Air Quality
Basics
Gridlock Sam: Avert Climate Catastrophe, Ride a Vespa®
While Parisians are starting to complain that "an invasion of noisy scooters and motorcycles and a rise in accidents involving pedestrian and motorcyclists" is one of the "unintended consequences" of Mayor Bertrand Delanoe's traffic reduction policies, "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz's consulting firm just issued a report claiming that New York City could better meet its long-term sustainability goals by adding more scooters to the traffic mix. Commissioned for Piaggio, the Italian manufacturer of Vespa scooters, the study says:
February 12, 2007
New York New Visions Tackles “Sustainable” New York Future
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.
February 6, 2007
Study: Kids Who Live Near Freeways Have Trouble Breathing
A new study to be published in the Feb. 17 issue of the Lancet makes a strong case for the link between proximity to vehicular traffic and poor lung function in children. An article on Medical News Today sums up the report, which is currently available online to Lancet subscribers.
January 30, 2007
Uncool New York: NYC Lags in Combatting Climate Change
Chris Smith has an outstanding story in this week's New York Magazine pointing out that New York City has fallen behind other world cities in addressing climate change and challenging the Bloomberg Administration to do more. An excerpt:
January 16, 2007
Making Hell’s Kitchen Less Hellish
Monday night was the first meeting of the Ninth Avenue Renaissance project. About 130 neighborhood stakeholders filled the gym at the Holy Cross School in Midtown to begin a process to transform Ninth Avenue from a dysfunctional, traffic-choked, polluted highway into, what organizer Christine Berthet says should be "a neighborhood Main Street" for Hell's Kitchen and Clinton.
January 10, 2007
Bloomberg: “New York City 2030: Accepting the Challenge”
Is happening right now....Catch it at NYC.gov
December 12, 2006
Urban Density and a Pocketbook Plea for Congestion Pricing
Of the ten largest cities in the United States, New York has far and away the greatest population density: 26,402.9 people per square mile, more than double the second densest big city, Chicago. The chart at right shows how the largest metropolitan areas stack up in terms of core population, overall population and core population density. This fact alone should force New York City authorities to think differently than the rest of the country on all sorts of matters of public policy. New York is a quantitatively different animal than the other big American metropolitan regions in terms of percentage of people that live in the core, density and size of the core and size of the metropolitan area.
September 26, 2006