Aaron Naparstek

Congestion Mitigation Commission chairman Marc Shaw has a big job ahead of him.

 Photo: Lars Klove, Sixth Avenue and 13th Street, Manhattan.

April Greene reports on Monday's congestion pricing panel discussion at the New School:

The Grand Army Plaza Coalition (GAPCo) and the Design Trust for Public Space are launching an "Ideas Competition" called Reinventing Grand Army Plaza. Building on GAPCo's on-going effort to re-envision this historic Brooklyn crossroads, the Ideas Competition will solicit new, creative proposals for Grand Army Plaza's re-design. Top submissions will be exhibited in the summer of 2008 at the Brooklyn Public Library or the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Cities won't wait for national governments to solve their pressing problems, argues Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City in this week's Economist:

We already know that the New York Rangers' center Sean Avery loves riding his bike. Now we learn that forward Brendan Shanahan and several other teammate take the subway to the office. From yesterday's New York Times:

Spencer Wilking reports:

Blinding headlights make cycling difficult on a mile-long uptown stretch of the Hudson River Greenway.

Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller's team at the Department of Transportation has been taking ideas offered up by Traffic Mitigation Commission members and running them through NYMTC's regional traffic model. Schaller's job is to help the Commission determine how effective each of these ideas will be in cutting traffic and reducing total vehicle miles traveled in New York City. To keep its $354.5 million federal transportation grant, the City must reduce VMT 6.3 percent using road pricing.

I'm not sure that this particular set of facts matters one bit to Traffic Mitigation Commission member Richard Brodsky, who claims to represent the little guy in the congestion pricing debate, but New York City's Independent Budget Office released a report today demolishing the argument that pricing is unfair to the poor and working class (download it here).