“Gridlock” Sam Schwartz

9th St. and 4th Ave.: "A dangerous crossing that divides surrounding neighborhoods and inhibits street life."

It's the New Math: a dollar-a-trip rise in the cost of fuel for a car trip to Manhattan is cutting traffic almost as much as Mayor Bloomberg's eight-dollar toll plan would have done.

A new Prospect Park skating rink and recreational facility will come with a smaller parking lot and improved bike access, reports neighborhood blog Hawthorne Street. The plan to re-design the southeast area of Brooklyn's flagship park, unveiled at a public meeting this Monday, will also restrict car access at one entrance, but stops short of doing away with the current rink's parking lot altogether. It remains to be seen whether the re-design will address the hazardous entrance at Parkside and Ocean.

Only three days remain until 20 percent of government parking placards must be surrendered, but as Gridlock Sam wrote here last month, that should be just the beginning of placard reform. Case in point: Uncivil Servants featured a story last week of an Upper East Side synagogue that manufactures its own bogus placards while the 19th Precinct turns a blind eye and infamous Community Board 8 lends a hand. Uncivil Servants reports that employees of the Park East Synagogue on East 68th Street have been getting away with the printing of homemade placards since the attacks of September 11, 2001:

The following was contributed by Samuel I. Schwartz, AKA Gridlock Sam.

 

As if we didn't already know it, last week's Traffic Mitigation Commission hearings revealed that opposition to Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan among outer borough and suburban legislators may very well be intractable. Even in traffic-crushed districts where one would almost certainly find a majority in favor of some form of congestion pricing, we didn't see a single state legislator willing to stand up for the Mayor's plan. While support for congestion pricing was surprisingly strong among citizens and civic groups that showed up to testify, elected representatives' timidity was no surprise. As a Transport for London spokesman told me a while back, "If congestion pricing had to go through a legislative process it probably wouldn't have happened."

In today's Daily News, former New York City Deputy Traffic Commissioner "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz says congestion pricing should "proceed now" and offers four additional ideas for creating a little breathing room on Manhattan's streets: