Our July meeting kicks off our popular summer walking tours -- this time, to Fordham Road in the Bronx. Some 75 years ago, in the 1930's, General Motors joined forces with Robert Moses, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and the city's elites to rid the NYC of its extensive and very popular street railway network -- the world's largest at the time. With pluck, persistence, payola and even some WPA money, they succeeded in dismantling a priceless and irreplaceable urban investment.

Today, New Yorkers must endure an immense but second-rate surface transit system of some 6,000 buses carrying about 3 million passengers a day. Our city buses, mostly in shared, not dedicated, lanes, must yield to private motorists. If not slowed by private vehicles, our buses may find their bus stops blocked by them, since enforcement is extremely uneven.

Now Mayor Bloomberg and a handful of environmental advocates have 'discovered' the bus. They are calling for a Cinderella-like transformation of this ugly duckling of public transit into a sparkling new mode of travel: BRT, or bus rapid transit. These advocates see BRT as a way to forestall the serious investment in light rail transit and dramatic changes in city street use, which inevitable oil shortages are going to necessitate in the near future. In an unusual model of municipal cooperation, the NYC Dept. of Transportation and MTA NYC Transit Bus have actually taken a baby step together. They are transforming a busy bus route in the Bronx -- the Bx12 on Fordham Road -- into a model of what BRT could be like.

Have they succeeded? Are such experiments a good substitute for doing something substantial? Join us at our next Auto-Free New York walking tour and see for yourself!