The Oil Drum: Local

Update 4pm Friday: Thankfully the grid held yesterday in Midtown, Murray Hill and Gramercy areas, although one building in Kips Bay lost power for a day, that seemed to be the worst of it. Hats off to everyone who helped reduce power at that critical time last night. Special recognition to Councilmember Dan Garodnick who personally went out with his entire staff to canvass the neighborhood to ask folks to reduce power dramatically.

Update 10:01pm: NY1 has some new coverage, including the fact that a building in Kips Bay is without power and the rest of the neighborhood is still on the brink

Manhattan's East Side is the latest part of the city to be hit with outages. Con Ed crews are working to fix manhole fires and feeder cables along the Lower East Side, as many residents are left without power. Con Ed says the feeders serve more than 50,000 customers, and that could mean hundreds of thousands of people are without power. One of the buildings without power is the Kips Bay Towers. Residents NY1 spoke with there say they are doing their best to cope with the loss of both power and water to the building. “It was a brownout [Wednesday] night. The lights were low, the air conditioners were not as functional as they usually are, so I knew something was happening last night,” said Kips Bay resident Karen Braglia. “And then when I woke up this morning the air conditioning wasn't working at all."

Update 4:15pm: NY Times has some more depth

The utility reported that it had lost the use of multiple feeder cables in each of two networks on the East Side, 3 of 12 at Kips Bay and 4 of 24 at Madison Square. The networks cover the area between 14th and 40th Streets, Fifth Avenue and the East River. Three manhole fires in the morning, at 30th Street and First Avenue, 29th Street and Lexington Avenue, and 24th Street and Third Avenue apparently started the problem. Power was still on at midday today in the high-rise, heavily commercial neighborhood. The utility said it had 53,000 customers in the area, but a customer could be an entire building.

Update 4:08pm: Crain's has just put up this story

Tonight I attended a forum on Bus Rapid Transit sponsored by State Senator Liz Krueger's office and co-sponsored by newly elected councilmembers Lappin & Garodnick, CIVITAS and Transportation Alternatives as well as other local elected officials and community board members. There was even a representative from Borough President Scott Stringer's office.

First to present their side were a collection of folks from the MTA, city DOT and state DOT. The first disappointment to most of the people in attendence was that despite the broad-based community support for faster, more efficient and higher quality bus services all that is being discussed by city/state/MTA officials is a STUDY that will examine 15 routes to pick JUST 5 in June 2007 and then (assuming the planets are aligned) to implement by late 2008.

They have been dragging this study out for years. People are starting to get frustrated at the lack of progress and continuing uncertainty around the actual implementation. And you could almost understand the time to plan this out if their plan was even semi-ambitious, but alas it's about as minimal as BRT can get and even still honestly call it "BRT".