Plotting a Route for Urban Biking
While studying to become city planners at New York University in 2003, Vaidila Kungys and Jordan Anderson wanted to explore the city by bike, but neither knew the streets that well. Anderson got clipped by a cab on one outing and grew tired of pulling paper maps out of his backpack and finding them a disheveled mess. Kungys, a former competitive rider, did a better job navigating the moving obstacles and tight spaces of the city’s streets, but learning the best bike routes was a different matter. After hearing similar stories from their fellow bikers, the friends came up with an idea: How about a HopStop for cyclists? HopStop is a popular website that tells you how to get from Point A to Point B in New York City and other major metro areas using buses, trains, and subways. Kungys and Anderson thought it would be the perfect tool to find maps of popular bike routes and learn about New York’s growing network of bike lanes. But HopStop’s creators turned down the idea. So the friends decided to build their own site, and in 2008, Ride the City debuted. It was a hit with urban cyclists and soon expanded to Chicago and Austin. Today, Ride the City offers bike maps in nine North American cities, with more planned. (Bikers and city officials around the world have put in requests.) The website has 46,500 monthly users and recently launched a version for the iPhone that made Apple’s list of "hot apps" when it debuted in April. May is Bike Month in New York City and nationwide , and Friday is National Bike to Work Day, so a lot of new people might be looking for routes to work. Ride the City’s goal is to make it easier for them — riders can plug in their starting point and destination, and the site will plot a route. Users can choose whether they prefer the most direct route through city traffic, or the safest one. Anderson and Kungys built their site at the same time that New York City officials were working to make the metropolis more friendly to bikers and pedestrians, part of an overall environmental and transportation strategy designed to provide alternatives to driving and cut down on pollution. Those efforts have included protected bike lanes on busy thoroughfares and closing off parts of Time Square to vehicular traffic. It’s worked, according to a recent study by the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, which says the number of daily riders in the city has grown from 73,000 in 2003 to 201,000 this year. "Every time you’re walking to work, you’re noticing more and more bike racks, you’re noticing more and more bike lanes, which kind of gets you in the mindset that, ‘Hey, the city is actually making a space for bikes,’" Anderson says. "I think Ride the City is a small part of that. It’s a nice part of that." Kungys is originally from Eugene, Oregon, and Anderson grew up in Montana. Biking in their hometowns was nothing like biking in New York City. Even while living in Chicago, Anderson didn’t have the same kind of near misses that can be routine on New York streets. "In Chicago, I never even got close to be hitting by a car," he says. "It’s amazingly easy to get around by bike. I got here to New York and I’m like, ‘Man, this place is crazy.’ I jumped on my bike and I rode around, and I always felt like I was kind of taking my life in my hands." Kungys ( right ) was more comfortable dodging and weaving through New York traffic because he once trained to race bikes as part of the U.S. national team. As a teen-ager, he lived at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, dreaming of gold medals. But one day, talking to a fellow racer about the endless, grueling cycle of training and competition, he started to realize that he didn’t want to "sit on a bike my whole life." Over time, he decided that the pursuit of Olympic gold took too much time away from other goals. He quit, but he never lost his passion for cycling; he just didn’t want to make it his only one. Now Kungys helps others ride safely instead. He and Anderson are now urban planners; Anderson is in private practice; Kungys works for the city. But they’ll often put in an extra 20 hours a week on their website. Kungys will sometimes look out the window and watch as folks bike to the park while he’s inside helping them plot better routes. "There’s a quirky irony" in that, he acknowledges, but he’s not worried about burning out like he did on the national team. "Number one, this isn’t about me. Cycling was just about me getting better for myself. This is about making it easier for other people to get around. To get other people who may never have been on a bike (to ride)." Despite new competition from Google Maps, which launched its own bike route-plotting option in March, Anderson and Kungys feel confident that their creation, with a two-year head start, has built a place for itself in the biking community. Ride the City works in part by relying on user feedback, as well as data from OpenStreetMap , a volunteer community mapping project. Riders can rate stops along the way and remove or add routes according to their preference. Media outlets in Austin, Texas, and Louisville, Kentucky, compared the site to Google’s directions and found Ride the City’s advice more helpful. "One of the great things about (Ride the City) is the crowd sourcing aspect," says Wiley Norvell with Transportation Alternatives in New York City. "The more cyclists choose and recommend specific routes, the more commonly those routes are recommended to everyone else. This isn’t just two guys looking at a map. It has the benefits of tens of thousands of cyclists who are out there, being the eyes and ears of it." Years after giving up his Olympic dream, Kungys is glad to have something new to drive him — something that also contributes to his community. "When I work hard and don’t sleep enough and am tired," Kungys says, "I still get energy from it, because I realize we are helping people. We’re helping people ride their bikes."
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New York Puts Brakes on Drilling in NYC Watershed, Clears Way for Upstate Wells by Next Spring
By Abrahm Lustgarten New York State environment officials shoved a cumbersome task off their plates Friday when they announced that their controversial environmental review of natural gas drilling in New York’s Marcellus Shale would not apply to drilling inside New York City’s 1,900-square-mile watershed. The decision appears to protect the unfiltered water supply for nine million residents — as well as another unfiltered watershed near Syracuse, N.Y. — because energy companies will be required to undergo a separate and exhaustive review for each well they propose to drill and hydraulically fracture inside the area, a hurdle that may amount to a de facto ban. But it also removes a significant political and scientific obstacle to completing the two-year statewide review process , paving the way for drilling to proceed across much of the rest of the state as soon as next spring. "Clearly there will be less analysis required to finish the job now that we are going to be focusing on the environmental safety of the process and not getting into the unique components of the FAD watersheds," said New York State Department of Environmental Conservation assistant commissioner Stuart Gruskin, referring to the Filtration Avoidance Determination, the federal permit that allows New York City’s water to be delivered untreated. "We are not giving special treatment to those FAD watersheds or deciding that it is unsafe to drill there — rather we are pulling them out and recognizing that there are a distinct set of issues." The state has received more than 14,000 comments relating to its generic statewide environmental review and has struggled to complete another draft of that review while coping with questions about the New York City watershed, and a shortage of staff to complete the research. By simplifying the scope of the study, state officials hope they can finish the larger review, known as the SGEIS, by the end of the year. Then they’ll begin considering the 58 drilling applications for outside the watersheds that have already been submitted, soon after. Concerns about the environmental impacts of drilling inside the New York City watershed — and about the state’s preparedness to manage the drilling elsewhere — were first raised by ProPublica in a July 2008 article that found state officials were not informed about what chemicals would be pumped underground during hydraulic fracturing and did not have a plan to dispose of the hazardous waste the process would produce. Gruskin said Friday’s decision to separately review drilling in the watershed was not an acknowledgement that fracturing presented any special risk, but rather was based on concerns that construction and traffic associated with drilling could lead to more sediment and turbidity in the city’s reservoirs. New York City officials praised Friday’s announcement as recognition that the state did not have enough information to say whether hydraulic fracturing was safe, and said they welcomed the additional environmental reviews. Last December the city pressed for an all-out ban on drilling in the watershed after a study it commissioned contradicted the state’s assessments and found that it would be impossible to protect the city’s water supply from the chemicals, waste and disturbance from the drilling. The announcement drew immediate consternation from both the energy industry and environmental groups. "Requiring an individual EIS on a well by well basis is too much," said Jim Smith, a spokesman for the Independent Oil & Gas Association of New York. Kate Sinding , a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: "It indicates the state is still considering allowing drilling with toxic chemicals in watersheds that supply drinking water to more than 9 million New Yorkers," adding, "And it’s an ominous sign for the water supplies of those in the rest of the state — which could be subject to drilling under a rushed and fatally flawed environmental review that environmentalists, politicians and residents have said for months needs to be started anew." Sinding said the state was just avoiding a final decision about how drilling should proceed in the most delicate areas. She said the only way to fully protect New York City’s water would be to ban drilling in the watershed altogether. Gruskin said such a move would be nearly impossible to make. "At the end of the day an outright ban risks very substantial litigation without a sound basis," he said in a conference call with reporters. "Seventy percent of the property in watershed is privately owned, and to wave a wand and say no drilling can take place in the watershed would deprive people of the right to access natural gas that may be under their properties and there would have to be compensation." Reporter Sabrina Shankman contributed to this report. This story was published by ProPublica , an independent, nonprofit newsroom based in New York City, and is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license.
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New York Puts Brakes on Drilling in NYC Watershed, Clears Way for Upstate Wells by Next Spring
NRDC and the Big Apple
OnEarth spoke to Mark Izeman, director of NRDC’s New York urban program, which works to protect the nation’s largest metropolitan area. Why should restoring the New York City waterfront be a top environmental priority? For starters, it’s the greatest untapped area of open space in the city. The shoreline is longer than the entire coastline of Cape Cod, but historically much of it has been walled off from the public. Second, revitalizing the waterfront must also be seen as a key element in jump-starting the region’s new green economy. There are huge opportunities to create and preserve environmentally friendly industries, including the city’s historic maritime industry. Can you give us some examples of how the waterfront can help build a green economy? I can think of two good examples. The first is the city’s state-of the-art recycling facility, which is being built along the Sunset Park waterfront in Brooklyn. And the second is the ongoing effort to transform the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard on the East River into a green industrial park. Both of these projects will not only help create thousands of new jobs in green industries, but they will also help reduce city air pollution by using our barges and boats-instead of relying exclusively on trucks-to move people, goods, and recyclables. How clean are New York City’s waterways these days? Well, over the past 40 years the level of pollution has declined dramatically in the harbor. But significant problems persist, such as toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in the Hudson River and dioxin contamination in the Passaic River in New Jersey. And, despite sharp reductions in sewage pollution since the 1970s, our waterways are still regularly contaminated by untreated sewage discharges from our antiquated sewer system. Indeed, every time it rains, millions of gallons of raw sewage and rainwater are discharged into the surrounding rivers and bays from hundreds of outfalls dotting the coastline. This lingering problem limits New Yorkers’ recreational opportunities, such as kayaking and swimming. At the same time, the city’s sewage treatment plants also need to be upgraded to remove more nitrogen from our sewage wastes. High nitrogen levels lead to algae blooms that harm fish and other aquatic life. And what about eating fish caught off the city’s coastline? Are they safe to eat? Unfortunately, despite all the gains we have made since passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972, there are still significant health concerns with eating fish from the city’s waterways. The biggest problem is PCB contamination, which comes from the more than one million pounds of PCBs dumped into the Hudson River by General Electric over a 30-year period. Because of this toxic legacy, New York State officials advise that any fish caught from the Upper Hudson should not be eaten. And officials warn that most fish species from the Lower Hudson should not be eaten more than once per week .
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NRDC and the Big Apple