Show Me a Good Loeser, And I'll Show You a Loser

Our annoying little friend Stu Loeser is at it again. This time he's taking Anthony Weiner to task for the congressman's plan to combat congestion in the city. Now, we haven't had a chance to fully review Weiner's proposal, but Loeser's comments are genuinely droll.

Weiner's plan focuses in on reducing truck traffic by encouraging deliveries outside of peak daytime hours. Loeser's take is that Weiner's idea would "drastically increase truck traffic in neighborhoods that already have high child asthma rates." Really, Stu, you need to get out more. It is Mayor Bloomberg who has drastically-and already-increased truck traffic in asthma-laden nabes by his box store mania.

How can you explain or justify building an auto-dependent mall, with 500,000 square feet of retail space, right on the Major Deegan parking lot next to Yankee Stadium? Stu, this area is called asthma alley and your own Planning Commission ignored the traffic analysis that the Alliance did, along with the one done by our friend Teresa Toro of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

Both of these studies, work that should be seen alongside of the analyses that have been done on the CBX/Deegan interchange and the new Yankee Stadium, predict millions of additional tons of CO2 emissions as cars and trucks try to navigate entry and exit from the Gateway Mall. Yet the mayor's myopic CPC wasn't able to see any flaws in a traffic study that felt that simply widening the Deegan off ramp at 149th Street would somehow mitigate an extra 250,000 cars and thousands of more trucks a week

In addition, this mall will pull thousands of local shoppers away from their neighborhood shopping areas, commercial strips that many, if not most consumers, are walking to shop at. Nurturing local shopping should be part of creating a sustainable city, but Bloomberg's grand plan hasn't a single mention of this.

But Loser is nothing if not arrogantly presumptuous. After all who else could, in criticizing Weiner, claim that the congressman's plan would "hurt small business." This from an administration whose policies have been virulently anti-small business (and from a mayor who called the $250 million a year Bodega tax, "a minor economic issue").

Kermit the Mayor and his little mouthpiece sidekick should stick to the promotion of their own plan and steer clear of caricaturing the alternative proposal of the Congressman. The more that Loeser does so, the more he appears to be engaging in self-parody.