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.

That said, I think that BoogieDowner's arguments are regressive, anti-urban and anti-environment. The Bronx does not need more people driving to the Botanic Garden. It would be bad for the air quality, and bad for safety.

The Botanic Garden has an eponymous Metro-North stop right across the street, but the Garden doesn't feel welcoming to pedestrians or train riders. In order to get into the Garden you have to walk through a parking lot, negotiating the space with cars. The most direct route from the Metro-North station is through another parking lot.

If you're coming from the subway, it's either a long walk (hot and noisy during the summer) or a long wait for the Bx26 bus. Then you have to cross Webster Avenue, which is always an unpleasant experience. For $55 million the NYBG could have bought a fleet of comfortable jitneys and run them to every subway line. As Brad wrote, instead of asking for $20 million for the garage, they could have asked that it be spent on improving transit connections.

Jose Rivera's assembly district contains most of the area around the Garden. 71.9% of the households in the district were car-free in 2000 - and we don't want to encourage anyone to add to that number, right? It's the elite of the borough that's "well entrenched in the car culture," not the residents as a whole.

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

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.

Just as Inwood and Washington Heights are very different neighborhoods that are both considered "Northern Manhattan," I described these locations as being in the "South Bronx." My mistake, obvs, but I think we can agree that this area of the Bronx, regardless of what you call it, or whether you call it anything, has seen its share of taxpayer-supported parking.

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 is about the lamest thing I've ever read on Streetsblog.

Obviously you don't get to the Bronx very much. According to Google maps they're 4 1/2 miles apart.

A stone's throw on steroids?

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).

The point is that both the Bot Garden and Yankee Stadium are in the South Bronx, which has suffered disproportionately from the Bloomberg admin's pro-parking policies.