New York City's transportation commissioner wants you to come clog up her roads and subways. "If you want to save the planet, move to New York," Janette Sadik-Khan said at a Clinton Global Initiative panel discussion on Tuesday. Thanks to dense, car-light living, she said, New Yorkers have a third of the carbon footprint of the average American.
It doesn't have to be New York, and maybe it shouldn't — poverty has risen more sharply there than in the rest of the country in recent years, the income disparity is staggering, and unemployment rates among young adults are awful. If you read Grist, New Yorkers may be frantically waving you away, because you're in the exact demographic (non-rich renters under 29) that the city can't really handle any more of. Luckily, the things that make NYC a sustainable metropolis exist in other cities as well: density, public transportation, and walkability.
Sadik-Khan thinks we should be adapting federal and state policies to support cities, so maybe more and more urban areas can reach NYC levels of functional density.
