He was against it before he voted for it. Sounds awfully familiar, right? This, at least, is a flip-flop that makes some sense, unlike John Kerry’s inexplicable comments in the lead-up to the 2004 Presidential election.

City Councilman Kendall Stewart; who represents Flatbush, East Flatbush, Flatlands; opined in a Brooklyn Daily Eagle op-ed this past Tuesday — Earth Day — that based on the evidence presented him, including facts brought to his attention by the Campaign for New York’s Future, he could not and would not oppose congestion pricing.

I say this as a council member who opposed congestion pricing in the beginning but ended up changing my mind and voting for it. There are those who will say I did so for political reasons. They are wrong. I voted for it because I came to understand that my original position did not take into account the magnitude of the present congestion problem and the related effects of pollution, asthma and other health problems. To vote against the plan would have been voting to do nothing about a problem that only grows worse each day and will continue to worsen if we try to ignore it.

[...]

As Campaign for New York’s Future has pointed out, after Los Angeles, New York City has the worst air quality of any city in the nation. Background pollutants are found in greater concentrations along heavily trafficked corridors, especially in Harlem and the South Bronx. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, over 125,000 cars and over 20,000 trucks pass through the neighborhood daily via the Gowanus Expressway.

Medical science now shows that living within 500 to 1,500 feet of major roads dramatically increases serious health risks associated with air pollution, including asthma, cancer, heart disease and lung impairment. Over two million New Yorkers live within 500 feet of pollution “hot spots.” New York’s asthma rates are twice the national average, with thousands of children hospitalized from it every year, and vehicular emissions contribute to more than 86 percent of the total cancer risk from hazardous air pollutants.

When I considered these facts in light of the city budget, recalling how every year I and other members of the City Council have to fight tooth and nail to get money into the budget to take care of low-income people struggling with these illnesses, it was clear that the only sensible thing to do was vote to cut off one major cause of these diseases at its source: vehicular air pollution.

Councilman Stewart makes many good points. And GBK hopes that congestion pricing sees — at minimum — a fair vote.

GBK would also like to see a robust, subsidized, modern, five-borough ferry system integrated into the MTA. A metrocard-swipable ferry system would offer outer-borough city residents a cheap — and fast — method of transportation into Manhattan, and would take cars off the congested roads of New York, reducing air pollution from exhaust.

Ferry transportation has been a central point of advocacy for a few New York organizations — namely the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, Sunset-Ridge Waterfront Alliance, and the Riverdale Ferry Coalition.

As for the Councilman’s involvement in his aides’ fraud indictments? We’ll see if the Councilman has some more ’splainin to do.

Tags: Asthma, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Campaign for NYs Future, Cancer, City Council, Congestion Pricing, Earth Day, Ferry, Gowanus, Gowanus Expressway, Harlem, Heart Disease, Kendall Stewart, Low-Income, Manhattan, Pollution, South Bronx, Sunset Park

Category: Alternative Transportation, Carbon, Energy Conservation, Gowanus, Politics, Urban Greening

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