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Fingers Point as NYC Traffic Plan Runs Aground
Diane Cardwell, New York Times
It was supposed to be different this time. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his aides conducted elaborate analyses and an intricate media campaign, not to mention all the detailed strategy sessions with advocates and experts, to develop and promote the mayor’s traffic congestion pricing plan.
Yet, despite ads on cable television, a video on YouTube and the mayor’s passionate pleas from church pulpits, the proposal never got very far in the State Legislature.
At a news conference in Brooklyn yesterday, Mr. Bloomberg denounced lawmakers for failing to even take up his plan, suggesting that they lacked “guts” and that their inaction would result in children being exposed to polluted air. “Albany just does not seem to get it,” he said.
But state officials and political operatives said it was Mr. Bloomberg who did not get it as he and his aides pursued a doomed strategy, one that all but guaranteed a replay for congestion pricing of the failed efforts to bring a football stadium to the Far West Side of Manhattan and the 2012 Olympics to the city.
Last night, state leaders grappled with whether to give the mayor a second chance as they negotiated with him to see if some version of his plan could be salvaged. But whatever ultimately emerged, state officials said, was unlikely to resemble what the mayor originally proposed.
State officials and operatives on both sides of the issue described what they saw as the strategic missteps made by the administration over the past few months.
(18 July 2007)
Derailed: Government’s green promises on transport policy
Ben Russell, Nigel Morris and James Macintyre, The Independant
Dramatic new evidence that car travel has become far cheaper while buses and trains have soared in cost led to renewed attacks on Labour’s transport policy last night, as MPs said the Government was undermining its own battle against climate change.
According to newly disclosed statistics, the cost of car travel has fallen by 10 per cent over the past 30 years, while the price of bus and train tickets has risen by more than 50 per cent. The respective trends have continued throughout Labour’s period in office.
Campaigners warned that the figures, revealed by the Department of Transport in a parliamentary answer yesterday, laid bare the huge disincentive for Britons to choose environmentally friendly forms of travel.
The statistics show that Labour has failed to reverse the long-term trend. Since 1997 when the party came to power, the cost of running a car has fallen by 10 per cent, but the price of bus travel has increased by 13 per cent and train travel has become 6 per cent more expensive. British trains are already among the most expensive in the world, with further above-inflation rises certain in the future. ..
(18 Jul 2007)
UK residents might also like Taxpayers face bill of hundreds of millions for Metronet debacle.
The car industry is in a hole, perhaps it should keep digging
Christian Kerr, Crikey Australia
Oh God! The nation’s biggest welfare bludgers are whinging again.
The government is being heavied to dole out billions of dollars of new aid to Australia’s car industry in the wake of Ford’s decision to close its Geelong engine manufacturing plant.
Andrew McKellar, chief executive of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, has told The Australian that car-makers want to renegotiate the rest of a $7.3 billion government support package for Ford, General Motors, Toyota and Mitsubishi, due to expire in 2015.
But Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane should listen to industry analyst John Mellor instead. He points out that Ford opted to stay within the Australian market rather than expand into exports like Toyota did.
Then there’s the matter of the Geelong plant’s product – an ageing six-cylinder engine that only measures up to the Euro III emissions regulations. The four-cylinder Toyota Camry and six-cylinder Toyota Aurion already comply with the later Euro IV standard.
Our much molly-coddled manufacturers of vehicles still suffer from the delusion that they don’t need to actually look after customer needs and instead can stay on the government tit. ..
(19 Jul 2007)
Need to read the article to get the punchline in the heading. Ford and Holden in Australia are stuck in a decades long affair with six & eight cylinder cars, a romance maintained by Government money, via direct subsidy and as the biggest single buyer of big cars. How many other industries will follow Australia’s fossil fool Prime Minister John Howard into the abyss? See New rail flagged to ease coal bottleneck for an idea of his governments priorities.-LJ
Hummer owner gets angry message
Vandals batter D.C. man’s SUV, slash its tires and scratch in an eco note
Allison Klein, Washington Post
On a narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington, where Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm, one man bought a flashy gray Hummer that was too massive to fit in his garage.
So he parked the seven-foot-tall behemoth on the street in front of his house and smiled politely when his eco-friendly neighbors looked on in disapproval at his “dream car.”
It lasted five days on the street before two masked men took a bat to every window, a knife to each 38-inch tire and scratched into the body: “FOR THE ENVIRON.”
“The thought of somebody vandalizing it never crossed my mind,” said Gareth Groves, 32, who lives with his mother in a three-story home in the 3400 block of Brandywine Street NW in American University Park. “I’ve kind of been in shock.”
Now, as Groves ponders what to do with the remains of his $38,000 SUV, he has been the target of a number of people who have driven by the crime scene in his upscale neighborhood and glared at him in smug satisfaction.
(18 July 2007)
Social norms are changing. People who break those norms are subject to jokes, ostracism, “pranks.” -BA
