Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a dream: He wants to make vast, populous, sprawling New York City "the first environmentally sustainable city of the 21st century." He has 100 proposals on his list to make the city sustainable, in addition to the ones he has already enacted. Citizens may grumble, but there is no smoking in restaurants and bars. There is a ban on fast foods made with unwholesome fats. There is no more access to drinking on the computer trains that feed workers into and out of the city each day. It used to be that each day, and especially during holiday seasons, at the Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, the local police met the computer trains and anyone who came off drunk, they took his car keys and drove him safely home. Now that won’t be necessary since the commuter has no access to liquor until he reaches home.
The Mayor is even considering a fee on drivers of private cars to enter mid-Manhattan, a ban which exists in the heart of London. There is good public transportation and people are encouraged to use the subways and buses instead of their private cars. There are designated street lanes for buses and for bikes.
New York City, under Mayor Bloomberg’s direction, has converted tens of thousands of traffic lights and crossing signals to energy-efficient models and replaced wasteful appliances in public housing buildings.
Actually, people who live in the center of a city like New York or London do not contribute heavily to global warming, because they live in mixed-use neighborhoods, where they walk for most of their errands, to grocery stores, pharmacies, restaurants, and theaters. And the tall apartment buildings they live in takes less energy to heat than single-family houses since they have fewer outside walls.
Another of the Mayor’s innovation is a prohibition on using cellphones while driving cars, or inside a classroom. The city’s latest prohibition on the use of unhealthy trans fats will be put in force this July, a dream child of the Mayor, who is a health advocate, and his health commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden. This program will be enforced by the city health department that will send inspectors to fast food restaurants, to measure their use of trans fats. It is New York City’s answer to the growing national hazard of obesity. One in three Americans are considered obese, which is serious overweight and a cause of heart and kidney problems as well as diabetes.
Much of the city has been re-zoned under Bloomberg’s administration to allow a mix of offices, industry and housing. A new water-filtration plant is being built, as well as additional school buildings. A former landfill is being turned into the city’s newest, largest park. The mayor’s primary idea is to make the changes under his administration irreversible, so that the next Mayor cannot undo them. As we know, Mayor Rudolf Giuliani, his predecessor, who cleaned up the city’s streets of petty crime and vagrants, is now running for president on the Republican ticket. Maybe Mayor Bloomberg has a similar ambition.