Public Health

With development projects across the city threatened by an uncertain economy, critics of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project believe that a slowdown in construction could burden Prospect Heights with decades of blight. A slide show by the Municipal Art Society, called "Atlantic Yards or Atlantic Lots?," offers a bleak look into the future, like this rendering of neighborhood blocks destroyed for "temporary" surface lots that would accommodate some 1,400 cars.

 

This recent constituent e-mail shows that Council Member Jessica Lappin's lukewarm support for congestion pricing seems to have turned into full-fledged support now that the proposal has no chance of being implemented (taking a page out of Assemblywoman Joan Millman's book). In Lappin's defense, she did vote for pricing when it came before the council. But it might have been helpful had she found her voice a few months -- or even weeks -- before the plan went to Albany.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at Baruch College last week

Dave Lutz of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition has been digging through the Municipal Archives and look what he found: a 1938 memo from Robert Moses to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia about the need to create a network of dedicated bike paths in city parks. Moses's reasoning looks odd to modern eyes, in part because he argues for bike paths as a purely recreational amenity. His rationale for bike infrastructure fails to see cycling as transportation (sound familiar?), choosing instead to segregate bike facilities from the street network.

Following our post yesterday about a newspaper article in which Andrew Hevesi was quoted as calling congestion pricing "a money grab to pay for mass transit," Streetsblog got a call from the Queens assemblyman's office.

In three different studies presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Boston last weekend, researchers "provided mounting evidence that air pollution can both increase the risk of cardiovascular disease in the long-term and induce heart attacks within hours of traffic exposure." While the studies have yet to be released in full, the Guardian reveals some details from the presentations made at AAAS:

The Greenstreet at 110th and Amsterdam helps keep sewage out of city rivers and features a beefed-up, traffic-calming "blockbuster."

As attention turns to the next federal transportation bill, and livable streets fans scan the platforms of presidential candidates for glimpses of what to expect from Washington over the next four years, Alex Steffen, editor and CEO of the blog WorldChanging, has posted an essay-in-progress called "My Other Car is a Bright Green City." Steffen says that reining in fuel standards and auto emissions, for instance, is not nearly as important to present and future generations as developing communities that behave more like cities, which are, by environmental measures, much cleaner than commute-intensive suburbs and exurbs. Here are some excerpts.