Perhaps You Were Wondering Why No One Thought You Were Serious About Reducing Traffic Congestion?

I don’t know, closing lanes on Broadway to allow for cafe seating sounds like a great way to reduce soaring asthma rates:

In a surprising reshaping of the urban landscape, the city is creating a public esplanade along a portion of one of its most prominent streets, Broadway in Midtown, setting aside the east side of the roadway for a bicycle lane and a pedestrian walkway with cafe tables, chairs, umbrellas and flower-filled planters.

The esplanade, which the city is calling Broadway Boulevard, will run from 42nd Street to Herald Square. Scheduled to open in mid-August, it will change that section of Broadway from a four-lane to a two-lane street.

“I’m envisioning it as a public park on the street,” said Barbara Randall, the executive director of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, which is working with the city’s Department of Transportation to create the boulevard.

The work, which has begun without a formal public announcement, reflects Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s sweeping vision of reducing pollution and traffic congestion in New York, and particularly Manhattan, by increasing open space and encouraging bike riding and other alternatives to cars.

The plan also makes clear that the Bloomberg administration, after losing its bid in Albany for a congestion-pricing plan that would have fought traffic by charging drivers to enter the area of Manhattan below 59th Street, intends to push ahead with smaller-scale initiatives to wrest at least part of the street from cars and trucks.

Slow News Day

This just in — U.N. diplomats still haven’t paid their parking tickets:

More than a decade after Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared war on diplomatic scofflaws over unpaid parking tickets, the city is still owed more than $18 million, leaving many New Yorkers enraged.

“They should pay,” said Carmen Mercer, 35, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, standing outside a midtown DMV office. “Everybody else has to pay. It comes with the responsibility of having a car.”

Deadbeat nations are clearly in no rush to pay off their debts, the vast majority of which were incurred before a 2002 agreement provided more parking spaces for them. That deal has cut the number of new tickets issued by 94 percent and helped lower the total owed to the city from more than $21 million.

Nevertheless, the total owed has been stuck at $18 million since at least 2005. Some 175 countries are to blame for the missing pot of money, with Egypt and Kuwait leading the list of offenders.

After all, $18 million could be used to build one-tenth of the High Line:

City officials and the Friends of the High Line presented the final design on Wednesday for the first phase of the High Line, the $170 million park that is under construction on the West Side of Manhattan and has been called one of New York City’s more distinctive public projects.

The park, modeled loosely on the Promenade Plantée in Paris, is being built on a 1.45-mile elevated freight rail structure that stretches 22 blocks, from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street, near the Hudson River. The rail structure, built to support two fully loaded freight trains, was built from 1929 to 1934 when the West Side was a freight-transportation hub, but has been unused for decades. The tracks are 30 to 60 feet wide and 18 to 30 feet above the ground.

Ground was broken in April 2006. Over the past two years, crews have been constructing the first, $85 million segment of the 6.7-acre park, which is estimated to cost $170 million and is financed by federal, city and private money.

Location Scout: UN, High Line.

Give This Man A Job Already!

He’s obviously dedicated:

Darius McCollum knows the New York City Transit system well. Perhaps too well.

For about a quarter of a century, he has taken trains and buses for joy rides and impersonated Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers, racking up 23 transit-related arrests. The first came in 1981, after he drove the E train to the World Trade Center. He was last in the news in 2006, when he was charged with criminal impersonation.

Mr. McCollum, 43, of East Elmhurst, Queens, was arrested again on Saturday after he tried to pass himself off as a subway worker, the police said.

When he was arrested, just after 2 a.m. on the platform at the 59th Street/Columbus Circle subway station, he was wearing navy blue clothes similar to a transit uniform, and had a hard hat, transit-logo gloves, a knapsack and documents related to the transit system in his possession, the police said.

. . .

Mr. McCollum’s mother, Elizabeth, 82, said her son had Asperger’s syndrome and had a lifelong obsession with trains.

She said she had last heard from her son three days ago, when he told her he would arrive at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Thursday, taking a Greyhound bus from New York City. But he never showed up.

She said he had been living in Queens with her niece and had told her that he was working in a warehouse.

“They arrest him every time if he has got on anything that looks like transit clothes,” she said by telephone.

She said she and her husband, Samuel, had tried many times over the years to keep Mr. McCollum, who is their only child, from being arrested again by trying to persuade him to stay with them in North Carolina. But to no avail. He slips away and returns to New York City.

“He just loves New York,” she said. “He knows the people in Transportation. And he goes up there to be around them.”

His mother said that she had been telling him that “he has got to learn,” and added that hiring lawyers for him over the years had put her in debt.

But she said he needed help.

“With all these kids who are autistic, they slip behind the cracks, but nobody is trying to help him at all,” she said. “I tried when I lived in New York. Every time he was arrested he wasn’t hurting anybody, and nobody could figure out what is his problem.”

How about as a docent at the Transit Museum at least?

R, FK T, We’ll Call It What We Want

In the end, it may have been a gracious but hollow measure to rename the Triborough Bridge to honor Robert F. Kennedy:

What’s in a name, anyway? Would that which we call the Triborough Bridge by any other name — oh, let’s skip the Shakespeare and get to the point. Would anybody call the Triborough anything but the Triborough?

The short answer seems to be, no.

“It connects three boroughs,” said Susan Breslaoukhov, the manager of a French Connection clothing store in Rockefeller Center. “That’s self-explanatory, I expect people will keep calling it Triborough for a long time.”

The what-will-they-call-it question came up after the State Assembly voted to rename the Triborough the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, for the former attorney general who was elected to the United States Senate from New York in 1964. He died 40 years ago Friday, after being shot in Los Angeles, just after he won the California Democratic primary.

Gov. David A. Paterson is expected to sign the bill making the name change official. His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, suggested the bridge renaming in January. At that time, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the eldest of Robert Kennedy’s 11 children, said, “This has been a dream for quite a while.”

But some said the renaming could be confusing for commuters. “It’s been that way for a million years,” said Morton Mozzar, an automobile-service consultant in Queens. “If they had renamed it right afterwards, O.K., like they did with J.F.K. Airport.” (The airport was called Idlewild but was renamed after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It only seems as if the Triborough has been around for a million years. Next month it will have been open for 72 years.)

Some New Yorkers pointed to name changes that did not take. Consider the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, as it has been known for 30 years in honor of the former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and Mets manager.

Or what about renaming the Miller Highway the Joe DiMaggio? Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki agreed to that in 1999, soon after DiMaggio’s death.

The Miller Highway? Nobody called it that in the first place (except, perhaps, relatives of Julius Miller, the Manhattan borough president when the first section was opened in 1930). It ran from West 72nd Street to Battery Place and was not to be confused with the Henry Hudson Parkway, which runs north from 72nd.

“And what about the Thruway?” asked Mimi Marenberg of Airmont, N.Y. “Its name is the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, but who calls it that? No one. How about Newark International Airport? No one calls it Liberty. We spend money on big signs, renaming these things, but all it does is generate money for the sign people.”

What about RFKTB? Like NKOTB, only more reverent . . .

Earlier: Few Will Have The Greatness To Bend The Span Between Queens And The Bronx.

Location Scout: Triborough Bridge.

No 7 Train Extension!

Sorry, I assumed that would be the headline instead of “MTA hike fare-y may visit us again”:

A rare back-to-back increase — along with service cuts — could be in store for commuters now that MTA number crunchers are suddenly dealing with a massive hole in next year’s budget.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s projected 2009 budget gap has ballooned — doubling or even tripling original estimates, sources said.

Without new state money, officials may soon raise the spectre of increases, service cuts — or both, sources and experts said.

“They don’t have many options,” one source said.

Subway riders gasped at the suggestion.

“I’m a recent college graduate so I can’t afford the subway as it is,” said Bryan Tran, 21, of Queens. “Any higher and I will have to walk everywhere. It’s ridiculous.”