The 86th Street Parallel

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Glenn McAnanama: [00:06] Hi, I’m Glenn McAnanama. I run a local environmental group called Upper Green Side. This is the intersection of 86^th Street and 2^nd Avenue. This is where Mayor Bloomberg proposes to draw the line for congestion pricing. And as you can see, it’s a very congested intersection. This is four o’clock in the afternoon and you can already see that the traffic’s building up. This is traffic heading into Downtown Manhattan. You can see that a lot of cars coming through this intersection are personal automobiles and in looking inside we rarely see very few that have more than one person. Midtown on many days is just completely gridlocked and you’ll see a lot of blocking the box. So like for instance right now, you know, a lot of these cars might not make it through the intersection and if they don’t, then they start blocking other cars and that’s what, you know, you call classic gridlock. So the more cars that we can get off the road, the less chance that you’re going to create these gridlock situations. There’s a lot of traffic that is more important than other traffic, so there are very necessary truck deliveries that happen in our area. We want to make sure that those trucks and deliveries get here on time. And then there’s also elderly and disabled people who probably need cars, or maybe taxis, and we want to make more room for those, more sort of necessary transportation needs to get around. And then lastly, there’s a lot of emergency vehicles and you can see when there’s an emergency vehicle trying to get down 2^nd Avenue, a lot of times it’s blocked at almost every intersection. I mean I think that the benefits are going to be cleaner air, it’s going to be faster commutes by bus, you’re going to have a lot more space for things like bicycles and pedestrians, you’re going to have more people demanding better mass transit, and more people funding mass transit through the fare box.

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