Transportation Alternatives

A chart illustrating the number who commute by auto to the Central Business District from Bruce Schaller's study for the Manhattan Institute, Battling Traffic: What New Yorkers Think About Road Pricing.

Below is an interesting e-mail sent yesterday to Transportation Alternatives. T.A. forwarded it to Streetsblog and we all thought that it would make fodder for an interesting discussion. The letter's author gave Streetsblog permission to publish it. One of my questions is whether people think that this cyclist's approach is a productive way for New York City's urban environmental advocates to press their case?

Pedestrian injury and fatality data from the Transportation Alternatives Crash Map

The New York Sun has the first of what will be a littany of congestion pricing stories coming out in the next few months. Finally, with city and state elections out of the way, New York City is about to embark on a substantive discussion of its transportation, traffic congestion and long-term sustainability issues. Some excerpts below:

Citywide Coalition for Traffic Relief Press Conference A few quick scenes from yesterday's event Running time: 2:02

Councilmember Gale Brewer joined Transportation Alternatives and representatives of community groups from all over the city at this morning's Citywide Coalition for Traffic Relief rally on the steps of City Hall. The Coalition currently includes 129 community organizations.

Paul White of TransAlt and Gene Russianoff of Straphangers' Campaign deliver the Golden Snail.

Transportation Alternatives' new study, Traffic's Human Toll, is getting picked up all over the place (CBS, NBC, Post). The report is an update on the famous Appleyard Study and it found that New Yorkers who live on high traffic streets have a measurably lower quality of life. Not exactly a huge surprise, and yet this is the first time that anyone has ever quantified it. The study is yet another argument in on behalf of an aggressive traffic reduction program for New York City.

For the last two years or so Transportation Alternatives' Karla Quintero has been working on a New York City-based update of the famous "Appleyard Study" examining the social costs of traffic. Karla presented the study's preliminary findings last year at a forum I helped organize in Brooklyn and it was really interesting. This event is sure to be a good one. From Transalt: