Charles Komanoff
Recent Posts
Why Gridlock Sam’s Traffic Plan Could Go the Distance
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Saturday will mark two months of non-stop acclaim for Gridlock Sam’s traffic-pricing plan. The accolades kicked off on March 5 with a gushing op-ed, “Meet Sam Schwartz,” by New York Times emeritus editor Bill Keller, and they haven’t let up. The Wall Street Journal, Transportation Nation, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, Channel 13, and Crain’s New […]
Twenty Years Later, Horrific Washington Square Park Crash Still Resonates
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Twenty years ago today, as throngs of New Yorkers were sunning themselves in Washington Square Park on the first warm day of spring, a 1987 Oldsmobile zoomed down Washington Place, gunned through the stop sign at Greene Street, plowed across the sidewalk at Washington Square East and smashed into the park. When the car finally […]
The Greater Good of Bike Tolls
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Sam Schwartz’s proposal to collect a half-a-buck per bicycle entry on bridges to the Manhattan Central Business District is putting New York cyclists in a bind. Cyclists, like drivers, don’t relish paying for something they’ve been getting for free, particularly when they feel they’re being singled out. Yet Schwartz’s bike-toll idea is merely one part, […]
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Wastefulness
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The Republican presidential campaign recently produced a couple of characteristic bits of what Americans, for lack of a better word, call “news”: Newt Gingrich declaring that New Yorkers “live in high rises and ride the subway” and thus don’t care about gasoline prices; and Tea Party “activists” in Virginia, Florida and Maine convinced that smart-growth […]
Cost of Tappan Zee Mega-Bridge Could Cause Tolls to Triple
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“Rate shock” was the name given to the electricity industry’s financial crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, when utility company finances buckled under the weight of escalating nuclear power costs. Not only were the costs of the nukes spiraling out of control, but the electricity rate hikes required to pay for them caused energy use […]
Cuomo’s $320 Million Transit Cut Could Cost NYC Dearly
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Albany’s latest raid of transit funds could hit New York City particularly hard. To help pay for his upper-middle-class tax cut, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state legislature are stripping an estimated $320 million a year in revenues from the MTA payroll tax. Although the legislation is said to contain a pledge to find equivalent […]
Can the 99 Percent Movement Reinvigorate Congestion Pricing?
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Not yet three months old, Occupy Wall Street stands this week on the threshold of its first big concrete win. Governor Andrew Cuomo has called a special session of the New York State Legislature, reportedly to recalibrate the state income tax to draw more from the one or two percent at the top and less […]
At Last, a Times Critic Gets It: NYC Is Best Absorbed From a Bike
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The Arts Section of today’s Times leads with a gorgeous meditation on cycling in New York that is so unabashedly positive, it’ll take your breath away. At least it took mine. In my 50 years as a Times reader — nearly 40 of them as a daily bicycle rider — I can’t recall any essay […]
New Tech Promises Less Subway Crowding, If Albany Doesn’t Beggar the MTA
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Last week’s news that NYC Transit is planning to boost L train service isn’t just good for residents of Williamsburg. It points to a new era of faster and more reliable service throughout the subway system as the new signal technology known as Communications Based Train Control (CBTC) begins to take hold. As the Times […]
Why Is the Manhattan Institute Afraid of Livable Streets?
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The term “livable streets” first surfaced in 1981. That’s when UC Berkeley urban planning professor Donald Appleyard made it the title of his path-breaking new book on the social effects of cars on cities. But it was the advent of Streetsblog and the livable streets movement 25 years later that brought the term into public […]
Guess Who Has a Lot to Lose From an MTA Meltdown: Drivers
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Can you spot the flaw in this excerpt from the New York Times’ Saturday backgrounder on MTA chief Jay Walder’s pending departure for Hong Kong? [T]he future of New York’s cash-poor transit system, depended on by millions of riders a day, has now fallen directly to Mr. Cuomo, who must pick a successor. The passage […]
Look Ma, No Windshield!
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My teenage son’s baseball game in Inwood on Wednesday gave me a fine excuse to ride the full length of the Hudson River Greenway and back. Watching my son’s Downtown team dispatch the Harlem club was a treat, but the real blast for me was my ride home. The trek up was easy enough. I […]