Michael Bloomberg

Flickr via basykes:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/basykes/

A few days ago, New York City announced its “Cool Roofs” initiative, an effort to save energy by combining volunteerism and green design. According to the Mayor’s press release:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Vice President and founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection Al Gore today launched an NYC Service initiative, “NYC Cool Roofs,” to mobilize volunteers to coat the rooftops of participating buildings with reflective, white coating to reduce cooling costs, energy usage and greenhouse emissions… A cool roof absorbs 80 percent less heat than traditional dark colored roofs and can lower roof temperatures by up to 60 degrees and indoor temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees on hot days. The decrease in temperature reduces the need for air conditioning, lowering electric bills and reducing energy consumption.  Coating all eligible dark rooftops in New York City could result in up to a 1 degree reduction of New York City’s ambient air temperature – a significant and lasting change towards cooling the City.

While the city’s building code requires that new buildings include these types of roofs, the city has thousands of old structures that are not subject to these rules but could still be painted and help save energy. This is the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency. The Mayor and his team should also be congratulated for integrating this program into the national effort to encourage greater volunteerism and public service.

However, in addition to the modest effort announced here, given the level of unemployment in the city and around the country, I wonder why we don’t take some of those billions of stimulus dollars still unspent and put a bunch of people to work painting roofs throughout America. We could start with public buildings, including the nation’s schools. Most people know how to paint or can be quickly trained, and it seems to me to be the kind of “shovel-ready” project that could do a lot of good in a hurry.

In his 2009 State of the City address back in January, Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined plans to create thousands of new jobs and bolster the city's workforce.

The following month, on Feb. 18, he announced a series of 11 initiatives specifically targeting job creation and entrepreneurship.

One of those was to create "incubators" for startup businesses: "To help entrepreneurs launch new start-up companies, the City is partnering with academic institutions, property management companies and commercial landlords to establish high-quality, ready-to-use office space that comes with basic business services and administrative support."

Earlier today, Mr. Bloomberg welcomed 27 new businesses to the first such hub, the 160 Varick Street Incubator, for which the city negotiated a three-year lease between Trinity Real Estate and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

From the press release the mayor's office sent out this afternoon:

The businesses represent a cross-section of promising start-ups, including a green retrofitting company, a global fund management firm for feature film production and distribution, a digital forensics and data recovery product developer, an electronic fixed-income brokerage, and an online company that will help patients make informed healthcare decisions. More than 300 start-up companies have applied to lease space at the incubator, which is now fully subscribed and will be expanded this fall to offer space to another 15 start-up companies.

...

The 16,000-square foot incubator now offers high-quality, ready-to-use office space that comes with basic business services and administrative support. NYU-Poly is providing mentoring services, business seminars and networking opportunities for tenants, who can sublease space starting at $200 per person per month for six months with an option to renew. In addition, up to 2,000 desks are available at discounted rates starting at $180 per desk through City partnerships with the Coalition of Office Space Providers and the Office Business Center Association of New York.

The full list of tenants is below:

Flickr via chrisbastian44

A few days ago, at the West 181st Street station of the No. 1 subway line, the roof literally caved in. According to the M.T.A.’s Web site:

“Due to a collapse of the brick façade from the ceiling above the tracks at the 181st Street station, 1 train service will remain suspended throughout the rest of today, Monday, August 17th, 2009. Service through this area will be suspended until further notice.  At approximately 10:30 p.m. Sunday, a section of the brick architectural façade fell 35 feet to the track bed below. A downtown 1 train was in the station, but did not sustain any major damage. No customer injuries were reported. The cause of the ceiling collapse at the 181st Street station is under investigation.”

To anyone who has ever been in that station, the cause of the collapse didn’t hold much mystery—the ceiling has been leaking for years and the collapse was completely predictable.  The station, over a century old, is a landmark that once featured chandeliers and an almost elegant décor that in recent decades has suffered relentless neglect.

Mayor Bloomberg used the ceiling collapse to make the critical political point that the M.T.A. still does not have a capital budget, and that this near tragedy needs to be seen as a warning:

montreal.bixi.com

Bike-sharing got a big boost Thursday morning, August 20, when the New York Post reported that Mayor Michael Bloomberg, once skeptical that bike-sharing systems could work in New York City, shifted gears and said that such a system would be “ideal” here.

Cycling advocates had even more cause for optimism later that day when the city’s transportation department set up a bike-sharing demo in Union Square.

It was the latest in a series of such events to teach New Yorkers about a system, prominent in cities like Paris, Barcelona and Montreal, in which bikes are rented out in short intervals at self-pick-up and drop-off points throughout a city.

At Thursday’s demo in Union Square, which was by Bixi, a Montreal-based bike-share company that recently enlisted Boston and Minneapolis as the first U.S. cities to implement its services, Bixi employees and D.O.T. staffers were teaching curious passersby about how bike-sharing works, and there were about 10 docking stations set up with bikes available for people to ride around the square.

Transportation Commissioner (and local cycling hero) Janette Sadik-Khan happened to be checking out the demo when we stopped by around 4 p.m.

via tacandidatesurvey.org

Cy Vance.

We blogged the other day about the series of City Council candidate debates Transportation Alternatives is hosting in the coming weeks.

Now the alt-transit advocacy organization has launched a new Web site that provides information on where candidates in all city political races stand on transportation issues, including congestion pricing, Bus Rapid Transit, cycling, traffic crime and public space.

The site is called Transportation Alternatives Candidate Survey 2009, and the information it contains is based on surveys given to candidates with different questions targeting specific races and districts. Seventy-three candidates have responded so far, including those in the mayoral, public advocate, comptroller, borough president, Manhattan district attorney and City Council races.

Here's how it works: Users can plug in their addresses to bring up a list of candidates running in their district. Click on the results and you'll get detailed candidate biographies and the survey responses, which are pretty thorough as well.

For instance, curious about Manhattan D.A. candidate Cy Vance's legal philosophy in regard to the prosecution and prevention of vehicular crimes?

Looks like the mayor is warming to the idea of a bike-sharing system in New York.

The New York Post reports:

He's been skeptical for years about whether bike-sharing would work here, but in the middle of his re-election campaign, Mayor Bloomberg has told a bicycling advocacy group that such a program would be "ideal" for the city.

Stu Loeser, Bloomberg's spokesman, said the city continues to explore the viability of setting up a system, such as Paris has, where a bike could be grabbed by anyone from one spot and dropped off at another location.

Last week, Boston's Metropolitan Area Planning Council announced it would be implementing a bike-sharing system used in Montreal.

UPDATE: There's a demo of Montreal's Bixi bike share system in Union Square today, another tomorrow at Bowling Green, and another Saturday at Washington Square Park.

[via newamsterdamize]

When we last checked in on the city's Gov 2.0 movement, the tech community was talking about rallying around Mayor Bloomberg's Big Apps contest, which will open up certain city data sets for programmers to create Web applications out of.

The first step of the contest, which is being administered by the NYC Economic Development Corporation, is a request for expressions of interest to determine what data the city decides to release:

Respondents to this RFEI are requested to submit written descriptions of City-related data they would like to see made public. These descriptions should provide as much detail as possible about the type and level of data desired. In addition, respondents are requested to describe how they envision the data being used in software applications that provide a useful service to City residents, visitors and government. The information gathered from this RFEI will be used to help the City decide how to prioritize the release of City data to the public in a format easily utilized by application developers. City data will be released or reformatted in connection with a related software application competition where contestants will develop applications that make it easier to live, work and play in New York City.

To help people navigate this process, a few members of the OpenGovNYC meetup will be hosting BigAppsDevCamp the next two Saturdays, Aug. 15 and 22.

Topics covered will include:

Getty Images

Michael Bloomberg made a splash this week when he posted items on Twitter throughout the day on Tuesday, ostensibly himself.

Twitter is a wildly successful enterprise, but turning a profit isn’t been something the creators have figured out how to do yet. So, today, I asked Bloomberg, who founded a pretty successful media company of his own, if he had any suggestions for how Twitter can generate revenue.

After some laughter from my colleagues in the press corps, Bloomberg said, “I think that’s going to be the great challenge.”

“All of these new social networking--new ways of communicating--have yet to find a new business model that really works and they tend to be replaced by something else,” Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg said that Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter with whom he met earlier this week, has some ideas about how to generate revenue from the site. “Whether they’ll work or not, I don’t know.”

Bloomberg went on to say “We also get trapped into thinking that the world is coming to an end with old ways of communicating, and I’m still a believer in a lot of the old ways.” He also said, “Newspapers and magazines aren’t going to go away. The challenge for them is to stay relevant.”

Noted.

Video after the jump:

Getty Images

Delta Airlines is creating a domestic hub at LaGuardia airport. Mayor Bloomberg is happy about the news because of the economic implications it has on the future of New York.

From a statement his office just sent out: 

“Delta’s decision to expand service and build a new hub at LaGuardia Airport is the latest example of major employers betting big on New York City’s future. If the plan is approved, Delta will invest $40 million in terminal enhancements, bringing new jobs to Queens. By flying larger jets, Delta’s plan would allow LaGuardia to serve an additional two million passengers without increasing the number of takeoffs or landings, bringing greater efficiency to our airport system. We want to enhance passenger experience and heighten New York City’s standing as the top destination for tourists and business travelers, and these kinds of investments go a long way toward helping us achieve that. At a time when the airline industry is struggling – like most industries – to cope with the national economic recession, this decision by Delta is a real vote of confidence in the future of our City, and it will help both Delta and New York City compete in the global marketplace.”

This morning, City Room broke the news that eight city bus shelters on two 34th Street lines are getting real-time bus arrival indicators so riders can know how many minutes of waiting they have left before the next bus shows up.

The installment is part of a pilot program launched by the M.T.A. and the city's transportation department that will be evaluated over the next six months and potentially expanded to include more stops and routes, according to a press release Mayor Bloomberg's office sent out this afternoon.

From the City Room report:

Tracking systems are commonplace in other major cities like London and Washington, where subway straphangers know exactly when the next train will arrive. (The accuracy is high, even if not 100 percent.) In New York, electronic displays are already installed on the L train.

It is not the first time that New York has tried to provide bus customers with a more precise estimate of when their rides will arrive. In fall 2007, the city tested a similar satellite-based system along First and Second Avenues, which also included digital signs that displayed the number of minutes until the next bus.

That system was plagued by technical errors and was abandoned after just four months. Transit officials said the 34th Street pilot program would avoid the same problems.

The announcement of the program comes a week after Mayor Bloomberg announced a wide-ranging campaign platform to improve the city’s mass transit infrastructure.

The mayor pledged to install some form of tracking technology along half of the city’s bus routes by 2013. His plan also noted that buses along 34th Street will use “mesh network technology, similar to that used to track military vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

There's more on 2nd Ave. Sagas and Streetsblog. The full press release is after the jump: