New York

Should Bronx Parkland Be Used for a Cricket World Cup Stadium?

Published

11 months ago

August 8, 2023

Should Bronx Parkland Be Used for a Cricket World Cup Stadium?

Mayor Eric Adams has made no secret of his desire to push New York City as a sports mecca. He struck a deal in November to build the city’s first professional soccer stadium. He has pitched the region as a site for the 2026 World Cup final.

But the mayor’s latest campaign — having the city be one of the hosts for next year’s Men’s T20 World Cup in cricket — has run into significant opposition.

Mr. Adams wants to allow the Dubai-based International Cricket Council to build a temporary stadium with roughly the seating capacity of Fenway Park in the middle of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, right over the city’s largest expanse of cricket pitches.

In a pointed letter to City Hall on Monday, the New York Cricket League, which encompasses six cricket clubs, joined several parks organizations, two soccer clubs, a baseball league and two track-and-field groups in urging City Hall to find a new location. (A spokeswoman for the Cricket Council said the track in the park would be unaffected.)

“The only place that we play is Van Cortlandt Park,” said Godfrey Mitchell, the president of the New York Cricket League and an opponent of the plan. “So we have no other place to go.”

The International Cricket Council is proposing to host at least five days of play at a temporary stadium in Van Cortlandt Park next June for the Men’s T20. The council first approached City Hall about its proposal in March, both the city and cricket council said. Mayor Adams quickly got on board. The plans were reported earlier by The City.

Claire Furlong, a spokeswoman for the Cricket Council, said that New York City was regarded as one of five potential hosts in the United States, and that Van Cortlandt Park’s appeal lies in its status as the city’s epicenter of cricket. The temporary stadium would be built on existing cricket pitches, which would be upgraded. The council has promised to rebuild the rest of the cricket pitches once the tournament is complete.

“Cricket is one of the world’s most popular sports and holds special importance to countless immigrant communities who call New York home,” said Fabien Levy, the mayor’s spokesman.

Not every local cricket league opposes the stadium plan. The Commonwealth Cricket League, which said it has more than 90 clubs in New York City, argued that the $20 million proposal would help expand what is by some measures the world’s second most popular sport within the United States and bring much-needed resources to local players.

Ajith Shetty, the president of the Commonwealth Cricket League, accused critics like Mr. Mitchell of being “selfish.”

The heated dispute underscores a weightier public policy question that may play out in court. Indeed, attached to the letter sent to City Hall on Monday was a legal memo from a prominent environmental lawyer that may presage legal action.

“There’s tremendous legal risk for this proposal, and there is a very short time frame in which to resolve the legal issues,” said Christopher Rizzo, the memo’s author and the director of the environmental practice group at Carter Ledyard.

The city has told elected officials that turning over up to 20 acres of parkland to a private entity for an estimated six months is akin to holding a concert in a park, said Eric Dinowitz, the New York City councilman whose district encompasses the park. He said he would like the city to invest its resources in renovating an existing park stadium, south of the cricket pitches.

The project’s opponents argue the proposal is more akin to selling parkland and would require at least a year of public review.

“Parkland is not vacant space,” said Adam Ganser, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. “Our parks are not there to host large-scale events making them inaccessible for months at a time.”

Van Cortlandt Park, the city’s third largest, has a long history of conflict. A historical sign for the park notes that in 1655, a Lenape woman tried to steal a peach from a farm there belonging to Henry Van Dyck. Mr. Van Dyck shot her. Reprisals ensued.

At the turn of this century, the community pitched a failed battle to prevent the city from building a new water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park, a construction project that rendered a large portion of the park unusable for years.

On Saturday afternoon, nearly 70 cricketers were playing on the pitches at Van Cortlandt.

Of eight interviewed, none expressed support for the proposal, but all were open to alternatives.

“You know, you don’t want to come into a community and just throw things down their throat,” said Curtis Clarke, a professional driver and the president of the New York Masters Cricket Association. “It is a good proposal, but not the right location,” he said.

Emlyn Cameron contributed reporting.

New York

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Published

4 days ago

July 1, 2024

Press Room

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

By Ana Ley, Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris

Ana Ley spent more than 12 hours at M.T.A. board meetings last week. Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris and 25 of their colleagues spent the morning counting more than 22,000 cars.

July 1, 2024

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

Here’s what we saw:

Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.

It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates

Queens-Midtown Tunnel	50,600
Lincoln Tunnel	49,200
Williamsburg Bridge	27,900
Manhattan Bridge	24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel	23,100
Queensboro Bridge	21,700
Brooklyn Bridge	17,100
Holland Tunnel	15,400
All other entrances	118,000
Total	347,000

Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.

Methodology

We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.

Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.

We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.

We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.

For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

Published

1 month ago

June 3, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

Published

1 month ago

May 31, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter