New York is a lot like Venice. It sinks.

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’ll hear from a scientist who figured out that New York City is sinking, in part because all of its buildings weigh 1.68 trillion pounds. We’ll also look at why the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is proposing to raise the base fare to $2.90.

Maybe you’ve had that sinking feeling lately. a recently published scientific article suggested that all of New York has and will continue to do so.

The paper said New York is sinking between two millimeters and four millimeters a year under the weight of all the buildings, “with some areas sinking much faster.”

A few millimeters is so little that the finding almost sounds amusing. Four millimeters is three-twentieths of an inch. But the finding about the city’s slow and gradual descent was not meant to be funny. “And that’s the point,” said Tom Parsons, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey who was the paper’s lead author.

The concern is that the downward force of the buildings, coupled with rising water levels from global warming, could make the city more susceptible to natural disasters. Those factors “imply an increasing problem along coastal and riverfront areas,” he wrote in the paper, published in the journal Earth’s future. “The purpose of the paper is to raise awareness that any additional tall building” along a river “could contribute to future flood risk.”

What is happening in New York is “very similar to what is happening in Venice,” he said in an interview. “They’re sinking at the same rate.” But in Venice, climate change is beating projections that a $5.3 billion seawall system was designed to withstand.

And Indonesia is building from scratch to build a new capital, because the current one, Jakarta, is sinking. The president, Joko Widodo, gave up trying to save Jakarta after raising the seawall and trying other measures. My colleague Hannah Beech called them “duct tape solutions” that couldn’t take Jakarta out of reach of the water.

Parsons is not arguing for a new New York on higher and drier ground. “It’s not an emergency right now,” he said. “What we wanted to do is provide this science that helps plan for the future. It’s easy for scientists to show up when there’s an emergency, but it’s more helpful to talk about it early enough so something can be done to mitigate it.

“That’s the main question I get, how can we reduce this,” he added. “The answer that many people don’t want to hear is the greenhouse gas side of it. We can slow sea level rise if we can jointly find a way to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That is of course not an easy task.”

He quoted one The United Nations expects that 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. “If you build a city and it fills up with people, you get subsidence,” he said, saying that New York City was “symbolic of a place that people migrate to and that clearly has a high concentration of construction.”

He and his co-authors calculated that there aren’t quite 1.1 million buildings in the city — 1,084,954 to be exact. After estimating the number of floors in each floor and making some computer models, he calculated their total weight to be 1.68 trillion pounds. He then took into account the pull of gravity and other factors to determine how much the city would sink.

Parsons said some parts of the city are sinking faster than others. He mentioned areas along the East River in Queens and Brooklyn, as well as Coney Island, Jamaica Bay, and the Rockaways. Most Manhattan skyscrapers are anchored in rock, which is “much less compressible” than soil.

Weather

Enjoy a sunny day with an altitude of almost 68 and light winds. At night, expect mostly clear skies with light winds and a minimum around 54.

ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING

Effective until Friday (Shavuot).

The latest New York news

The The consumer price index for the New York area rose 3.7 percent in the 12 months ending April 2023 — even more so if food and energy were left out of the calculations. Against that backdrop, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is joining the parade to seek out more of its customers.

The agency wants to increase the base fare for a one-way ride on the subway, bus or paratransit by 5 percent from $2.75 to $2.90. It would be the first base rate increase since 2015. The agency also wants to charge $34 for a seven-day MetroCard, up from the current $33, and $132 for a 30-day MetroCard, up from 4 percent from $127 now. their first increases since 2019.

Fares for express bus services, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad would also rise, as would tolls on the authority’s bridges and tunnels.

“This is a reasonable increase, given inflation,” Neal Zuckerman, the chair of the agency’s finance committeesaid Monday after agency officials gave a presentation on the proposed rate increases.

The authority’s board expects to hold public hearings on the proposal next month and vote on it in July.

Zuckerman noted that passenger numbers are 30 percentage points lower than before the pandemic. In fact, as my colleague Ed Shanahan points out, the subway carried four million passengers on different weekdays, up 70 percent since last month.

Each of those passengers, and every bus and commuter train customer, would have to pay a little more for each ride, according to the authority’s proposal. But the authority tried to limit the pain for working people by raising rates more modestly on weekly and monthly MetroCards, officials said.

METROPOLITAN Diary

Arriving late, almost empty

Dear Diary:

While riding the subway on a Wednesday morning, my eyes wandered from the clock on the top left of my phone to the charging signal on the right. I was going to be late for a meeting and my phone was at 1 percent.

I looked up to see how many stops I was from my destination in Midtown and realized I had boarded the wrong train. I sighed and stepped out into the heart of Chinatown.

With my phone asleep, I took off my headphones and headed to another station, listening to the hustle and bustle of a seafood market on the sidewalk as I began to walk.

When I got on the next train, a young couple with a pram sat opposite me. As my eyes drifted to the right, I saw an older woman sitting next to the couple playing peek-a-boo with the baby in the pram.