Streetsblog New York City

Have you given to Streetsblog’s spring pledge drive yet? If not, may I suggest that this is the week to do so. In addition to supporting livable streets journalism and putting yourself in the running to win a Dahon folding bike, you could take home a sweet collection of books and zines courtesy of eminent bike-ologist Elly Blue.

If you make a habit of reading Streetsblog and you value the work we do to make the case for transforming our streets, please make a tax-deductible donation so we can keep on doing it.

We’ll send one donor who gives by midnight Friday this Elly Blue library, including Bikenomics, Taking the Lane, and the brand new Bikes in Space: A Feminist Science Fiction Anthology (sample story: “in Elizabeth Buchanan’s classic pulp tale of postapocalyptic Appalachia, a gripping bicycle-truck chase gives a young woman a surprising new hope”).

In summary: Channel your frustrations with the New York Post’s bike-share coverage by making a generous donation to Streetsblog. Thanks for supporting our tabloid fact-checking operation!

Yesterday we had a feisty exchange of posts between Charles Komanoff and Nicole Gelinas about what the city should do to enhance safety for Citi Bike users (and everyone else).

One of Gelinas’s main suggestions is to educate bike-share users about how to interact safely with trucks, and it turns that there’s a big graphic about this in DOT’s Bike Smart brochure [PDF], which is distributed to all annual bike-share members in the packet that comes with their key fobs. Word is that the city is looking into getting the same message across to daily and weekly users too.

It’s good advice for anyone who bikes on NYC streets. Here’s a look:

The black rectangles represent the amount of space required for parking in proportion to 10,000 square foot office buildings (represented by the blue rectangles) in different U.S. cities. Image: Seth Goodman/Graphing Parking Click to enlarge.

Architect Seth Goodman is on a mission to illustrate the absurdity of parking requirements. The above image, showing mandatory parking requirements for office buildings in different American cities, is one of three infographics he created to show the extent to which American cities mandate the construction of parking.

The worst offenders in the office category were San Jose, Albuquerque and Austin (though Austin recently eliminated all parking minimums downtown). Goodman notes that the majority of U.S. cities exempt their downtowns from these requirements, but he says that’s not enough.”In many of these cities, the relatively small footprint of these exempt areas has failed achieve the critical mass necessary to create robust transit ridership and fully-functioning pedestrian oriented communities.”

Goodman has created two other infographics that explain different cities’ parking requirements for residences and restaurants. The below comes from his examination of residential parking requirements.  You can see that for two-bedroom apartments in U.S. cities, the median parking requirement consumes more than half as much space as the dwelling itself:

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Hats off to Matt Flegenheimer for the enlightening piece in today’s Times describing the lessons from other bike-share systems that informed New York’s big decisions about Citi Bike. This passage stood out, given the recent tabloid coverage about station placement:

In London and Paris, stations are trenched in the ground, rendering them difficult to remove. Kiosks in New York’s system, similar to Montreal’s, are simply set on the street surface, secured by their own weight, with no physical tethering to the ground.

“Can you imagine doing 300 miniconstruction sites around the city?” Mr. Orcutt said, alluding to the resident complaints about even the low-maintenance installation.

The flexibility has already allowed the city to adjust kiosks, as workers did recently on Bank Street, where a few spots were removed to avoid blocking a building entrance.

In related news, the sterling journalists at the New York Post insist that rearranging bike-share docks isn’t a sign of the system’s flexibility but instead amounts to “a kind of shell game.” Because it’s so, so devious and deceptive to respond to feedback.

Say what you will about whether the feedback from 99 Bank and 175 West 13th Street was worth a response (Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano said the complaints about emergency access have no basis in reality), the ability to fine-tune Citi Bike stations is a big plus. Unlike huge, expensive wastes of concrete like the parking garages at East River Plaza and Yankee Stadium, it’s a cinch to make adjustments to Citi Bike as needed.

A bill targeted at NYPD’s self-imposed ban on penalizing motorists for careless driving has cleared the State Senate, but awaits passage in the Assembly.

NYPD refuses to enforce the law named after Diego Martinez and Hayley Ng, who were killed by a careless driver in 2009.

The bill would amend Hayley and Diego’s Law by explicitly stating that officers may ticket or arrest drivers who harm pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable street users whether or not they directly observe an infraction, as long as officers have reasonable cause to believe a violation was committed.

Currently, NYPD protocol prohibits precinct officers from issuing tickets under VTL 1146, the state statute that includes Hayley and Diego’s Law as well as Elle’s Law.

Hayley and Diego’s Law, which went into effect in 2010, established the offense of careless driving. It imposed penalties, including the possibility of license sanctions and jail time, upon drivers who injure or kill pedestrians and cyclists.

The bill and its amendment were introduced by Senator Dan Squadron and Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh. It is named after Hayley Ng and Diego Martinez, two toddlers who were killed in 2009 by a driver whose unattended and idling van mounted a curb in Chinatown. The driver was not charged with a crime by DA Robert Morgenthau or his successor Cy Vance.

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His claim to fame is that he retired at age 30. He swears that you can achieve greater financial freedom too, if you follow his example by eliminating unnecessary expenses and investing wisely. He calls himself Mr. Money Mustache. And he says nothing is more essential to his philosophy and wealth-building strategy than riding a bike.

Mr. Money Mustache rides through the snow with 85 pounds of groceries. Pin this picture up next to your car keys. Photo: MMM

Mr. MM (his real name is Pete, but that’s no fun) has been dishing out lifestyle advice on his personal finance blog for two years to a faithful following that now numbers about 300,000 regular readers. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, he counseled prospective early retirees to live close to work and “of course, ride a bike.” In fact, MMM says, it’ll take you forever to retire if you keep wasting money on cars. He estimates it costs a person $125,000 and 1.3 working years’ worth of time to drive 19 miles each way to work.

Living so far from work that you “need” to drive is a result of bad planning, he says, and should be remedied — or “optimized” — as quickly as possible. Riding a bike is the boiled-down essence of everything he preaches. He rejects the idea that his readers can “just follow the rest of his advice, while ignoring the bike parts.”

“It’s time for this silliness to come to an end,” he wrote earlier this month. “You must ride a bike. We all must.”

I’ll let you read on your own about how driving a car is like throwing away 24 blackened salmon salads, and the three questions you should always ask yourself before getting behind the wheel.

Streetsblog caught up with Mr. Money Moustache recently to talk more about how sensible transportation decisions fit into an economically sound lifestyle — and, of course, early retirement for us car-free Streetsblog editors.

Tanya Snyder: Last month was Anti-Automobile April. What did that consist of? How did it go?

Mr. Money Moustache: Anti-Automobile April was a little experiment where I tried to make the readers of my blog track their own driving for the month. My hope was that they would become more aware of it and hopefully consider canceling some of their trips, combining some of the smaller trips into fewer ones, and most importantly, replacing some of the local ones with bike trips.

MMM: Yeah, I am certainly not an anti-car zealot. I secretly love those machines. I love driving them, sitting in them, and reading about them. And for some reason, I have the technical stats for almost every model available in the U.S. memorized.

But you just have to realize what they’re good for.

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Governor Cuomo announced Monday that new DMV drivers license rules have taken thousands of dangerous motorists off New York State roads. The changes set an important precedent by mandating the permanent revocation of driving privileges for the worst drunk driving offenders. But since the new policies apply only to DWI violations, the state is still allowing thousands of reckless drivers to keep their licenses.

As long as they aren't drunk, drivers like the one who struck 10 people on a Brooklyn sidewalk, killing a toddler, have nothing to fear from new DMV relicensing rules. Photo: Post

Under the new rules, DMV will not relicense a driver who has five or more DWI convictions in a lifetime, or three or more DWI convictions in 25 years plus another serious driving offense, such as a fatal crash — which is not normally an offense unless the driver is impaired — or the accumulation of 20 or more license points.

Previously, repeat drunk drivers whose licenses were suspended or revoked for up to a year could be relicensed in as little as seven weeks by completing an education program, and drivers with multiple DWI convictions did not permanently lose their licenses unless they were convicted for two DWI crashes resulting in injury.

“We have seen too many times the heartbreak and tragedy that results when a driver under the influence of alcohol or drugs gets behind the wheel,” Cuomo said, via press release. “Those who have continually shown a complete lack of regard for the safety of other drivers have no place on New York’s roadways.”

Since the rules took effect last September, the DMV has reviewed 3,891 relicensing applications from drivers with more than two alcohol or drug related offenses, according to the press release. Of those, 1,658 motorists broke the five-or-more DWI convictions rule and were permanently denied relicensing. The remaining 1,506 had three or four DWI convictions, and were denied relicensing for an additional five years, after which they will get restricted licenses and will be required to use an ignition interlock device for five years.

Said Cuomo: “With more than 3,100 potentially dangerous motorists kept off the road since September, it is clear these new regulations have already been a tremendous success at protecting law-abiding New York drivers, passengers, and pedestrians.”

Though this is certainly progress for New York State, it also shows how low the bar is set. After all, under the new rules, people with as many as four DWI convictions — not people who drove drunk four times, but those who were caught, arrested, and convicted four times — continue to drive legally.

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Mayoral candidates stand to gain votes if they support increased bicycling, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll.

The last question of the poll, which surveyed 1,082 NYC voters via land lines and cell phones the week of May 14-20, asked: “If a candidate for Mayor supports – encouraging increased use of bicycles, would you be more likely to vote for a candidate who held this position, less likely, or wouldn’t it make a difference?” About half said bike policy wouldn’t factor into their decision, 30 percent said they would be more likely to vote for a pro-bike candidate, and 20 percent said they would be less likely:

Several opinion polls conducted in 2011 and 2012 revealed that among all New Yorkers (not just voters), public support for bike lanes stands in the 55-65 percent range, and a 2011 poll of likely voters commissioned by Transportation Alternatives found similar levels of support. This Q Poll question is the first to frame the issue so explicitly in terms of how it will influence decisions in the voting booth.

Holding pro-bike positions is a net plus for candidates among voters of all income levels and ethnicities, and in every borough except Staten Island, though there is some variation. Men (35 percent) are more likely to favor a pro-bike candidate than women (25 percent). Hispanic voters (36 percent) are somewhat more likely to vote for a pro-bike candidate than the average voter, black voters are somewhat less likely (25 percent), and white voters sit in the middle (30 percent). Voters with household income above $100,000 are more likely than average to support a pro-biking candidate, while voters in the $50,000 to $100,000 range are less likely, and voters in the $50,000-and-under range align with the average.

One of the interesting things about the Q Poll results is the high percentage of voters who said bike policy wouldn’t influence their decision. While most coverage of bike lanes and bike-share is all about conflict and controversy, relatively few New Yorkers apparently feel strongly enough about bike policy to consider it when casting votes. Only a third of voters said the issue of creating an NYPD inspector general would not influence their decision, for instance, compared to half of voters who said the same about bicycling.

Still, a 10-point advantage for the pro-bike position is substantial. We probably won’t be hearing the winning candidate say anything about “ripping out the f—ing bike lanes,” no matter who’s in the race.

See the white pinpoints where central cities are? That's where the federal mortgage interest deduction is helping people the least. Meanwhile, residents of sprawling suburbs are raking in the subsidies. Image: Pew Center on the States

Despite the ruinous housing crisis just a few years ago, the federal government still keeps the suburban sprawl machine humming.

About 85 percent of federal subsidies for housing flow to single family homes, according to a recent report from Smart Growth America, though only about 65 percent of Americans are homeowners and the majority of renters live in multi-family housing. The ultimate sprawl subsidy just might be the mortgage interest deduction. Not only is this baby completely regressive — the vast majority of subsidies flow to households with incomes greater than $200,000 — as you can see in the above map, this money tends to flow to areas where everyone is dependent on a car.

Network blog West North writes:

See those donut holes? Inner-city areas with low rates of homeownership, low incomes (and thus fewer residents who itemize deductions), and relatively lower property values are receiving far less of America’s fattest housing subsidy — the mortgage-interest personal income tax deduction (see previous discussion) — than their better-off suburbs. The sprawl subsidies continue apace.

The bigger picture is that this is a subsidy that overwhelmingly benefits wealthy people who have expensive houses, and big mortgages to match — and thus benefits “coastal elites” more.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Human Transit reports that Google Maps is planning some big improvements to its transit directions feature. Mobilizing the Region reports that New Jersey is the newest state to consider reducing speed limits to 20 miles per hour in residential areas. And Better Institutions comments on an unorthodox new plan for a federal infrastructure bank.