Greening the City
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Yesterday we were at Tibet House in New York, filming an interview with Dr. Robert Thurman, the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk. The talk was all about karma, the role of chance events in life and, because we were filming in New York City, we talked traffic. (We all remember the ancient spiritual puzzle, “What is the sound of one car not moving in traffic?”)
I’m from New York, so when I complain about it I do so as a professional. I’ve always found New York to be challenging for film crews – just finding parking can eat an hour of the shoot, to say nothing of getting camera gear through security checkpoints, jammed into cranky old service elevators staffed by even older and crankier service elevator operators, and determining how much to bribe the nut next door who decides to hammer on the wall for a couple hours.
But now, there’s something else to contend with – Mayor Bloomberg. He wants to turn the city green.
“The city has changed completely in the past year. Eighth Avenue was down to one lane yesterday,” one crew member told me. Many other streets are the same way: one lane. Why? It’s crazy, but the Mayor is putting in bike lanes. 
The city’s full of them, big generous paths of green subtracting road space from cars and adding New Yorker-style bikers aggressive enough to turn you into road kill unless you’re vigilant. The West Side Highway is gaining green space, too, and there are 376 lawn chairs scattered around Times Square. They are, exotically enough, just for sitting in, provided as part of a plan to make the city more pedestrian friendly. That’s just weird.
“I’ve had people say to me both that it’s a stroke of genius and that I’m the king of trailer trash. The lawn chair decision is far and away the most controversial decision I’ve made in my seven years as head of the alliance.” — Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance.
According to Popular Science, among America’s greenest cities, New York is ranked number twenty. (Portland is number one.) The NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) ranks New York as environmentally smarter than Los Angeles. New York was the first US city to require that manufacturers recycle the electronics they make. As of this summer you can’t just dump your old computer out on the street. You have to recycle it — and its maker, be it Dell or Apple, has to help. New York City is even playing around with using the tides in its waterways to generate electricity with turbines. San Francisco has outlawed supermarket plastic bags. Are you listening, Los Angeles?
LA has more palm trees, but the concrete canyons of New York might be the greener place.
