Here is my first commercial (Note: PG-13 rating for obscenity).
And here's my second attempt.

I like them but I think I can do better. Stay tuned.

3:52 PM | Link | (2) comments   

In conjuntion with Donald Trump's "The Apprentice," Chevy is running a promotion in which you to make your own television commercial for the Tahoe SUV. Man, I've been wanting to do this for ages.

People are creating some pretty good ones. Like this one, this one and this one too.

While I'm happy that the folks at Chevy have given culture-jammers the opportunity to screw with their brand, this ad campaign strikes me as yet another prime example of the automobile industry's total, utter cluelessness. Didn't it occur to anyone at headquarters or the ad agency that this promotion would result in widespread and heavily publicized mockery of their latest Planet Wrecker?

Check out the subvertisements before Chevy takes them down. I'm fixing to make my own later today.

See Climate Change Action for more subverts.
And yet more here at Left Behinds.

9:04 AM | Link | (2) comments   

Today the New York Times' Matthew Wald asks the question that I ponder every time a late model muscle car rips through my neighborhood at 50 mph just to get to the next red light a little bit faster:

Why have US automakers spent the last twenty years pouring their R&D resources and brainpower into improving performance, acceleration, and exterior design when they could have been working on fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions reductions? From the Times:

For two decades automakers have been developing technology that could make vehicles go farther on a gallon of gasoline. But instead, they have chosen pep and size — making vehicles like the new Murano accelerate faster than cars like the old Mustang, and making them bigger.

Because Americans have not insisted on better fuel economy, "we can take the technology in the cars and turn the knob toward performance," said Karl H. Hellman, an automotive development expert who retired from the E.P.A. two years ago. Improving mileage now would be easy if drivers sacrificed some zip in new cars, he said, "but in this country, we don't sacrifice for anything."

Do the American people demand muscle? Or do the automakers billion dollar marketing budgets make the American people think they want muscle?

10:21 AM | Link | (2) comments   

When London set up its congestion charging system in 2002, the city purposely decided to allow very few exemptions from the fee. Whether you are an elected member of Parliament, an off-duty police officer, or the head of Transport for London, it doesn't matter. You are still paying £8 ($14) if you want to drive into the crowded center of the city. Limiting exemptions made the law simpler, fairer and easier to enforce.

Over the last four years only one entity has consistently refused to pay London's congestion charge and, apparently, Mayor Ken Livingstone has finally had enough of it. Yesterday, during a television interview, Livingstone said, "It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like a chiselling little crook." The US Embassy, which has about 100 cars, refuses to pay the congestion charge and the tens of thousands of pounds of violations it has racked up.

Maybe Livingstone doesn't get it. We are Americans. Driving is our birthright. We drive in whatever vehicle we want, wherever we want, whenever we want. We fight wars and spill American blood to ensure these rights. The message from the Bush Administration to the United Kingdom and the rest of the world is clear: Take your congestion charges, bike infrastructure, bus rapid transit systems, and greenhouse gas emission reduction schemes and stick 'em. As Dick Cheney said in 2002, "The American way of life is not negotiable." Who could have known that the vice president was talking about parking tickets.

12:46 PM | Link | (8) comments   

How does she say it with a straight face?

Responding to 100,000 signatures and long-standing calls for a three month car-free summer experiment in Central Park, DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall said, "While we continue to investigate opportunities to limit traffic on the Central Park loop, it remains a critical transportation link for commuters, and we are unable to prohibit vehicles from using the loop at this time," Weinshall said.

So, there you have it. To Weinshall, the Central Park Loop Drives are no different than the BQE. To DOT Central Park isn't a park. Rather it is a crtical part of the transportation network.

Let's take Weinshall's statement at face value. Central Park is a "critical transportation link" in New York City's commuter system. OK. Well, that's a problem, folks. That's not what Central Park is supposed to be. The forward-looking city fathers who set aside the land for Central Park in the middle of the 19th century didn't intend for it to be a highway. And that's not what New Yorkers who live in an increasingly dense, crowded and traffic-congested city need it to be today. If Central Park now functions as a critical transportation link, is that something we really need and want to continue? Or is that something we need and want to change?

But those questions assume that Weinshall's assertion deserves to be taken at face value. It doesn't. The fact of the matter is that the Central Park Drives are not a critical transportation link in the Manhattan commuter network. Millions of commuters travel in and out of the Manhattan business district each day. The MetroNorth Railway is a critical link. The Lincoln Tunnel is a critical link. The subway lines are critical links. The Central Park Loop Drives are not a critical link! The Loop Drives carry a minuscule fraction of the city's commuter traffic each day. And the vast majority of this small number of commuters would still have many other transportation options were the Drives closed for the summer. That the city's transportation commissioner would characterize the Central Park Loop Drives as a "critical transportation link" reflects either profound disingenuousness or an embarrassing lack of knowledge about how her city's transportation system actually works.

For years the DOT has been saying that closing Central Park to cars would create a traffic cataclysm around the Park. This claim is based on bogus traffic models. When modeling a car-free park, the DOT assumes that every single vehicle that currently uses the park would simply shift over to the next adjacent north-south avenue if the park were closed. The studies assume that not a single motorist will choose to use transit, or travel at a different time of day, or consolidate trips, or travel on, say, 2nd or 8th Avenues if the park were closed. The studies don't account for the elasticity of traffic and the well known fact that when you close a thoroughfare to traffic, more often than not, traffic congestion is reduced on surrounding streets.

But the biggest and most obvious problem with DOT's traffic models is that they don't account for the many benefits that would accrue to a vast number of human beings if the park were closed to traffic. When the DOT does these studies it only counts cars and traffic volumes. It doesn't count rollerbladers, the difficulty of crossing the street at Columbus Circle, asthmatic kids in Harlem, or the impact of automobile emissions on global climate change. In a DOT traffic engineering study there is simply no qualitative difference between Central Park's Drives and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. DOT studies and plans for cars and traffic. As a result New York City gets cars and traffic. Even in our parks.

Statements like the one above make me think that history will look unkindly on Commissioner Weinshall's regime. While her counterpart in the city's public health agency Thomas Friedan has overhauled and updated the city's public health system and pushed progressive but politically difficult initiatives like the smoking ban, Weinshall has maintained her agency's cars-first status quo and overseen a record-setting increase in traffic congestion. In the same time that the City of London's transport agency has set and begun acting on ambitious goals to reduce traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions and pedestrian deaths, Weinshall's DOT has filled x number of pot holes and fixed y number of street lights. The city still doesn't set meaningful goals for transportation and public space. It has no over-arching, long-term transportation plan.

The most disappointing thing about Weinshall's public statement on Central Park is that it backs her into a corner. To make the park car-free, the mayor will now have to contradict her and set policy that goes against this idea that the Central Park Drives are a vital commuter link. Through misinformation, Weinshall has made it that much harder for a car-free park to happen during the Bloomberg Administration.

Hopefully the Mayor or his deputy Dan Doctoroff can figure out a face-saving way to overrule their transportation commissioner. All advocates are asking for is an experiment -- three months in the summer without cars in the park. If it doesn't work, it doesn't have to happen again. Why not give it a shot? One hundred thousand people signed petitions asking for it.

If you want to help make the push for a car-free park, Transportation Alternatives is organizing a rally on the steps of City Hall on Sunday, March 26 at noon. Show up.

9:59 AM | Link | (5) comments   

Three of the top items on the Livable Streets wish list for New York City are congestion pricing for Manhattan's business district, more car and truck-free streets, and "red light cameras" at busy intersections to catch speeders and prevent pedestrian carnage.

Needless to say, this agenda has been a tough sell. Congestion pricing has long been viewed as a political non-starter. Car-free streets are generally ignored by the powers-that-be as a kind of trivial, bourgeouis, environmental cause. And red light cameras have been held hostage in Albany for years. Apparently some Assemblyman in Buffalo or Rochester with a civil libertarian streak doesn't want New York City to have automated traffic enforcement, no matter the fact that they have been proven to significantly reduce speeding, crashes and pedestrian injuries and deaths.

I've long had the feeling that homeland security would be the argument that would ultimately win some of these changes for New York City. What's the connection? London's congestion pricing system is entirely camera-based. One of the reasons why Londoners were relatively comfortable with the idea of a cordon of video cameras around Central London was because they had grown used to the "Ring of Steel" surveillance system during the days of IRA terrorist bombings. As for car-free streets, Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance is beginning to talk seriously about how having fewer cars and trucks driving through midtown would be a great boon to security. It's really kind of a no-brainer. One of the biggest and most obvious threats to the city is a dirty bomb in the back of a generic delivery truck. Tompkins clearly realizes that City Hall doesn’t move to the beat of environmental and quality of life arguments these days. Post 9/11, it's all about security. That’s where the federal funding is as well. Let's see a pipsqueak upstate Assemblyman try to stop New York City from getting cameras on the street when the city's police commissioner says he needs them to stop terrorism and when federal homeland security funds are going to pay for them.

Well, today, the Daily News reports that New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly is ordering 505 new surveillance cameras for Lower Manhattan. Kelly even calls the system a "ring of steel." Like London's congestion pricing cameras, New York City's video system would keep constant track of vehicles' license plates, among other things.

Kelly and City Hall almost certainly have no intention of using the cameras to stop red light runners or charge drivers money to enter Manhattan at this point. And if they did, they certainly wouldn't want to admit it. The idea of a citywide surveillance system is already going to make people squeamish enough. But once this security system is up and running-- and it will be built, regardless of civil libertarians objections -- New York City will have taken significant legal, cultural and infrastructural steps closer to congestion pricing, car-free streets, and automated traffic camera enforcement. For better or worse, homeland security may very well be the Livable Streets movement's Trojan horse.

10:44 AM | Link | (8) comments   

What happens when you give street space back to people?

Join Transportation Alternatives and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy as they welcome economist, urbanist and former mayor of Bogota Colombia, Enrique Peñalosa.

While mayor, Peñalosa was responsible for numerous radical improvements to the city and its citizens. He promoted a city model giving priority to children and public spaces and restricting private car use, building hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, greenways, and parks.

Wednesday March 22nd, 2006
6-8 pm
Union Square Ballroom
27 Union Square West

11:21 AM | Link | (0) comments   

The other day, the NYC Department of Transportation unveiled a proposal to build a new pedestrian-only plaza with tables, benches, greenery and bike racks in Downtown Brooklyn along two blocks where Willoughby and Adams Streets intersect. According to a New York 1 report, the bottom two floors of the city-owned building at 345 Adams will also be opened up for retail use. The Metrotech Business Improvement District will be responsible for managing the new public space. Here's an overhead plan sketch:

And here is a before-and-after rendering:

You can find some more great photos of the space here at Starts & Fits.

DOT's plan is a welcome change in attitude if not policy. While cities around the world have been making serious, concerted efforts over the last ten years to reallocate street space from motor vehicles to human beings, New York City's DOT has operated under policies that tend to bring more traffic to city streets. Though this one little pedestrian mall is not, by itself, going to have a huge impact on Downtown Brooklyn traffic, it does represent a radical departure from DOT business-as-usual. Hopefully, it signals the beginning of an important change in the way New York City manages its streets. It is not an exaggeration to say that public space projects like this are exactly what New York City needs to do if it wants to continue to grow and be a great and vibrant city in the 21st century.

Community advoctes have been pushing changes like this for years through the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project and various other inititatives, usually to no avail. Why the DOT is suddenly interested in developing something like this is a little bit of a mystery. It would be nice if we could say that the Willoughby-Adams project is part of an overall city policy. But New York City still has no clearly-stated transportation policy.

Unlike London, where the city has methodically set out to create one hundred new public spaces in the next few years using money raised from congestion charging, this Willoughby-Adams project seems to have been dropped down on Brooklyn randomly at the whim of some faceless deputy commissioner. The project is part of no clearly stated long-term strategy or intiative. It just sort of appeared.

Sources tell me that the rapid development of this ped mall is directly related to Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff's recent take-over and re-shuffling of DOT. And that DOT is now scrambling to fast-track a batch of public space and pedestrian projects at the request of Doctoroff. Unfortunately, it is way too difficult for members of the public to understand what drives these decisions and how they are made. It's the primary reason why many community people are skeptical of anything that DOT and other city agencies do these days, even good projects like this one.

But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth. This pedestrian zone is an encouraging development and a somewhat radical break from city policies that have helped to make much of Downtown Brooklyn a traffic-choked nightmare. Willoughby-Adams is likely to be a good spot for a ped mall. Only 130 cars per hour travel through this little two block stretch at peak compared to 2,600 pedestrians. As the picture below shows, at any given moment during the work day, the area is absolutely packed with peds:

Likewise, Willoughby-Adams is not a particularly useful or important road for motor vehicles. In fact, the main purpose of this little stretch of streetscape today is as a free parking lot for police officers' personal vehicles. These government employees seem to view Downtown Brooklyn as their free, private parking lot.

Not surprisingly, the cops don't give themselves summonses for this illegal parking. Even when they are blatantly parked in crosswalks:

Or when they are parked on top of the bike lane leading to the Brooklyn Bridge:

Or when their parking placard expired months ago. This cop's permit expired in 2005:

This member of New York City's Finest doesn't even have a permit. Apparently, a police deparment notebook and a "NarcoPouch" on the dashboard are all the credentials you need for free, all-day parking in Downtown Brooklyn:

People who want to see this pedestrian plaza come to fruition this spring will have a chance to speak up in favor of it when Community Board 2's Transportation Committee meets on Tuesday, March 21 at 6:30pm, Founders Hall, St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street between Clinton and Court Streets.

If you care about this sort of thing, I urge you to show up, especially if you live within the boundaries of CB2. The pedestrian plaza is not a done deal. As with any change in New York City -– particularly changes that reduce parking and travel space for motor vehicles -– there is certain to be opposition to DOT’s plan and fear that removing any small amount of roadspace used by motor vehicles is going to create a traffic catastrophe on surrounding streets.

Aside from the police who enjoy their free parking and community people who have grown to be suspicious of any DOT plan for Downtown Brooklyn, some number of parents who drop off their kids by car at the Brooklyn Friends School are also likely to be unhappy with the reallocation of this street to pedestrians. The closure of the street to cars will make their drive out of the area a few minutes longer and less convenient. You may scoff at that argument, but this is exactly the kind of opposition that kills great plans at Community Board meetings.

Speakers will likely have two or three minutes to say their piece. Obviously, you can say whatever you want. But if you need some ideas, here are a few talking points that you might want to hit:

1. This plan isn't going to make traffic congestion in Downtown Brooklyn worse. There just aren't enough cars using this two-block stretch to have any real impact on the surrounding street network. Likewise, cities around the world are finding that when you reduce road capacity to motor vehicles and give that street space to pedestrians, cyclists and buses, in fact, you make traffic congestion disappear. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the single best way to reduce traffic congestion, especially in a place with great mass transit like Downtown Brooklyn, is to take away street space from motor vehicles.

2. Downtown Brooklyn needs more and better places for people to sit outside, eat lunch, walk around and people-watch, especially with all of the new development in the area. Even Fulton Mall lacks places to sit and hang out. For years, a variety of advocates -- many of whom are members of CB2 -- have been encouraging DOT to improve traffic flow, public space and parking enforcement in Downtown Brooklyn. Well, now DOT is doing it. By approving this ped mall we encourage and stregthen the progressive forces within DOT that are pushing for the kinds of changes that the community has been requesting for years.

3. Perhaps, most important: There is no real downside to this plan. If the pedestrian plaza doesn’t work out for some reason, all DOT has to do is pick up the tables, benches and planters and return the street to the illegal police parking lot that it is today. No concrete is being poured. No streets are being de-mapped. This is exactly the kind of experimentation that we want to encourage DOT to do. This experiment offers very little risk and great potential rewards for workers, residents and visitors of Downtown Brooklyn.

A final note: Standing in the middle of Willoughby Street, looking east, you get a great view of the Prison Ship Martyr's Monument in Fort Greene Park. You can be certain that, today, no one notices the monument in their rear view mirror as they weave through the throngs of pedestrians and illegally parked cops. But if people had a spot to sit and hang out, and if the pedestrian plaza was someday extended two blocks further down Willoughby to Jay Street, the monument would be noticed. It would become an integral part of this public space:

I have walked through this area dozens of times and until the other day when I stood in the middle of Willoughby Street and just took a moment to look around, I had no idea the Fort Greene monument was even visible from this part of Downtown Brooklyn. The view of the monument reminded me how much a street changes when you remove the traffic and give people the chance to sit and just be for a moment. We've come to assume that streets are places to store vehicles or drive through on the way to somewhere else. But when we take the cars and trucks away, a street becomes an actual place, a destination, a spot where people can get together. Public spaces like this are where community happens in a big city.

11:24 AM | Link | (2) comments   

The theme of last night's community forum on transportation and traffic in Brownstone Brooklyn: If you want to fix the problem blame Bloomberg.

11:56 AM | Link | (35) comments