New York

‘Toward the End of the Walk, a Bird Somewhere Ahead Burst Into Song’

Published

2 years ago

April 3, 2022

Press Room

Birdsong

Pricey Diary:

On Presidents’ Day, about three dozen folks of assorted ages gathered on the Brooklyn Botanic Backyard’s entrance for a household chook stroll. You couldn’t have requested for higher winter climate: sunny, not too chilly, gentle breezes.

Our information, a lady sporting a bucket hat adorned with colourful chook prints, made some preliminary remarks, and we had been on our approach.

“Yellow-bellied sapsucker,” she referred to as out 10 minutes into the stroll.

The group stopped in its tracks. Binoculars had been raised, fingers pointed, sighting ideas shared.

The opposite birds we encountered included a downy woodpecker, a Cooper’s hawk (a blue jay’s warning cries alerted us to its presence) and a white-throated sparrow camouflaged in a bush’s dense branches.

Towards the tip of the stroll, a chook someplace forward burst into tune.

“Cardinal,” the information introduced, and the search started.

Within the flurry of exercise, I questioned whether or not anyone else was listening to the good whistled tune.

“Isn’t the singing fantastic?” I requested, loud sufficient for everybody to listen to.

At the least one different member of the group, a person, heard me.

“Feels like a automotive alarm to me,” he stated.

— Roth Wilkofsky

‘Free Sweets!’

Pricey Diary:

It was round 1952. I used to be 10, and I favored it that my household needed to change from the downtown D to the native AA at West Fourth Avenue.

The vertical I-beams on the platform there had merchandising machines that distributed miniature Suchard chocolate bars for a penny a pop.

I all the time pulled on the little plungers to see if chocolate bars would seem magically with out the requisite pennies.

Someday, ta-da!: The plungers on all 4 machines weren’t working, and I used to be filling my pockets with free candies simply because the native pulled into the station.

As I obtained on the prepare with my household, I noticed one other boy approaching.

“Free candies!” I yelled, pointing to one of many machines. “It’s jammed!”

As we pulled away within the course of Spring Avenue, I used to be pleased to see the opposite boy busily “milking” the machine at a livid tempo.

— Giulio Maestro

A Little Late

Pricey Diary:

I boarded the M104 and took a seat behind a gray-haired lady dressed all in black. The white tag on her sweater was sticking straight up from her neckline.

I tapped her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” I stated. “Would you want me to place your tag inside your sweater?”

“Sure,” she replied. “The place had been you three hours in the past?”

“It is best to have referred to as,” I stated.

We each laughed.

— Jane Seskin

Coleslaw

Pricey Diary:

Early one sunny Saturday in 1975, my pal Beth and I climbed the steps to the elevated tracks in Far Rockaway and caught the A.

The prepare bumped and rumbled alongside the seashore roads, into Brooklyn after which by means of the tunnel into Manhattan. The lights within the automotive flickered because the prepare screeched into every cease alongside the way in which.

At Washington Sq., we jumped off, climbed the steps to the road and emerged into the brilliant daylight of a wonderful fall day.

We wandered by means of Greenwich Village, stopping at outlets the place youngsters only a few years older and much hipper than us oversaw considerable inventories of artwork posters, handcrafted jewellery, T-shirts and a broad assortment of different, superbly random objects.

The profusion of products was past thrilling to us. We drank within the sights and sounds, flapped enthusiastically over a couple of small purchases and tried our greatest to tune into the tradition surrounding us.

To economize, every of us had introduced a sandwich alongside. At one level, we discovered a aspect avenue. We sat on a curb between two parked vehicles and had our picnic.

Beth’s sandwich had coleslaw on it, one thing I had by no means thought so as to add. It created a seismic shift in how I considered meals.

Later, we caught the A at Union Sq., ensuring we obtained residence earlier than darkish.

— June Holder

Class Present

Pricey Diary:

I used to be working as a fourth-grade instructor at a non-public faculty on the East Facet. As a year-end reward, the dad and mom had their daughters scratch their names right into a silverish image body, which was given to me wrapped in yards of tissue paper inside a Tiffany field.

I put a gracious look on my face as I unwrapped it. I held up the body and smiled at every of the 15 ladies who had “signed” it.

After faculty, I sneaked right into a pawnshop on Lexington Avenue. The person on the counter seemed approvingly on the Tiffany field.

I eliminated the distinctive blue lid, took the body out of the tissue paper and handed it to him.

He stared at it for a few seconds.

“Inform you what,” he stated. “I don’t need this, however I’ll purchase the field.”

— Mary Jo Robertiello

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Illustrations by Agnes Lee

New York

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

Published

3 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