Parking

Congestion pricing advocate Carolyn Konheim and consulting partner Brian Ketcham are advising the Bloomberg administration to drop its resistance to a congestion pricing Environmental Impact Study.

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:

Yes, the Yankees' season is over. But on the bright side, this morning the city handed the team a nice consolation prize: $225 million in tax exempt bonds for parking deck construction at the new Yankee Stadium.

Community activists in Jackson Heights have been complaining about congestion at the corner at 73rd St. and 37th Ave. (right) for years. A major traffic study of the area is underway, but according to a DOT spokesman, the department didn't want to wait to implement "short-term initiatives" that could ease the problem. Problem is, some of the activists--including Will Sweeney of the Western Jackson Heights Alliance--aren't necessarily thrilled with the department's solution.

Last weekend the New York Times published a nice piece about a resurgence in downtown Manhattan street life.

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.

With apologies for my carbon footprint, I recently returned from a working tour of eight cities Down Under. The trip included an invitation to Melbourne to work with the staff of the city's successful new public space development, Federation Square, and to help lead a Placemaking training course that included many city staff, local developers and "place managers." In the process, I had the opportunity to learn a few things relevant to my hometown, New York City.

Today's Crain's Insider, available to subscribers only, reports on the next steps for the Bloomberg Administration's broader Long-Term Sustainability Plan now that congestion pricing has cleared its first hurdle in Albany: