Aaron Naparstek

One of the most oft-repeated slams against congestion pricing we heard at this week's Congestion Mitigation Committee hearings is that congestion pricing would be a "regressive tax," an unfair burden to poorer New Yorkers.

New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will declare his support today for a national carbon tax, according to a report posted this morning on the New York Times City Room blog by metro reporter Sewell Chan:

Help shape the neighborhood streets of the Upper West Side. Work with your neighbors to create beautiful, green streets with safer bike lanes, great walking spaces, less traffic and cleaner air. The Upper West Side Streets Renaissance Campaign is holding a series of events aimed at empowering residents to re-imagine neighborhood streets and make their visions a reality.

If you haven't heard it already, WNYC's Arun Venugopal has an outstanding piece on New York City's rapidly changing transportation policies regarding bicycling. We hear from T.A.'s Noah Budnick, Copenhagen's Jan Gehl, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, NYPD Chief Ray Kelly, Judy Ross of Times Up, and a moron in a huge SUV. Click here or press the play button below:

If you're the type of person who has been following the Yankee Stadium parking garage story, or the Hudson Yards zoning story or the story about the city block in Prospect Heights that's being leveled and turned into a gigantic surface parking lot, you may enjoy James Howard Kunstler's column this week. The author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, has lately noticed that many American towns "are obsessed to the point of mania with the issue of parking and more generally the management of cars, and much of their spending is directed to those ends." He writes:

Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson was at Town Hall on Saturday night for the New Yorker Festival's "How New Yorkers Ride Bikes," hosted by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Clarence wasn't allowed to film the event so he published a nice write-up on StreetFilms. Some excerpts:

The interim redesign of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street is done. Tables, chairs, planters and some of those giant granite blocks from DOT's Bridges Division have been set out as multipurpose bollard-bench-tables atop a gravelly, earth-tone pavement surface. 

The Department of Transportation revealed plans for New York City's first-ever physically-separated bike lane, or "cycle track," at a Manhattan Community Board 4 meeting last night. The new bike path will run southbound on Ninth Avenue from W. 23rd to W. 16th Street in Manhattan. Unlike the typical Class II on-street bike lane in which cyclists mix with motor vehicle traffic, this new design will create an exclusive path for bicycles between the sidewalk and parked cars.

Driving (carefully) with Dutch "shared space" guru and traffic engineer Hans Monderman.

Car & Travel magazine is published by the Automobile Club of New York, also known as AAA. In addition to being the friendly guys who schlep out at a moment's notice to tow your broken-down car, the Automobile Club has, over the course of decades, done everything in its power to ensure that nothing like congestion pricing will ever be implemented in New York City. They even opposed park-o-meters when they were first introduced in the 1930's.