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When he takes office next year, Zohran Mamdani will be the first mayor of New York City in decades not to own a car. Mamdaniwho bikes and rides public transit to workwants to make city buses both faster to ride and free, building on a fare-free pilot he helped run in 2023. He also plans to expand the citys network of bike lanes, add more car-free streets in front of schools, and wants to pedestrianize more areas in Manhattan as congestion pricing has reduced traffic. “In a city where the majority of households are car-free, we haven’t had a car-free mayor in a really long time,” says Alexa Sledge, communications director at the nonprofit Transportation Alternatives. “It’s really exciting to see how he can prioritize the vast majority of the New Yorkers who do walk, bike, and take public transportation every single day.” Mamdani inherits a city with streets that have massively transformed over the last two decades. “People have seen their streets change in real time,” says Janette Sadik-Khan, the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation under the Bloomberg Administration. Sadik-Khan, now a principal at Bloomberg Associates, built nearly 400 miles of bike lanes, launched Citi Bike, introduced new rapid bus lanes, created dozens of plazas, and pedestrianized Times Square. The changes have continued to roll out. New York now has 1,500 miles of bike lanes, more than half a million daily cyclists, and a mile-long stretch of 14th Street dedicated entirely to buses. Under the city’s Streets Plan, passed in 2019, Mamdani’s administration must add 50 miles of bike lanes and 30 miles of bus lanes each yeartargets the Adams administration missed. But he wants to go farther. He’s proposed making buses free to ride, though that’s likely to be a tough sell with the MTA. He also wants to bring true bus rapid transit to the city. “A car-free bus lane can move 8,000 people an hour; meanwhile a busway on a car-free street can move 25,000 people an hour in each direction,” he told Streetsblog earlier this year. “This is an essential service that New Yorkers need, especially those in transit deserts or those forced to rely on the poor service of our current bus system.” Right now, he says, city buses only move at an average of 8 miles an hour. The 14th Street Busway sped up buses by 30%, and other major roads across the cityincluding in the outer boroughscould see the same results with a similar design. “People walking and biking and taking transit far outnumber those in cars, but the street does not reflect that reality,” says Sadik-Khan. Improving reliability matters as much as cost, she says. “New Yorkers don’t just want more affordable transit. They want more frequent and reliable service, so they’re not rolling the dice every time they go to and from work,” she says. Other than dedicated bus lanes, other tweaks to street design could help improve speeds, including “bulb-out” bus stops that allow buses to pick up passengers without pulling over to the side of the road. The city can also roll out more traffic signals that give buses priority at lights. To improve the experience of biking, Sadik-Khan says that the city needs to find a way to deal with the surge of e-bikes and scooters that are too fast for bike lanes now. Mamdani could consider a new type of bike lane, she says. “New York City could be the first in the nation to dedicate lanes on avenues and in crosstown streets to faster bikes and scooters, which would take them out of the way for regular bike riders and pedestrians and make the streets much safer for everybody,” she says. Mamdani wants to pedestrianize “vast swaths” of the new congestion pricing zone, along with streets near public open space and schools. It’s an ambitious vision, though not impossible. Paris has transformed even more radically than New York, turning a highway into park space, planting tens of thousands of parking spaces with trees, closing more than 100 streets to cars, charging SUVs extra to park, and making rush hour look more like Copenhagen, with streets filled with bikes. Other cities have also reshaped around pedestrians, like Barcelona, which now has several car-free superblocks. The same scale of change could happen in New York. “There’s absolutely no reason we couldn’t do it here,” says Sadik-Kahn. “We have all of the scaffolding for it. I think it’s really a matter of imagination and implementation.” Even after years of improvements in New York, it’s still a challenge to get support for new bike lanes and other changes. But Mamdani has one key advantage: he’s skilled at communicating a vision. “I think he’s done an extraordinary job of communicating the importance of change in this election,” she says. “He’s definitely laid things out. And now I think the implementation is the next step.”
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E-Commerce
The world’s richest man was just handed a chance to become history’s first trillionaire.Elon Musk won a shareholder vote on Thursday that would give the Tesla CEO stock worth $1 trillion if he hits certain performance targets over the next decade. The vote followed weeks of debate over his management record at the electric car maker and whether anyone deserved such unprecedented pay, drawing heated commentary from small investors to giant pension funds and even the pope.In the end, more than 75% of voters approved the plan as shareholders gathered in Austin, Texas, for their annual meeting.“Fantastic group of shareholders,” Musk said after the final vote was tallied, adding “Hang on to your Tesla stock.”The vote is a resounding victory for Musk showing investors still have faith in him as Tesla struggles with plunging sales, market share and profits in no small part due to Musk himself. Car buyers fled the company this year as he has ventured into politics both in the U.S. and Europe, and trafficked in conspiracy theories.The vote came just three days after a report from Europe showing Tesla car sales plunged again last month, including a 50% collapse in Germany.Still, many Tesla investors consider Musk as a sort of miracle man capable of stunning business feats, such as when he pulled Tesla from the brink of bankruptcy a half-dozen years ago to turn it into one of the world’s most valuable companies.The vote clears a path for Musk to become a trillionaire by granting him new shares, but it won’t be easy. The board of directors that designed the pay package require him to hit several ambitious financial and operational targets, including increasing the value of the company on the stock market nearly six times its current level.Musk also has to deliver 20 million Tesla electric vehicles to the market over 10 years amid new, stiff competition, more than double the number since the founding of the company. He also has to deploy 1 million of his human-like robots that he has promised will transform work and home he calls it a “robot army” from zero today.Musk could add billions to his wealth in a few years by partly delivering these goals, according to various intermediate steps that will hand him newly created stock in the company as he nears the ultimate targets.That could help him eventually top what is now considered America’s all-time richest man, John D. Rockefeller. The oil titan is estimated by Guinness World Records to have been worth $630 billion, in current dollars, at his peak wealth more than 110 years ago. Musk is worth $493 billion, as estimated by Forbes magazine.Musk’s win came despite opposition from several large funds, including CalPERS, the biggest U.S. public pension, and Norway’s sovereign wealth fund. Two corporate watchdogs, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, also blasted the package, which so angered Musk he took to calling them “corporate terrorists” at a recent investor meeting.Critics argued that the board of directors was too beholden to Musk, his behavior too reckless lately and the riches offered too much.“He has hundreds of billions of dollars already in the company and to say that he won’t stay without a trillion is ridiculous,” said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst at research firm Telemetry who has been covering Tesla for nearly two decades. “It’s absurd that shareholders think he is worth this much.”Supporters said that Musk needed to be incentivized to focus on the company as he works to transform it into an AI powerhouse using software to operate hundreds of thousands of self-driving Tesla cars many without steering wheels and Tesla robots deployed in offices, factories and homes doing many tasks now handled by humans.“This AI chapter needs one person to lead it and that’s Musk,” said financial analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities. “It’s a huge win for shareholders.”Investors voting for the pay had to consider not only this Musk promise of a bold, new tomorrow, but whether he could ruin things today: He had threatened to walk away from the company, which investors feared would tank the stock.Tesla shares, already up 80% in the past year, rose on news of the vote in after-hours trading but then flattened basically unchanged to $445.44.For his part, Musk says the vote wasn’t really about the money but getting a higher Tesla stake it will double to nearly 30% so he could have more power over the company. He said that was a pressing concern given Tesla’s future “robot army” that he suggested he didn’t trust anyone else to control given the possible danger to humanity.Other issues up for a vote at the annual meeting turned out wins for Musk, too.Shareholders approved allowing Tesla to invest in one of Musk’s other ventures, xAI. They also shot down a proposal to make it easier for shareholders to sue the company by lowering the size of ownership needed to file. The current rule requires at least a 3% stake.-This story corrects that Rockefeller wealth was in oil, not railroads. Bernard Condon, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The United States has about 640 million acres of public land, covering national parks to conservation areas and wild rivers to lake shores. These lands contain resources like oil and gas reserves, or minerals like lithium and copper that could be mined. But theyre also home to hiking trails, camping sites, fishing spots, and all sorts of outdoor recreational activitiesactivities that contribute billions of dollars to our economy. Outdoor recreation specifically on federal public lands and waters generates $128 billion in economic activity every year, according to a new report by the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR), a coalition of trade associations and outdoor organizations. That translates to $351 million a day from access to outdoor recreation on public lands and watersor $14.6 million in economic value every hour. The ORR report is a first-of-its-kind assessment meant to highlight the value of keeping public lands open and available to such activities, rather than closing them off to outdoor enthusiasts so that they can be mined and drilled for resources. The report comes amid the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, during which national parks have limited staff and so may also limit public access. The study also follows multiple attacks on public lands by President Donald Trump, from considering selling off millions of acres to actually opening up public lands to more drilling and mining. [Photo: Robert Cocquyt/Adobe Stock] Outdoor recreation as an economic engine Outdoor recreation in the U.S. is a $1.2 trillion industry, supporting more than five million jobs and made up of more than 110,000 businesses (plus the countless individuals who partake in all sorts of activities, from boating to RVing to hiking). Whitney Potter Schwartz, ORRs senior vice president of communications and operations, calls this industry one of Americas greatest economic engines. Yet, there hasnt been a comprehensive picture of exactly how federal lands specifically contribute to all those numbers, she adds, until the study out this week. The $128 billion generated by such activities includes at least half a billion dollars that go straight to federal coffers through park passes, entrance fees, permits, and leases. Then theres federal taxes revenue, which totals $5.8 billion. State and local taxes add another $5 billion. But outdoor recreation also benefits American businesses and American workers. Of the outdoor recreation industrys five million jobs, one in five depend on federal public lands. When people visit public lands, they usually spend money on food, hotels, or recreational equipment. Direct annual spending by recreational visitors to federal public lands totals $72 billion, per the report. Federal agencies, like the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, produce their own economic reports, but this is the first time all the information has been pulled together to provide a collective picture of outdoor recreation on public lands, says Rob Southwick, a senior adviser at Southwick Associates, which conducted the study. Economic models helped fill in the gaps, like to understand how much Americans spend outside of these sites. [Photo: Mick Haupt/Unsplash] A sustainable, long-term revenue source Using federal public lands for outdoor recreation provides a value that is sustainable, recurring, and long term, the report shows. Thats counter to the idea of generating revenue from public lands through resource extraction including oil, gas, and minerals. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has proposed leveraging the countrys public lands to pay off its national debt, specifically by ramping up drilling and mining. He has said he views public lands and waters as part of the countrys balance sheet, full of valuable assets just waiting to be extracted. But such resources are finite, the ORR report notes. When the oil, gas, or minerals are gone, so are the associated jobs, income, and tax revenues, it reads. Furthermore, the land may require remediation before it is fit for other uses or it may never return as a revenue-bearing asset. Outdoor recreation, in contrast, is a sustainable and appreciating asset, Schwartz says. Americans can hike, camp, and climb on the same piece of land over and over again, continuously generating money. Recreation can also support more jobs than other activities. Its the largest source of economic returns from U.S. Forest Service lands, the report notes, supporting 161,000 jobs. In comparison, forest products, livestock grazing, mineral extraction, and energy production support a combined 103,200 jobs. Access to recreation is this economic powerhouse, Schwartz says, and it delivers these compounding returns year after year for the econoy.
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E-Commerce
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