Last week's New York Times Week in Review section offered a tiny blurb about the recent hot weather headlined "How the Heat Came On." Ostensibly, the article set out to explain the meteorological conditions that created the mini heat wave that New York City went through last week. "Hot spells occur," Andrew Revkin wrote, "because surfaces are heating and the oceans serve as a depository for that accumulating energy." But before getting into that he made sure to point out, "Global warming has little to do with hot spells."

This note on global warming really struck me. How could Revkin be so certain and authoritative that last week's heat wave was completely unrelated to a broader trend of global warming? In fact, he can't be. It will be at least a few years before we have any idea of how 2005, or the spring of 2005, or last week's hot spell fit in to the big picture of man-made climate change. It takes time for trends to show themselves.

Ross Gelbspan, author of Boiling Point, argues that the continuing denial of global warming is, essentially, a "crime against humanity." The criminals Gelbspan is thinking of are mostly people like Phillip Clooney, the former oil industry lobbyist and recently resigned Bush administration official who went out of his way to edit EPA climate reports in ways that play down links between man-made emissions and global warming. But what about Revkin's blasé, off-the-cuff global warming denial in the Times on Sunday? Where does that fit in on the crimes-against-humanity spectrum?

In some ways I find this little New York Times blurb equally troublesome. With a Phillip Clooney, you know exactly what you're dealing with (He has gone back to work for Exxon-Mobil). Revkin, however, is supposed to be on the side of truth and objectivity. His hot spells article either shouldn't have said anything about global warming or it just should have noted that we can't really know if a particular heat wave is part of a broader trend -- just as we can't know whether a specific pack of cigarettes causes a lung cancer to start growing.

To my mind, the mini-denial of the Times is very different but almost just as bad. It works on a much more subtle, unconscious level than Clooney's heavy-handed, egregious actions. The Times article lulls us with its calm authority. It gives the sophisticated Sunday reader the comforting sense that global warming is something happening somewhere else -- in Alaska and Antarctica. Our hot spells gots nothing to do with it. Don't worry says this blurb. You still don't really need to think about how your fossil fuel-intensive consumer-oriented way of life is impacting the wider world or even your very own weather.

Indeed, last week's hot spells were merely the result of localized meterological phenomenon.... totally disconnected from broader global trends.... you're getting sleepy... very sleepy... You're flipping to the Sunday Automobiles section now... You're looking at the ad for the new Subaru Deforester... If you owned one you could get the hell out of this steaming, hot city and go to the beach... Now when I snap my fingers...

10:25 PM | Link | (6) comments   

The bike wreck on Fifth Avenue and Warren Street in Park Slope last Thursday was as bad as it gets. Elizabeth Padilla, a 28-year-old non-profit lawyer, was killed just six blocks from her apartment. She was cruising down Fifth Avenue at about 9 a.m. when the driver of a P.C. Richard delivery truck, Ioseb Peikrishvili, swung open his door directly in her path. She swerved out of the way just as a big, 10-wheeled ice cream delivery truck was passing, leaving her no room to maneuver. With her shoes clipped in to her pedals, she was unable to get her feet on the ground.

George Zampetis, a witness I spoke with, said Padilla was "squeezed, pinched, and rattled around" between the two trucks before she fell to her left. The rear wheels of the ice cream truck crushed her skull and she died instantly. The driver, Jose Cruz, had "no idea" he had run someone over. "He was absolutely shocked," Zampetis said.

By the time I came on the scene, one of Padilla's feet was sticking out from under a blue tarp. Crowds were gathering around the yellow police tape and detectives were going about their investigation. Some of the witnesses who saw the grisly aftermath seemed pretty traumatized. I found the whole thing chilling. I bike down Fifth Avenue all the time. In fact, only two weeks prior, two blocks away, I had crashed into the curb after being cut off by a careless cabbie. The body lying for way too long in the middle of the street under a plastic tarp could easily have been me or any one of a number of friends.

Padilla was the third New York City cyclists to die in just the last six weeks. On April 26, 59-year-old banking administrator Jerome Allen was run over from behind by a hit-and-run SUV driver while biking on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island. And on May 10, Brandie Bailey, a 21-year-old waitress, was struck by a private sanitation truck on Avenue A in the East Village. All in all, nine cyclists have been killed on the streets of New York this year, and 198 since 1995. Don't quit biking just yet. There are more cyclists on the streets than there ever have been and deaths and injuries per cyclist are trending down the last 10 years.

Nevertheless, it still very much feels like the city and the police don't seem to care a whole lot when cyclists get killed. The cops essentially blamed the crash on Padilla, claiming that she "cut in between" the two trucks. The police didn't even give the careless slob in the P.C. Richard truck a summons for illegally opening his door into the path of a cyclist. After the crash, the driver of the ice cream truck was sitting on the curb talking on his cell phone. Did the cops check his phone records to see if he was on a call at the time Padilla was run over? They won't answer that question, but you can bet not. Cyclist and pedestrian deaths in New York City aren't investigated like that. They're chalked up as "accidents" and the cost of doing business in NYC.

Not that a $100 summons to a traumatized appliance delivery guy is going to bring back a dead woman who, by all accounts, was a lovely woman and a genuine asset to her community. Nor will a $100 summons fund the construction of buffered, protected bike lanes for New Yorkers who wish to get around by the cleanest, cheapest, most efficient form of urban transportation there is. An alliance of local bike advocacy groups is calling on Mayor Bloomberg to convene a task force. Among other things they want a rigorous analysis of all cyclist fatalities over the last 10 years, more and better bike facilities, safer street design standards, and a public education campaign to make motorists more aware of cyclists..

This is all good and necessary and the right thing to do. Yet, it still feels like not enough. Cyclists can yell at City Hall all they want. Today, there doesn't appear to be a single elected official working in that building who is going to step up and start forcing the city to make the changes that need to be made. Conditions aren't going to get significantly better for New York City cyclists until the Mayor of New York City says that they need to get better. And cyclists are just too small of a minority in New York City to force a mayor to do that. What we need to do is begin to fold cycling priorities into a larger Eco-Metropolis initiative. Then we need a candidate to run for mayor on an Eco-Metropolis platform.

Let's start fleshing that out. What would the Eco-Metropolis look like? How would it work? Let me know your thoughts.

10:17 PM | Link | (12) comments   

I just returned from a horrific scene down on 5th Avenue and Warren Street. A woman cyclist was killed at the intersection about an hour ago. She was riding northbound on 5th towards Flatbush. Apparently, she got pinned between a PC Richardson appliance truck parked curbside and an Edy's ice cream truck coming up on her left. A witness told me that the ice cream truck on her left didn't make enough room for her as she passed by the parked truck. The cops are saying that the driver of the PC Richardson truck opened his door, causing her to veer to the left. She got jostled off her bike, fell under the moving truck -- a very big 10-wheeler -- and her head was crushed under the right rear wheels. She died instantly.

The cops have not released her name. She was wearing bike shoes and was riding what looked to be a rather high-end looking bike. Another witness, a passenger in a U-Haul truck riding directly behind the ice cream truck who was very shaken up, said that she was not doored by the driver of the PC Richardson truck. The witness also said that the light on 5th Ave was green when the incident took place and all the vehicles were moving. The cops, however, are saying that the cyclist "cut between" the two trucks. Typically, when these things happen, the cops and the media, consciously or not, slant towards blaming the cyclist.

Several years ago, the advocacy group Right Of Way documented that aggressive passing is the driving maneuver most responsible for killing cyclists in NYC. (Click here to see the report. Warning: It's a PDF document.)

The driver of the Edy's ice cream truck, a young Hispanic guy, drove off after running over the woman. He was chased and stopped about two blocks down the road by onlookers. He told the guys who chased him down that he had no idea he hit anyone.

I am somewhat ambivalent about posting these photographs on the site. But I think it is important to see this. At least three cyclists have been killed in New York City since the end of April. Two weekends ago I myself was cut off and knocked down by a cab about two blocks from the site of today's crash. My bike is still all bent up.

Dying like this seems to me to be just an incredible, massive injustice, particularly because it would take so little effort and money to create safer cycling routes in New York City. And the benefits of making New York City more safely bikeable extend so far beyond just cyclists themselves. So, I'm posting these photos not to be ghoulish, but to let people see the injustice that I witnessed this morning. It is one thing to read about it. But viewing the scene I couldn't help but think: This could easily be me, my wife, or my friend. In fact, for all I know it is one of my friends.

12:04 PM | Link | (11) comments   

You've got to hand it to Tim Tompkins. In the absence of any real citywide strategy on urban environmental issues, the president of the Times Square Alliance has stepped up with some real vision and foresight. Last Wednesday he unveiled a new urban design for the planet's most prominent public space. If Tompkins can manage to make the vision a reality—and that's always a big "if" in New York City—the Crossroads of the World is going to have a lot less road and a lot more sidewalk in it.

Whether you call it Disneyfication or revitalization, the "new" Times Square also has a new set of problems. Though you're far less likely to be pick-pocketed or murdered, the street-level environment is dreary, hostile and about as clogged as Dick Cheney's arteries. Between 1982 and 2003, pedestrian traffic increased nearly five-fold. With new office and residential buildings going up all over midtown, conditions are only going to grow more claustrophobic in coming years. Employees who work in and around Times Square overwhelmingly cite "congestion" as the number-one reason why they would consider working somewhere else. Tompkins calls it "pedlock."

The solution for "pedlock" is clear. Stop dedicating so much of Times Square's valuable public real estate to cars and trucks. Give some space back to human beings in the form of wider sidewalks and places to sit, eat, watch and take a load off. This is exactly what the Times Square Alliance is proposing to do. Its plan calls for widening sidewalks and reducing road space, redesigning Duffy Square and permanently wiring up the streets for big media events. Most significant, the Alliance proposes to completely revamp the way traffic flows by getting rid of the 7th Avenue-Broadway crossover between 44th and 45th Streets.

While the plan represents a true paradigm shift in urban-design thinking in New York City, it doesn't go as far it could. London saw fit to ban cars from one of the busy arteries surrounding Trafalgar Square. Combined with a congestion pricing system that charges motorists a fee to drive into high-traffic areas with great mass transit, the results have been a stunning success. There is every reason to believe that making 42nd Street car-free could be equally successful. But, for now, lacking any leadership from City Hall, we suspect Tompkins is going to find it enough of a challenge just to get the cars-first engineers at DOT to widen the sidewalks a little bit. More power to him.

3:34 PM | Link | (0) comments   

A short history of New York's nefarious noisemakers

Sunday morning, 8:30. As I open the front door and step outside, the beautiful morning is shattered by a Lincoln Towncar pulling up across the street, blasting its horn as it slows to a stop. What kind of legislative, police or vigilante action would it take to get these car-service slobs to use a doorbell or phone? I strap on my bike helmet and roll out into the street. With a dull, feral mindlessness on his face, the limo driver gives it another blast.

The New York City soundscape is utterly defined by the automobile horn. Stop, close your eyes and listen, even in an ostensibly quiet place like Central Park, and you will discover that the racket of tens of thousands of aggravated motorists pounding on their steering wheels is the city's omnipresent soundtrack. If man has casually introduced a more useless and destructive technology into the daily life of the city, I don't know it.

Like most bad ideas, the horn sprung from good intentions. In the mid-1800s, as steam carriages became popular in England, public outcry resulted in the 1865 passage of the "Red Flag Act." The law specified that all motorized vehicles be preceded by a man on foot carrying a flag during the day or a lantern at night. Clearly impractical, it was not long before motorists could choose from a variety of signaling devices including bells, whistles and small hand-squeezed bulb horns.

As is still the case today, the first New York drivers preferred horn to brakes. A 1900 New York Tribune item tells the story of a nurse struck and killed by an automobile. According to the account, the driver didn't slow down or steer out of the way, but "considered his responsibility fully discharged by ringing the gong."

As cars grew in popularity, the futility of honking became increasingly apparent. After the turn of the century, the bulb horn, popular in France, became the standard in most American cities. First hailed as being more "novel and penetrating" than a bell, "any usefulness that the horn had was quickly negated by the fact that people in cities were constantly tooting at one another," according to Dr. Eugene Garfield, in his essential 1983 essay, "The Tyranny of the Horn."

After 1910, motoring periodicals began calling for more effective warning devices and manufacturers were quick to oblige, developing a new generation of ear-shattering noisemakers. One of the more popular accessories of the teens and 20s was an electrically powered air horn called the Klaxon, the name derived from the Greek word klaxo, meaning "to shriek." The technological forefather of modern honkers, the Klaxon was touted as "the only horn which would instantly move cows and bullocks."

Today's horns are not designed with the crowded canyons of New York City in mind. They are engineered to travel great distances on fast-moving highways and to penetrate the increasingly soundproof cockpits of luxury vehicles. The horn is also considered a critical component of the automotive brand experience. As American vehicles have grown bigger and more intimidating, so too have their monosyllabic "voices." Until the mid-1960s, many car horns were tuned to the musical notes E-flat and C, a combination deemed pleasing to the ear. Most manufacturers have today moved to discordant combinations like F-sharp and A-sharp. In New York City, the horn has essentially become a sanctioned form of aggravated aural assault. The unfortunate results, of course, are incidents like this:

I pulled my bike up alongside the driver's- side window and hopped off. I asked the limo driver who he was honking for. He shrugged and began rolling up his window. I pressed down on the top edge of the glass. The power window's motor made a clunking noise. I leaned in and, at the top of my lungs bellowed, "Hoooonnnk! Honk honk honk!"

Enraged, the limo driver swatted at my face and yanked at his handle as I continued to honk at him. With all my weight braced against the door, he couldn't open it. Desperate to throttle me, he hurled himself against the door until, finally, I let it go. He burst out headlong. He was surprisingly quick and wiry. As he came up at me, I got my hands on either side of his head, reared back and smashed him in the middle of the face with my forehead.

The crack of bone reverberated so loudly in my head, I thought I broke my nose. But I was fine. The limo driver collapsed ass-first in the street, hands cupped over his face, staring up at me in shock. As blood burbled between his fingers his throat released a girlish, Klaxon-like squeal. I dusted off and picked up my bike as a guy appeared pulling a small suitcase on wheels. It looked like he was going to the airport.

"Your car is here," I said.

Editor's note: No police report has been filed and no witnesses have come forward to confirm the author's account of the beating. We believe the author may simply be working out some violent anti-honking wish-fulfillment issues.

9:37 PM | Link | (7) comments