The Oil Drum: Local

Staten Island's Old North Shore Rail Right of Way

[Update 9/20]: Last night at a community meeting with City Councilmember Michael McMahon (D-North Shore) a disgruntled citizen made this statement:

"The poor people of the North Shore, all they have is the bus, and if they don't have a bus, they're walking," he said. "It's inexcusable that all the politicians of Staten Island can't figure out how to open up the railroad."

In my continuing series on Restoring New York City's region rail network, today I will touch on NYC's forgotton borough, Staten Island. While Staten Island is the smallest borough in population, it has almost half a million people. It is also New York City's least dense and most automobile dependent borough by far. Part of this stems from geographic isolation, but also because the Island was not developed until after passenger automobiles became the norm in transportation. Indeed, it's major railway branch on the North Shore of Staten Island died long before the Verrazano Bridge was completed which brought a flood of development to the island.

However, the over-reliance on the automobile has created a traffic and transportation nightmare for Staten Islanders, who have one of the longest average commutes in the country - 44 minutes. So what's being done to address Staten Island's transit pain?

On Sunday May 14th (Mother's Day) 2006 it took me double the time and double the fare to travel from 86th St & Second Ave to New Brighton Staten Island. Normally it only takes 1.5 hrs and $2, but this weekend the NYC's transit system failed to deliver on its mission of moving people through the city efficiently for one $2 fare.

Today's Gotham Gazette features an article by Bruce Schaller on Staten Island's transportation plan and they note that the city's economy is slowing down.

The Queen Mary 2 docked at Red Hook for 12 hours.

The Bronx is considering creating a network of bike lanes that emulate what Enrique Penalosa did for Bogotá.

Connecticut is pursuing some interesting strategies toward a goal of 20% renewables by 2010.

Both Curbed, UrbanDigs and the NY Post covered the local greenmarket initiative I am pushing in my 'hood.

And of course, you can see all the latest in cars from gas guzzler SUVs/HUMMERS to super efficient hybrids at the New York Auto Show.

Staten Island is mostly known as being the forgotten borough, the safe, quiet suburbs in the midst of urban chaos. But today, it is taking center stage mostly because of automobile death and destruction. First, there was an incident of Cop vs. Cop Road Rage:

A retired hero Port Authority cop from New Springville, out with his wife to pick up Chinese food, was shot dead last night, hit at least eight times in a barrage of 17 bullets fired by an ex-NYPD detective who snapped in a fit of road rage because the victim had been driving too slow, cops said.

It seems the shooter was drunk, with two equally deadly weapons: A car and a gun.

The audience was mostly progressive minded folks and many of them live a fairly suburban lifestyle in Staten Island. I think most realize that this lifestyle is not sustainable and want to change the local systems to encourage more community and less dependency on oil.

The film certainly framed the issue very well for new people to peak oil and in my opinion remains the indisputable resource for spreading the word about peak oil. That said, some of the content does need to be updated and I have heard that they will probably either make a sequel or update the current one (maybe both).

I also made some great local contacts for the future.

On Monday, I hosted a screening of the new Walmart movie which clearly painted a picture of a truly evil corporation that sucks the life out of small towns, relying on government subsidies, illegal immigrant labor, not paying workers a living wage here or abroad, all in the name of low prices. Good posts on the film can be found at Startsandfits, Baloghblog before and after with link of rare appearance on TV.

Yesterday I went to see Syriana, which Super G wrote about earlier today and I summarize some additional points in a comment to his post. I think this film will wake up some people, but it does not take on PO head on.

There remains one film that does address PO and the centrality of the automobile in a very direct way that remains the film of choice for spreading the word about Peak Oil - The End Of Suburbia. On Sunday at 1pm, I will be showing EOS in my home borough of Staten Island at the Unitarian Universalist Church. Please tell any friends who haven't seen it to come watch it there. Or tell them to rent it on Netflix!