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What the Verizon Deal Does -- and Doesn't -- Do


Verizon Rollout Schedule
Photo (cc) Eric Hauser

New York City has moved quickly to seal a deal with Verizon to offer cable service throughout the five boroughs. The Franchise and Concession Review Commission waited only four business days after one unpublicized public hearing before voting on May 27 to approve the plan. The franchise still needs final authorization from the state Public Service Commission.

The contract is 59 pages long with 74 pages of appendices, plus side agreements with the community access organizations in each borough. Verizon and the city Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications hammered out the details in 18 months of secret negotiations.

A deal of this magnitude deserves more than a passing glance from the public and our elected officials. It will determine how we watch TV, make phone calls and use the Internet in New York City for at least the next 20 years. Below is a summary of key points in the agreement.

(If you'd like to read the whole thing, you can request a copy from information technology or download it from my blog, here. For background onVerizon's fiber optic service, known as FiOS, see last month's column, "Fiber Optics: Bringing the Next Big Thing to New York.")

What Verizon Will Do

Verizon Rollout Schedule
The Cable Franchise Agreement between New York City and Verizon New York requires that Verizon's fiber optic network cover the entire city by June3, 2014. It sets targets along the way, giving the company more time to serve apartment buildings because of the challenges of running the wires in them. (All dates refer to December 31 of the year indicated, except for 2014, which refers to June 30.)

Under the terms of the agreement, Verizon promises to build a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network, the gold standard of modern telecommunications that brings the highest capacity wires right up to every doorstep. Even if the cable companies were to replace all of their coaxial wires with fiber optics, the peer-to-peer architecture of the phone network (as opposed to the one-to-many broadcast architecture of the cable companies) makes the fiber-to-the-premises network faster, especially on upload speeds.

There are no government subsidies in this franchise agreement. Verizon will pay for the upgrade to its copper network and recoup all costs from subscribers. Other cities are considering investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a similar fiber network. The advantage of New York's arrangement is that it saves the city money. On the other hand, the network will be Verizon's alone. The other cities would have an open access network, allowing any number of companies to compete to offer services.

Verizon is paying the maximum franchise fee of 5 percent of gross revenue in exchange for use of the city's streets and other areas, usually referred to as rights-of-way. The network will be citywide, marking the first time a single provider will offer cable service to all city residents. Time Warner and Cablevision currently divide the city between them.

Once Verizon's network is complete, consumers will have two choices for cable service: their current cable provider and Verizon. Residents of most other major cities still have only one choice. A duopoly is not true competition, but it's an improvement from a monopoly.

The buildout schedule for the new service is actually pretty fast. A lot of people have criticized the uneven pace of deployment. Staten Island and Manhattan will be complete long before Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. (See chart, below.) However, this is more of a reflection of how quickly the network will cover those two boroughs, than of excessive slowness in the other three.

On the other hand, there are no meaningful penalties if Verizon ignores the buildout schedule, which, according to Bruce Kushnick's research, they have a track record of doing.

The administration has made much of the fact that the deal is for service citywide and Verizon has said it will not discriminate against poorer neighborhoods. While the company has to meet benchmarks in extending service to particular boroughs, it has full discretion about which neighborhoods to wire first within each borough. The deal explicitly allows Verizon to deploy in wealthier neighborhoods first and then extend service to other areas once it has garnered enough subscribers. These official delays are called "Checkpoint Extensions."

The franchise requires Verizon to post a $50 million performance bond, but that goes down to $35 million at the end of this year, when Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx will have barely any service. The amount continues to drop each year. Even the starting sum of $50 million is a drop in the estimated $6-billion bucket Verizon will spend on deployment or the tens of billions the company stands to make in revenue.

There is a requirement that the households Verizon reaches cannot all be high income, but the mandate is fairly lenient. The agreement says, "The estimated median household income of all homes passed shall not be greater than the average household income of all households in New York City." But comparing a median to an average is the statistical equivalent of comparing apples to pineapples. As it's written, a household with an income of $70,000 is below the threshold. If it compared the median household income of households passed to the median of the city, rather than the average, Verizon would need to serve households with incomes of $45,000 and less in order to make the benchmark.

The Public Good

As part of its deal, Verizon negotiated a number of side agreement with the community access organizations, more commonly known as public access centers, in each borough. I have not been able to review them but am told each of the centers will receive a decent payment per subscriber per month. Of course, most Verizon subscribers will be switching from Time Warner or Cablevision, which already provide a community access charge, so this will not be a huge new source of revenue for the organizations, just a guarantee that they will not lose out.

While the funding for community access organizations is good, Verizon is not required to offer high-definition or video-on-demand services for any public, educational or government channels, though the company says it will offer this "enhanced digital platform" over time.

As part of the franchise, Verizon will pay into a Technology and Education Fund. The payment, though, is only $4 million over seven years, which comes to something like 8 cents per person per year.

The idea for this fund comes out of the city's Broadband Advisory Committee and a report from the consultant hired by the Economic Development Corporation. It represents a key part of a strategy to close the digital divide, though launching a new city agency with this money could add a new layer of bureaucracy without increasing the effectiveness of existing community technology programs. The city is going to have to augment significantly the money from Verizon if it wants to have an impact. And all of the computer skills training will be for naught if the city can't reign in broadband prices or if wealthy residents move up to high-speed fiber optics while others are left with DSL or cable modems.

Buyer Beware?

The deal lists numerous consumer protection standards and requires the completion of an annual cable consumer report card, though not until all of the cable companies have been subject to this requirement for a full calendar year. The first report card might not appear until February 2010.

The deal lowers the consumer protection standards codified in the existing franchises. Most notably, the proposed franchise would significantly reduce the established penalty for a cable company missing a scheduled installation or repair appointment. Currently, the penalty for a missed appointment - the appointment is not for a precise time, but for a four-hour window - is free installation (for an installation call) and one month's credit based on the preceding month's bill. The Verizon franchise reduces this to a $25 credit.

Verizon apparently raised this in negotiations, pushing hard for the flat amount. According to the information technology department, it then became a matter of agreeing on how much that amount would be, but it's hard to imagine how it could be lower: Did Verizon originally propose a $5 credit?

The administration says that penalties are less crucial than they once were because consumers will now have a choice of cable providers. If Verizon's customer service is unsatisfactory, people can opt for Time Warner or Cablevision. But the lower standard will be written into the competitors' franchises when they are renewed this year, immediately putting them into effect citywide, while Verizon's competition will roll out slowly and unevenly. Huge portions of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens will have no competition and weaker protections for the next four to nine years.

The competition may also spur the providers to lock subscribers in to extended contracts with the kind of early termination fees that cell phone companies have used. The Daily News reported last month that Verizon was planning to impose a penalty of $199 on subscribers who cancel service. When Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer questioned Verizon on this issue, company officials acknowledged they might impose it on special introductory rates or on package deals like the common "triple play" of Internet, phone and cable service combined.

It costs an estimated $1,000 to $1,200 to install FiOS in a home. Once in place, fiber optics requires much less repair and upkeep than copper or coaxial wires so they are less expensive to maintain. But Verizon needs customers to keep the service for a year to recoup that installation cost. This is one of the reasons Verizon likes to pull out the old copper wires when it installs the fiber optics, since it means the customer loses the option of downgrading to the cheaper service. A company representative said, however, that its current practice in New York is to leave the copper in place unless the customer requests the wires' removal.

Other Issues

The provisions for non-English speakers are vague, simply saying that Verizon should provide service in a language spoken by a "substantial" number of its subscribers. This is of little use to potential subscribers who do not speak English, unless Verizon decides there are enough customers to make it profitable to offer services in their langue. Further, the open-ended language raises the concern that this franchise is more of a gentlemen's agreement than a service contract. The franchise could specify what languages Verizon must provide service in.

There has not been enough public disclosure. The deal was worked out behind closed doors and it seems as thought the department of information technology wants to conduct all of its oversight in private, as well. The agreement makes frequent reference to the confidentiality of information that Verizon will provide to the city, but the presumption should be on disclosure, not secrecy.

The Bottom Line

Overall, the deal is very favorable to Verizon, which, pending Public Service Commission approval, now has access to the largest cable market in the country. It permits the company to build to areas of the city in the order it wants and allows for delays if its services do not attract enough subscribers early on. There are no repercussions for further delays or for poor customer service.

New Yorkers will benefit from having a fully fiber optic network and a choice of cable TV providers. According to Consumers Union, the existence of a second choice in cable providers tends to lower prices by as much as 15 percent. But the lowered customer service standards suggest we may see the phone company sink to the level of the cable companies rather than see the cable companies rise to the level of the phone company. This deal is the beginning of the end of competition for Internet or phone service in New York. Rather than choosing among multiple providers for each service, you will choose between two packages of all of your communication needs - TV, phone, Internet.

There are certainly enough red flags in the deal to have warranted further review from the franchise review commission. Now that the arrangement seems almost certain to be approved, it will be up to the department of information technology to provide reliable oversight and report regularly to the public on how well Verizon is living up to the agreement. As part of that, the department should maintain an up-to-date buildout calendar on its Web site and release the reports that Verizon is required to file with them. The city will have to make good on the initial $4 million Technology Education Fund by finding additional money. And local consumer and public interest groups will have plenty to keep them busy in this area for years to come.

 

Anger and Accusations Greet Budget Cuts


Photo from Bronx High School of Science
Students at Bronx High School of Science, slated to bear some of the budget's largest cuts.

For years, the city schools have not only been immune to budget cuts. They have seen their funding increase dramatically. Now, though, that has started to change, and the controversy over whether to cut, how much and where has touched off a heated debate. A number of City Council members, including Council Speaker Christine Quinn, have indicated they will not vote for any budget that includes cuts to the classroom.

Quinn said she could not "in good faith" support a budget that cut classroom spending. Acknowledging the straitened economic picture, said, "Even in that climate, even with that reality, there are some services that have to be protected."

Councilmember Lew Fidler agreed. "There generally a sense in this council that this budget is not going to pass if there's a dime of cuts in the classroom," he said.

The money at stake represents a tiny proportion of the school system's $17.6 billion budget. But with schools still suffering from low achievement rates, advocates see any cut as unconscionable (as Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself might say) and a betrayal by the mayor of his pledge to remake the nation's largest public school system. In the last week, the debate has become even more contentious. The administration has sought to blame the state for the cuts, while state officials have blasted the city for trying to shortchange New York's poorest children and council members have accused the administration of "divisive" tactics.

Subtracting by Adding

By most measures, the cut is not exactly a cut. Overall, according to a statement by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, funding for schools will increase by $664 million in fiscal year 2009, with $535 million coming from the state largely as a result of the settlement in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity suit over school financing. However, Klein said, basic costs for education are projected to rise by $963 million next year because of contract agreements with teachers and other education department employees, and rising fuel, energy and special education costs. This leaves the city with a $299 million gap in money for education. (The city has already reduced education spending this year from its anticipated level.)

Klein said he has identified some $200 million in cuts in what the department calls "non-school spending" -- such as the central and district administrations. That leaves almost $100 million to come out of spending for the district's approximately 1,200 schools.

Opposing the Cuts

Over the past several months, education advocates, many members of the City Council and other officials have adamantly opposed any cut in city education spending. In February the teachers union, Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the Coalition for Education Justice and other groups formed a coalition called "Keep the Promises" to fight any cuts. The coalition has staged rallies and launched an advertising campaign to press its case.

"We have been getting better for a while, and we thought there was a way to progress, and then all of the sudden there's these cuts," Alicia Cortes, the parent coordinator at Intermediate School 302 in Brooklyn told the Times. "You can't cut off people's legs and then expect them to succeed."

When the state, facing a more dire budget picture in the city, increased funding for schools, advocates focused their anger on Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Klein. At a hearing on the education budget Monday, a number of council members questioned whether the city needed to classroom spending at all . They pointed to reports (see related story) that the city could have a $4.6 billion budget surplus at the end of this fiscal year.

"Being ultraconservative is not being fiscally responsible to the children of New York City," said Councilmember Robert Jackson, who chairs the education committee.

Other members urged Klein to look outside the classroom for cuts, perhaps to the contracts budget, as Quinn suggested. John Liu offered that if money was indeed that tight, the mayor might want to take a second look at the $400 property tax rebate he sends homeowners every summer.

Sharing the Pain

Last week, Klein began offering briefings on specifically where the reductions would come from. He said the city's most prestigious schools, particularly middle and high schools, would bear the brunt of the $99 million in cuts. This would include, he said, a cut of about $955,000 at Stuyvesant High School, $852,000 at Bronx High School of Science and $133,762 as Salk School of Science, a well regarded Manhattan middle school.

 

The culprit according to Klein, is a state program that tries to focus some state education money on low performing schools. Known as the Contracts for Excellence, it has been a bete noire of the Bloomberg administration, which has a history of resisting any limits on its control of public school spending and programs.

If the state loosened the requirements, Klein has said, the city could cut spending at all schools by a comparatively manageable 1.4 percent, sparing any school the kind of slashing that might now take place at top schools. "I asked for discretion so that I can treat all students equitably," Klein told City Council.

To make a complicated situation even murkier, according to Klein, the city cannot simply augment Stuyvesant's budget to make up for the difference in its state funding and that of a poorly performing high school -- a process Klein called "supplantation." So, he said, if the state does not relent, the city would have to spend $400 million to avoid any reductions in individual school budgets. On the other hand, if the state relaxed its restrictions, the city would have to spend just $99 million to avoid the cuts.

To bolster his argument, Klein has said that a change in the city's school funding formula, enacted last year, already takes into account schools that have particular needs, such as large numbers of students living in poverty.

"When people say our high-needs schools are being underfunded, they don't understand that last year we took a huge step toward solving that problem," he has said.

If Klein thought this proposal would tamp down the anger over budget cuts or at least deflect it, he miscalculated -- badly. Whatever the merits of Klein's argument, it appeared to "backfire," as the Times put it. Some saw it as a bald-faced effort to provoke outrage from parents with children at elite school, who tend to be more vocal and have more political clout than parents of students at poor schools, many of whom do not speak English or understand the vagaries of New York City budget politics.

"It's a political game on the backs of the kids," Paola De Kock, president of the parent association at Stuyvesant, told the Daily News.

Several council members at the budget hearing agreed. "We have to avoid pitting the high-needs child against the low-needs child," said Mike McMahon.

Other observers, including state officials, viewed Klein's comments as a move to shift blame."What you're trying to do in my opinion is hold a gun to Albany," said Jackson. "If I was a legislator in Albany, I would be enraged that you were trying to hold me hostage."

Many of Klein's critics, including Jackson, who was an original plaintiff in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity suit, noted that the suit was intended to help poorly performing schools or those with many students who are poor, do not speak English or require special education classes. "The lowest performing schools need more, not less," Jackson said.

"The funds are to bring all the schools to equal standing," said Councilmember Melissa Mark Viverito. Using it to plug holes in the budget from Bloomberg's cuts, she continued, "is something we would not support because that is not the intent of the funds…. I would ask the state not to consider or entertain that."

She probably does not have to worry. In public comments last week, various state officials said they would block any effort to relax controls on the money.

"There's no chance we're even going to consider what the chancellor is talking about," State Sen. Kevin Parker of Brooklyn told the Post.

State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver issued a statement saying, "If the city provided the funding as promised, there would be no need to discuss budget cuts for schools around the city."

Advocacy groups endorsed that position. "Asking the state for flexibility is 'unconscionable,'" Geri Palast, president of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, said in a statement. "The state in tough fiscal times stayed the course and kept its promise of increased funding to meet its CFE obligations. The city must do the same and not pit higher performing schools against the lower performing schools."

At least one council member cast took a more jaded view of the state government's action. Albany does not deserve any praise for increasing education money to the city, since the city pays $14 billion more in taxes than it gets back from the state, according to Peter Vallone, just about Klein's only defender at the City Council hearing. The state, Vallone said, "is like a thief taking your wallet, giving you a dollar back and saying, 'look how much I give to charity.'"

 

The View from Fit City 3


illustration
Gotham Gazette image by Ya-Hsuan Huang, photo (cc) yung

New York City collectively gained 10 million pounds between 2002 and 2004. In those two years more than 170,000 New Yorkers became newly obese. As a city, we have a weight problem that has created a health problem -- and it's getting worse.

While a number of factors contribute to this obesity epidemic -- and to heart disease, stroke, asthma and some forms of cancer -- more and more experts attribute it, in part, to the shape of the city and the physically inactive lifestyle it has created. With this in mind, public health professionals, policy makers and designers are taking a closer look at how the built environment affects the public's health and, more importantly, ways in which they can work together so that New York City can, by its very structure, encourage physical activity.

Earlier this month, the commissioners of five city departments -- Health and Mental Hygiene, Design and Construction, Transportation, City Planning, and Parks and Recreation gathered for a conference -- called Fit-City to see what could be done. City employees, public health experts, urban planners, architect, and policy specialists packed the Center for Architecture on LaGuardia Place to discuss what has become a hot topic.

Creating Healthy Cities

The idea of using design to fight illness is not new. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, infectious disease experts banded together with planners, sanitation specialists, and urban reformers to combat tuberculosis and waste-born diseases. The structures, laws and regulations they created remain essential to New York City's infrastructure. However, as that health crises faded, so too did the unusual and productive partnership that helped curb it.

Only in recent years, with the sharp rise in obesity-related chronic illness, has the connection between the design of a place and its health reemerged in policy circles. According to Dr. James Sallis, a professor at San Diego State University and the Fit-City conference's keynote speaker, in 2000, fewer than 50 academic papers focused on the relationship between the built environment and physical activity. In 2006, more than 300 academic papers made that same connection.

That research has not simply stayed on the shelf. In recent years, public health professionals have become increasingly involved in planning, transportation, and design decisions. Interagency reports and task forces now often include representatives of the health community. The Fit-City conference itself, with its goal of "promoting physical activity through design" and a diverse roster of speakers and attendees, is testament to the growing importance of public health considerations on design and vice versa.

The Cost of Inactivity

The rates of chronic illnesses that regular physical activity can help combat, or at least reduce the risk of, like diabetes and heart disease, are skyrocketing in New York City. According to Department of Health and Mental Hygiene statistics, more than 500,000 New Yorkers have been diagnosed with diabetes, more than 1 million are obese, more than 2 million are overweight and more than half report having no physical activity or significantly less than "healthy people."

Other chronic illnesses are of great concern too. About 6 percent of New Yorkers have had an asthmatic episode in the past 12 months, and in some communities, like northern Manhattan where hospitalization rates for asthma are 21 times higher than in the least affected New York City neighborhoods, estimates of childhood asthma rates are as high as one in four. Increasingly reports link high rates of these chronic illnesses to certain patterns in the built environment, such as location of highways, traffic patterns and citing of certain facilities, such as bus garages.

Researchers have found that asthma rates and the frequency of asthma episodes are correlated with air quality, which in turn is related to proximity to high vehicular traffic. Numerous students have highlighted the high asthma rates in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan and Hunts Point in the Bronx (see related article). Both neighborhoods are flanked by highways and inundated with truck traffic.

Furthermore, studies from around the country point to the correlation between obesity and a lack of physical activity. In 2006, the Journal of the American Medical Association published "Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity in the United States, 1999-2004," which found that 25 million kids are overweight or obese. That is more than one third of all children in the U.S. According to 2006 estimates by the office of the surgeon general, nearly two thirds of all adolescents do not engage in the recommended hour a day of moderate activity.

The effects of all this extend far beyond the ill individuals and their families. Asthma hospitalizations cost the city more than $240 million in 2000, and the Centers for Disease Control estimate that the obesity epidemic cost the United States $117 billion in the same year in direct medical expenses and indirect costs, including lost productivity.

Couple those numbers with the litany of studies that conclude the design of neighborhoods, schools and parks can greatly influence physical activity and it is simple to see why health professionals and planners are talking more and more about how they can help each other confront these problems.

Places to Exercise

New York City, according to many at the conference, has already taken steps to promote this collaboration. Although Mayor Michael Bloomberg's sustainability initiative PlaNYC focuses primarily on accommodating growth in the city while improving the environment, many of its goals, participants said, would also make for healthier communities.

Take for example the schoolyards to parks initiative. To help meet its aim of ensuring that every New Yorker lives within a 10-minute walk of a park, Bloomberg and Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe have opened 30 school playgrounds during off-school hours so they can be fully enjoyed by community members. The city plans to open 260 more schoolyard playgrounds by 2030 and claims that the program will make a space for physical activity easily available to approximately 360,000 New York children.

By all accounts, park access can play a key role in improving fitness. A 2006 study published in the journal "Pediatrics" found teenage girls reported an additional "35 minutes of physical activity per week for each park located within a half-mile from home." A national study published in the same journal concluded, "Communities with seven recreational facilities within a five mile radius had 32 percent fewer overweight teens than did communities with no facilities."

Getting People Moving

The city's efforts extend beyond recreational facilities. Health, transportation and other city agencies together are examining the ways that residents move between destinations in their neighborhoods. A review of 33 studies published in 2006 found that having walkable streets and destinations near one's home increased physical activity among children, while unsafe intersections and dangerous traffic lowered the likelihood of physical exertion. This kind of data provides backing for the long-standing Safe Routes to School program, which former Gov. Elliot Spitzer secured $32 million in federal funding for last September and the Safe Streets for Seniors initiative.

PlaNYC also aims to promote cycling as a healthy means of transportation (see related story). This will include an increase in the number of bicycle lanes on city streets, along with efforts to make indoor bike parking more available to building tenants. Legislation encouraging reasonable provisions for indoor bicycle storage has been pending for some time.

Seemingly simple moves, such as getting people to climb more stairs, could have a major impact. At Fit-City, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene premiered new signage encouraging New Yorkers to take the stairs, and David Burney, commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction, spoke of changes in building code, such as allowing the use of transparent materials for stairwell doors, that would allow architects to focus more attention to stairs and make them more appealing to use. City officials played up both the environmental and health aspects of this effort by tag-lining it "Burn Calories, Not Electricity. Take the Stairs."

The Department of Design and Construction has also been working on high performance building guidelines. The agency reports that buildings with better lighting, ventilation and design are beneficial to employee health and productivity and could potentially save employers between $2 and $5 per square foot in regained productivity and between $.87 and $1.15 per square foot in a reduction of sick days. PlaNYC, however, has little to say about improving conditions in buildings, other than those owned by the city.

A Permanent Shift?

Although the city has launched many efforts to increase physical activity and health through infrastructure and design, advocates say there is still more to do.

For one, there is sometimes a gap between the goals of PlaNYC and the administration's accompanying pronouncements and the realities of some of its policies. In his proposed budget for next year, for example, Bloomberg calls for a decrease of $17.2 million in the parks department budget (see related story). The budget also does not restore the council's playground associates initiative, which funds full-time employees to oversee the city's playgrounds.

Plans to promote fitness in design can falter as they conflict with other city priorities. To cite one case currently in the news, the city sacrificed parkland and recreational facilities in the Bronx to make way for a new Yankee Stadium. As the New York Times reported, none of the replacement parks have been completed, the efforts to create new facilities have fallen behind schedule, and the area will be without some sports fields until at least 2011. NYC Park Advocates has concluded that, if and when all the parks are built, the area will lose parkland as a result of the deal.

Even if the administration managed to follow through on all the relevant proposals in PlaNYC, Bloomberg almost certainly will leave office on Jan. 1, 2010 -- and no one can be sure what will happen then.

To avoid these and other pitfalls, some advocates would like to see changes in laws and regulations. "What we need to see is more policy-based systematic oversight and less ad hoc good-faith efforts. That's the way to make things stick," said Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for Transportation Alternatives.

This sentiment is one echoed on the national level. In "The Built Environment and Its Relationship to the Public's Health," an article from the "American Journal of Public Health," the authors write, "Law can be a potent tool in creating a built environment that is conducive to public health. Public health practitioners can best influence design decisions by intervening early in the process, when broad policies are being made about population density, land-use configurations, transportation, and other-important issues."

Certainly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the midst of the last great union of public health professionals and urban planners, real change did not come about until legislative reforms like the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, which set light and ventilation guidelines for tenement buildings. With such laws, health and quality of life truly started to change for the better, and the infectious disease epidemic started to taper off.

Of course, prior to the passage of effective legislative reforms a century or so ago, there were conferences, one-off attempts, progressive visionaries and failed legal maneuvers for the better part of 50 years. Judging from the passion, commitment and enthusiasm on display at Fit-City, New York City may not have that long to wait for history to repeat itself.

Graham T. Beck is the managing editor of Transportation Alternatives' StreetBeat and a freelance writer. He lives in Brooklyn.  

 



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