It’s official. Six years and two lawsuits after then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg first proposed a ban on plastic-foam products, New York City is now a polystyrene- (or Styrofoam- as it’s more commonly called) free zone. New York City’s ban includes all single-use Styrofoam coffee cups, soup bowls, plates, trays, and clamshell-style take-out cartons, as well as packing peanuts.

If you’re in the camp that thinks that a Styrofoam ban is nothing more than a tree hugger’s dream come true, think again. For New York City, which generates more than 14 million tons of trash each year with a tab of more than $2.3 billion for trash collection and disposal, the ban is an economic imperative.

It’s not just New York

As of 2019, the Big Apple joins a group of environmentally committed and financially challenged municipalities and counties across the country where Styrofoam already is officially banned—among them, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Miami Beach, Minneapolis, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle. In California, more than eighty cities, towns, and counties are full in on the ban, with more to come. And that’s not all. A host of other major cities, like Chicago, Boston, Honolulu, and Philadelphia, as well as smaller cities and towns in red, blue, and purple states, currently are considering bans.

If you’re thinking this sounds like a movement that’s gathering momentum, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. You’d also be correct to assume that the road to Styrofoam-free zones has generated considerable pushback, particularly in the food industry.  After all, a ban on Styrofoam packaging will dramatically alter how restaurants and street food vendors serve food to the public. In places where the ban is in place, food purveyors will now be required to use biodegradable, environmentally friendly containers. And although biodegradable take-out containers are cheaper than ever, they’re still more costly than containers manufactured from traditional Styrofoam.

Costs

How much more costly is the question. Let’s look at the facts. On average, Styrofoam cups cost $25 per 1,000. Biodegradable cups cost approximately $100 for 1,000. For a business that uses 1,000 cups per year, the additional cost is $75 per year. For green take-out containers, the additional cost to businesses is approximately $140 per year on a count of 1,000.

On the other side of the spreadsheet are some troubling facts. First, there’s the issue of disposal.  Styrofoam products, manufactured from non-renewable fossil fuels and toxic chemicals, take a minimum of 500 years to biodegrade. Think about that. Then there’s the fact that 99.8% of Styrofoam products end up either in landfills or in the oceans where they sicken or poison wildlife. And did you know that Styrofoam products now account for an astonishing 30% of all of the waste in U.S. landfills? One estimate captures the scale of the problem on the micro level: One individual purchasing a disposable cup of coffee every day generates approximately 23 pounds of waste per year.

Health issues

Second, there are potentially harmful health issues that have flown under the radar for far too long.  It’s been known for many years that as polystyrene comes into contact with hot, greasy, or acidic foods, the chemicals and toxins used in the plastics’ manufacture can leach into the food we ingest and the hot beverages we drink. Five years ago, in 2014, the National Research Council stepped up and sounded the alarm by signing off on the National Toxicology Program’s conclusion that polystyrene should be listed as a human carcinogen.

Economics, health, and the environment. All will be positively impacted by the commitment of communities—large and small—across the country to ban single-use Styrofoam products. And in case we’ve forgotten, this is what commonsense, fact-based, and responsible governance looks like.

If you’re interested in learning more about the health issues concerning polystyrene, a good place to start is to take a look at the information provided by Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, a coalition representing 450 organizations and businesses and more than eleven million parents and professionals who share the goal of educating the public about health issues related to toxic chemicals.

The post Why New York City has gone Styrofoam-free appeared first on Occasional Planet.

They may not have needed photo ID to cast their ballots, but in the 2013 city election, New York City voters would have done well to bring along high-powered magnifying lenses. That’s because, in some precincts in New York City, the names of candidates were printed in tiny, 6-point type. [I would have liked to include a paragraph, here, written in 6-point type, but my blog format doesn’t allow me to go smaller than 8 point. What does that tell you?

Here’s what the actual six-point ballot looked like in November 2013:

Why would an election board print its ballots with such minuscule type? The New York Daily News explains:

The [New York City] Election Board took a beating over the eye-straining six-point typeface on last year’s general election ballots from a legion of elected officials and watchdog groups who said the print was preposterously small.

The 2013 problem arose because of the number of languages — as many as five in some pockets of Queens — into which the ballots had to be translated.

Now the Board will do what some say it could well have done last year: Print no more than three languages on any single ballot, which will boost the type size to 10 points.

The agency insisted it had no choice but to microsize the print citywide last year because providing ballots with varying type sizes might trigger accusations of discrimination and possibly lawsuits.

New York City has 5,369 election districts, according to the Board.

Of those, just 194 — all located in polyglot Queens — have enough qualifying voters to require ballots in four languages.

And in only 79 districts — also all in Queens — must the Board provide ballots in all five languages it offers: English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Bengali.

In those 79 spots, pollsites will be equipped with three sets of ballots, each printed in English and Spanish plus one of the other three Asian languages.

Xenophobes and English-only zealots would probably argue that it would be a lot simpler if ballots were printed only in English, and that, if you want to vote, you should be able to read “our” language. Those arguments may have some merit–but it’s no longer a matter of preference.

According to the New York Times, Section 203 of the federal Voting Rights Act

…requires ballots, forms, pamphlets and signs to be translated wherever 5 percent of the local population — or more than 10,000 voting-age citizens — speak the same native language and have limited proficiency in English.

As of the 2010 census, states with new populations covered by the law are Alaska, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Washington.

A positive side effect of multi-language ballots is that they are a powerful signal of inclusiveness, and they encourage political participation by newer Americans.

“It is often a source of community pride and a signal that it is a large enough group for political mobilization,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside, who directs a national survey of Asian-American voters.

So, it’s nice to know that the New York City Board of Elections is trying to ameliorate the tiny-type situation. They’re increasing the type size to 10 points. That’s still rather small for us older folks. But it’s a sign that the Board wants to encourage voters, not turn them away–as has been the trend in too many other political jurisdictions.

The post Voting news: No more microscopic type on New York City ballots appeared first on Occasional Planet.

America’s failure to invest in its infrastructure is a national disgrace. I think most of us can agree on that. But it’s very hard to get people riled up enough about it to demand a change.

Recently, I was in New York City for a few days. Being there made me think about the issue in a more personal way.  While there, I took a new look at the city’s subway system, a massive piece of infrastructure that was an essential part of my daily routine for more than thirty years.

New York City. Not everyone loves it as much as I do. But can we agree that New York is one of the world’s greatest cities and that it exerts more influence on American business, culture, media, literature, and art than any other place on the continent?  Can we acknowledge that the city’s outsized influence extends far beyond our national borders?

New York City is home to more than 8 million pushy, hyperactive, trend-obsessed individuals. Of those 8 million, over 5.3 million ride the subway every day. New York’s system, with its 468 stations, is the most extensive in the world and the most cost efficient in the country.  And it’s hard to find many other mass-transit systems that beat its efficiency as a people mover twenty-four-seven.

The statistics for New York’s subway system are off the charts.  One in every three American users of mass transit rides on one of New York’s twenty-four subway lines.  Those high rates of use make New York one of the most energy efficient cities in America. In 2008 (the last year for which stats are available), because New Yorkers chose to ride collectively on subway cars rather than driving solo on the highway, 1.8 billion gallons of oil were saved, and 11.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide did not get spewed into the atmosphere.

What this means in the big picture is that the massive ridership of New York’s subway system helps ameliorate America’s overall contribution to some of the primary causes of climate change. (Read that again, California!)

So why is that it that despite incremental investment over the years into one of America’s premier infrastructure assets, its stations are still filthy, poorly lit, and poorly maintained? Tiles still fall off walls. Pockmarked ceilings go unrepaired.  Mothers with babies strapped into strollers have no alternative but to lug their precious cargo dangerously up and down multiple flights of stairs. When you see that bit of craziness, you’ve got to shake your head and ask: What century is this?

And those inconveniences aren’t the worst of it.

America’s first-class city with its third-class infrastructure is on track for one hundred subway deaths in 2013.   Over the last decade, subway riders have witnessed an average of thirty to forty track suicides per year.  What a shame.  Those tragedies were and are preventable—if only.

If only we’d invest in technology already in use throughout Europe and Asia, like the systems in London, Paris, Barcelona, Saint Petersburg, Singapore, Taipei, and Toronto, where platform screens or edge doors have been installed for the protection of riders in mass-transit stations.

If only we’d recognize the value of public transportation. If only we’d have a national commitment and political will to invest in our own country’s infrastructure. If only our politicians would fight for investing in safer public spaces and services and the well-paying, non–outsourceable jobs that would surely follow from that commitment.

The point is that our inability to adequately maintain and improve a public-transportation system located in the world’s most influential city is indicative of the broader failure to commit the resources to maintain and improve infrastructure in communities of all sizes across the country.

And if you dismiss this argument because you think this is just a New York problem, think again.  Even if you’ve never taken a ride on the subway or never will, similar neglect of infrastructure where you live is costing you dearly. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, in 2010 the national price tag for infrastructure neglect was $130 billion. For a family of four, the share of that price tag would be the equivalent of purchasing groceries for five months.

So look around your community. It’s your mass-transit systems, bridges, tunnels, roadways, water and wastewater systems, railroad tracks, airports, electric grids, dams, levies, canals, and ports that are falling apart. You name it.  We’re neglecting it. And, according to the engineers, “it’s only projected to get worse.”

This lack of investment affects so much: our safety, our jobs and productivity, our economy, the future of how our children and grandchildren will flourish or not, and our economic competiveness in the global economy.  So, back to my original question: What are we going to do about it?

The post NYC: 1st-class city, 3rd-class infrastructure, and what it means for the rest of us appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Most people who want to navigate the streets of New York City quickly learn the easy-to-follow logic of the city’s street grid. But what many—even long-time residents—may not know is how that grid came to be, and how it transformed Manhattan from a naturally rocky, hilly island into a level playing field that engendered the commercial and urban hub that New York City has become over the past 200 years.

Those who want to know can visit “The Greatest Grid,” an impressive exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, or buy the book that accompanies it. Both celebrate the 200^th anniversary of the grid, which got its start in 1811, when New York City had about 96,000 residents.

The city’s leaders could see that the population was going to grow, and they wanted to create a city that worked—something modern and in contrast to many European cities, which lacked a coherent street system. [Think London.]  So, they commissioned a massive survey of the island. On display at the museum are the tools of the trade: surveyors’ transits, chains, quill pens, leather-bound logbooks inscribed with measurements and calculations in the flowery penmanship of the era, and stone mile markers that were installed along the way.

The survey took years, but it may have been the easiest part of this massive public-works project. The next step was to decide what kind of a grid the city would divide itself into. Grids were not new, and there were many models to choose from. In one section of the exhibit, you can study grid maps of Paris, Washington DC, Philadelphia and Savannah, Georgia—each of which has its own personality. Among the most intriguing grid maps is the one of Lima, Peru. According to historians, a city grid was part of Spain’s strategy in its invasion of Peru in the 16th century. Spanish settlers imposed a street grid on Lima as a way of—literally—dividing and conquering the local residents.

There was plenty of dividing and conquering to be done in New York City, too. The most populated area of Manhattan was its southern end, where landowners had well-established homes, farms and businesses–mostly on large, irregularly shaped parcels. Farther north, there were small homesteads and lots of squatters in makeshift shacks and tents. Few—whether rich or poor—were interested in moving and/or losing their land, so the city planners had to cut a lot of deals to get their plan off the ground.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the grid project is how it transformed Manhattan’s topography. The island was a rocky place, with a wide variety of elevations. The new grid essentially flattened everything in its path. At the New York City exhibit, dramatic pictures show how, as the process of grading streets and avenues proceeded, many homes and farms were left stranded atop hills, with the leveled street far below. Homeowners got no help from the city: They were responsible for building paths and steps up to their properties. Many simply found themselves in the way: Their homes were seized by eminent domain and torn down.

You can still get a glimpse of Manhattan’s natural topography, though. The original grid stopped at the northern end of the island, so those hills and rocky crags were not excavated. The difference is striking, and looking at the buildings built into the hills of the Bronx, you can almost imagine what the rest of Manhattan might have looked like before the bulldozers took over.

Don’t read that bit about the bulldozers wrong: I’m not here to superimpose a 21^st century environmental sensibility onto a 19^th century plan. They did what they did using the rationales and technologies of the day. It wasn’t all bad, and it wasn’t all good. In the end, the New York City grid was a lot of both. Most of the vision was economically motivated, and most of the immediate benefits accrued to those who were already doing well as landowners—although even some of them had to be convinced via cajoling, arm-twisting, and a likely dose of under-the-table dealing. If you were a low-end farmer or a squatter, your job was simply to get out of the way.  The planners ran roughshod over the little guy, and their regard for property rights and human rights was overridden by their huge ambitions [and, no doubt, greed]. I’m not dismissing those moral deficits.

But there were many benefits, too. As a part of the grid project, the city broke up land into smaller parcels, opening up possibilities for commerce and residential development. Those opportunities became available not just to owners of huge tracts of land, but also to on-the-rise entrepreneurs, for whom success could mean upward social and economic mobility not previously available to them. [Evidence of this trend is still visible today, in the intense New York City real-estate market, where fortunes continue to be made and lost.]

Walking through “The Greatest Grid,” I both indulged my inner nerd and got an imagination-popping, photographic glimpse into New York City’s history. I also found myself musing on the contrast between the accomplishments of 19^th century city planners and our own inability not just to dream big, but even to spend money on basics like our electrical systems, our bridges, and our water and sewer facilities.

We’ve gone from the grand vision of an urban grid to complete political gridlock.

The people who dreamed up New York City’s grid, and their vision of the commercial and residential hub that it would help engender, were all about doing something big.  It’s tempting to say that, in the horse-and-buggy days, things were simpler and you could get things done more easily. Piffle. Yes, it can be harder to ram things through today, when so much more is out in the open. But aren’t entrenched interests  the same in every century? Resistance to change is resistance to change.

The ability to think big is always on the table, and to me, that’s the lesson of “The Greatest Grid.” I’m not pretending that it’s easy. It requires getting out of our own way by looking beyond our narrow interests, overcoming our obliviousness to the needs of others, and—for the sake of something much bigger—putting on hold our absolutist ideologies [right and left] and then thinking and acting—to use a 19^th-century-sounding phrase—more grandly.

The post The greatest grid: When America thought big appeared first on Occasional Planet.

As any gardener will tell you, every plant tells a story.  But only a handful revealed their stories to me before I discovered a passion for gardening in my middle years. Lilac and iris meant the arrival of spring.  Peonies heralded my June birthdays.  Marigolds brought back memories of the mingling of their scent with the cherry pipe tobacco that clung to my grandfather as he taught me how to pull weeds and told me of the effort to coax a garden out of his suburban lot. Yew, a plant-kingdom cliché, was never on my list of story-telling plants.

It was not surprising, then, that I paid slight attention to the struggling shrub tucked beneath a window at my friends’ house in upstate New York, where I would visit on weekends. When my friends decided to redesign their garden beds, the yew was the first on their get-rid-of list.  One day the removal of the beds began in earnest, and the shrub was pulled carelessly from its bearings and unceremoniously dumped in a pile at the back of the property. When I arrived the following weekend, I noticed that despite my friends’ deliberate neglect the yew’s waxy needles had retained their intense green.  Intrigued by the plant’s tenacious will to survive, I decided it deserved another chance.  And so, one Sunday evening, I tossed the shrub in the back of my van and drove south to my city garden.

My Brooklyn garden was tucked behind a wrought-iron fence between a brownstone housing our parlor-floor apartment and a restored nineteenth-century brick carriage house next door. The then-neglected garden had been planted decades before by an Italian immigrant family.  Compelled by agrarian memories too insistent to ignore, the family had planted what would become a fruitful oasis of two sour-cherry trees, a pear, an apple, a peach, and one green and one black fig tree.  With the nurturing of their skilled hands, the whips grew over time within the garden’s constricted circumstances into grand specimens and, in their maturity, bore improbably bountiful harvests of fruit.

My own maiden planting was tucked in beneath the cherry trees that stood next to a crumbling concrete slab at the center of the garden.  At a loss to understand why anyone would mar the garden’s natural beauty, I imagined a superstitious gardener pouring the unyielding material in hopes of obscuring the garden’s true nature, trying desperately to overcome the fear that something so ravishingly beautiful would not be left in peace to endure. Apart from these fanciful musings, I was sure the reason for installing the concrete was far more mundane.  I guessed that one disinterested property owner, finding the task of pulling up uninvited urban flora too repetitive to endure, found it easier to sweep and hose than weed and tend. This was the garden, rich with hidden stories and memories, to which I brought the forlorn yew.  I dug the tangle of its remaining thickened roots into fertile soil in which two generations of fervent Sicilian gardeners had buried their tabbies and mutts.

That garden and brownstone became a nurturing place for my husband, myself, and our then-baby daughter.  In our tenth year there, on the morning of September 11, my husband climbed the stairs to the roof of our building and with numbed disbelief photographed the plume of gray dust and sparkling shards emanating from what had been Manhattan’s tallest towers.  Before we rushed out of the building to retrieve our daughter from school, my husband had captured in sequential snapshots the hypnotic drift of the detritus over the East River to our Brooklyn neighborhood.

For several days, shock kept us from venturing out into a garden transformed by  fallout and the sound of fighter jets scanning the skies overhead. Fragments of charred office memos blanketed the soil between plantings, the names of their recipients sometimes still legible.  From our bedroom window we could see how the gray powder had settled thickly on leaves, at once outlining and then obscuring their silhouettes in a frost-like show.  When I finally stepped out, my gardening boots stamped perfectly sized 7 ½ imprints on the dust-covered path.  Although it felt almost too soon, my husband and I gathered the paper scraps, swatted the plants’ leaves with a broom, and then sprayed them with a strong stream of water until they shed their dull coats.

That December we bought a house in upstate New York.  I knew I would bring with me the plants I had nurtured during those ten years of my ever-increasing fervor for gardening.

Among the plants that made the trip north was the yew, which had thrived in the fecund soil of the Brooklyn garden and now was returned to its roots.  I had faithfully pruned, watered, and fertilized.  Rewarding my attentions, it grew into a bushy two-foot-round ball that settled in at the northerly edge of a bed between our newly renovated 1780s house and a wooden outbuilding.

That first full winter in the country I observed how the relentless foraging of our deer herds nearly returned the yew to its former state of decrepitude.  I realized then that the survivor would need renewed pampering.  In the first warmth of our second spring in the country, I combed through the yew’s center to remove any dead, loose needles left behind by the deer’s voracious nibbling.  As my fingers probed the deep recesses they dislodged a light cloud of spectral gray dust that rose and hung in the air for the briefest of moments, like the puff of the extinguishment of a flame, before being dissipated by a sunny breeze.

This spring, five since that fall in September, I impatiently busy myself to meet the new season.  As I have every year, I note the condition of the yew. As I stroll through the garden taking stock of the day’s tasks, I am reminded that among the other things I brought with me to my new home are the remains of that September dust tucked within the sphere of the rescued yew and mixed into the earth that clings to the roots of the other transplants. The shrubs, perennials, and herbs have grown large, bloomed fragrantly and abundantly, and multiplied robustly in the co-mingling of Brooklyn’s loamy soil and the pebbly soil of upstate.  In this quiet place, where no grand ambitions need be fulfilled nor competing interests appeased, the yew has become a part of my story. It has become my own modest, improbable memorial to the world-shattering events of one clear fall day.

[Editor’s note: On September 11, 2001, Renee Shur was living in Brooklyn, New York. She wrote this reminiscence five years later, and she is sharing it here for the first time.]

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You may recall Arlo Guthrie’s wonderful song, “City of New Orleans” about the train from Chicago to NOLA.  In the movie “Risky Business,” the mystery of what a couple of young lovers were doing occurred on the ‘el’ (or elevated subway) in Chicago.  If you have trouble sleeping and have a device that provides soothing sounds to help take you into dreamland, you’ll find dozens of train and subway sounds, but virtually nothing from either a Greyhound or your metropolitan bus service.

But those of us who are rail lovers have to come to grips with the inherent limitation of trains and subways: They can travel only where tracks exist.  Laying new track is a major public works program.

Buses can essentially go wherever paved roads exist, thus they have unparalleled capacity and flexibility for mass transit.

As Aaron Renn has reported in “Urbanophile,”

Buses are what most people think of when they think of not getting anywhere: senior citizens waiting in lines, guys counting out change, double-parked cars. They are less sexy than subways and tend to be ignored until the MTA announces another round of service cuts. The last time buses were new was in the forties, when they were installed around the city as a cheaper, more flexible alternative to streetcars….But over the last decade, in a few transit-enlightened cities around the world, the bus has received a dramatic makeover. It has been reengineered to load passengers more quickly. It has become much more energy-efficient. And, most important, the bus system—the network of bus lines and its relationship to the city street—has been rethought.

Streetcars are making a comeback, but like buses, their speed and efficiency is limited by street lights and stop signs.  Unlike streetcars, buses have the flexibility to change routes when gridlock paralyzes their movement.

There is no inherent reason why buses can’t be more attractive and enjoyable.

Borrowing interior designs from airport vans, etc., municipal buses can provide passengers with comfortable experiences where they can be comfortable and relax.  Since buses are a slow means of point-to-point transit, passengers deserve a trade-off, and the most likely “reward” is comfortable seating with ample leg room.

Aaron Renn further states:

If New York City, the ultimate American city for rail transit, can see the wisdom of reinvigorating its bus system, then every other city in America should as well. No, New York is not cancelling its subway expansions. But it realizes that in a world of financial constraint, New Yorkers can’t wait decades for the relatively small number of projects that it has in the pipe to come online, much less develop new ones.

Buses came on the scene when metropolitan meant urban, and the automobile revolution was just beginning.  Streetcars faded when metropolitan came to include suburban. Fixed-rail couldn’t keep up with the growth.  The fact that core cities now have more open space than their surrounding suburbs simply proves the point that “things change.”  This is where the flexibility of buses can trump the romance of fixed-rail: A bus can change its route in a day while a streetcar, subway, or commuter train takes years.

Maybe the solution to enjoyable urban mass transit is to ride the bus while listening to the sounds of a train or subway on your headphones.

The post There’s nothing sexy about buses, but they work appeared first on Occasional Planet.