Special Reports

Former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, widely credited as the architect of PlaNYC, spoke at the Museum of the City of New York last week on the potential impact of Mayor Bloomberg's signature program. According to City Room, Doctoroff considers the two-year-old environmental blueprint on par with such grand projects as Central Park and the development of the Manhattan street grid.

Editor’s note: This year’s reauthorization of the federal transportation funding bill will be one of the most important opportunities in history for the nation’s advocates of livable streets, sustainable transportation and smart growth. But it’s going to be a complicated process. We’d like to demystify it for you, and to that end we’ll be featuring regular posts from Yonah Freemark, an independent researcher currently working in France on comparative urban development as part of a Gordon Grand Fellowship from Yale University. He is also the author of Streetsblog Network member blog The Transport Politic.

While President Barack Obama promoted wind power and cap-and-trade legislation, VP Joe Biden spent Earth Day talking up transit. Public radio's "The Takeaway" reports that Biden held a presser at a bus maintenance facility in Landover, Maryland, to tout a $300 million investment in hybrid buses and other municipal vehicles as part of the federal stimulus package. Said Biden:

The news coming out of Washington last week jacked up expectations for national transportation policy to new heights. Cabinet members Ray LaHood and Shaun Donovan announced a partnership to connect transportation and housing policy, branded as the "Sustainable Communities Initiative." The second-in-command at DOT, Vice Admiral Thomas Barrett, told a New York audience that "building communities" is a top priority at his agency.

AARP announced today that it will join the Transportation for America campaign to advocate for a "broad restructuring" of national transportation policy. In a letter sent to Congressional leaders last week [PDF], AARP said that it is "working to enable older adults to live independently in their homes and communities throughout their lifespan, and transportation is critical to maintaining the community connections that make that possible."

Here's some good news: The Brooklyn Paper reports that livable streets advocate Teresa Toro has been reinstated as chair of the transportation committee at Brooklyn Community Board 1. 

If you want to join a Manhattan community board and haven't yet filed an application, you have until tomorrow. Manhattan has the earliest (and by far the most well-publicized) deadline of the five boroughs, so no need to panic if you intend to apply elsewhere.

A tipster sends word that opponents of the Kent Avenue bike lane are making appeals to Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, a long-time supporter of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway. A large group representing the Williamsburg Hasidic community showed up at Velazquez's office last week, our source tells us, to register their opposition to the bike lane, which is a precursor to the full build-out of the greenway.