making new pollution laws.

Mr. Tonko’s bill is important because it’s not enough to undo Donald Trump’s machinations by court ruling or executive order. Congress must write such standards into law so they can’t be easily swept aside by the next ideologue looking to undo decades of health and environmental progress.

FOILed again

The Cuomo administration lost a Freedom of Information Law battle over its coronavirus nursing home numbers, and guess who gets to pay for it? Yep, New York taxpayers.

A state Supreme Court justice ruled in favor of the Empire Center for Public Policy, which sued the state for stonewalling the release of data on COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents. The administration intentionally violated FOIL by not responding to the “straightforward” records request, the judge ruled. So the state must pay the center’s legal costs, still to be tallied.

The think tank — along with journalists, legislators, and others — got a litany of bogus excuses for months on why the information wasn’t forthcoming. Then came a damning report from the attorney general, and — how about that? — the state Health Department was out with the numbers within a matter of hours.

An open government is an accountable government, one that affirms its integrity and owns up to its mistakes so they won’t happen again. The governor’s affinity for secrecy hurts New Yorkers. This time, it has also cost them.