As we ease out of the COVID-19 PAUSE in NYC, one thing is making a comeback that nobody wants: traffic congestion. While businesses continue to reopen and more workers returning to their job sites, most people are leery of using mass transit, which can mean only one thing: More driving…which is putting decades of air quality improvements in jeopardy.
“We avoid 17 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year because of the MTA,” said Julie Tighe, president of the New York League of Conservation Voters. “If we’re swapping that with cars, which are less efficient to begin with, we are going to have a problem.”
Traffic on bridges and tunnels is down only 18 percent on average from its pre-pandemic levels. The number of vehicles entering Manhattan’s central business district is only 15 percent below the volume seen ahead of the public health crisis, according to the city’s Department of Transportation. In early April, traffic was down roughly 60 percent from normal levels.
While subway ridership has rebounded from an all-time low, it’s still down roughly 78 percent from 2019 levels — with just more than one million riders using the system on weekdays. Buses have recovered more quickly, but ridership is still down 50 percent.
While environmental advocates have focused their efforts in recent years on targeting the largest source of emissions — city buildings — they acknowledge transit could become a greater concern in the Covid-19 era.
Western Queens is the home of the Ravenswood Generating Station, the country’s 23rd largest power plant. Its gas-powered turbines consume millions of cubic feet of natural gas creating steam and steam-powered electricity. As a peaker plant, it is only supposed to come online a few times a year when electricity demand exceeds the capacity of normal plants, but with the increase in the numbers of visitors and residents to NYC in recent years, they have been needed more and more, especially in the evening hours when so many computers, televisions and other electronic devices are being used. And it is now known that the pollution they cause can create severe adverse health effects for the people who live in close proximity to them.
Against the backdrop of renewed calls for racial justice nationwide in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the state of New York announced on Tuesday a slate of 
Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, which marked the final chapter of legalized human slavery in the United States. But down in Texas, no one was in a hurry to tell the 250,000 enslaved people there that they were free. They had to endure another two and a half years of forced servitude before General Gordon Granger read the Proclamation declaring them free on June 19, 1865 in Galveston.