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 mind around why [...]
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 create historic-looking [...]
WSYR reports on gas prices finally spiking to above $4 in some places around Syracuse. This was supposed to be the magical, mythical number that would cause Americans to abandon their cars along the side of the road en masse. Well, I saw a guy proudly driving his Hummer down on Erie Boulevard this morning, [...]
Trucking companies are, understandably, quite angry about this week’s announced crackdown on garbage haulers using back roads in the Finger Lakes to get to upstate landfills. Will the downstate municipal garbage authorities ever figure out that it might be cheaper (if slower) to haul trash to Seneca Falls via the Erie Canal system? (Not to [...]
U.S. Representative Peter King of Long Island is pushing a new meme: Native Americans in Upstate New York are in cahoots with radical Islamic terrorists and are using untaxed smuggled cigarettes to fund their plots. As reported in the Buffalo News, the evidence for this conclusion from King’s House H#^$&*#land Security Committee “study” is thin. [...]
How to argue about I-81 with maps.
It’s not just Choppergate.
What happens if nothing happens to I-81?
Singing about OnTrack is like dancing about architecture, but maybe we should do it anyway.

Deficient U.S. bridges by county (1994 data) – via The Albany Project