Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll meet a man who channeled his frustration with an exit on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway into a video. We’ll also get details on a parking scam involving fraudulent QR codes.
Andrew Rose Gregory has spent much too much time thinking about Exit 31 of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
That may or may not be less time than he has spent enduring Exit 31.
It’s a chutelike ramp that Gregory considers the third-worst place in New York City. Rikers Island, the city’s troubled jail complex, is the worst on his list. We’ll get to the second-worst later.
Exit 31 has a nondescript chain-link fence and grass that could use a trimming. It’s less haunted by shattered glass and stray gravel than some such places, and less a pothole obstacle course. It’s not part of the infamous “B.Q.E. Central,” the 1.5-mile stretch with the triple cantilever in Brooklyn Heights that will get a $4 billion overhaul. Exit 31 is maintained by the state, not the city.
Exit 31 is uninspiring — to everyone but Gregory. It inspired him to channel his rancor into a video. The soundtrack is a song about Exit 31 that rhymes “road so cursed” with “alternate universe.” His brother Evan, who worked on the video with him, said that Exit 31 is “a very predictable pain point.” This was before Andrew Gregory told me that “the stress experience of being at Exit 31 has so deeply settled into my brainstem that, really, we’re all on Exit 31.”
The Gregorys (with another brother and a sister-in-law) are a comedic production group, some of whose videos have gone viral. They made others as Op Docs for The New York Times.
But they are serious about the dashboard-pounding, time-wasting nuisance of Exit 31. The video suggests installing a traffic barrier to separate cars turning right at the end of the exit ramp from cars turning left, as well as thoughtfully programmed traffic signals. And it characterizes drivers as “cutters,” “blockers” and “poor suckers.” Cutters nose their way in front of others. Blockers don’t let the cutters (or anyone else) in. Suckers are the drivers who get cut in on, blocked or just wait.
They all fit into Andrew Gregory’s claim that Exit 31 is “a story of societal and design failure.”
“The cutters, the blockers and the suckers are just doing their best in this miserable situation,” he said.
He wrote an eight-page memo about how to improve Exit 31 during the pandemic and sent it to the city Department of Transportation. He received a response — a page from a website about planned work on the B.Q.E. that “made me feel very smart and very dumb.”
“What made me feel very smart was that all of my proposed changes were already in progress, so I had made some good suggestions,” he said. “What made me feel dumb was that I had spent two work days writing the proposal.”
A spokesman for the state Transportation Department said on Wednesday that the agency “shares the community’s frustration with frequent backups at Exit 31” and is in the final design stage of a program to reconfigure the exit ramp, separating traffic as it approaches Wythe Avenue. The agency said the planning would be completed “over the next year,” with construction to begin in 2028.
How Exit 31 became something to sing about
The idea for the song came to mind as he headed home from vacation last month.
“I’m a single dad now,” he said. “I’ve been widowed for three years. I have a very young daughter. She was asleep in the back of the car. What was I thinking about? ‘Oh, God, we’re going to have to get off at Exit 31.’”
The song almost wrote itself, with an opening line about Exit 31 as the “first worst place” in the city. “I thought, ‘That’s not true,’” he recalled. He wrote in Rikers.
And the second-worst place in the city? The video says it is “the Chipotle where Timothée Chalamet broke up with you in 2017.” That was a made-up line, and Gregory said that he was unaware that Chalamet had been given a Chipotle celebrity card during a Knicks game in the Eastern Conference Finals in May. The line amounted to a tribute to his late wife, who had once been broken up with in a Chipotle.
Until the promised makeover is completed, Gregory figures that the waits at Exit 31 may not be shorter, but he can make them more pleasant. “At least I can put on the song in the car,” he said.
Weather
Expect cloudy skies before it becomes sunny and temperatures near 77. Tonight will be cloudy with a low around 68.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Saturday (Shemini Atzeret).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I kept saying, ‘Oh, my God, what did I change?’ It’s just so stunning.” — Robert Kravitz, the school superintendent responsible for Jericho Senior High School on Long Island, after it plunged from high on the list of best high schools in the country to No. 3,959.
The latest New York news
-
Debating how to slow e-bikes: At a City Council hearing, lawmakers reviewed more than 20 proposals to regulate electric bikes and scooters after a series of fatal crashes.
-
New evidence in the Cornell case: Matthew Van Houten, the Tompkins County district attorney, who decided against pursuing a criminal case in 2024 after a woman told the police that she had been sexually assaulted at a Cornell University fraternity, is now weighing “new evidence that exists.”
-
DNA evidence solves a cold case: A 80-year-old man was given a life sentence in the 1978 death of Marissa Rolf Harvey, a 15-year-old girl from Hollis, Queens. Harvey was strangled in San Francisco’s Golden State Park.
-
Moving on: Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the chairwoman of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, will not seek another term. Reformers in the party had accused her of engaging in a “power grab” by changing the group’s leadership-selection rules.
-
In ICE custody: Immigration officers detained Yehonatan Ovadia, an Israeli citizen, after revoking his legal status because he protested the mounting of the Israeli flag in a small town upstate. Ovadia has been in the U.S. since 2022 on a visa for religious workers.
-
A house in the Hamptons: Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo bought a seven-acre compound in Remsenberg for nearly $10 million. It includes a nine-bedroom main house, a guesthouse, a saltwater pool and a tennis court.
A Brooklyn man is arrested in a parking meter scam
The QR codes were fraudulent, the Manhattan district attorney said. So was the website that the QR codes connected drivers’ cellphones to.
Investigators said the setup was a scam run to steal personal information from people parking on Manhattan streets. An investigation found 64 stickers with fraudulent QR codes on parking meters and traced them to Mihai Theodor Enescu, 39. He was charged with identity theft and criminal impersonation.
“The unfortunate reality of modern technology is that routine tasks like parking a vehicle have become opportunities for scammers,” the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, said in a statement.
Enescu entered a plea of not guilty at his arraignment in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said D. Andrew Marshall, a lawyer representing him. He said that the allegations would be “disturbing and troubling” if they were true, adding that “we don’t know that they’re true at this point.”
Court documents said the city learned of the scheme in July 2025, when a driver scanned a QR code from a sticker on a parking meter on East 10th Street. The QR code led to a website that displayed what looked like the official ParkNYC logo. It had spaces for the user to type in credit card information, along with a billing address and the car’s license number.
The driver, who had driven into Manhattan with his girlfriend to visit a friend of hers, tried several times, as did his girlfriend, using different payment information — only to hit what court documents called “a continual buffer” on the website. Then the driver noticed that the sticker with the QR code had been placed over the actual ParkNYC sticker. ParkNYC is an app that can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or Google Play.
Court documents said the account associated with the fake website was set up in Enescu’s name.
METROPOLITAN diary
This Manhattan morning
Dear Diary:
Starts out gray. We wake up in shadow, listen to the weather, wonder what kind of day it will be.
Manhattan sun seems skittish today, as if cowed by the island’s savvy sophistication.
But by noon it sends down slices of warmth; they brighten the shaded plazas under the tall towers,
with enough light left over to cover the parks, the rivers, and us. The day has shaped up nicely.
Some knock this island, uneasy with its famous mix of smarts, bravado and bluster. But that’s the draw: come
measure yourself against the best, find your own voice and add it to the striving heart of New York.
— Jimmy Roberts
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
The post Why He Sings About Exit 31 on the B.Q.E. appeared first on New York Times.
