Cars

Congestion in Jackson Heights: The DOT needs some new ideas

The Sierra Club points out that in India, there are currently about 7 cars per 1,000 persons (as compared to nearly 500 per 1,000 in the US). With the advent of the $3,000 car, that is surely about to change. The Independent's Andrew Buncombe reports:

On his frequent runs and bike rides around his Jackson Heights neighborhood and nearby Corona and Elmhurst, Will Sweeney recently started noticing something strange: a lot of license plates from North Carolina. Sweeney writes:

When George Monbiot, the popular columnist for the UK's Guardian newspaper, gets interested in something, he digs and digs until he's found what he's satisfied is the truth. Monbiot is interested in global warming, and presents in Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (U.S. Edition: South End Press, May 2007) a heavily footnoted 215-page brisk and compelling case for why we should all be very worried. This is probably the clearest and broadest book yet published about global warming, with doses of skepticism, inquisitiveness, sobriety and optimism. Every Streetsblog reader should read it. More important, every Streetsblog reader should get it into the hands of five Streetsblog non-readers and ask each of them to do the same.

According to a new U.S. Census Bureau analysis of data from the American Community Survey, most Americans drive to work -- alone, and public transportation commuters are concentrated in a handful of large cities. From the Bureau's press release:

The Staten Island Advance ran an article last Thursday about a "perfect storm" of crushing Staten Island-bound traffic on the Gowanus Expressway and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. To give you a sense of the frustrated tone of the article, it was entitled "21-Month Nightmare: Agency Offers Zero Solutions for Verrazano Lane Mess." Here's how it began:

Bud & Walter Brewer Collection/Tulsa Historical Society, via The New York Times.

The New York Times reports:

A third-grader was hit on her way to school here two weeks ago.