New York City

A couple of blogs I follow have mentioned that the May issue of Popular Mechanics includes a feature called, “10 Pieces of U.S. Infrastructure We Must Fix Now”. I’ve seen the feature mentioned in the context of Atlanta’s water shortage, but the entire list is actually rather interesting to me (not surprising, given my interests):

• Circle Interchange, Chicago
   
• Brooklyn Bridge Approaches, New York City
   
• Industrial Canal Locks, New Orleans
  (Ships can wait 36 hours for clearance to transit, creating a drag on the efficiency of the Port of New Orleans. PM doesn’t mention that survivors of the Lower Ninth Ward would like to see the canal itself fixed by being filled in….)
   
• Atlanta’s water system
  (PM estimates 18% of the daily water consumption in ATL is the result of leaky water mains)
   
• Alaskan Way viaduct, Seattle
   
• Lake Okeechobee dike, Florida
   
• Dover Bridge, Bonner County, Idaho
  (Northern Idaho bridge for US95, scores 2 out of a possible 100 in sufficiency rating.)
   
• Wolf Creek Dam, Kentucky
  (Kentucky River dam deemed in enough danger of collapse that TVA reduced the water level behind it, to reduce flood risk to downstream towns, including Nashville.)
   
• Sacramento River levees, California
  (Remind me not to write flood cover on the Arco Arena, or on SMF.)
   
• O’Hare

None of those are surprises, and many of them are slated for repairs in the next few years, assuming funding remains available. However, it’s nice to be reminded every once in a while of some neglected priorities.

(How much money have Presidential candidates raised to date for this election cycle?)

Seen in the New York Times:

Democratic members of the State Assembly held one final meeting to debate the merits of Mr. Bloomberg’s plan and found overwhelming and persistent opposition. The plan would have charged drivers $8 to enter a congestion zone in Manhattan south of 60th Street during peak hours.[...]

“The congestion pricing bill did not have anywhere near a majority of the Democratic conference, and will not be on the floor of the Assembly,” Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, said after the meeting.

The plan’s collapse was a severe blow to Mr. Bloomberg’s environmental agenda and political legacy. The mayor introduced his plan a year ago as the signature proposal of a 127-item program for sustainable city growth that helped raise his national profile. Without approval from Albany, the city now stands to lose about $354 million worth of federal money that would have financed the system for collecting the fee and helped to pay for new bus routes and other traffic mitigation measures.

I realize that the congestion plan pricing was extremely unpopular among non-Manhattanites who regularly drive into the city…but wasn’t that part of the point? Traffic in the City is mind-boggling, and one can get high just thinking of the level of emissions spewed by vehicles sitting in city traffic.

In short, folks heading into the City need to make greater use of public transportation…and public transportation needs to be able to support that level of demand.

If a few folks would have been obliged to pay a few bucks for the privilege of driving into the city (to avoid associating with the hoi-polloi on the trains), to help fund those enhancements…well so be it.

(And before anyone asks, yes, I do go into the City rather frequently. Normally I take the train in, unless my wife is coming with for some reason. Then we drive, since public transit isn’t particularly friendly towards mobility-limited folks….another squeaky wheel that gobs of financial grease could be used to address.)

Seen at Green Car Congress:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) will require black cars—the large sedans (often Lincoln Town Cars) that primarily service corporate clients—to increase fuel efficiency standards to a level currently achievable only by using hybrid technology.[...]

Currently, black cars average 12-15 mph. The TLC will require fuel efficiency standards for new licensed black car vehicles of 25 mpg in 2009 and 30 mpg in 2010. Many black cars line up, idling in front of office buildings in Midtown and Lower Manhattan awaiting customers. With hybrid powertrains, the engines will shut down instead.

Like the earlier mandate for taxis to go green…it’s about d*mn time.

I’ve been a little remiss in sharing an experience my wife and I had over the long weekend.

You see, from about the time we moved to Connecticut until the time of her accident, we had a habit of going into New York a couple of times a year to see a show on Broadway. Our last one of those Broadway-runs was remarkable in that at the Rocky Horror show, my wife had the opportunity to do the Time Warp with Dick Cavett and one of the ghouls.

Well, with my wife doing somewhat better since she got her occipital nerve stimulator, I took a gamble with her Christmas present—I got us fourth-row tickets to see Hairspray on Presidents Day weekend.

It was a great day, all things considered. True, we had to drive in rather than Metro North it in, and our wanderings were limited to the block the theater was on…but the weather was decent and traffic was (relatively) light. We arrived on 52nd street 90 minutes before show-time, allowing us time for a quick and unexpectedly good lunch at Victor’s Cafe, a Cuban restaurant next door to the theater.

(I wonder if we can take credit for our unexpected culinary diversion at a Cuban restaurant as being the shock that finally caused Fidel Castro to retire.)

The show itself was great. The plot details of Hairspray, the musical are significantly different than either movie. To be honest, I hadn’t seen the movies or heard the musical’s soundtrack before this weekend, but my wife assured me that the musical, while less realistic than the movies, was far more entertaining.

The music was great, the actors were obviously having fun cheesing up their roles…it was a good show.

About the only negative I could say about the experience was that the ratio of fake orgasms to number of pre-teen children in the audience was uncomfortably high to me…but that could be a function of either my prudishness or the visible confusion on the faces of the munchkins sitting up in the first row.

After the show, the stage door was mobbed by folks wanting to get autographs from the cast. My wife, looking to park her walker someplace comfortable and out-of-the-way while I stood on line in the garage, decided to watch the mob scene from across the street.

While she waited, she noticed a man, bundled up a little too tightly, walking towards her.

Then she noticed he was wearing make up.

Turns out it was George Wendt, who played Edna Turnblad in the show, trying to escape without being mobbed. When my wife quietly complimented him on his (her?) performance without requesting an autograph or otherwise drawing attention, he stopped and they chatted for a little bit.

Shortly after that, it was back in the car to return behind the Nutmeg Curtain for home.

All-in-all, it was probably one of the better Christmas present experiences we’ve had.

From the AP wire:

The city Board of Health voted Tuesday to approve a new version of a law requiring fast-food outlets to display calorie counts on their menus, hoping the fat-filled truth will shock New Yorkers into eating healthier.

The regulation, which takes effect March 31, was altered slightly after a judge rejected the city’s first attempt last year.

The new regulation applies to any chain that operates at least 15 separate outlets, including those that don’t currently provide any information on calories. Major fast-food chains make up about 10 percent of the city’s restaurants.

The earlier edition of the reg was thrown out after a judge pointed out that it only required calorie information posted if the restaurant was already making it available.

The nummy treat police apparently had a goal of focusing efforts on fast food joints, where the food is standardized enough to make calorie counts consistent enough to be credible. Thus the 15-franchise threshold in the revised rule.

Well, at least it isn’t a corporate sponsorship:

As part of his State of the State address on Wednesday, Gov. Eliot Spitzer intends to call on the Legislature to rename the Triborough Bridge — the flagship set of spans that opened in 1936, connecting three of New York City’s five boroughs — for Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968.

While RFK is a notable American who probably does deserve recognition in the form of some piece of public infrastructure, I still have to wonder…why?

“Triborough” has been the classic and descriptive name of the bridge complex for over 70 years.  Surely it isn’t in need of a moniker at this point in its history.

I think I’ve come across one possible enhancement to Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to toll all of Manhattan below 86th Street—an outright ban on vehicles not meeting emissions standards. Via Treehugger:

Since the start of the year, drivers to the inner city of Berlin - the 88-square kilometer area inside the subway ‘ring’ - must display badges to show their cars meet new rules for particulate and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions. Cars without badges are subject to the not-too hefty ticket price of 40 Euros (US$58) and a penalty point on the errant driver’s license.[...]

In 2010 the emissions law will be further tightened, and only ‘green badge’ cars will be able to go into the inner city zones.

I also wonder if this might be a possible workaround for California’s new squabble with the EPA over competing emissions standards. I’d bet it would more likely pass judicial muster if California tolerated the sale of vehicles passing federal CO² standards, but kept them out of parts of the Bay Area and Southern California.

For this week, a trip to the Big Apple is in order:

This is a rather infamous interchange, between I-87 (the Major Deegan Expressway) and I-95 (Alexander Hamilton Bridge / Cross Bronx Expressway), where travelers heading south from upstate (or north, after having escaped Queens) have the opportunity to wind up narrow ramps from the valley floor to gain access to I-95 and either the Cross-Bronx Expressway (northbound/eastbound) or the George Washington Bridge (southbound/westbound).

From I-87, it’s a rather impressive view.  From I-95, less so.

For more information, see information on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge at Steve Anderson’s ncyroads.com.

Earlier this year, Mayor Bloomberg expressed a desire to institute congestion-zone tolling for Manhattan below 86th Street. The plan didn’t play all that well in Albany, so as a compromise to keep access to federal traffic-alleviation funds alive, a plan was hatched to assemble a commission to look at alternatives.

The New York Times has a report up on what the Commission’s thinking:

One proposal could be nearly as controversial as the mayor’s congestion pricing plan: the establishment of a No Hail Zone in the area below 86th Street.

Under such a plan, yellow cabs could pick up people only at designated taxi stands. The stands, up to 1,200 of them, would be set up on each block in busy areas and every few blocks in other parts of the zone. [...]

The commission is also studying a proposal known as license plate rationing, under which cars would be barred from the area below 86th Street on certain days, depending on their license plate.

One possibility would be to ban cars on the days of the month that end in the same digit as their license plates. That would mean that if a person’s plates end in a 5, for example, they could not drive on the 5th, the 15th or the 25th of each month. If the person’s plate ended in a 4, the vehicle would be banned on a different three days: the 4th, the 14th, and the 24th. In another version, license plates would come in five colors, with each color barred from the congestion zone one day a week. [...]

One solution that could cut traffic and raise money involves increasing the cost of on-street parking. Currently, Mr. Schaller said, most metered parking spaces in Manhattan charge $1 or $1.50 an hour. If those rates were increased to up to $4 an hour, he said, parking on the street for eight hours would cost about the same as the daily rate at many garages.

Personally, I think that tolling/congestion pricing the area is probably the simplest idea.

It’s nice to see a a prominent entity leading by example. Seen at CNN:

The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is going “greener”—with energy-saving lights replacing old-fashioned bulbs on the towering evergreen this year.[...]

The 84-foot-tall Norway spruce will be covered with 30,000 multicolored light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, strung on five miles of wire.

Using the energy-efficient LEDs to replace incandescent bulbs will reduce the display’s electricity consumption from 3,510 to 1,297 kilowatt hours per day. The daily savings is equal to the amount of electricity consumed by a typical 2,000-square-foot house in a month.

I have to admit that I’ve been amazed at how many folks seem to be accepting the transition away from incandescent bulbs to CFL’s and LED’s. Now, if only dimmable CCFL’s were easier to find, I could retire the last incandescents in the house.