Stadium

While it's true that it's practically impossible to push through big civic projects on the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge or Lincoln Center in New York City these days, the proposed West Side stadium was a singularly bad idea. Whatever economic benefits it might have brought the city, the money and the focus of the Bloomberg administration should have been put into downtown Manhattan, where neglect has left plans for Ground Zero in tatters.

Setting all that aside, the reason many New Yorkers (and hence their representatives in Albany) were against the stadium is because they were horrified at the thought of trying to get around the city on game days, or God helps us, during the Olympics. All of the Bloomberg administration's fancy numbers and talk of the economic benefit to the city could not overcome that basic dread of more people and more traffic.