Yankee Stadium Parking Scandal

The people of the South Bronx will organize against the subsidized construction of parking garages for the new Yankee Stadium, one resident said yesterday.

This morning a representative of Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Jr., read a statement of protest ahead of an expected Tuesday vote on the city's deal with the Yankees to subsidize the construction of three parking garages.

As Streetsblog reported back in April, the city is set to subsidize thousands of parking spaces for the new Yankee Stadium by issuing hundreds of millions in tax-exempt bonds for parking deck construction.

From the Tri-State Transportation Campaign's latest newsletter, three examples of how City Hall contradicts its stated Long-Term Planning and Sustainability goals with policies that foster more automobile dependence:

What could be worse than replacing neighborhood parks with private parking decks, built with the specific intent of increasing car trips by the tens of thousands through a community already suffering from so much disease-causing pollution that its nickname is "Asthma Alley"?

The first in a three-part series on New York City parking policy.

Anybody else catch the Discovery Channel's 2-hour special on global warming on Sunday night?  It recapped the many problems we can expect to see from global warming: potential death for millions of people, millions more forced to move as coastal cities are permanently flooded, extinction for many species of plants and animals, more frequent severe weather events like forest fires, hurricanes and tornadoes, and positive feedback loops that reinforce the warming. It all would sort of a change life as we've come to know it - for the worse. Complete transformation of the planet: Every other issue sort of pales in comparison, and it makes one wonder, how can we be concerned about anything else?

Oil Drum points to a recent spike in motorist insanity on Staten Island this week: A retired Port Authority cop out with his wife, pulls in to a strip mall to pick up some Chinese food. An ex-NYPD detective jumps out of his car and guns the guy down in a barrage of 17 bullets. Why? He had been driving too slowly. Add to that, a crash on the Brooklyn-bound side of the Verrazano backing up traffic for miles and a car plowing into the front of a house, and it's just another day in Shaolin.