WNYC is asking people to count the number of SUVs versus regular cars on their block. I’m game just as soon as I get back to Brooklyn (actually, the count ends today at 1 p.m.). Let’s see how many SUVs there are in green Park Slope? It’s going to be a scary number.
We want you to go outside and count the number of SUVs on your block, as well as the number of regular cars. This is our experiment in “crowdsourcing,” where we employ you, the listener, in an act of journalism. We’re trying to find out just how much gas-guzzling SUV use there is throughout the New York area, with all the talk of environmental sustainability in the city. We’re giving you until next Thursday to do the counting, but please, just count the cars once. Most trucks and minivans are not SUVs, so we’re trusting your judgment. Also, please count the cars on both sides of the block (i.e. the section of your street between intersecting roads).
If you want to take photos, feel free to upload to Flickr and tag the photos blsuv. Post your results in the comment section below and we’ll analyze the results next week.
Wired Magazine writer Jeff Howe explains the idea on the air.
Please post 1) your neighborhood, 2) your block (street and cross street) 3) the number of SUVs parked 4) the total number of cars parked
NOTE: While we ordinarily encourage comments of any kind, we would like to keep this page limited to the findings about SUVs. We will take other comments when we discuss this next week. Thanks!
(that was in response to roberto’s comment…)
except volvos and subaru foresters are not the size of NYC studio apartments; cadillac escalades, chevy tahoes, and hummers are.
that means that a curbside parking space large enough to accommodate one of the aforementioned behemoths should be worth about $1000 a month in park slope (bring your own tent)…
NY Times reports that Mayor Bloomberg is driven 22 blocks to an express stop to avoid having to catch the #6 local…
August 1, 2007, 9:37 am
Shadowing the Mayor of New York
By Michael M. Grynbaum
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg approached two Chevrolet Suburbans waiting for him outside his town house on Tuesday morning. (Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times)When I started as a reporting intern on The Times’s Metro desk, I didn’t expect I would find myself shadowing the mayor of New York. But when my editor asked me how I’d feel about waking up every morning at 6 o’clock to hop on a subway and stand around a street 70 blocks from my apartment, it seemed too good to pass up. The story was irresistible: Checking Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s assertion that he commuted regularly to work by subway. It was a perennial political question: Did image live up to reality?
The last time I’d been conscious at that hour involved finishing up a term paper from the night before. But Mayor Bloomberg is a notorious early riser — in his 1997 autobiography, he recalls chastising a colleague for arriving to work at 8 a.m.
We would be following the mayor’s morning commute, and we set out at first to determine his basic routine. Taking our cue from past reports that placed him at the 77th Street stop on weekday mornings, The Times sent the reporters Cassi Feldman and Cristina Maldonado (and me) to the mayor’s Beaux-Arts town house and nearby points on the Upper East Side.
For the first few days, we thought we had an amazing scoop: The mayor never takes the subway at all!
The waiting Suburbans would pick up their passenger and zip off, but the reporter at the 77th Street subway never saw Mr. Bloomberg arrive. Newspaper vendors and employees from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the station all said the same thing: The mayor doesn’t come here.
But something did not feel right. Mr. Bloomberg continued to refer to his subway travels at news conferences, and it didn’t seem likely he would make up a fact so easily verifiable. So we set out walking down the Lexington Avenue line to figure out what was going on.
All was quiet until 59th Street, when people’s eyes started to light up. “The mayor? Oh yeah, he’s here all the time!” Employees for Metro and other free newspapers told us how the mayor was dropped off right across the street from Bloomingdale’s, by the Hampton Jitney bus stop. (At this point, we couldn’t help but notice that the soaring blue headquarters of Bloomberg L.P., the mayor’s media company, sits a block south of the subway stop on Lexington.)
Before long, we saw what was going on. On the days the mayor takes the subway, he typically hops into one of two waiting S.U.V.’s and gets driven to the 59th Street stop, where he rides the express line (the No. 4 or No. 5) to City Hall.
Newspaper vendors seemed bemused by — then slightly suspicious of — our curiosity. An initially friendly man started sending us strange looks the third time we showed up loitering around the stop. By the fifth time he was making stalking jokes, though he never seemed to laugh.
Readers will have their own opinions about the article and the mayor’s commute, but we enjoyed ourselves.
We also had a chance to sample a few excellent breakfast places in the area. Highly recommended: Nectar Coffee Shop, Madison Avenue on the corner of 79th Street. A bit pricey, but what can you expect for the Upper East Side? Try the two-eggs-and-bacon combo, with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. And the service is great.
Government & Politics, Transportation, City Hall, M.T.A., Michael R. Bloomberg, subways, Upper East Side
also carried in NY1..
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=1&aid=72206
And he wants to implement congestion pricing for working stiffs and increase subway fairs?
Kind of like counting the Volvos or Subaru Foresters on any PS block.
Lame.