New York Magazine’s Chris Smith, who calls congestion pricing a trojan horse, suspects fewer cars and more trees may be a "green screen" for mayor Bloomberg’s real estate development agenda:

Mayor
Bloomberg’s Earth Day speech compiled 127 ideas for making the city
more "sustainable" by 2030. But congestion pricing has dominated the
conversation ever since. Which may be just what the mayor needs to get
the rest of PlaNYC going.

Last week, the mayor added $150 million to the city budget to launch
his 2030 initiatives. Yet he’s deferring some relatively easy
fixes like pushing harder to "green" the building code. And the
sketchiness of when and how he intends to deliver on the grandest ideas
feeds suspicions that PlaNYC is a green fig leaf for boosting
real-estate development.

Bloomberg has created a profoundly hopeful moment in the environmental
life of the city. It would be truly depressing if the primary result of
the Olympics bid and PlaNYC turns out to be the same: lots of big new
buildings, only this time with Bloomberg’s million new trees growing in
the shadows."

Photo: BigMikeNYC/Flickr