1. CONGESTION PRICING IS A TROJAN HORSEMayor Bloomberg's Earth Day speech compiled 127 ideas for making the city more "sustainable" by 2030. But congestion pricing has dominated the conversation ever since. Which may be just what the mayor needs to get the rest of PlaNYC going.

Bloomberg's aides debated nearly to the end about whether to include CP in PlaNYC, partly because it was sure to provoke headlines about angry drivers. But endorsing congestion pricing, besides being good policy, came with a crucial political upside: It won Bloomberg the support of editorial pages and of energetic transportation activists. "We'll mobilize teams of organizers to go into battleground state-legislator districts," says Paul Steely White, the head of Transportation Alternatives. City Hall supplied a list of potential collaborators, from unions to ministers, and the day after Bloomberg's big speech, the "Campaign for New York's Future" made its debut.

The furor over congestion pricing is also usefully obscuring. "State legislators who are against congestion pricing will want to show they're not against all environmental programs," says Bill Cunningham, the former Bloomberg political strategist who's now at Dan Klores PR. "So they'll get onboard with the mayor's mass-transit ideas."

Bloomberg disdains empty rhetoric. When he's made a big show of taking on tough issues in the past--the public-school system, illegal guns--he's backed up the words with sustained action. Last week, the mayor added $150 million to the city budget to launch his 2030 initiatives. Yet he's deferring some relatively easy fixes--like pushing harder to "green" the building code. And the sketchiness of when and how he intends to deliver on the grandest ideas feeds suspicions that PlaNYC is a green fig leaf for boosting real-estate development.

The 2030 plan evokes a sense of d