Political Party:
Democratic Party
http://www.markgreen.com
Candidate Submitted Biography:
Mark Green, the President of Air America and the first Public Advocate is running this year to be the third Public Advocate. Green brings years of experience as a public official, public interest lawyer, author, teacher, and liberal pundit. An attorney admitted in New York and Washington, D.C., Green ran the Public Citizen's Congress Watch, the largest consumer lobbying group in D.C., and served as Consumer Affairs Commissioner before successfully seeking election as New York City's first Public Advocate. As a consumer prosecutor and Public Advocate, Green established numerous local and national precedents: conducting almost 80 city-wide town hall meetings, exposing and helping to break up the mob garbage cartel, enacting the law protecting the victims of domestic violence from unjust firings, filing the FTC petition that led to the elimination of Joe Camel ads addicting children and twice successfully sued Mayor Giuliani because of racial profiling and police misconduct. More information about Mark Green and his campaign for Public Advocate is available at markgreen.com.
Question 1: The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's website reports: "In New York City, obesity is epidemic: more than half of adult New Yorkers are overweight (34%) or obese (22%). Data show that obesity begins early in life: nearly half of all elementary school children and Head Start children are not a healthy weight. In New York City, 1 in 5 kindergarten students, and 1 in 4 Head Start children, is obese." Do you believe that increasing walking and biking in New York City would improve public health? If yes, what types of programs and policies would you pursue? Yes, increasing walking and biking in New York City would improve public health. That’s why we support the expansion of safe bike lanes, the phasing in of congestion pricing, and tax incentives for alternative for bikes, which would encourage more people to walk and bike to get around which would also make it safer to do so. We also need to make crosswalks safer for pedestrians, having cars stop farther from the where people walk and enforcing “don’t block the box” laws more rigorously.
Question 2: What is your vision for New York City's transportation network? What needs do you see and what steps will you take as the Public Advocate to help ensure that New Yorkers have access to affordable, convenient and healthy modes of transportation? Our City should be a place where it is convenient and safe to ride a bike and walk, where mass transit is affordable, reliable and available to all.
Instead of taking money out of our mass transit system, we must put politics aside and realize that since everyone benefits from an improved mass transit system, everyone should help pay. Capital spending and maintenance of infrastructure is a high priority given the failure to keep the City’s infrastructure up to date and growing.
The Public Advocate should fight for the creation of a citywide Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. BRT is an extremely efficient and relatively cheap way to expand our mass transit system, costing only $10 million per mile compared to the $1 to $2 billion per mile for the Second Avenue Subway. It has worked well in other cities -- and the City’s BX12 line in the Bronx, our first BRT line, has been a major success, increasing ridership and decreasing travel time.
We must also work with the City and stakeholders to improve conditions on sidewalks, starting in the neediest areas and expand and improve bike paths. It’s also time we develop a regional transit pass – a long-delayed proposal that, if implemented, would be a great step toward uniting our disparate transportation system.
Question 3: New York City's senior citizens make up a disproportionate number of the city's pedestrian injuries and deaths. What would your office do to protect senior pedestrians on our streets? While many have accepted traffic accidents as common they can be prevented through smarter management of transportation by the Department of Transportation (DOT) and a partnership with the community and organizations like Transportation Alternatives. An example of one such opportunity for a partnership would be Crash Stat 2.0, available at http://crashstat.org, which was launched by Transportation Alternatives in 2004 providing a map showing the quantity, type and results of traffic accidents all over the City.
As Public Advocate we will make information like accident data from the DOT available in as close to real time as possible through a commitment to “Open Data” so that Crash Stat would have real time information and provide funding for an “Apps for New York” competition with prize money for innovative projects like Crash Stat. Working together we can identify dangerous intersections in real time (even before accidents occurred), make intersections safer, and keep track of our results. You can learn more at http://markgreen.com/gov2.
In the mean time we can ask the Department of Transportation to provide warning signs on bike maps and around the City’s 100 most dangerous intersections already identified by Transportation Alternatives while work towards improvements.
Question 4: What relationship do you see between vehicular congestion on New York City's streets, highways and bridges and the quality of life for its residents? As Public Advocate, are there policies that you would pursue to reduce congestion? As mentioned previously, we should revisit congestion pricing and increasing funding for mass transit initiatives such as a BRT system. In our policy paper, "Our Next Economy: THE Creative City" (available at http://MarkGreen.com/THE_Creative_City), we proposed the use of technology to provide commuters and businesses with live information regarding traffic delays and service changes. If a train sent you a text message or a visual on-platform message that it was running 15 minutes late you might stay at work improving economic output. Increased information of traffic delays would also improve the flow of traffic throughout the City.
The Public Advocate can monitor the progress of that Department of Transportation’s plans to reduce congestion in downtown Brooklyn, ensure that the plans are followed through on and work with stakeholders for ways to improve upon the plans.
We will also investigate the practice of trucks turning down neighborhood streets illegally, and work to find a way to stop it.
Details on our Transportation 2.0 initiative are available for you to comment on as part of "Change for New York: 100 Ideas for a Better City" (available at http://www.markgreen.com/100_ideas_part_1_html).
Question 5: In an effort to increase the safety, enjoyment and health of New Yorkers walking, running, skating or riding a bike in Central and Prospect Parks, car traffic has been gradually restricted on the loop drives within these parks. What do you think of these changes? Do you have an opinion on the idea of completely closing these loop drives (not crosstown transverses) to cars and reserving them strictly for recreational users? What effect do you think such an action would have on the people in surrounding neighborhoods? Restricting traffic will encourage people to find new, cleaner modes of transportation, make the park safer, and allow more people to enjoy our City’s urban sanctuaries. It also may have the effect of reducing traffic in surrounding neighborhoods, as fewer cars will drive through to use the loops. While completely closing down the loops should be experimented with, to study the effects it would have both on the park and on the surrounding neighborhoods, this experiment must be done in an open way with plenty of opportunity for public input at hearings.
Question 6: According to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, in 2007 speeding was a contributing factor in over 3,000 motor vehicle crashes in New York City. Furthermore, the same data showed that the top human contributing factor to the 264 fatal crashes in New York City during 2007 was also speeding. Given these figures, what measures, if any, do you support to redress this problem? Speed related fatal crashes can be reduced through increased fines, greater deployment of traffic police, increased radar use and “this is how fast you are driving” signs. We should also work with the community, schools, senior centers and the Department of Transportation to identify streets for closure during school days or for the addition of obstructions like speed bumps to eliminate speeders and make the streets safer for children, pedestrians and bikers.
Submitted by markgreen on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 17:11.
Submitted by markgreen on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 12:55. |
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