« More than 200 rally against demolition for parking; new protest coming Wednesday | Main | Smoke (and Mirrors) on the Water »
April 16, 2007
A ‘lot’ of debate
Rain doesn’t dampen rally over Atlantic Yards parking
MetroNY
By Amy Zimmer
The torrential rains didn’t keep more than 200 people away from a rally yesterday against Forest City Ratner’s plan to demolish empty buildings to create a seven-acre parking lot for the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project.
Ratner officials say the lot is needed for construction uses, but protesters believe it’s for the Nets arena expected to open in 2009. They worry it would encourage more traffic despite the project’s proximity to the city’s third largest transit hub.
“In the age of sustainability and global warming and added people to New York, it’s an obscenity to knock down buildings to build surface parking,” said Jon Orcutt, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign advocacy group at the event at the Lafeyette Presbyterian Church organized by a community coalition behind BrooklynSpeaks.net.
Metro included a bunch of nonsense from "The Other Bruce":
Bruce Bender, executive vice president at Forest City Ratner, issued a statement explaining that the state’s Environmental Impact Statement mandated “temporary, paid parking to construction workers to limit their use of on-street parking so they would not take already hard to find spots within the surrounding communities.”
...
He added, “While opponents will say they should be using mass-transit to commute to and from the location, as many of them do, it is a tad difficult when your job requires that you arrive with tools and other gear.”
NoLandGrab: Construction of the World Trade Center site doesn't require enormous surface parking lots, nor does Ratner's own project, The Times Tower.
In addition, Bruce Ratner's own Environmental Impact Statement conveniently chose not to study the availability of on-street parking during the morning rush period. The Final Environmental Impact Statement did incredibly claim (page 12-19) that a minimum of 1,930 on-street spaces would be available within a quarter mile of the project site during the evening or weekend peak periods.
For the morning rush, the EIS determined that there are 1,342 available off-street parking spots within a half mile of the arena.
BTW, the Environmental Impact Statement doesn't "mandate" anything, it's just a disclosure document.
When is the press going to learn, that just because the administration says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it doesn't mean it's true? Assertions of the need to demolish historic buildings for parking are just as erroneous and, like a war, has implications beyond the claim itself.
Posted by lumi at April 16, 2007 11:22 AM