{"id":2065,"date":"2007-01-31T09:35:42","date_gmt":"2007-01-31T17:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2007\/01\/follow_the_money-4.html"},"modified":"2008-01-24T14:19:56","modified_gmt":"2008-01-24T19:19:56","slug":"follow_the_mone_3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/01\/follow_the_mone_3.html","title":{"rendered":"Follow The Money"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Who&#8217;s behind congestion pricing proposals? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.observer.com\/20070205\/20070205_Matthew_Schuerman_finance_financialpress.asp\">The powerful bike lobby<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Once the domain of traffic nerds, congestion pricing has taken hold here recently like never before. Both the Partnership for New York City, a prominent group of business executives, and the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank, endorsed or re-endorsed it in December, joining a list of longstanding proponents such as the Regional Plan Association.<\/p>\n<p>[Transportation Alternatives executive director] Mr. [Paul Steely] White represents the left flank, then, of a set of strange bedfellows. Founded by radical bicyclists in the 1970&#8217;s, Transportation Alternatives comes across as a sort of alterna-elite group of forward-thinking urban planners.<\/p>\n<p>About half of its 5,500 members are from Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, and its 18 full- and part-time employees are generally white, well-educated twentysomethings who ride their bikes to work. Many of its largest donors are Wall Street types, and its largest individual funder is Mark Gorton, the high-tech entrepreneur who founded LimeWire. To them, Mr. White says, &#8220;Biking is the new golf.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But T.A., as it&#8217;s called, has long tried to project itself as a generally pro-person, anti-traffic group. The city Department of Transportation ended up copying Safe Routes to Schools, a program established by Mr. White&#8217;s predecessor, John Kaehny, which seeks improvements to streets near schools. A similar program, Safe Routes for Seniors, is next in line for adoption, Mr. White hopes.<\/p>\n<p>And the group regularly submits suggestions for traffic improvements throughout the city, sponsors bike rides, and gives away helmets in poor neighborhoods.<\/p>\n<p>The potential constituency for this tiny, million-dollar-a-year organization headquartered in a Chelsea loft is quite large. Everybody has a gripe about traffic, after all, and it&#8217;s only going to get worse.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who&#8217;s behind congestion pricing proposals? The powerful bike lobby: Once the domain of traffic nerds, congestion pricing has taken hold here recently like never before. Both the Partnership for New York City, a prominent group of business executives, and the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank, endorsed or re-endorsed it in December, joining a list [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture_infrastructure","category-follow_the_money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2065\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}