If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere

New York has probably set the standard internationally. But (as reported in Crain's New York Business.com it can still be a grind...

Five years into Mr. Bloomberg's sweeping vision for sustainability across New York, his so-called “PlaNYC” finds itself at a crossroads. Congestion pricing, the original document's most controversial component, was torpedoed by outer-borough pols in Albany. Meanwhile, the city took a beating from a recession, a real estate crash and a deadlocked U.S. Congress that together have starved funds for mass transit and other vital projects.

Faced with these realities, City Hall has retooled its original environmental blueprint for slashing greenhouse gases by 30% and preparing for a million more people in New York by 2030. With 20 months left in office, the Bloomberg administration knows it's running out of time to make a difference.

“The best chance we have is to make sustainability the DNA of the city,” Caswell Holloway, deputy mayor for operations, said at a recent Crain's breakfast forum.

Since PlaNYC launched on Earth Day 2007, the administration has unleashed, by its count, more than 120 initiatives that creep into nearly every aspect of city life. Lively pedestrian plazas have blossomed in Midtown, the Flatiron district and Chelsea. Year-round ferries traverse the East River, transporting thousands of commuters to Manhattan from Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens. More than 500,000 trees have been planted in all five boroughs, with another half-million to come in the next few years. Other initiatives, from installing rooftop gardens to introducing fleets of hybrid buses, also have fundamentally transformed the look and feel of New York.