Streetsblog New York City

And what about the Bronx Zoo's proposed garage ("intermodal center") at their Bronx River Parkway entrance? The same solution to the problem of "how can we encourage even more people to cram into our grounds on peak days?" They are already signed up for federal money for this due to its supposed "intermodal" aspect.

Subsidies encouraging private auto use within the five boroughs should be illegal. The city council and Albany should enact this legislation immediately. If you are going drive, to detriment of us all, you should have to pay full price.

Morally, how can Bloomberg not see this? It is wrong and it degrades our city.

As city mayor, Bloomberg has little control over transit decisions. Parking is all he can build. He'd rather bring more business in now than try to convince the almost bankrupt MTA over some potential additional transit later. It's this disconnect that hurts our city the most- local politicians have control over roads and parking but not over transit.

Another reason behind the parking garage is that unlike Central Park, the NYBG isn't considered the local community's park. Many people come from far away, and most locals aren't interested (or can't even afford it).

Brad, the Botanical Gardens are in a very different neighborhood than Yankee Stadium and lumping them both into the "South Bronx" does not give a useful understanding of the garage contexts. I don't think most Bronxites would even consider the Gardens to be in the "South Bronx." That said, I'm not defending public investment in parking facilities- the more important point is that both of these destinations have good subway access and Metro North stations nearby.

The man behind not just PlaNYC, but Congestion Pricing too. Quite backwards.

Treat this as an action alert, folks. Call Bloomberg, your house reps, and our Senators. Tell them "anything but parking." Or, if you can specify the "anything," even better. And for contacting the Mayor's office, maybe there are some good relevant (angry?) quotes the Mayor himself on the subject of car pollution? And there's lots of good stuff to quote from PlaNYC, here's just a start:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/plan/air_traffic-plan.shtml

Of course, the idea really isn't bad; I mean, we've treated the environment and people of the Bronx so well for so many decades that putting a new parking garage there is only fair.

This story is bad journalism - I live in the Bronx and the Botanical Garden and Yankee Stadium are nowhere near one another. Someone didn't check their facts beforehand. I know Streetsblog tends to be Manhattan and Brooklyn-centric but come on.

Regardless of location, 20M for 6 floors of parking. If that's 3,333,333.33
per floor, if each floor holds 100 cars, the 33,333.33 per parking spot. That's seems mighty expensive.

When is the last time Bloomberg talked about PlaNYC? That is so last year. I think he lost interest when congestion pricing went down.

Maybe the media has lost interest, or maybe people aren't paying attention. The city agencies still refer constantly to PlaNYC as proposals are presented or when funding priorities are debated. It's still very much a guiding principle for city government - it's just that planting thousands of trees or creating public plazas and parks or offering zoning text amendments for green roofs and bicycle parking doesn't get on the 6:00 news when you have ball players drugging themselves and demanding hundred-million-dollar salaries so they can afford their call girls.

Not the South Bronx, but definitely a stone's throw from Fordham's new parking garage and existing huge parking lot, the existing garden parking lot, the Metro North lot, the zoo's lot, the lot by the old Sears on Fordham Rd., lots of smaller lots on Fordham Rd, and isn't there a garage on the Concourse near Fordham?

Even the strongest arm in baseball would have a tough time throwing a stone from Yankee Stadium to the New York Botanical Garden. Mr. Aaron, I live in the Bronx, and support a lot of your arguments about the need for more investment in mass transit, etc. But as a Bronx resident, I also see the flaws in the public transportation infrastructure in the outer boroughs. A parking garage like the one the Garden is trying to build, believe it or not, would be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Have you been to the Garden or the Zoo or even Yankee Stadium on any peak day? A facility like this is part of the answer to solving the traffic mess. I disagree with your premise that it will make matters worse. I think it will be a step in the right direction.

Yesterday I attended a function where Mike Bloomberg made a very good speech. Amongst other fun lines he had this one: "Joe had the best parking spot in midtown.."

I am telling you, Mike is obsessed with parking... so it makes you wonder if mass transit is just for the rest of us ?

I don't think the "stone's throw" and "South Bronx" references are superficial. It's easy for any of us to voice our opinions on matters like this, but all of our arguments lose some validitiy if it sounds like we're uninformed.

Before "casting stones" at this plan or the efforts of the Garden and Masyor, we need to see the neighborhood with our own eyes. This project and other capital investments in the Bronx will be vast improvements compared to the empty warehouse that was in its place for years before, standing as a testament to the disregard to the area, and dare I say to the borough of the Bronx as a whole up until now.

The Botanical Garden, with its neighbor-institutions Fordham University, the Bronx Zoo, and Montefiore, have joined together to propose solutions for the urban challenges. The mass transit system might serve Manhattan well, but they are severely flawed in the outer boroughs. Metro-North's Harlem Line runs sporadically and is expensive, the subways are out of the way and inconvenient especially for the Garden's elderly visitors, the buses are a labyrinthian nightmare. And investing to improve those transit "solutions" will require much more than 20 million dollars.

The parking garage is not an effort to make more people drive their cars to the neighborhood -- it seems to me that it's a reasonable effort to address one of the many issues that have arisen in the neighborhood.