Neil deMause

Early Friday morning, more than 100 transportation experts and advocates descended on the garish hell that is New Times Square to hear a two-hour presentation about parking. In a cozy theater across the street from Dave and Buster's, UCLA urban planner Donald Shoup held forth on his much-discussed ideas for reforming traffic via "market-based" street parking.

After Mayor Bloomberg's December announcement of his PlaNYC initiative to prepare for a sustainable New York of 9 million people by 2030, New York New Visions, the group of architects and planners originally organized around Ground Zero rebuilding, announced it was expanding its scope to tackle the new challenge. Last night, in a stark white room in the basement of the American Institute of Architects building in Greenwich Village, a collection of almost equally stark white faces began reimagining the New York of the future.