The Oil Drum: Local

Today was a good day for local produce and community development. The new greenmarket at St. Stephen's church brought together all the local elected officials in including Councilmember Jessica Lappin and Borough President Scott Stringer as well as the Father Angelo of St. Stephen (pictured above) and many folks from the local community board.

The Upper Green Side has a quick post about it up. It was great to see so many people talking, sharing recipes, bringing their dogs and children with them to shop.

And the crowds were bigger than expected because of the big outreach effort we did over the past two weeks.

First to present their side were a collection of folks from the MTA, city DOT and state DOT. The first disappointment to most of the people in attendence was that despite the broad-based community support for faster, more efficient and higher quality bus services all that is being discussed by city/state/MTA officials is a STUDY that will examine 15 routes to pick JUST 5 in June 2007 and then (assuming the planets are aligned) to implement by late 2008.

They have been dragging this study out for years. People are starting to get frustrated at the lack of progress and continuing uncertainty around the actual implementation. And you could almost understand the time to plan this out if their plan was even semi-ambitious, but alas it's about as minimal as BRT can get and even still honestly call it "BRT".