 |
(Photo: Patrick McMullan) |
Mayor Bloomberg’s new enviro-friendly traffic commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, starts this week. One challenge will be a culture clash inside her own agency. The Department of Transportation is a notorious, car-friendly bureaucracy. “The greeting you get from folks there is, ‘Commissioners come, commissioners go, and we’re always here,’ ” recalls Urbitran CEO Michael Horodniceanu, who was up for Sadik-Khan’s job but ultimately lost out. Her arrival signals the mayor’s “sea change in attitude” toward congestion, one watchdog says. Sadik-Khan’s predecessor, Iris Weinshall, Mrs. Chuck Schumer, was appointed by Rudy Giuliani in 2000 and had a background in administration, not traffic control. (She testified this year that New York’s traffic nightmare was a false “perception”: There aren’t more cars, she said, just more large ones.) Sadik-Khan is a radical in comparison. What’s her priority for New York? “Green it up,” she says.
Email
Print
Eight Year-End Films Vie for Oscar Contention
Sondheim and Lansbury on a Lifetime in Theater
The Black Keys Release Their Hip-hop Debut 
How the BQE Became an Artistic Muse
On Great Jones Street, Shopping Is Art 
Classic Fare, Old-world Charm at Le Caprice
Buy a Brownstone for Less Than $1 Million
Fifty of the City's Tastiest Soups
Reasons to Love New York 2009
New York Politicians Refuse to Quit
A-Rod Has Babe Ruth in His Sights
McCain Yields to the Party's Pressure
