Mr. Gioia, a likely candidate for public advocate, said yesterday that his campaign would purchase carbon offsets, use hybrid vehicles, send fewer mailers and more e-mail, and take other steps to make up for the greenhouse emissions produced by his run for office.

Why use hybrid vehicles? Why would a campaign for a citywide office need any motor vehicles at all? Because he thinks nobody in Gerritsen Beach will take him seriously if he doesn't show up in an SUV?

Right. Where the City Council and the food supply is concerned, I can't help it.

Everyone forgets -- no accountability.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/nyregion/23moynihan.html

As I pointed out, the transportation (i.e. non-symbolic, non-developer-oriented) benefits of this plan are very minor. Symbols are nice, but in a declining economy, $3 billion is an awful lot to pay for a symbol. A less expensive symbol would be the Fulton Street Transit Center, which at last count was $1.2 billion over budget. Let's take that $1.2 billion and build the big dome and the Calatrava birdie-whatsis, and spend the $1.8 billion on the Tenth Avenue station for the #7 (if we're going to build that extension).

Or more frugally still, how much could we save a year in interest payments if we cut the MTA debt by ten percent?

http://capntransit.blogspot.com/2008/01/of-rats-and-gods.html

Back in 1996, City Planning proposed allowing larger stores in certain categories on wide streets in manufacturing districts, without a multi-year review process most stores could not afford. The goal was to allow more large supermarkets to open near poor neighborhoods. DCP found that many middle income people were shopping at large stores in the suburbs, denying the city jobs for the less well off and tax revenues, while the poor were stranded with monopolistic stores providing bad food at high prices.

DCP was opposed be a coalition that hired Richard Lipsky. He went to white neighborhoods and said large stores would attract "outsiders" to their neighborhood and bring "crime." He went to minority neighborhoods and claimed that the proposal was a white plot to wipe out minority businesses. And he went to snobby neighborhoods and claimed that allowing new large stores within the city as anti-urban, auto-centric, etc. Meanwhile, his backers sprinkled money on the City Council. The proposal was defeated.

As I predicted in DCP documents, high markup, large corporate stores have been above to afford the process (and the political contributions) and open. So we have IKEA, Whole Foods and Trader Joes for the Yuppies, but poor communities are still stuck with bad food at high prices.

So now Bloomberg has proposed auto-centric, anti-urban carts in poor neighborhoods, and the same coalition is set to shoot it down again.

I mention this only in case some of you were taken in by the phony urban-snob/environmental argument 12 years ago. No doubt Lipsky, that defender of the envirnoment and the urban lifestyle who is also opposing congestion pricing, is in on this little piece of self interest as well.