Charles Komanoff

Thirty years ago the health arguments against car-dependence were 90 percent about air pollution and 10 percent about physical inactivity. Now, with tailpipe pollution down and obesity and diabetes up, those percentages are reversed. The latest evidence is a valuable new report, Steps to Get New Yorkers Moving (PDF file), from the Public Health Association of New York City.

Aaron's piece questioning the memorialization of bike fatalities reminds us that cycle advocacy is rife with paradoxes. Drawing attention to cycling deaths and injuries can be powerful politically and symbolically but may also scare off would-be riders. Moreover, cycling is safer for all when there are more cyclists.

Today's Times marked the onset of Gridlock Alert season with a paean to Fresh Direct -- the dot-com that brings New Yorkers expensive, home-delivered groceries along with idling engines, double-parking and gridlock galore.

Charles Komanoff, flanked by Marquez Claxton and Norman Siegel, at City Hall this morning.

Has it come to this, a car can be driven down a sidewalk for an entire crowded city block, injuring four pedestrians, one of them critically, without the driver getting a ticket or even a photo appearing in the next day's newspapers?

There is a palpable schizophrenia in the Bloomberg Administration these days when it comes to Livable Streets issues. On the one hand, the Administration is developing some 200 miles of new bike lanes, initiating a long-term sustainability project and, for the first time, talking openly about reducing automobile use. On the other hand, very little seems to have changed in the day-to-day operations of the government agencies responsible for our streets and public spaces. They continue to plan for cars and traffic at the expense of people and places.

November 7, 2006

Republican lobbyist and convicted tax-evader Albert J. Pirro is the husband of Jeanine F. Pirro, the law-n-order Westchester prosecutor and Republican candidate for state Attorney General. Albert was busted the other day in White Plains for doing 51 in a 25 mph school zone - just two months after being clocked at 98 in a 55 zone.