Cars
Basics
When a Two-Car Garage Just Isn’t Enough
There are 255,794 vehicles registered in Staten Island, and as the borough's population has taken off in the last few years, some of the local parking customs have become increasingly strained. A story published Monday in the Staten Island Advance illuminates just how entitled the people of that borough still feel to free parking -- not just on their own blocks, but directly in front of their homes. It tells the story of an anonymous Great Kills resident who, when a neighbor parked in front of his house, left the following note on the windshield:
April 3, 2007
StreetFilm: Room to Breathe
Inspired by a poster produced by Portland's Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA) in the mid-1990s, this weekend Transportation Alternatives gathered a gaggle of cyclists on 42nd Street in Manhattan to stage New York's own dramatic illustration of how much street space would be saved if everyone riding an automobile were traveling on a bicycle or bus.
April 2, 2007
Congestion Relief: It’s About Your Health
Yesterday's New York Times editorial on transportation policy makes a strong case for linking concerns about traffic congestion to concerns about health. It's worth looking at the full text of All Choked Up, the report from Environmental Defense that the paper references when arguing that in order to achieve his goal of a sustainable city,
April 2, 2007
Breaking News: Frieden Tapped as DOT Commish
Please note: This was an April Fool's Day post...
Dr. Thomas Frieden accepting his new job as DOT commissioner this morning in Central Park.
April 1, 2007
Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?
Yesterday marked the opening of the Sexy Green Auto Show at the Eden Project bio theme park in Cornwall, UK. It's a display meant to demonstrate that "green" cars (like the Ford Focus Flexi Fuel bio-ethanol number at right) don't have to fit the clunky Birkenstock stereotype. As the Guardian notes,
March 30, 2007
Ad Nauseam: Tiki Barber and His Cadillac Escalade
While reading the NY Times essay about the woman who drives back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge the other day, I was reminded of the Tiki Barber ads for the Cadillac Escalade. The spot that premiered during the Super Bowl is a moody, impressionistic montage that shows the former New York Giants running back driving solo through the streets and over the bridges of New York, talking about "seizing opportunities." The tagline is "Life. Liberty. And the Pursuit."
March 28, 2007
Going Nowhere Fast
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.
March 26, 2007
StreetFilms: Interview with Parking Guru Donald Shoup
"I don't see why people have to pay market rents to live in a neighborhood but the cars should live rent-free. In New York you have expensive housing for people and free parking for cars. You've got your priorities exactly the wrong way around."
March 20, 2007
Things Heating Up Over at UncivilServants.org
Over at the site UncivilServants.org, the Transportation Alternatives project where readers can post photos of illegally parked cars sporting government-issued parking permits (like the court officers above who are comfortably ensconced in a no-parking zone on Crosby Street), there's a hot thread on whether showing the plate numbers of the vehicles constitutes a potentially dangerous invasion of privacy for police officers and others who are caught in violation. What do Streetsblog readers think?
March 19, 2007