Sarah Goodyear
Recent Posts
Pedestrian Safety: The National Picture
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Whose light is it, anyway? A recent story in USA Today talked about the growing national movement for pedestrian and bicyclist safety. The piece included a table that showed the number of pedestrians killed state by state in 2005 (Florida, with 3.24 deaths per 100,000 population, was the worst for pedestrians, while New Hampshire was […]
Congestion Relief: It’s About Your Health
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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, […]
Bloomberg Says He’ll Veto Pedicab Bill
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Speaking on his weekly radio show on WABC, Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced he would veto the City Council’s legislation capping the number of pedicabs in the city at 325: However, the mayor also said he may be amenable to a revised version that simply raised the cap on the vehicles, known as pedicabs. He suggested […]
Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?
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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, [T]he main task of […]
Ad Nauseam: Tiki Barber and His Cadillac Escalade
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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 […]
Going Nowhere Fast
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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. Shey, who is […]
Studies Refute DOT’s Claim That One-Way Avenues Are Safer
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Prospect Park West at 8th Street, September 16, 2006, 9:45 am. "Higher vehicle speeds are strongly associated with a greater likelihood of crashes involving pedestrians as well as more serious pedestrian injuries." American Journal of Public Health Last Thursday, DOT Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia presented a plan to turn a pair of two-way avenues running […]
In Defense of Horodniceanu
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This comment from Carolyn Konheim of Community Consulting Services, which appeared on a thread that stemmed from our earlier report about the likely appointment of Michael Horodniceanu (right) as the next NYC DOT Commissioner, provides an interesting counterpoint to the "cars-first" rap he has been tagged with: Michael Horodniceanu is more progressive than generally appreciated. […]
Congestion Pricing: Does New York Have the Will?
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Brad Aaron reports: Political will, holistic planning, centralized management. That’s what Malcolm Murray-Clark says it takes to implement an effective congestion pricing plan. He should know. The Director of Congestion Charging at Transport for London (TfL) oversees a program that is as ambitious as it is successful — a program that went from idea to […]
StreetFilms: Interview with Parking Guru Donald Shoup
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Donald Shoup on the High Cost of Free Parking Running time: 6 minutes 37 seconds "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 […]
Things Heating Up Over at UncivilServants.org
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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 […]
Park Slope says: “One Way? No Way.” CB6 says: “Let’s Study It.”
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In the aftermath of last Thursday’s CB6 transportation committee meeting on the DOT’s proposal to convert Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn to one-way arterials, some observers are noting that the motion that came out of the meeting may not accurately reflect the input of the nearly 700 people who came out to […]