I’m an incrementalist by nature: I prefer change via many small steps to radical upheaval. That seems to me to be safer, since you can more easily change direction if you find that you’ve made a mistake. But when dealing with very large problems, the early steps can seem like futile nibbling around the edges.
Two articles from Curbed, published a day apart, and an interactive graphic from a month earlier in the New York Times, connect a few of these steps. “NYC buildings will soon display letter grades tracking energy efficiency” by Valeria Ricciulli and “It’s time to end NYC’s free parking giveaway” by Benjamin Kabak focus on small pieces of the environmental discussion in the city. We’ve gotten used to seeing letter grades for restaurant cleanliness given by the NYC Department of Health*, so extending the idea to how well buildings meet the new goals for energy efficiency seems obvious. As for the second piece, most people don’t know that it was illegal to park a car overnight in NYC until the 1950s; Kabak argues that it should be again. Study after study has shown that if you make it more difficult for people to park, they are less likely to drive; the inadvertent experiment with banning cars from 14th Street has shown how much our surface transit can be improved when the buses aren’t competing with cars for space.
The Times piece, “The Most Detailed Map of Auto Emissions in America” by Nadja Popovich and Denise Lu gives some infographics on pollution from cars. The New York metro area, as the largest in the nation, has the most pollution, but our heavy reliance on mass transit puts us at the bottom for per-capita pollution. That tells us what we already knew: that there are enormous reductions in pollution to be had by using more transit in the rest of the country.
Small steps, added together, can accomplish a lot. But we need to take them now.
* One of the most bizarre quirks of the NYC government is the full name of that agency: the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The name is a carry-over of early-twentieth-century progressive ideas that sounds exceedingly odd today.
