Charles Komanoff

Twenty years ago today, as throngs of New Yorkers were sunning themselves in Washington Square Park on the first warm day of spring, a 1987 Oldsmobile zoomed down Washington Place, gunned through the stop sign at Greene Street, plowed across the sidewalk at Washington Square East and smashed into the park. When the car finally came to rest against a couple of benches near the center of the park, five people lay dead or dying. Twenty-seven people were injured, some of them grievously.

Sam Schwartz's proposal to collect a half-a-buck per bicycle entry on bridges to the Manhattan Central Business District is putting New York cyclists in a bind. Cyclists, like drivers, don't relish paying for something they've been getting for free, particularly when they feel they're being singled out. Yet Schwartz's bike-toll idea is merely one part, and a minor one at that, of an audacious scheme to restructure bridge and road tolls across the city and revolutionize travel by car, bike, train and bus. If a bike toll can help sell the grand plan — and Schwartz insists it can — it might be a price worth paying.

The Republican presidential campaign recently produced a couple of characteristic bits of what Americans, for lack of a better word, call “news”: Newt Gingrich declaring that New Yorkers “live in high rises and ride the subway” and thus don’t care about gasoline prices; and Tea Party “activists” in Virginia, Florida and Maine convinced that smart-growth initiatives are — wait for it — a UN plot!

“Rate shock” was the name given to the electricity industry’s financial crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, when utility company finances buckled under the weight of escalating nuclear power costs. Not only were the costs of the nukes spiraling out of control, but the electricity rate hikes required to pay for them caused energy use to flatten, as customers pinched by the high rates were forced to conserve. Facing higher costs but flat sales, the utilities made up the difference with further rate hikes, until their customers rebelled, the dividends stopped flowing, and utility investors lost billions.

Albany’s latest raid of transit funds could hit New York City particularly hard. To help pay for his upper-middle-class tax cut, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature are stripping an estimated $320 million a year in revenues from the MTA payroll tax. Although the legislation is said to contain a pledge to find equivalent funds elsewhere, the as-yet unspecified reimbursement mechanism is likely to make the transit agency more vulnerable to future cuts, as Streetsblog noted last week.The potential deterioration in service could easily end up costing drivers and transit riders more in lost time and damaged health than they will gain in lower taxes.

Not yet three months old, Occupy Wall Street stands this week on the threshold of its first big concrete win. Governor Andrew Cuomo has called a special session of the New York State Legislature, reportedly to recalibrate the state income tax to draw more from the one or two percent at the top and less from everyone else. After refusing for months to consider extending the state’s “millionaires’ tax,” the governor may have sensed a need to stand with the 99 percent, even if it requires bending a campaign promise.

The Arts Section of today’s Times leads with a gorgeous meditation on cycling in New York that is so unabashedly positive, it’ll take your breath away. At least it took mine. In my 50 years as a Times reader -- nearly 40 of them as a daily bicycle rider -- I can’t recall any essay on cycling as the quintessential urban experience as lyrical and unapologetic as this one.

The term “livable streets” first surfaced in 1981. That’s when UC Berkeley urban planning professor Donald Appleyard made it the title of his path-breaking new book on the social effects of cars on cities. But it was the advent of Streetsblog and the livable streets movement 25 years later that brought the term into public view.

Can you spot the flaw in this excerpt from the New York Times' Saturday backgrounder on MTA chief Jay Walder’s pending departure for Hong Kong?

My teenage son’s baseball game in Inwood on Wednesday gave me a fine excuse to ride the full length of the Hudson River Greenway and back. Watching my son’s Downtown team dispatch the Harlem club was a treat, but the real blast for me was my ride home.