Today’s Headlines

  • Major report

    Streets Blog should cover this major report from Environmental Defense. It was just released today

    http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/6117_AllChokedUp_NYCTrafficandHealthReport.pdf

  • Damian

    re: Traffic Pollution the “Outdoor Version of Secondhand Smoke”

    I’ve always been amazed to see how vigorously people will speak out against a few smokers congregating outside a building — while remaining completely oblivious to the CO output of thousands of passing motor vehicles.

  • What would happen if you spent 30 minutes in a windowless garage with a car that’s running? I think that is a lot more dangerous than smokers in bars…right?

  • Re: “Outdoor Secondhand Smoke”:

    –> “People are not going for joy rides in their cars,” said the chairman of the City Council Transportation Committee, John Liu (D-Queens). He said many residents drive “because they don’t have real mass transit options.”

    Could someone send Mr. Liu a copy of the NY Times City-section article that was the subject of the article here on SB earlier this week, “Going Nowhere Fast”:

    “…a mind-blowing essay by children’s-book writer Sarah Shey about her habit of taking her one-year-old son out for drives in the city — drives with no destination or purpose in mind, in which she crossed and recrossed the Brooklyn Bridge endless times.”

    Sure sounds like Mr. Liu is oblivious to the secretive joyriders out there, whose mysteries can only be confirmed by reading, say, The New York Times.

    Hope Ms. Shey’s son isn’t among the busloads of NYC kids with childhood asthma… or at least, she is aware why he has it.

  • (P.S. That’s not to say that Mr. Liu isn’t correct in stating that there is room for improvement in the mass-transit department – say, with funding generated from a congestion charge…)