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What Will Manhattan Congestion Pricing Do to Restaurants?

The sky didn’t fall through the first week of Manhattan’s congestion pricing. However you wouldn’t have recognized that by speaking to restaurant homeowners within the affected zone, who’re in a state of excessive nervousness.
The fees — $9 for a automobile or van, as much as $21.60 for a truck coming into Manhattan under sixtieth Avenue between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. — went into impact on Sunday. Nearly all of the boroughs’s luxurious eating choices are within the zone, together with hundreds of smaller eating places that feed Midtown, SoHo, Greenwich Village, Chinatown, Chelsea and extra.
The brand new prices, authorized by Gov. Kathy Hochul, are supposed to relieve site visitors and air pollution, and lift cash for the town’s beleaguered transit system. And whereas many restaurant homeowners agree these are worthy targets, they had been much more preoccupied this week with how the fees will have an effect on their workers, deliveries, prospects and prices.
“That is all anybody is speaking about,” mentioned Todd McMullen, the supervisor of Steak Frites, a bistro in Hell’s Kitchen close to the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. He mentioned the fixed noise and air pollution on Ninth Avenue have been a longstanding downside, so he hopes the fees skinny site visitors.
However because the trucking corporations that herald necessities like produce, meat, liquor and laundry will go the brand new prices on to eating places, he added, ”there’s no means this doesn’t price us cash within the instant future.”
Jae Jung, the proprietor of Kjun in Murray Hill, mentioned Friday that her produce, meat and fish distributors had introduced new surcharges on every supply. As a result of her restaurant is small and has restricted cupboard space, she mentioned, she receives deliveries three or 4 instances every week, and can attempt to consolidate these into one or two.
Nonetheless, she mentioned, it’s “inevitable” that she must go a few of the new prices on to prospects by elevating costs.
The timing of the brand new site visitors prices additionally worries many house owners. “This might not come at a worse second,” mentioned Salil Mehta, who operates three Southeast Asian eating places within the zone.
January is the slowest month for New York eating places. It’s also when distributors impose their annual worth will increase. New Yr’s Day introduced one other bump within the minimal wage, from $16 to $16.50 per hour. And costs for components like rooster, eggs and different staples are at report highs.
However Mr. Mehta mentioned elevating his costs was not an choice. When he opened Laut close to Union Sq. in 2010, the least costly dish, roti canai — flaky flatbread with a spicy broth for dipping — price $5. Right this moment it’s $11, and he mentioned prospects are already balking. “How a lot larger can I’m going?” he requested.
Lots of his friends drive in from the suburbs, he mentioned, and pay about $20 in tolls and $50 for parking even earlier than congestion pricing. Mr. Mehta mentioned that they’re each cost- and safety-conscious, and that forcing them to selected between spending extra for a night out or braving public transit will maintain them out of Manhattan altogether.
“It could be completely different if the subway had been as clear because the one in New Delhi,” the place he grew up, he mentioned.
A number of restaurateurs have jumped on the probability to appease and appeal to prospects, providing rebates and reductions. Le Jardin Bistro, on the Decrease East Facet, Mr. Mehta’s eating places and the Sushi by Bou omakase chain are providing a $9 low cost on every examine to prospects who’ve paid the driving cost. (Visitors aren’t required to supply proof of cost.)
Different restaurateurs are extra instantly involved about their workers.
Jeffrey Financial institution runs the Carmine’s and Virgil’s mini-empire, together with two of the biggest eating places in Occasions Sq.. He mentioned that immediately imposing a each day $9 cost ($45 per workweek, or about $2,000 of post-tax revenue yearly) on restaurant staff — a lot of whom make near minimal wage — was unfair.
Final week, he mentioned, some workers had resorted to driving into Manhattan north of the congestion zone, parking there and taking the subway to the Occasions Sq., including time and trouble to their commutes. Amanda Cohen, the chef and proprietor of Dirt Candy on the Decrease East Facet, mentioned cost-of-living challenges, like an additional cost for taking an Uber to or from work ($1.50 every means for rides into and out of the zone), may add to the labor scarcity that has plagued eating places because the pandemic started. Most of the skilled servers and cooks who left the town by no means returned. Even her latest commercial for a dishwashing job at $29 per hour drew only some candidates, she mentioned.
Nonetheless, she helps the targets of congestion pricing. “It’s a value, however at the very least it has a profit,” she mentioned.
Jake Dell, an proprietor of Katz’s Deli, estimated that one-fifth of his workers drive to work, normally as a result of they dwell in elements of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx which might be underserved by public transit. The additional prices, he mentioned, can be yet one more problem for them, and for him.
“This isn’t a hardship for Financial institution of America” and different white-collar corporations, he mentioned. “There’s a actual squeeze on small companies on this metropolis.” Mr. Dell mentioned that rising prices had compelled him to lift the worth of his signature pastrami sandwich (now $28.95) yearly since 2022, and that he hoped to not do it once more in 2025.
Late final month, tons of of New York meals companies, together with restaurant teams just like the chef Thomas Colicchio’s Crafted Hospitality and main suppliers just like the Fulton Fish Market and Hunts Level Market, signed a letter to Governor Hochul urging an entire exemption from the congestion prices for distributors based mostly within the metropolis, stating that meals can’t journey by public transportation.
“We must always not face the identical constraints as out-of-state operators when serving our area people,” it learn.
These companies, like most employers within the metropolis, already contribute as much as 0.6 % of their earnings to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, via a tax that went into impact in 2009.
Sam Spokony, a spokesman for the governor’s workplace, mentioned in a press release: “Governor Hochul has been a champion for New York’s meals and restaurant business, advancing an enormous $1.7 billion plan to ease entry to the Hunts Level Terminal Market and signing a number of new legal guidelines to help eating places and different small companies.
“By decreasing site visitors in and round Manhattan’s central enterprise district, this program will make deliveries simpler and sooner.”
Baldor is a Bronx-based distributor that provides about 3,000 eating places in Manhattan with the whole lot from contemporary amaranth to dried ziti. Seth Gottlieb, the corporate’s director of logistics, mentioned he sends 80 vehicles into the zone every day, delivering as much as one million kilos of meals. At $14 per two-axle truck, he estimated that the brand new prices would price the corporate $250,000 to $500,000 per 12 months. (Vans are charged every time they enter the zone, whereas vehicles are charged as soon as per day.)
Mr. Gottlieb mentioned 20 % of Baldo’s deliveries already happen in a single day, and he anticipated that quantity to rise; congestion prices are steeply discounted from 9 p.m. to five a.m. Some eating places have already got “key drop” techniques that enable Baldor workers to ship components instantly into walk-in fridges, however, he mentioned, many cooks who prize (and pay high greenback for) high components nonetheless insist on receiving deliveries themselves. And few unbiased eating places maintain workers readily available in a single day.
Robert DeMasco is the director of restaurant gross sales for Citarella Purveying, which makes a number of deliveries of seafood every day to eating places like Le Bernardin and Gramercy Tavern. He mentioned he was contemplating new choices, like leaving the corporate’s vans parked contained in the congestion zone and operating only one truck out and in, dividing its haul among the many vans to make the last-mile journey to the eating places. Logistically, he mentioned, it will demand extra folks and decelerate deliveries.
“We wish to be within the seafood enterprise,” he mentioned, “not the trucking enterprise.”
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Spring-loaded Robot Could Explore the Asteroid Belt Almost Indefinitely

The asteroid belt beckons – it incorporates sufficient sources for people to increase into the whole remainder of the photo voltaic system and has no biosphere to talk of. Basically, it’s a large mine simply ready to be exploited. So, a scholar workforce from the College of Texas at Austin has devised a plan to use it as a part of the Revolutionary Aerospace System Ideas – Educational Linkage (RASC-AL), a contest sponsored by NASA to encourage undergraduate and graduate college students to develop modern concepts to unravel a few of area exploration’s challenges. UT Austin’s submission to the competitors final yr, often known as the Autonomous Exploration By Extraterrestrial Areas (AETHER) undertaking, definitely matches that invoice.
AETHER was submitted to the AI-Powered Self-Replicating Probes sub-section of RASC-AL 2024, which solicited concepts that might advance John von Neumann’s thought of a self-replicating area probe. AETHER addresses these challenges in two distinct methods.
First, it combines a spring-loaded touchdown system and a metal-burning rocket engine to hop between totally different asteroids within the belt. To gasoline its rocket, it makes use of a system to reap water and metallic (particularly aluminum) from the floor of the asteroid it’s at the moment on, splits it into its parts, after which dumps them right into a gasoline tank that can be utilized to energy its subsequent journey to a unique asteroid. All of that is powered by a Kilowatt Reactor Utilizing Stirling TechnoloY (KRUSTY) nuclear reactor that has been present process NASA and DoE testing for over a decade.
The springs in AETHER’s legs have a two-fold goal. First, they permit for a tender touchdown on the floor of the gravitationally weak asteroid and might switch a number of the vitality created by that touchdown into saved vitality, which can be utilized to launch the system from its touchdown place later. It additionally has a set of wheels to navigate across the asteroid’s floor. When it’s time to leap off once more, it replants its legs and is derived again into area – with slightly assist from its rocket engine.
The rocket engine designed as a part of AETHER can burn metallic, corresponding to aluminum, that the craft harvests from the asteroid to make use of as gasoline. It’s the major system designed to take the craft from asteroid to asteroid, and it’s meant to be a high-delta-v choice for doing so rapidly.
AETHER additionally tries to imitate a von Neumann probe by utilizing a machine-learning algorithm to enhance its resource-harvesting efforts. It could take knowledge from varied sensors, together with artificial aperture radar and a spectrometer, and estimate the place the perfect spot could be to land to refuel. Whereas accumulating that extra gasoline materials, it will talk again with Earth by way of a high-speed optical communication hyperlink, permitting an Earth-based server to replace the machine studying parameters and enhance the algorithm’s consequence for the following hop.
Credit score – HeroX YouTuBe Channel
The unique mission design for AETHER has it stopping at two particular asteroids earlier than shifting on to as-yet-unnamed ones. The primary, which might be no shock, is Psyche, the large metallic asteroid that’s about to be visited by its personal devoted probe. Information from that probe will assist inform the primary iteration of AETHER’s studying algorithm, and the enter the sensors present from its go to will replace it earlier than its subsequent step – Themis. That asteroid, although smaller, is predicted to comprise a considerable amount of water ice, which is a mandatory element for AETHER’s rocket engines.
After visiting the primary two asteroids, the mission strikes on to locations unknown, as finishing these steps could be thought of a hit. However given the longevity of the KRUSTY reactor and the craft’s capability to refill its personal gasoline tank, it’s potential, and even possible, that AETHER would contemplate working effectively previous its rendezvous with Themis.
The UT Austin workforce was comprised solely of undergraduate college students, although it’s unclear what yr of research they had been in. However, given their expertise with the 2024 model of RASC-AL, they would appear well-placed to submit a undertaking proposal for the just lately introduced 2025 model. In the event that they do, hopefully, their thought shall be simply as modern as AETHER’s.
Be taught Extra:
Flores et al – AETHER
UT – Miniaturized Jumping Robots Could Study An Asteroid’s Gravity
UT – NASA Funds the Development of a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon That Would Last for 10 Years
UT – Engineers Design a Robot That Can Stick To, Crawl Along, and Sail Around Rubble Pile Asteroids
Lead Picture:
Touchdown and take-off depiction of AETHER.
Credit score – Flores et al.
News
Two earthquakes near Malibu, one in Inland Empire rattle L.A. region

Two small earthquakes rattled the Malibu space Friday and Saturday, adopted by one other one within the Inland Empire.
The primary Malibu quake was reported round 11:44 p.m. Friday and was registered as a magnitude 3.7, with an epicenter about 6.8 miles northwest of Malibu, in line with the U.S. Geological Survey. It was felt throughout the Westside, San Fernando Valley and Ventura County in addition to within the Los Angeles Basin and South Bay.
A second quake, which was measured as a magnitude 3.5, struck in roughly the identical space at 6:30 a.m. Saturday. Residents in Ventura County reported feeling a pointy jolt, and the shaking triggered some automobile alarms.
A 3rd quake, measured at magnitude 3.5, was recorded close to the San Jacinto Mountains in Riverside County at 2:16 p.m. Saturday, with an epicenter a number of miles south of Idyllwild.
There have been no reviews of harm from any of the quakes.

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Heavy Rain Strikes Kentucky and Tennessee

Uncommon downpours in February started to pound a broad swath of the Decrease Mississippi Valley, from western parts of Kentucky and Tennessee and increasing to southwestern Virginia, officers and residents reported on Saturday.
Flooding in these areas could possibly be “life-threatening,” the Nationwide Climate Service stated on Saturday. It additionally stated that widespread flash flooding was anticipated over components of the decrease Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee Valleys.
“That is unprecedented for mid-February, at the least within the final 20 years,” stated Phil Baker, a meteorologist with the Nationwide Climate Service in Memphis, of the rain in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Whereas there have been no fast stories of deaths or catastrophic property harm, officers warned residents to be ready for the heavy rain, and not to drive by way of floodwaters as a result of the water can change into electrified.
Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said on Saturday afternoon {that a} landslide would preserve Freeway 160 in Knott County closed for a number of hours. Mr. Beshear additionally stated that the water in Elizabethtown, a metropolis of 33,000 residents, was reaching document ranges. Some houses in Perry County had been evacuated, he stated.
In Tennessee, officers stated that some roads, principally within the western a part of the state, had been flooding, together with State Route 210 in Lauderdale County.
For the remainder of the jap United States, frost, ice or snow was anticipated to coat a lot of the jap United States on Saturday into Sunday. However the uncommon springlike surge of hotter, wetter climate into Sunday morning might imply that components of the area will even face flooding rains, extreme storms, freezing rain and, within the far north, heavy snow.
Listed here are the hazards to observe for.
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Flooding rain: From northeastern Arkansas to southwestern West Virginia, there’s a average threat of extreme rainfall that would trigger rivers to rise or result in flash flooding. One to a few inches of rain fell over northwest Arkansas to northwest Tennessee on Friday evening.
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Extreme storms: Within the Deep South, primarily in northern Louisiana and Mississippi, an outbreak of extreme storms that would embrace tornadoes and damaging winds is feasible from Saturday afternoon into the night.
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Heavy snow: Average to heavy snow has been hitting the Midwest, which might stand up to 13 inches of snow by Sunday. It was anticipated on Saturday to maneuver towards the Nice Lakes by way of New England. Maine might see as much as 19 inches of snow by Monday.
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Wintry combine: New York and different cities alongside the Northeast coast will see snow first on Saturday afternoon, earlier than heat air strikes in, turning the precipitation to a large number of sleet, freezing rain after which rain. Some areas, particularly near the coast, will transition shortly from snow to rain. Some average snow might fall throughout the upper elevations of the Appalachians.
The rainfall is the rarity of this mid-February storm.
The area most susceptible to flooding — together with Tennessee and Kentucky — is already soaking wet, with some rivers close to or at flood stage after having seen weeks of latest rainfall.
This uncommon quantity of moisture surging north is extra intense than the rain that has already fallen. And a few locations, like Lexington, Ky., the place three to 5 inches of rain is forecast, might break their February document for each day rainfall. (Over three inches of rain was measured there on Feb. 13, 1989.)
“A part of the issue is earlier than this rain occasion even began this morning, the grounds have already been saturated from earlier rainfall,” stated Mr. Baker, the forecaster. “There’s going to be river flooding that’s going to persist for days.”
As of Saturday, the heaviest rainfall was anticipated over northwest Tennessee and western Kentucky, Mr. Baker stated, with 4 to 6 inches of rain anticipated. As much as eight inches of rain might fall in some remoted areas, he stated.
With the bottom already saturated, forecasters in locations like Paducah, Ky., are particularly involved by a few of the outlier rainfall quantities of as much as seven inches.
“It received’t take a lot to provide flooding,” one forecaster there wrote, warning that the area “could have a major flooding occasion on our fingers.”
Forecasters within the mountainous areas within the jap areas of the locations most in danger for flooding warned that the bottom had produced situations ripe for landslides and particles flows on steep slopes across the space.
Forecasters in Charleston, W.Va., reminded residents who stay on or on the base of hillsides to observe for indicators of potential floor motion: timber leaning in uncommon orientations, or water and dust seeping in the place they aren’t anticipated.
The hotter, springlike storm is predicted to maneuver off the Atlantic seaboard by Sunday night, and winter will return on Monday.
Temperatures will plunge to under common throughout the jap United States. Snow is prone to return on Tuesday and Wednesday, coating the identical areas that will probably flood this weekend in Tennessee and Kentucky — all as a coastal storm presumably returns heavy snow again to northeast coastal cities.
Adeel Hassan contributed reporting.

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