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truck to rail. The Staten Island Railroad was reactivated, and household waste in that borough now travels by rail. In 2009, residential waste generated in the North Brooklyn waste shed was shifted to rail from trucks. This Brooklyn operation represents up to 950 tons of waste per day. Eliminated are an estimated forty long-haul tractor trailer trips a day and about thirteen thousand trips a year. Permits to construct new marine transfer stations are also being sought so more containerized waste can be transported by barge to rail loading points or out-of-state receiving sites. Reducing large vehicular traffic on a big scale is no small feat. At present, more than one-third of the city’s residential and solid waste is now being transported out of the city by rail.
    Mayor Bloomberg not only agreed to the environmental justice civic coalition’s longtime proposals but also brought into the administration one of the leaders of that fight. Eddie Bautista was the lead organizer for the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods before he was appointed director of the Mayor’s Office of City Legislative Affairs to oversee the Bloomberg administration’s local legislative agenda. Bautista also continues to work with administration officials on the implementation of the landmark 2006 Solid Waste Management Plan.
    The extraordinary success at the three-hundred-acre Brooklyn Navy Yard—between the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges—under Andrew Kimball is the clearest evidence any city official should need to understand that New York City is still a perfectly viable site for light industry and that not enough space for it exists, as more than one hundred neighborhoods are upzoned, squeezing out existing manufacturing. In five years, the Navy Yard has gone from 3,500 to 5,000 jobs in forty or more buildings. The 230 companies vary remarkably in size, with many having grown exponentially in recent years. New buildings are in construction. The waiting list continues to grow. Only one company failed during the economic collapse, and as soon as one moves out, another moves in, all this while Wall Street, tourism, and retail hemorrhage jobs.
    The Parks Department’s two-billion-dollar ten-year capital plan to build new and repair old facilities is the largest ever, and its impact is incremental citywide. In 2008 alone, four hundred million dollars was spent, clearly a stimulus package of the best kind. The restoration of the historic Highbridge, a substantial new park in Elmhurst; replacement of gas tanks, an indoor pool, and a skating rink in Flushing Meadow; restoration of McCarren Pool (a beneficial Moses legacy); creation of a huge new park on the former landfill of Staten Island’s Fresh Kills; and renovation and upgrades of small parks all over town are significant quality-of-life and neighborhood investments that have nothing to do with real estate or conventional economic development projects. In themselves, however, these investments function as magnets for economic and social improvement of an area, the kind that really works. Most significantly, many of the city’s best park investments (Hunts Point, Bronx River, High Line, community gardens) followed grassroots proposals. Responding to local ideas is the highest form of government leadership.
    After years of debate and indecision, the mayor also began installing 3,300 bus-stop shelters made in New York City, 20 public toilets, and 330 replacement newsstands; converted more of the city’s car fleet to hybrids; and drastically reduced parking privileges for city employees who unnecessarily added to traffic congestion. 24 These are not insignificant quality-of-life and environmental issues, either; they will have citywide social and economic impacts rather than the big-bang impact of one big development project in one place.
    All these governmental efforts dovetail nicely with local, private, and nonprofit initiatives. These are big efforts in modest doses spread all over