Michael Bloomberg

Speaking on his weekly radio show on WABC, Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced he would veto the City Council's legislation capping the number of pedicabs in the city at 325:

 

With DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall set to depart city government in three weeks, sources say that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is close to announcing her replacement. The Mayor's choice will have a profound impact on day-to-day neighborhood life as well as the City of New York's long-term future. Though the DOT commissioner job search has barely been covered by the local press, this may very well be one of the most important decisions of the last 1,000 days of the Bloomberg Administration.

The first in a three-part series on New York City parking policy.

Below is a letter from the Park Slope Civic Council to Mayor Bloomberg and local elected representatives regarding the City's plan to transform Sixth and Seventh Avenue's into one-way streets. It's lengthy but it's worth a read (and full disclosure: I'm a trustee of the Civic Council):

More on tomorrow's rally and press conference on the city's proposed pedicab regulations: Chad Marlow of the Public Advocacy Group, the pedicab industry's lobbyist, sends along this press release arguing that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Speaker Christine Quinn's proposal to put a cap on the number of pedicabs and ban electric-assist technology harms the industry and compromises safety while, really, helping no one in particular. We don't like publishing press releases verbatim, but this one is really pretty good reading. You get the sense that these new pedicab regs were designed with the same level of sensitivity and awareness as the city's new school bus system. Here's what the pedicab industry has to say:

After Mayor Bloomberg's December announcement of his PlaNYC initiative to prepare for a sustainable New York of 9 million people by 2030, New York New Visions, the group of architects and planners originally organized around Ground Zero rebuilding, announced it was expanding its scope to tackle the new challenge. Last night, in a stark white room in the basement of the American Institute of Architects building in Greenwich Village, a collection of almost equally stark white faces began reimagining the New York of the future.  

From today's Crain's Insider: