Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Making New York Undrivable

So I’ve got this theory that because Bloomberg had his congestion tax shot down he’s decided to make New York as uninhabitable as possible for drivers. This includes turning busy intersections into parks and turning one of two lanes on the incredibly busy Broadway into a bus only lane. As an inhabitant of Soho (roughly), I’ve been particularly interested in the bus thing as I’ve both watched countless people get ticketed while walking to work and been annoyed while in a cab that they wouldn’t just pull into the right lane and speed past traffic (because they were afraid of said tickets).

Anyway, I was writing all this because I just saw this New York Times breakdown on parking tickets given and discovered that 10,997 tickets were given on that stretch of one-lane Broadway, but then I realized that parking tickets and traffic tickets were different. Even so, it’s a lot of tickets and in total, there were 9,955,441 parking tickets given out in New York City between July 2007 to June 2008 (which is a Holy Crap Fact I believe).

November 28, 2008