Streetsblog New York City

New York City's Moynihan Station project has snagged $83 million in grant money from the stimulus law's Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) announced today.

The grant makes the intended successor to the current Penn Station, a longstanding priority for New York's congressional delegation, the first winner in a highly competitive chase for $1.5 billion in federal transport funding aimed at moving the U.S. DOT towards a more merit-based decision-making process.

The TIGER funding will allow the project to begin its Phase I of construction, which includes building vertical access points from the street to the new transit hub. Work should begin by the end of the year, according to Friends of Moynihan Station, a private-sector advocacy group founded by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's (D-NY) daughter.

"Moynihan Station is the poster child for the best way to use federal funding -- it creates jobs, upgrades aging transportation infrastructure, and leaves behind an economic engine for the entire region," Schumer said in a statement.

Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer also hailed the federal grant through his spokeswoman: "For too long, Moynihan Station has been stopped dead in its tracks. Now that our congressional delegation has been able to secure a down payment, we can begin moving forward on this project, which will create jobs, ease congestion, boost tourism, and right the wrongs of half a century ago" -- a reference to the destruction of the original, above-ground Penn Station, which urbanist pioneer Jane Jacobs fought to preserve.

The rest of the Obama administration's TIGER grants are expected to reach public view starting tomorrow, with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood slated to visit Tuscon (hoping for streetcar aid) and Kansas City (home to the ambitious Green Impact Zone).

Early this week, I noticed a number of my favorite bloggers linking to this Elisabeth Rosenthal essay at Environment 360, on the mysterious greenness of European nations. The average American, as it happens, produces about twice as much carbon dioxide each year as your typical resident of Western Europe.

Rosenthal attributes much of this difference to behavioral factors relating, it seems, to Europeans' unique tolerance of inconvenience. She writes:

But even as an American, if you go live in a nice apartment in Rome, as I did a few years back, your carbon footprint effortlessly plummets. It’s not that the Italians care more about the environment; I’d say they don’t. But the normal Italian poshy apartment in Rome doesn’t have a clothes dryer or an air conditioner or microwave or limitless hot water. The heat doesn’t turn on each fall until you’ve spent a couple of chilly weeks living in sweaters. The fridge is tiny. The average car is small. The Fiat 500 gets twice as much gas mileage as any hybrid SUV. And it’s not considered suffering. It’s living the dolce vita.

She later adds:

Also, in Europe, the construction of most cities preceded the invention of cars. The centuries-old streets in London or Barcelona or Rome simply can’t accommodate much traffic — it’s really a pain, but you learn to live with it. In contrast, most American cities, think Atlanta and Dallas, were designed for people with wheels.

What makes this particularly remarkable is that she opens the essay by discussing an experience she has in Stockholm, in which she insists on taking a taxi from the airport, which ends up being much slower and more expensive than the train.

Read more...

When President Obama announced his plan for a national  high-speed rail network earlier this year, one of the people invited to attend was the Republican mayor of a city you've most likely never heard of -- Meridian, Mississippi. And one of the rail routes, running from Atlanta to New Orleans, went right through Meridian.

The presence of the city's mayor, John Robert Smith, at that announcement -- and the likelihood that Meridian, a city of 40,000 people, will be a stop on a regional high-speed train -- is the product of years of effort. Smith, who has been serving as mayor since 1993 and will be leaving office this year, has been working since the beginning of his tenure to capitalize on Meridian's history as a railroad town and its role as the commercial center for some 350,000 people living in Mississippi and Alabama. USDOT Secretary Ray LaHood's recent trip to look at high-speed rail in Europe underscores the Obama administration's conviction, which Smith shares, that trains can radically change the economic prospects of small cities for the better.

Read more...