Noah Kazis

The City Planning Commission approved a Rudin family request to build 50 percent more parking than allowed at the site of the former St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. The commission's unanimous approval came last Monday despite opposition to the parking garage from the local community board and evidence that Rudin hadn't met the city's own requirements for granting exemptions to parking maximums.

When bike-share launches this summer, 10,000 new public bicycles will be available at 600 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The stations will typically be located about 1,000 feet apart from each other, ensuring a quick walk to a public bike from anywhere below 79th Street and in northwest Brooklyn. The exact location of the stations -- this corner or that one, on the street or on the sidewalk -- is largely up to each neighborhood to decide. The hyper-local planning begins next week at a workshop for the Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods [PDF] and continues throughout the service area over the next two months.

The Cuomo administration's plan for an extra-wide, transit-free Tappan Zee Bridge is exactly the kind of project that New York state's smart growth law is supposed to prevent.

The Cuomo administration's plan for the new Tappan Zee Bridge, described in yesterday's draft environmental impact statement, is more than a missed opportunity to provide New Yorkers with faster and greener commutes using transit. It also foreshadows a potential environmental disaster, as the state prepares to spend huge sums on a span that can funnel much more traffic than the current bridge.

The Cuomo administration's latest thinking on the new Tappan Zee Bridge, contained in the draft environmental impact statement it released yesterday, reinforces the state's commitment to building a sprawl-inducing, highway-only bridge. The document not only dismisses bus rapid transit, but also clears the way for an enormous expansion of automobile capacity and makes a mockery of New York's statewide smart growth law. We'll be breaking down the DEIS in a series of posts today.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Hilda Cohen, Ali Loxton and 1,600 petition-signers are asking for a painted bike lane and a road diet on Brooklyn's Lafayette Avenue: They're hoping to calm traffic and improve the area's bike network by turning one traffic lane into a bike lane, and they helped persuade Brooklyn Community Board 2 to ask NYC DOT to revisit the idea.

Governor Cuomo, your neighbors have something to tell you.

The MTA needs new revenues, announced chairman Joe Lhota during a broad-ranging panel discussion at Fordham University this morning. "There's going to be the need for broad-based tax revenue somewhere within the system over the next couple of years," Lhota said, noting that he's generally the kind of conservative person loath to call for tax increases.

Just one of the many problems with running an interstate highway through the heart of an urban area is what to do with the on-ramps and off-ramps. Motorists accustomed to freeway speeds, or eager to reach them, can drive more aggressively than normal and without as much regard for pedestrians and cyclists. At one on-ramp to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, where increasing numbers of people are crossing to reach the new Brooklyn Bridge Park, DOT hopes to make things safer with a new intersection design and an end to right turns on red [PDF].