Queens Pols Rally to Keep Using Gioia’s District as Their Doormat

4:25 PM EDT on March 27, 2008

Tony Avella, Leroy Comrie, Melinda Katz, David Weprin "and other possible members of the Queens Delegation" are holding an anti-congestion pricing rally tomorrow morning at 8:00 on the Queens side of the 59th Street Bridge, according to an e-mail from the Queens Civic Congress.

Notably, Eric Gioia (right), who represents the traffic-burdened district where the rally will be taking place, is not listed as a participant. Perhaps he realizes that standing in front of a backdrop of rush hour traffic, yelling, "We need to keep this as is!" isn't going to play all that well with his constituents.

But who knows. Maybe he'll show up. Despite the clear benefit to his district (only 3.2% of his constituents regularly commute by car into the pricing zone), Gioia has yet to come out in support of congestion pricing. You can be sure that the car commuting Council members to his east are happy about that. For them, Gioia's district is little more than a highway on-ramp that helps them avoid the toll at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

Queens Pols Rally to Keep Using Gioia’s District as Their Doormat

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