Sustainable Flatbush

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Yesterday’s Tour de Brooklyn bike ride was a fantastic success, with over 2,000 riders! This year’s route covered approximately 18 miles and went through many neighborhoods. It was really fun to ride through Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights with a view of New York Harbor, and I always enjoy riding with a huge crowd of [...]

Tour de Brooklyn 2007 is this Sunday! This year’s route includes Park Slope, Green-Wood Cemetery, Sunset Park (highest elevation in Brooklyn, great view of the harbor!), Bay Ridge, Verrazano Bridge, Dyker Beach Park, Bensonhurst Park, Drier Offerman Park, Kensington, Prospect Park South… and ends at the Prospect Park Carousel. Worth getting up absurdly early on [...]

Streetsblog reports that a community-driven traffic calming project, similar to that profiled in a previous post on Portland, Oregon’s Village Building Convergence, will happen here in Brooklyn this summer. It is unfortunate that the choice of location, Third Avenue and Baltic Street, is motivated by tragedy (a four-year-old boy was killed there by a Hummer [...]

Last night I attended the 2nd Annual Brooklyn Blogfest at the Old Stone House in Park Slope. As a newcomer to the blogging world (my first post is dated only three weeks ago!), I felt somewhat out of my league in the same room with the brains (and actual human beings) behind such established blogs [...]

The past week has been a whirlwind of permaculture activities for me. I am fascinated by this subject, though I still have trouble adequately explaining what it IS when asked. Fundamentally, permaculture is a practice of sustainable design based on ecological principles, and although usually associated with farming or gardening, it can also be applied [...]

I went on this tour (sponsored by Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment) in 2004, and the experience was somewhat life-changing. It was the first time I learned about rainwater harvesting (at the Hollenback Community Garden on Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill), and the first time I saw a green roof (at Bushwick Gardens, a [...]

This year’s schedule is filled with great rides and events for the whole family. Tour de Brooklyn 2007 should be the best yet! Check out the fun from last year’s ride, courtesy of Streetfilms.

“… This looks like a back-door way of putting tolls on the free East River bridges -Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and the 59th Street Bridge. And only during rush hours. What’s the big deal? I think that’s good.

There are larger traffic issues that can be discussed, but allow me to focus on one thing only.- the “free toll” policy, especially during rush hours, is strangling traffic on the Gowanus and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Every hour during the day, hundreds of vehicles from Brooklyn/SI/Long Island bypass the Battery Tunnel in order to get to the free bridges. Which causes traffic on the three-lane BQE to slow to a crawl, often to a dead stop during the daylight hours. Think what this means for the Brooklyn economy.

I work downtown now. I have a ringside seat to the traffic that is not going anywhere. This strangles the traffic arteries within Brooklyn, to/from LaGuardia, from Brooklyn to the Bronx and points north.

If it did nothing else, Bloomberg’s plan would divert many Manhattan-bound vehicles to the Battery Tunnel. Which would allow the Gowanus/Battery traffic to flow much better during the work day. Which is good for every Bay Ridge and Brooklyn resident, and ultimately to every Bay Ridge and Brooklyn ( and other ) motorist.

Bay Ridge is stuck at the nexus of the “Axis of Evil” of bad roads: the Gowanus, the Belt Parkway, and the Staten Island Expressway. Something needs to be done right now. All credit to Mayor Bloomberg for having the guts to propose this necessary legislation now.”

=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:= each month (or so) Sustainable Flatbush will present a workshop, lecture, or film on a sustainability-related theme that can benefit our neighborhood… … and then, we party! Sustainable Flatbush Event #2 | Livable Streets Friday, April 27th 2007 8pm-midnight at Vox Pop Cafe/Bookstore 1022 Cortelyou Road (at Stratford), Brooklyn Q train to Cortelyou Road [...]