Air Quality

Chris Smith has an outstanding story in this week's New York Magazine pointing out that New York City has fallen behind other world cities in addressing climate change and challenging the Bloomberg Administration to do more. An excerpt:

Monday night was the first meeting of the Ninth Avenue Renaissance project. About 130 neighborhood stakeholders filled the gym at the Holy Cross School in Midtown to begin a process to transform Ninth Avenue from a dysfunctional, traffic-choked, polluted highway into, what organizer Christine Berthet says should be "a neighborhood Main Street" for Hell's Kitchen and Clinton.

Eliot Spitzer's campaign for governor promised, "Day One: Everything Changes." Well, it's Day Two and it's time to govern. Much of New York City's transportation policy rests in the hands of Albany legislators and agency officials. Here are ten things that the new governor can do to make New York City's streets more livable and transportation policy more sensible. Feel free to add more to the list in the comments section.

Is happening right now....Catch it at NYC.gov

Private cars blocking service vehicles on W. 86th St. between Columbus and Amsterdam

The congestion charging policy roll-out is officially on the move. Today the Tri-State Transportation Campaign released the findings of a detailed telephone survey conducted last spring in an effort to learn more about how New Yorkers feel about traffic congestion and the idea of making motorists pay more to drive in to the most gridlocked parts of the city. Download TSTC's report here (PDF). See an excerpt below.

The New York Sun has the first of what will be a littany of congestion pricing stories coming out in the next few months. Finally, with city and state elections out of the way, New York City is about to embark on a substantive discussion of its transportation, traffic congestion and long-term sustainability issues. Some excerpts below:

Of the ten largest cities in the United States, New York has far and away the greatest population density: 26,402.9 people per square mile, more than double the second densest big city, Chicago. The chart at right shows how the largest metropolitan areas stack up in terms of core population, overall population and core population density.  This fact alone should force New York City authorities to think differently than the rest of the country on all sorts of matters of public policy. New York is a quantitatively different animal than the other big American metropolitan regions in terms of percentage of people that live in the core, density and size of the core and size of the metropolitan area.