Op/Ed

From a Streetsblog tipster:

This is the third essay from Alex Marshall, who has written extensively on transportation issues as a journalist and author. He is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association, where he edits the bi-weekly Spotlight on the Region newsletter.

On Earth Day Mayor Mike Bloomberg placed transportation and environmental issues at the top of New York City's political agenda. He took a major step towards changing the conventional wisdom that traffic congestion is a sign of the city's vibrancy and economic health. And he joined the list of forward-thinking global mayors like London's Ken Livingstone and Bertrand Delanoe in Paris who have said that excessive automobile dependence is a drag on the urban economy, detrimental to public health, and a contributor to global climate change.

As New Yorkers well know, sidewalks around subway stops and major transit hubs are often intensely crowded. Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC team is aware of this and buried on page 48 of the Technical Report supplementing PlaNYC's transportation recommendations is a new program called "Safe Routes to Transit" (SR2T). While the attention to pedestrian issues is welcome, given the scope of the congestion problem near major transit stops, SR2T is a fairly modest proposal and is best viewed as a good beginning, a point of departure for significantly improving the walking part of transit trips.

 When the Supreme Court held this week that the Environmental Protection Agency does, in fact, possess the latitude to protect the environment, the New York Times called it "a victory for a world whose environment seems increasingly threatened by climate change."

Theodore Kheel (pictured right), has been called by The New York Times "the most influential peacemaker in New York City in the last half-century" in light of the fact that he has participated in the resolution of more than 30,000 labor disputes. Kheel has founded several related foundations devoted to resolving the conflict between the environment and development, and has been an advocate for mass transit for over fifty years. He is a regular Streetsblog reader. A shorter version of this essay appeared in the New York Times this Sunday.

This weekend's City section of the New York Times featured a mind-blowing essay by children's-book writer Sarah Shey about her habit of taking her one-year-old son out for drives in the city -- drives with no destination or purpose in mind, in which she crossed and recrossed the Brooklyn Bridge endless times.

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.

"What became clear to me in this discussion was that the engineers were thinking from the motorists' viewpoint."  -- Iris Weinshall, New York Newsday, April 29, 2001