Streetsblog New York City

After much anticipation, bicycle directions are finally live on Google Maps. 

At the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC today, Google announced that its mapping tools can now provide bike directions in 150 American cities.

The software provides routes that point cyclists to bike paths or lanes whenever possible, avoid the busiest roads and intersections, and take into account hills, according to the Times' Gadgetwise blog.

While New Yorkers can already get bike directions from Ride the City, you can count on two hands the number of other American cities with such luck. Google is expanding the coverage of online bike directions by an order of magnitude. 

The bike routing is still in beta, and certain features, like a mobile version and a bike-specific Street View, haven't been released yet. Additionally, bike routing is notoriously difficult, so there are probably some kinks to work out. Even so, Google's strength has always been its ability to learn from its own data, so it's safe to expect its bike directions to improve over time. Try it out and let us know how well it works! 

It says something about the country that we live in that the simple act of walking to work can merit a blog post. But so it is. Today, at her fine blog The Naked City, Mary Newsom wrote about her experience walking the 4.2 miles from her home to her office. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. She often writes about planning and transportation issues and has a great understanding of livable streets issues. As she made her lonely way along the street, she was able to experience in a different way how completely dominated by cars her familiar landscape is, and what that means:

You won't get this view from a car going 40 miles per hour. (Photo: Happy Photography Maker via Flickr)

You see more when you walk, of course. I saw daffodils and crocuses and some fruit trees (cherry? plum?) blooming. I saw two places that were complete barriers to anyone wheelchair bound. They should be fixed.…

I didn't get run over, though I had to make eye contact with motorists a lot and a couple of times realized that state law giving me the right of way in crosswalks was irrelevant, when drivers were complete unaware I existed because they never even looked. It felt like wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak.

I walked mostly along Morehead Street, Queens Road and Providence Road. It was rush hour so traffic was heavy. Almost every vehicle I saw carried only a driver and no passengers. Maybe 5 to 10 percent had a second person, typically a child. All this on a beautiful spring-like morning with a shining sun and temperatures climbing from the 40s into the 50s as I walked. I started to wonder why more people weren't walking.…

No moral to this story, just sharing the experience, in hopes others might decide to give it a try someday, if they can.

I find the image of all those flowers blooming and all the people driving right past them quite sad.

Elsewhere around the network: Bike Portland has a write-up on the "People for Bikes" campaign announcement at the National Bike Summit. DC Bicycle Transportation Examiner asks, "Should your Senator be booted from the Senate Bike Caucus?" And Extraordinary Observations wonders if the recession is leaving suburban teens carless -- and even more adrift than before.

The nation's transit systems hosted 10.2 billion trips last year, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) reported yesterday. While that figure represents a 3.8 percent decline from 2008, APTA's data showed light rail ridership rising in nine cities and the long-term increase in transit use continuing to outpace growth in population and vehicle miles traveled.

APTA President William Millar portrayed the new ridership figures as a win for transit, given the economic recession and the fact that fuel prices declined last year relative to their 2008 highs.

"Considering that nearly 60 percent of riders take public transportation to commute to and from work, it is not surprising that ridership declined in light of the many Americans who lost their jobs last year," Millar said in a statement.

Since 1995, APTA has reported a 31-percent increase in transit ridership nationwide, compared with a 15-percent increase in population over the same period and a 21-percent increase in highway miles traveled.

Nine cities reported light-rail ridership increases to APTA: Baltimore; Oceanside, CA; Memphis; Seattle; Philadelphia; Tampa; San Francisco; Portland; and New Orleans. Heavy rail networks in Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia also saw more riders last year.

When the state of New York announced in December that it would slice $143 million from the MTA operating budget, it may have seemed like a belt-tightening measure for lean times. But the truth of the matter -- which often goes unstated, unreported, and unappreciated -- is more insidious.

The overwhelming majority of the $143 million reduction in transit funding did not originate from the state budget. Instead, Albany took dedicated transit tax revenues from the MTA and redirected them to the state's general fund. In effect, Albany stole $118 million from transit to subsidize the rest of the state budget. That's enough money to restore all the subway and bus cuts currently on the table in the MTA's austerity plan.

How did they pull off the heist? To explain, we need to give a short intro to the MTA operating budget.

In addition to fares and tolls, MTA service is mainly funded by an array of dedicated taxes, which total about $4.5 billion every year. A smaller portion comes from "state and local subsidies," of which Albany is supposed to contribute about $190 million. Already, we're only talking about a small fraction of the MTA's nearly $12 billion operating budget.

But here's the thing -- Albany's "contribution" consists almost entirely of tax revenue that's already dedicated to transit. This year, Albany put just $7 million from the general fund into MTA operations, according to the state Division of the Budget. The rest of its obligation to the MTA -- $183 million -- came from dedicated transit taxes.

So when the state made off with $143 million from the MTA budget in the December deficit reduction package, lawmakers were not reducing the state's contribution to transit so much as raiding the MTA piggy bank and robbing transit riders of funds collected specifically to serve them. When all was said and done, Albany had taken $118 million from dedicated MTA taxes.

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Even as the Obama administration ramps up its work on a sustainability initiative that treats transportation, housing, and energy efficiency as interconnected aspects of development policy, the effort remains without an official congressional authorization -- a situation that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) vowed to fix yesterday.

During an appearance in his home state with Ron Sims, chief of the administration's inter-agency Office of Livable Communities, Dodd vowed to work for passage of his legislation authorizing $4 billion in grants for Sims' work.

"I only have about eight to 10 months," he said, according to the Hartford Courant. "My goal is to see the Livable Communities Act become law before I retire."

Dodd, whose panel has jurisdiction over housing and urban development, is working with that 10-month deadline as he anticipates retiring from Congress at year's end. His push to create a long-term foundation for the administration's sustainability effort also could run into resistance from rural lawmakers whose states have tended to benefit from a transportation spending system based on road-mile formulas.

The first stirrings of rural skepticism came on Thursday, when Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) questioned the administration's move to emphasize "multi-modal" transport projects that would combine roads, transit, and bike-ped access.

Begich asked the U.S. DOT's No. 2, John Porcari, to make sure that rural states are "not lost in the mix." That sentiment was echoed later in the day by Sen. John Thune (R-SD).

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DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan appeared on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show last Wednesday to talk about the agency's plans to, as Lehrer put it, "spread the Times Square model." When Lehrer invited listeners to call in with their ideas for other streets that should be made car-free zones, "Steve from Manhattan" asked why the Central Park loop wasn't being closed to traffic, calling it "obvious" and a "no-brainer." In her response, the commissioner said that Central Park's loop road already is closed to traffic "98 percent of the time."

If this were true, it would invite the question why it's such a big deal to finish the job, but in fact Sadik-Khan's statistic is simply false. Worse, she's clearly been using this inaccurate figure for quite some time, because she also cited it in a conversation I had with her back in October 2008.

Here are the facts: Because different sections of the loop are open to traffic for different lengths of time, the actual percentage depends on where you are on the loop and also on what you define as "the time" (for example, is it every hour of every day or only the hours when people are actually in the park?). Given this, the actual percentage of time that cars are banned ranges from a low of 25 percent to a high of 94 percent, depending where you are on the loop.

Let's assume that "the time" means every hour of every day. With the West Drive now open to traffic for only two hours on weekday mornings, it's closed to traffic 94 percent of "the time," which is the likely source of Sadik-Khan's "98 percent." But as any recreational user of Central Park knows, the six-mile loop has an East Drive as well, which is open to traffic far longer. The East Drive north of 72nd Street is open from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., and the half-mile segment between the Sixth Avenue entrance and the E. 72nd Street exit permits vehicular access from morning until night, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. This means the section north of 72nd is closed to traffic 88 percent of "the time" and the southern section is closed only 64 percent of "the time."

The percentage of car-free time drops if we limit "the time" to weekday hours when people are actually likely to be in the park, and exclude weekends (when cars have been banned for 43 years), the overnight curfew (when no one is allowed in the park anyway), and the period from 10 p.m. to the curfews' start at 1 a.m. If "the time" is instead defined as weekdays from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., the West Drive is closed to traffic 87 percent of the time, the northern part of the East Drive is closed 77 percent of the time, and the southern section is closed only one quarter of the time.

Whatever the percentages are, the fact remains that the drives are open to traffic during the precise hours when non-motorized use is highest: Continue...

At Streetsblog Network member blog Planning Pool, this week is being billed as "Fail Week" -- a full five days on "information about bad planning, lack of planning, and planning generally gone awry." We can't wait to see what they'll be doing. There's certainly no shortage of potential topics.

Their first fail-related post actually has to do with a success of sorts -- the use of Twitter to highlight problems in transit:

One of the more complicated aspects of Twitter are hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by the hash symbol, #, like #transitFAIL. The purpose of a hashtag is to organize information and people. They are often used to Tweet about current events, conferences, quotes, activities, memes, and other things. Mashable has a good explanation about how they work.…

One of my favorite planning-related hashtags is #transitFAIL. The purpose of #transitFAIL is to publicize where public transportation fails its customers and users. It’s a particularly effective tool, because you can use SMS messaging or use a web-enabled smartphone to instantaneously tell the world about how transit just let you down. Some smartphones can even take photos or videos and upload them to Twitter, too.

Smart transit providers will use this feedback to improve their service and see where the problems are. I’d like to see transit providers use Twitter to notify people about service changes or delays, too.

I didn't know about the #transitFAIL hashtag, but it's a good idea (we actually used "transitfail" as a tag in Flickr when we were putting together this user-generated slide show on lousy transit). Some transit agencies are using Twitter for service delays as well -- @NYCTSubwayScoop is an example. Will this ever evolve into standard practice? Should it? Or is the reach too narrow?

If you know of more good transit-related uses of Twitter, drop them in the comments.

Oh, and we're @streetsblog, in case you want to follow us.

Atlantic and Flatbush time lapse from tracy collins on Vimeo.

This time-lapse film by Tracy Collins at Not Another F*cking Blog is a telling indictment of poor pedestrian conditions at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. And depending on how Bruce Ratner's new sports arena is built out -- the groundbreaking is set for this week -- things could get much worse.

As exemplified by the crosswalk hogs in the video, this is a terrible environment for pedestrians right now. If and when the arena arrives, two things will happen: thousands of pedestrians will arrive via transit to get to games -- the more the better, but they'll need more space; and more people will be driving here, especially if there's a huge surface parking lot.

Note that Forest City Ratner has not answered questions about all the "interim" surface parking it intends to construct. Scroll down this post for a thorough list of related unresolved issues from the Dean Street Block Association, care of Norman Oder.

American advocates for livable streets know that our addiction to the automobile is almost without peer. We know that we've given our land to driving lanes and parking lots and our air to exhaust fumes. Nevertheless, it can be hard to step outside of the car culture we've spent our lives marinating in and see the country with a new perspective.

That's why this letter we received from two British tourists is so refreshing. It's both a stark admonishment of how much we've given up for the car, sometimes barely noticing it, and a heartening reminder that what often seems normal to us need not be: 

We are visitors to the States from England. Our main reason for coming was to visit friends, however upon researching into transport options we were horrified to discover that the only viable option to get from NY to LA via many small towns was by car. Many of our friends have tried to justify this saying that 'America is simply too big to have public transport'. To us, this is purely INSANE. Surely a huge country should offer the best public transport in the world! Bullet trains could cover the driving distances in no time.

We are feeling quite ashamed of ourselves as we write this but inevitably we did end up driving across America. We have found the American people to be welcoming and friendly and the landscape beautiful but we have not yet seen a single 'town' in the US that we, as Europeans would class as a town. I would class them more as motorway service stations. Buildings designed for cars. People waiting in line for a drive through. People competing for car parking spaces at gyms! These are not communities as we would recognise - market squares, parks, rivers, cafes, stations, public art, gardens etc. 'Towns' are simply not towns! We feel saddened that many Americans are not afforded the community lifestyle that we enjoy in Europe.

Our purpose of writing is not to attack your country and we do apologise if we have offended. I am writing to urge you, beg with you, plead with you to keep up the fantastic work that you are doing. Despite the wonderful time that we have had in the US I simply cannot wait to get home in order to walk from my flat and pick up a newspaper and a pint of milk, on my journey I shall say hello to everyone I meet, take note of the weather and breathe some fresh air.

Tucked into an otherwise bleak state budget, there's one piece of good news for transit riders. One of Governor Paterson's amendments to the state budget would authorize New York City to keep its bus lanes clear of traffic with camera enforcement. 

New York can't install bus lane cameras without authorization from Albany. So far, the legislature hasn't bestowed it, despite wide-ranging support. Two years ago, Assembly transportation commmittee chair David Gantt killed an earlier version of bus camera legislation, leaving New York City bus riders stuck in traffic. 

The new budget amendment would actually be an improvement over that bill. The old legislation limited bus-mounted cameras to the city's five Select Bus Service routes, while the current version allows camera enforcement on up to 50 miles of bus routes -- exactly the length of the city's current bus lane network. "It's saying that all bus lanes are important, in every borough," said Lindsey Lusher Shute, Transportation Alternatives' director of environmental campaigns.

The cameras would either be stationary or mounted on buses, recording the license plates of motorists parked or driving in bus lanes. Fines would be set at a maximum of $125.

Camera enforcement would be a real game-changer for bus riders. Dedicated lanes can mean much faster trips, but in New York, all sorts of other vehicles constantly violate bus lanes. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer's office conducted a study last summer which found more than 350 vehicles parked in Midtown bus lanes over a 40 hour period. The police, meanwhile, are at best too thinly stretched to spend sufficient manpower on keeping bus lanes clear, and at worst they're the source of the problem.

Because NYCDOT and the MTA appear loath to install physically separated lanes for their big-ticket bus improvements on First and Second Avenues, camera enforcement will be critical to achieving better performance. 

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Lots going on this week, headlined by presentations on Select Bus Service for Manhattan's East Side.

• Tuesday: There are three events today, starting with a presentation from NYU's Jen Petersen, who will lay out an explicit case for the "human-scaled mobility right" to the street in a post-automobile city (1 p.m.). NYCDOT's Bruce Schaller headlines a panel discussion on parking policy reform at Manhattan CB 2 at 6 p.m. And Transportation Alternatives will hold a TEAM T.A. info session at 6:30 p.m.
• Wednesday: Manhattan CB 3 will hear a presentation on SBS before turning to LES bike routes. 6:30 p.m.
• Thursday: The SBS presentation to CB 8, snowed out last month, is on for 6:30 p.m. (There may be dueling Upper East Side SBS events Thursday. According to NYCDOT's website there will be an SBS open house just a few blocks away starting at 6 p.m. However, NYMTC has indicated this may have been postponed until later in the month.)
• [Next] Friday: Time's Up's new Bureau Of Organized Bikelane Safety (B*O*O*B*S) Team has moved up its inaugural ride to this week. 12 noon Friday. is still scheduled for next week, March 19.
• Saturday: More group action with the Ides -- make that Pies -- of March Ride, the perfect time for the Bike Lane Liberation Clown Brigade. 2 p.m.

Keep an eye on the calendar for updated listings. Got an event we should know about? Drop us a line.

If you've ever wanted a breakdown of the benefits of commuting by bike versus commuting by car, Carfree.us has got it for you. The writer of this Streetsblog Network member blog, a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina,  is not actually totally car-free, but he has made a commitment to commuting by bike or bus for the calendar year of 2010. From his introductory post:

These bike commuters are saving some serious money. Photo: Richard Masoner via Flickr

It’s important to understand I am an average Joe, in my thirties, working  a 9-5 desk job. I have a wife and a one-year-old son. I live in an average-size city with an average public transportation infrastructure, and I live seven miles from the city center. My wife is not a zealous bicyclist, and truthfully, not very supportive of this project! My wife does own a car and I will probably occasionally drive it with my family in the car.  I am not an anti-car zealot, but what I want to highlight are the challenges and choices I will face in my everyday life and the impact they will have on me as I live this (sadly) "alternative lifestyle."  These decisions may be banal but they just might be something more.

I am choosing not to transport myself individually in a vehicle designed to fit five. It’s ludicrous, and we all have grown numb to the impact we have on our communities, on our countrymen and women, and on the world. If I can do it, there are millions of other people in this country who can do the same thing, and that’s the story I plan to tell.

He's now tallied the results of the first two months of car-free life, and they're pretty impressive:

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