What to do with Route 81; why malls can’t ever be green; and reports of Buffalo’s demise.

The Onondaga Citizens League has a new blog, and they are posing the question: What is to be done about Route 81? (hey, that rhymes…) With car sales plummeting and gas prices rising, and bus ridership increasing, maybe that question is more relevant than ever. OCL is starting a study committee called […]

In the comments of the previous post, Simon notes the big trucker rally in Albany today protesting Thruway tolls and gas prices (are they also protesting the Finger Lakes trash truck agreement?) Hate to say it, but I wonder if that honking sound you hear is the sound of dying dinosaurs. I was […]

CNY ecoBlog takes a quick look at today’s bombshell that Syracuse is somehow the city with the worst “carbon footprint” in New York. Is Syracuse’s sprawl and highway addiction really worse than Buffalo’s or Rochester’s? C’mon. Despite sprawl without growth being a significant problem in Central New York, I can’t get my […]

A Buffalo News story on a backlash against “walkable redevelopment” makes me wonder if we’re not all dancing around the real problem with getting Americans to stop driving so much: it’s not just the distances involved, it’s also the stuff.
The “walkable community” uses a dense, villagelike mix of homes and businesses to […]

WSYR reports on gas prices finally spiking to above $4 in some places around Syracuse. This was supposed to be the magical, mythical number that would cause Americans to abandon their cars along the side of the road en masse. Well, I saw a guy proudly driving his Hummer down on Erie Boulevard […]

Trucking companies are, understandably, quite angry about this week’s announced crackdown on garbage haulers using back roads in the Finger Lakes to get to upstate landfills. Will the downstate municipal garbage authorities ever figure out that it might be cheaper (if slower) to haul trash to Seneca Falls via the Erie Canal system? […]

U.S. Representative Peter King of Long Island is pushing a new meme: Native Americans in Upstate New York are in cahoots with radical Islamic terrorists and are using untaxed smuggled cigarettes to fund their plots. As reported in the Buffalo News, the evidence for this conclusion from King’s House H#^$&*#land Security Committee “study” […]

How to argue about I-81 with maps.

It’s not just Choppergate.