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low-energy-consuming appliances in public housing, increasing efficiency and lowering energy costs. None of these are individually big projects in one place but are large overall, with positive effects nonetheless.
    The Transportation Department, under director Janette Sadik-Khan, is achieving enormous citywide change with small-scale initiatives that wrest traffic lanes from vehicles and expand the bicycle path network. Sadik-Khan created new plazas on street space where cars were once the sole occupants. Tables and chairs proliferate. More than two hundred miles of bike lanes have been added across the city in three years, with more planned. Bus stops are more welcoming. In the process, Sadik-Khan has reminded us of the multiple purposes of city streets. Nibble by nibble she is reclaiming city space eroded during the more-cars era—she calls it the “attrition of automobiles.” 23 But she’s done something equally significant in demonstrating that a department of transportation has a greater responsibility than just moving traffic and that streets belong as much to pedestrians and bikers as to cars. This is part of the mayor’s ambitious vision to reduce pollution and traffic congestion.
    PlaNYC is a shrewd planning document that includes many of the big development schemes that would have been included in a traditional master plan. However, this is not a traditional plan. What is unique are dozens of farsighted environmental initiatives that have never been seen in a city plan, including citywide storm-water drainage upgrades, making city buildings energy efficient, eliminating thousands of parking permits for city employees, the planting of 1 million trees (200,000 so far), and providing incentives to get 15 percent of the city’s taxi fleet converted to hybrids. This “long-term vision for a sustainable New York City” is based on a somewhat mysterious prediction that by 2030, the city population is expected to rise to 9.1 million, from its current 8.36 million. Such predictions are always tricky, like the one in the 1970s when the City Planning Commission predicted the population would go down to the 5 million range. The PlaNYC prediction, of course, did not anticipate an economic collapse or the exodus of some immigrants returning to their home countries as opportunities in the United States diminished. Futurist predictions are always risky and often wrong. Nevertheless, many of the modest accomplishments of city agencies already mentioned are enumerated worthwhile goals in this plan, regardless of population changes.
    It is well known that the city’s communities of color and low-income residents carry the heaviest burden in pollution and traffic, from garbage handling, incinerators, and power plants. For years, environmental justice groups had been pushing for equity in the handling of the city’s solid waste, both commercial and residential. The goal was to shift waste export to rail and barge from thousands of trucks and to equitably redevelop the city’s dormant network of marine waste-transfer stations. Progress here has been made on several fronts. Instead of just building new big power plants, some existing plants have been retrofitted to increase megawatt production, while simultaneously decreasing pollution emissions. Two new marine transfer stations were approved for Manhattan, one on the Upper East Side and one on the Lower West Side, to reduce the truck traffic having a negative impact on the South Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Recycling efforts have increased to reduce the volume of garbage. Again, it’s big change in small increments.
    Perhaps most significantly, a long-term solid-waste management plan proposed by Mayor Bloomberg and adopted by the New York City Council in 2006 is revolutionizing garbage removal for the city. This plan had been championed by environmental justice activists for a decade. All Bronx residential and municipal waste—about 2,100 tons per day—was shifted from