Submitted by NY1Writer, Mar 24, 2008 12:25

I too keep an old car, more for that sense of identity as a free (i.e., mobile) adult. It resides (more than moves around) in an affordable garage that dead-ends on the FDR Drive in East Harlem. While enclosed, the garage is open to the fumes and exhausts of the hundreds of thousands of cars passing within meters.

It only takes a week for the car to become so covered with filth that I can't see through the window. Most vehicles are covered with tarps, including mine. The automotive grit gets right under. Lining the FDR drive in the adjacent buildings are public housing towers, whose tenants clearly must open their windows, unlike the luxury high-rises farther south, whose residents can afford year-around air conditioning.

My point: Reducing traffic levels in midtown (if achievable) does nothing to spare the low-income residents along the FDR Drive from what I have learned is clearly an open-air gas chamber.

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