(Source: Mashable)

Those fun-loving & fun making folks at Improv Everywhere are at it again — this time they invaded a New York City subway car, treating passengers to a reenactment of the first Princess Leia/Darth Vader scene from Star Wars. Check this out:

It’s priceless to watch the reaction of fellow riders in the train.  Good people of NYC seem to enjoy the fun ride! Why does this not happen in DC.. Argh!  OUr boring (at times menacing) commutes could do a makeover like this once in a while!

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(Source: New York Times & Associated Press)

Like most large international conferences, the United Nations climate summit meeting in New York this week generated a hefty dose of greenhouse gas emissions.

Hundreds of presidents, prime ministers and officials from across the globe this week took airplanes to the United Nations meeting, some accompanied by dozens of people. Limousines and motorcades ferried the dignitaries from airports to meetings to hotels and back, often getting stuck in Midtown Manhattan gridlock.

But since the goal of this meeting was to reduce the global emissions that have been linked to global warming, the United Nations decided to try to do something about all the carbon dioxide produced by the delegates: it bought carbon offsets.

Under a new and expanding program for offsetting emissions, United Nations administrators calculated that the meeting would generate the equivalent of 461 tons of carbon dioxide, with air travel being the single largest component. They offset those emissions by directing money to a power project in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, through which agricultural leftovers like rice husks and sunflower stalks are turned into electricity for the local grid.

The offsets are intended to cancel out the carbon dioxide emissions created by airline travel or driving by financing green projects that will eliminate as much CO2 as the polluting activities create.

The United Nations first tried its hand at large-scale offsets two years ago, shortly after Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who called Tuesday’s conference, took office and declared that climate issues would be a central theme of his tenure.

“The secretary general started talking about greening the U.N. and that we needed to lead by example,” said Dan Shepard, a United Nations spokesman in New York.

(Source: Streetsblog)

Sure, knocking the MTA is a favorite local past time, particularly for the politicians and press who are practically guaranteed a “Hallelujah!” chorus for every barb (today’s scandal: fat cat transit workers poised to rake in cost-of-living allowance!!). But despite the MTA’s problems, as Michael Frumin points out on his Frumination blog, the city’s streets and highways can’t hold a candle to the subways when it comes to moving commuters into and out of Manhattan’s Central Business District.

Parsing data derived from 2008 subway passenger counts and the NYMTC 2007 Hub Bound Report [PDF], Frumin writes:

Just to get warmed up, chew on this — from 8:00AM to 8:59 AM on an average Fall day in 2007 the NYC Subway carried 388,802 passengers into the CBD on 370 trains over 22 tracks. In other words, a train carrying 1,050 people crossed into the CBD every 6 seconds.Breathtaking if you ask me.

Over this same period, the average number of passengers in a vehicle crossing any of the East River crossings was 1.20. This means that, lacking the subway, we would need to move 324,000 additional vehicles into the CBD (never mind where they would all park).

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.

Click here to read the entire article.

(Source: Tree Hugger)

Trivia: New York’s is also the only subway in the world to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Image courtesy: TreeHugger

Our friends at Treehugger have put together a great, easy to understand compilation of subway/metro train fares for a handful of major cities around the world, with a promise to update the list in the near future.  The article takes a stab at comparing the New York Subway system fares against the rest and goes on to analyze What Makes a Subway Fare Fair? and Why is New York City Raising the Subway Fare? Makes for quite an interesting read.

Click here to read the entire article.

In a bizzare case of  a DA-gone-wild, a poor cyclist is being penalized for trying to warn a behemoth SUV driver.   Read the story below reported by our friends at Streetsblog:

The Manhattan DA’s office is filing charges of criminal mischief against a cyclist, Ray Bengen, because he allegedly caused property damage to a multi-ton SUV in the process of getting doored by the driver. Too ridiculous to be true? Sadly, no. Here’s how it happened.

Image Courtesy - Streetsblog: Ray Bengen, pictured here lying on the sidewalk beneath the driver who knocked him off his bike, will face charges of criminal mischief in Manhattan criminal court next month

Bengen, 63, was riding down the Ninth Avenue bike lane on May 21 when he came across the Ford Excursion you see in this photo (curb weight: 7,190 lbs). A long-time city cyclist, Bengen had a green light and wasn’t quite sure what to make of the vehicle in front of him. The car wasn’t moving and its brake lights were off.

The bike lane on this stretch of Ninth Avenue is part of the city’s first on-street protected bike path. At the 20th Street intersection, where Bengen came across the car, there’s a left-turn bay for vehicles and an exclusive green phase for cyclists. The Excursion, as you can see, was in the bike lane, not the left-turn bay.

Bengen rode slowly by on the left. Then he sensed the car start to move as he was passing. Alarmed, he slapped the side of the car with his palm in an effort to alert the driver as to his presence. A witness, who Bengen says has agreed to testify in court, snapped three pictures of what happened next. We’ll let Bengen describe it:

The driver then went berserk. Talk about road rage. He threw open his door forcing me and my bike to the ground giving me some awful bruising down my leg. As I was now on the ground yelling at him that he’s in a bike lane and was just about to run me over, he started to scream at me “Don’t even think about it, don’t even think about it.” I’m still not sure what he meant by that. With me lying on the ground quite shaken, he suddenly stopped his assault and did something very unexpected. He moved away from me, picked up my bike where it was nearly underneath his truck. He then stood it up on its kickstand, and got back in the truck and drove away left into 20th street.

Last week, Bengen received a phone call from Detective Christopher Cipolli at the 10th Precinct. Officers from the precinct had arrived at the scene promptly following the altercation, Bengen says, and Cipolli had been very helpful during the investigation that followed. So it was with an apologetic tone that the detective informed Bengen that he had to come down to the precinct on Friday. The reason? Because the Manhattan DA had filed charges of criminal mischief against him. (The DA’s office is also pursuing assault charges against the SUV driver.)

“I had to go through the very humiliating process of being handcuffed and put into an interview room — locked and barred — for an hour or so,” Bengen recalled. After a fingerprint check, Bengen was released. He has a date in Manhattan criminal court set for July 14. The driver will appear on the 13th.

Click here to read the rest of this interesting article and for more pictures of the incident.

TransportGooru Musings:

(1).  The DA’s actions are squarely against New York City’s efforts to promote bicycling.

(2).  If the prosecutor had any common sense & logic, he would seen that anyone who is about to get hit by a behemoth SUV would take preventive actions to warn the driver.   What Ray Bengen did by banging on the door trying to get the SUV driver’s attention is akin to blowing the horn to get a drivers attention.

(3).  After reading the victim’s account of the incident, it will be obvious even to the dumbest idiot on the planet that the cyclist had all the rights to stay in his designated lane.

Let’s hope Ray Bengen comes out victorious in his fight against this murkey world of law and order.   Stay tuned for Streetsblog updates on this case as it evolves.

In this image taken with a cell phone by Jason McLane, the primary presidential aircraft, a Boeing 747 known as Air Force One when the president is aboard, flies low over New York Harbor, followed by an F-16 chase plane during a federal government photo op Monday, April 27, 2009. A low-flying Boeing 747 escorted by two fighter jets as part of a federal government photo opportunity over lower Manhattan caused a brief panic among workers near ground zero on Monday. (AP Photo/Jason McLane) (Jason Mclane - AP)

(Source: Washington Post)

NEW YORK — A Boeing 747 used by the president was escorted over lower Manhattan by two Air Force fighter jets Monday as part of a government photo opportunity, causing a brief panic among office workers near ground zero.

(Source: Streetsblog)

Police Say No Criminality Involved In Case of Cabbie Who Plowed Into Restaurant Injuring Seven – “the cab was competing with another car to make a turn when it careened, skidded and hit a pole, then veered into the pizzeria”

The horrific death of a young mother in Midtownwasn’t the only instance of curb-jumping mayhem on Friday. Shortly before Ysemny Ramos was pinned against a building by an allegedly drunk driver on E. 37th Street, a yellow cab lurched off Amsterdam at W. 106th, plowing onto the sidewalk and into a pizzeria.Though seven people were hurt, with one in critical condition as of Friday, and though witnesses told the Post “the cab was competing with another car to make a turn when it careened, skidded and hit a pole, then veered into the pizzeria,” Gothamist reports that “The police told us no charges were filed because there was no criminality involved.”

New York’s Times Square to Become Pedestrian Plaza (temporairly, at least)

(Source: New York Times)

Click here to read the entire article.

(Source: Streets Blog)

Bogotá’s TransMilenio carries 1.4 million riders per day. This bus- and bike-only transitway operates in the historic city center. Photo: Shreya Gadepalli/ITDP.

New York City made a major public commitment to Bus Rapid Transit in 2006 when, after years of discussion, the MTA and DOT put forward plans for pilot routes in each of the five boroughs. In the meantime, the city’s BRT agenda has encountered a few setbacks in Albany and made a partial breakthrough on Fordham Road, with a service that incorporates some nifty bus improvements, but not enough to merit the BRT designation.

Perhaps no one knows the ins and outs of BRT better than Walter Hook (right). As director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, Hook has advised cities on four continents about BRT implementation, including Jakarta’s seven-corridor network, the first full-fledged BRT system in Asia.
Streetsblog caught up with Hook — in between trips to Cape Town and Mexico City — for an email Q&A about why New York City needs Bus Rapid Transit, common misconceptions of BRT in America, and what will make BRT succeed here. This is the first of four installments.

Streetsblog: Is BRT the right mode for New York City at this moment in time? A lot of folks think that BRT is no substitute for light rail or a subway system. How would you pitch the idea of BRT to New Yorkers?

Walter Hook: I was in Philadelphia a few months back, which is a real rail and streetcar-loving town, and I took a lot of heat for suggesting BRT had a place in U.S. cities like New York and Philadelphia, particularly from my friends in the sustainable transportation advocacy community. I understand why a lot of folks in the U.S. see BRT as some sort of marketing trick to pawn off low-quality bus improvements as mass transportation. I think it’s because we don’t really have a full BRT system in the U.S. Not very many people have been to Bogotá, or Curitiba, or Pereira or Guayaquil to see the best BRT systems. These are not exactly tourist Meccas.

Click here to read the rest of this interesting conversation.