Aaron Naparstek

The New York Times metro reporting team has launched its new blog, City Room, with a flattering profile of Streetsblog by Sewell Chan, the web site's bureau chief.

Is Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan, a regressive tax, unfair to New York City's poor and working class?

At a press conference today, a group of Bronx and northern Manhattan elected officials have signed on in support of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing effort. They are:

Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan continues to assemble an impressive management team.

Last night, Brooklyn's Community Board 6 narrowly voted in favor of a resolution supporting the Department of Transportation's plan to put Park Slope's 9th Street on a "Road Diet."

In the fall of 2005, prior to Mayor Bloomberg's second term election victory, I began working on a story for New York Magazine about the broad-based coalition that was coming together to push for congestion pricing and a whole array of new urban environmental policies for New York City. While that story never quite came together as a big magazine feature, it eventually inspired the creation of Streetsblog. Ultimately, I used some of my reporting to write this longer piece about the numerous failed efforts over the last four decades to create some sort of congestion pricing system for New York City.

This Friday we'll be celebrating Streetsblog's first full year of operation and the remarkable progress that New York City's Livable Streets movement has made in pushing transportation policy and urban environmental issues to the very top of the civic agenda.

If you think handing out traffic tickets to Central Park cyclists or random seizures of locked bicycles qualifies as outrageous police behavior, check out what happened to Stephan Orsak when he tried to leave the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport on his Brompton folding bicycle. He says that he was pulled over by a police officer, harassed and then shot with a Taser stun gun. He has started a blog dedicated to the case:

Department of Transportation First Deputy Commissioner Judith Bergtraum, a top aide to former commissioner Iris Weinshall, is leaving DOT for a job at the City University of New York where Weinshall is now a vice chancellor.