Aaron Naparstek

Norman "the Human Tape Rec'oder" Oder , the hardest working advocacy journalist in New York City, has really been digging in to the important but not-particularly-sexy issue of parking policy at Forest City Enterprise's proposed "Atlantic Yards" development in Brooklyn.

Front row, left to right: Councilmember Melinda Katz, Councilmember Leroy Comrie, Councilmember Helen Sears, Councilmember David Weprin, Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free spokesman Walter McCaffrey,  Ray Irrera from the Queens Chamber of Commerce is behind McCaffrey, Joe Conley of Queens Community Board 2 and John Corlett from AAA. (Photo: Aaron Naparstek)

There will be a memorial bike ride for Eric Ng, the cyclist killed by a drunk driver on the Hudson River Greenway last week. Details below. Also, here is a note from the Visual Resistance blog. VR are the guys who make the "ghost bikes:"

WNYC 93.9 FM

Going through my morning headline round-up I clicked on ABC Channel 7's story, Should There be Tolls in Manhattan? While my eye was being drawn to the giant, red "Lukoil: We Love Cars" ad banner (What genius came up with, "Traffic: Sponsored by Lukoil?"), an animated little Gen Y hipster wearing a Toyota.com t-shirt jumped out in front of the text urging me to click him to hear more about Toyota's gargantuan new FJ Cruiser. The automobile and oil industry ad assault was so aggressive, I never even got around to reading the news story about how New York City is losing billions of dollars every year due to overwhelming gridlock. Is anyone still wondering why traffic reduction is a tough sell?  

Study Discovers $13+ Billion in Annual Costs Due to Traffic Congestion (PFNYC)Region Loses as Many as 52,000 Jobs Every Year Mayor Says Fee on Peak Traffic Is Not Likely (NYT) Fees To Ease Midtown Traffic Jams May Get a New Look From City Hall (Sun) Drivers get brake on congest tax (News) Choked Streets Cost City … Continued

While New York City inexplicably continues to open up Central Park to motor vehicles from Thanksgiving to New Year's as a "holiday traffic mitigation," London transformed its most popular shopping area this weekend into a car-free pedestrian zone for holiday shoppers and visitors. Stretches of Oxford and Regents Streets were made into car-free zones this Saturday, December 2 from 10:30 am to 5:00 pm. Mayor Ken Livingstone wants to transform Oxford Street into a permanent pedestrian zone with light rail running down the middle. This weekend's event was set up as a test. This London reports:

This morning, the Partnership for New York City publicly released its long-awaited study, Growth or Gridlock: The Economic Case for Traffic Relief and Transit Improvements for a Greater New York. London's congestion charging initiative was kick-started, in large part, by a similar report published by London First, that city's version of the Partnership. From today's report: 

Though many New Yorkers are learning about congestion charging for the first time this week, the transportation policy community has been working to sell this idea to a resistant public for more than three decades. What happens when Nobel Prize winning theory meets bare-fisted New York City politics? A heavily condensed version of this story ran in this week's New York Magazine:  

Car-Free lunchtime on Madison Avenue, April 19, 1971. New York City policy-makers haven't seriously considered traffic reduction since the Lindsay Administration. (Image courtesy of Jeff Zupan)