Sarah Goodyear
Recent Posts
Bush Administration Advocates for Congestion Pricing
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Here’s some more fodder for the debate that was prompted by today’s earlier post about charging more for parking on city streets. This story, too, comes from the Wall Street Journal, and is available online to subscribers only. But you might want to run out and buy today’s paper to read the whole thing, because […]
The Price of Parking: Let the Free Market Decide?
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The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this weekend by Conor Dougherty on the municipal move toward charging more for parking. It’s available online to paid subscribers only, but here’s a taste: As anyone who has ever circled the block for a marginally better spot knows, parking is an American obsession. It occasionally boils over […]
Streetfilms: An Interview with Sam Schwartz
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Sam Schwartz, aka "Gridlock Sam," is best-known to many New Yorkers through his Daily News column about the city’s quotidian traffic woes. Schwartz is the president and CEO of Sam Schwartz LLC, a traffic planning and engineering firm that has worked on projects including the JFK AirTrain, the IKEA project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and […]
EDC’s McDonald a Leading Candidate for DOT Commissioner
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From today’s Crain’s Insider: Insiders say Joan McDonald, senior vice president of transportation for the city’s Economic Development Corp., is the leading candidate to replace Iris Weinshall as transportation commissioner. McDonald has a broad resume, having worked for Jacobs Engineering Group, the city Department of Transportation, the Assembly Ways and Means Committee and the Metropolitan […]
What If Emily Lloyd Were Next at DOT?
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If Mayor Bloomberg is indeed looking inside his administration for the next head of DOT, at least some advocates of progressive planning would like him to consider Emily Lloyd, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. "It would be awesome if we had someone like her," said Fred Kent, president of the Project […]
Study: Kids Who Live Near Freeways Have Trouble Breathing
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A new study to be published in the Feb. 17 issue of the Lancet makes a strong case for the link between proximity to vehicular traffic and poor lung function in children. An article on Medical News Today sums up the report, which is currently available online to Lancet subscribers. [R]esearchers at the Keck School […]
Time’s Almost Up on New Parade Regs
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After months of debate, the NYPD’s new parade regulations aimed at pedestrian and bicycle demonstrations which critics say were designed specifically to target Critical Mass rides were quietly filed on Jan. 26, and the 30-day clock has started ticking on their implementation. The new rules require a parade permit for any "procession or race which […]
Streetfilms: “We’re New York, We Can Lead”
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Traffic Information & Relief Bill Press Conference Running time: 4 minutes 3 seconds Transportation Alternatives held press conference on the steps of City Hall yesterday in support of Intro 199, a bill introduced in the City Council by Councilmember Gale Brewer that calls for better information-gathering about the city’s traffic and aims to "reduce the […]
Are Port Authority’s Airport Expansionists Flying Blind?
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The top brass over at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are patting themselves on the back about the PA’s plan to take over Stewart Airport near Newburgh, NY. "The region clearly needs additional capacity for air travel," Anthony Coscia, the agency’s chairman, was quoted as saying in the New York Times. […]
UK Carbon-Reduction Activists in a Quiet “Riot for Austerity”
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While Americans are just waking up to the idea that they might have to do something about climate change, small groups of self-styled carbon-reduction activists in the United Kingdom are taking personal accountability for their emissions to the next level, as reported in the Observer of London. Heeding the call of environmental activist George Monbiot […]
Battle of the Weatherpeople
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It’s not just the weather that’s in an uproar these days, it’s the weatherpeople, too. After Heidi Cullen, host of the Weather Channel program "The Climate Code," wrote on her blog that she thought forecasters who deny manmade climate change were uneducated on the issue and should perhaps have their American Meteorological Society credentials revoked, […]
McKibben on Climate Change: “We Don’t Have a Movement”
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If the melting of Greenland can’t make the American people pay attention to global warming, can anything? Environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose The End of Nature was one of the first books to raise the alarm on climate change for a general audience in 1989, is hoping that "Step It Up 2007," a day of rallies […]