Unfortunately, nuttiness like this is no new thing, and its reach is longer than you might think. It has its roots in an antiquated and peculiarly American belief system that is standing in the way of improved urban livability.

Let’s start with gas prices. In recent weeks, Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and House Speaker John Boehner have all played to the notion that gas prices have doubled since President Obama took office. The price of gas is notoriously volatile; the national average price has actually fallen in 45 of the past 100 months (Excel spreadsheet). So a fair accounting would employ the U.S. average over an entire presidency, as in this chart, for the three most recent:

The chart makes clear that it was former oilman George W. Bush, not Obama, who came closest to presiding over a doubling of gas prices.

At one level, Gingrich and company are merely shilling for the Keystone XL pipeline. But of course excavating Canadian tar sands oil and piping it to Houston is so costly and energy-intensive that without high gas prices, the venture would collapse.

That aside, consider what Gingrich is really saying when he derides New Yorkers as elitists because each uptick in the price of gas doesn’t make us itchy to start a new war. In one way, he has a point. Unlike our countrymen trapped in punishing commutes and paying off two-car garages, we big city dwellers are fairly well insulated from fluctuating gas prices. And unlike big-box suburbs and the Sunbelt, which were built on the inefficiency of cars, highways, supersized houses and office parks, New York is built on the efficiency of dense neighborhoods and public transportation.

To anyone with common sense, that difference makes the ‘burbs brittle and cities resilient. To Newt, it makes city dwellers suspect.

Similarly suspect, in the eyes of Tea Party activists, are “all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy,” as the Times reported on Saturday. “Government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space [is seen] as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.” Ditto, bike lanes. And, you better believe, congestion pricing or any form of traffic pricing.

What’s at work here, according to the writer (and New Yorker) Dan Lazare, is the “Jeffersonian ideology that assumed that individual actions were autonomous unless proven otherwise. Whether a motorist chose to drive or not to drive,” Lazare wrote in his 2000 classic, America’s Undeclared War: What’s Killing Our Cities and How You Can Stop It, “was nobody’s business but his own; any suggestion to the contrary was positively un-American.”

The standard counterweight to the agrarian Jeffersonian model is the Hamiltonian sovereign nation-state drawing strength from cities built on manufacturing and trade. Lazare plumbed this duality in America’s Undeclared War, but he also broke new ground by contrasting Jeffersonianism to the “theory of externalities” that emerged in the early 20^th Century, which emphasized “the public dimension of individual acts” that consumed resources or otherwise damaged the commons:

Rather than regarding individual acts as private unless proven otherwise, the growing volume of external costs suggested that they had to be regarded as public acts — unless, that is, affirmative action was taken to mitigate the social consequences. To drive or not to drive, in other words, was no longer an individual decision but a social question because so many people were affected besides the motorist himself.

A great many people are affected by an individual’s decision to drive in NYC. I have shown elsewhere that a single car round-trip into the Manhattan Central Business District generates external costs on the order of a hundred dollars, just in terms of other road users’ lost time. Although the Bloomberg administration didn’t use this meme in its 2007-2008 push for congestion pricing, it is the essential motivating idea behind tolling vehicles entering the CBD. As I wrote on Reuters last month, any New York-area driver “is cognizant of the time he will expend being slowed by other cars, but not of the far greater delays he will impose on them.” A congestion toll helps close that feedback loop.

Tea Partiers are having none of that, of course, and Dan Lazare helps us make sense of their antipathy to treating driving — not to mention land use, transit provision, and climate change — as a social question rather than the sole province of individuals. To paraphrase America’s Undeclared War, “Where the externalities analysis highlights the tyranny that a mass of atomized individuals imposes on society, adherents of Jefferson worry about the tyranny imposed by society on the individual.”

In short, congestion pricing’s benefits be damned, you’ll still have to pry the car keys out of my cold dead hand.

Building a new structure twice as wide as the current Tappan Zee Bridge could create a financial black hole, where people who never use the bridge end up paying for its construction.

“Rate shock” was the name given to the electricity industry’s financial crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, when utility company finances buckled under the weight of escalating nuclear power costs. Not only were the costs of the nukes spiraling out of control, but the electricity rate hikes required to pay for them caused energy use to flatten, as customers pinched by the high rates were forced to conserve. Facing higher costs but flat sales, the utilities made up the difference with further rate hikes, until their customers rebelled, the dividends stopped flowing, and utility investors lost billions.

You have to wonder if the same fate awaits the New York State Thruway Authority with its Tappan Zee Bridge rebuild. This time, though, it won’t be investors holding the bag. It’ll be New York State drivers and taxpayers — and maybe even New York City transit riders.

These numbers are scary. They suggest that the finances of a replacement Tappan Zee Bridge could be shakier than the roadway of the existing one.

The potential catalyst is the extraordinary toll hikes that will almost certainly be needed to pay for the replacement Tappan Zee. The carrying costs on the $5.2 billion project — that’s the official figure for a span that’s twice as wide as the current bridge but without exclusive transit lanes — are so high that if they’re borne entirely by drivers using the bridge, the current $4.75 auto toll (one-way with E-ZPass) may need to triple. Call it “toll shock.”

But that’s not all. A toll increase of that magnitude — in the $10 ballpark — would almost certainly send “demand” (the number of car and truck crossings) into a tailspin. That in turn could necessitate another toll hike to ensure that bondholders stay paid and set up another round of the downward spiral — the same whirlpool that nearly swallowed dozens of utilities a few decades ago.

I’ve run some numbers, and they’re so disturbing that even I’m not sure how much credence to give them. But with the fast-tracking of the jumbo-sized, jumbo-priced rebuild, I felt it was less risky to put them out than to sit on them.

As I see it, the variables that will determine the per-trip carrying costs for the replacement bridge — literally, the project cost divided by the number of trips expected over the project’s life — are these:

• Project Cost — I used two figures: the official $5.2 billion estimate, or a 25 percent higher cost ($6.5 billion)
• Interest Rate on Bonds — either 4.5 percent, the approximate average for Thruway Authority debt; or 5.5 percent, incorporating a 1 percentage point market “risk premium” if the finances are as shaky as I suspect
• Term — 30 or 50 year project life (a longer life allows a lower carrying cost)
• “Baseline” Growth in Trips — either 3 percent a year, 1.5 percent a year, or zero, before factoring in demand suppression from toll hikes
• Price Elasticity — (negative) 0.4 or 0.7, with the latter figure denoting a stronger response to the higher tolls. (Note that elasticity is applied to the entire trip cost including not just tolls but gas, maintenance, parking, etc.)

These variations imply 48 different scenarios (2 x 2 x 2 x 3 x 2, for you mathematicians). The range of results, projected 10 years out, is wide: Average daily traffic across the Tappan Zee, which now stands at 134,000 vehicles, could be as high as 165,000 per day or as low as 82,000. The average projection, 123,000 vehicles per day, is 8 percent less than today. In only a third of the scenarios is bridge traffic in 10 years greater than today.

Even more yawning, though, is the range in the toll required to pay the replacement project’s carrying costs: It could be as low as $9 or as high as $30. The weighted average, $16, is well over three times today’s toll.

As I said, these numbers are scary. They suggest that the finances of a replacement Tappan Zee Bridge could be shakier than the roadway of the existing one.

Is there a way out of a Tappan Zee “death spiral” in which no toll can generate enough revenue to pay bondholders? I see two possibilities. Either the Thruway Authority offloads some of the project’s carrying costs to other parts of its system or onto the State DOT’s budget. Or the powers-that-be trim the cost by shrinking the bridge. (Or some combination of the two.)

Offloading merely shifts costs to drivers elsewhere, or to taxpayers in general. A particularly worrying downside is that to come up with the funds, Albany might be forced to starve roads and bridges in other parts of the state, or even transit in and around NYC — not in a “one-shot,” but year in and year out.

As for shrinking the bridge, trimming the cost to $3.5 billion — a number pulled out of a hat — could keep the required toll hike low enough that daily bridge crossings would be as likely to rise as fall. This would avert cascading toll hikes and allow the full cost to be covered with a toll between $5 and $12.

Of course, getting the cost down that far would probably require slimming the lane configuration to something close to the current one. Could traffic be accommodated? Yes, for the time being; and almost certainly over the long haul, by charging premium tolls during the relatively brief daily peaks.

A spreadsheet with my calculations is available as an Excel file. Please comment if you spot a flaw. I can’t quite believe that numbers so disconcerting can be airtight. Then again, the new Draft Environmental Impact Statement didn’t touch this subject. Maybe they knew?

Editor’s note: In the course of reporting on the Tappan Zee story, Streetsblog has requested financial planning documents for the new Tappan Zee from the governor’s press office, but received no answer. Our freedom of information request was also denied.

Governor Andrew Cuomo's tax package could leave straphangers stuck with longer subway trips and more crowding. Photo: ianqui/Flickr

To gauge the impact, I entered $320 million worth of cuts in subway operations into my Balanced Transportation Analyzer (BTA) spreadsheet, which combines New York City traffic, transit and revenues into a single model. Here’s what it predicts for city residents, workers and visitors in a worst-case scenario, in which Albany breaks its promise to replace the money, and all of the resulting cuts fall on subway service:

• A nearly 3 percent lengthening in the average duration of subway trips, as maintenance is curbed and service curtailed.
• A 2 percent drop in subway ridership triggered by the poorer service.
• An additional 13,000 more cars driven into the Manhattan Central Business District each weekday, as some frustrated subway riders elect to drive rather than wait for trains.
• An average 2 percent drop in vehicle speeds within the CBD and 0.5 to 1 percent on the approaches, a consequence of cramming more vehicles onto already jammed streets, highways and bridges.
• More pollution and traffic crashes, and less biking and walking, caused by the rise in driving.
• An estimated 27,000 fewer people journeying to the Manhattan CBD on a typical day — a drop of 0.8 percent — because only some of the lost subway trips are replaced by cars and taxicabs.
• A further shortfall of $40 million in MTA revenues as subway ridership declines.

Drivers’ and straphangers’ lost time — an estimated 23 million hours a year — can be expressed in dollar terms; so can the environmental consequences from the increased gridlock. Through a set of calculations that reflect the spectrum of “values of time” — more for an 18-wheeler than a car, for example — the BTA calculates the lost time at $450 million a year ($260 million for drivers and truckers, $190 milion for subway and bus riders). Tack on to that $90 million in worsened health due to the increased pollution and decreased biking and walking, plus the $40 million in reduced farebox revenues. Lost business income and tax revenues from the nearly 1 percent drop in person-trips to the CBD would compound these figures.

Under this scenario, New Yorkers’ $320 million in tax savings are swamped almost two-to-one by the $580 million in costs detailed above.

While belt-tightening by the MTA might soften the blow, the cost-cutting in recent years means that new cuts are likely to take out muscle instead of fat. The rise in congestion costs might also be eased by cutting bus service instead of subways, since most bus trips are outside the CBD, where gridlock is less endemic. But insofar as bus riders have lower average incomes than subway riders, the equity impacts would be even worse.

In the modeling, reduced transit budgets translate to longer transit travel times, which depress transit use. Some of the lost transit trips switch to autos (the conversion rate is around 70 percent for commute trips and 40 percent for other trips). In turn, the rise in auto trips is tempered somewhat by the tendency of some drivers to stay home rather than battle the increased traffic.

Contrary to voguish notions of tipping points, the modeling in the BTA — drawn from empirical data and embodied in a host of interactive equations — assumes that any change in travel cost or time evokes a commensurate change in behavior. Though it may seem surprising that tacking a mere minute onto a 20- or 30-minute subway journey should cause anyone to forego the ride, the fact is that many travel choices are balanced on a fine edge between transit or car or cab or bike or walk or stay home. At “the margin” where choices are made, changed service quality makes a difference.

Disturbingly, no State Senator or Assembly member asked last week whether cutting the MTA payroll tax might worsen transit service and compound highway gridlock. Then again, Governor Cuomo didn’t give them much time, handing them what was essentially a done deal. (The Times reported a NYPIRG source saying the bill was posted 26 minutes before voting began.) Legislators may also not have grasped that households earning $300,000 to $2 million a year would get steeper tax cuts than the middle- or working-class families that were touted as the main beneficiaries.

Could Albany have paid for the payroll tax cut and kept transit whole simply by zeroing out the tax break for incomes over $300,000? The governor and legislative leaders sealed their deal with such haste, shielding details from scrutiny, that even as of this writing there’s no way to tell.

Photo: AFP/Getty

At this point, it’s fair to ask how the changes in the zeitgeist wrought by the Occupy movement might affect transit and transportation in New York City. Will revenue infusions from Albany mean better service and stable fares for that most egalitarian mode of travel, mass transit? Will the most inefficient and socially destructive mode — driving private cars into Manhattan — finally pay for usurping so much street and road space? In particular, might congestion pricing, the sole policy measure that could finance transit and disincentivize driving in gridlock, get a boost from OWS’s paradigm of equity and equality?

All that’s clear at the moment is that little if any new state income tax revenue will go to transit. Any net increase will be too small, while other claimants such as education and medical care are too compelling. New revenues may lessen the chances that dedicated transit funds will be siphoned away, but the connection is tenuous and the potential take — under $100 million — is little more than a rounding error in the MTA’s nearly $13 billion annual budget.

In contrast, a cordon toll to drive into the Manhattan central business district could offer transit a billion dollars a year or more in new net revenues. If all of the tolls were paid by the super-rich, congestion pricing would align nicely with the Occupy movement. Alas, that’s not the case. Though the propensity to drive into Manhattan rises with income, and though only one in 25 residents of the MTA’s 12-county tax district is a habitual driver into or through the CBD, these aren’t necessarily the wealthiest four percent. The chronic CBD car commuter is as likely to be your neighbor Sal as a hedge fund billionaire. Which means that shouting “We are the 96 percent!” isn’t the way to rouse a political and legislative majority for congestion pricing.

Some other rubric is needed.

How about the unfairness of letting each CBD-bound driver impose a hundred dollars worth of “time costs” on other drivers, truckers and bus riders, without paying a dime for the privilege? Yes, you read that right. When you or I take a car into the Manhattan core on a weekday morning, each mile we drive causes other road users to ring up $3 worth of aggregate delay costs on the approaches to the CBD and close to $7 on the streets within it. Apply that rate to each mile of a Manhattan-bound round-trip from New Hyde Park or New Rochelle, and pretty soon your trip has racked up a social toll north of $100. In this light, a peak cordon toll of, say, $10 per trip seems eminently fair.

And yet, given that every driver who contributes to gridlock is stuck in it along with everyone else, the absence of a congestion toll is more a signifier of inefficiency than inequity. A more effective rubric for congestion pricing may be the egalitarian nature of the benefits provided by the transit improvements it will pay for. Not only subway and bus and rail riders benefit from better mass transit; so do drivers, who will be moving on freer-flowing highways and less-gridlocked streets because transit has attracted some trips that would otherwise be done in cars.

I estimated last summer that cutbacks in transit service causing just five percent of daily users to bail from the subways would cost drivers more than half-a-billion dollars a year in lost time by throwing an additional 30,000 cars onto CBD-bound roads. The converse is equally true. A cordon toll that reduces the number of car trips to the Manhattan CBD will cut down on traffic and save drivers time in two ways: not just via the stick of the toll but also by the carrot of better transit service that the tolls can pay for. Of course, transit users benefit as well.

Yet that too is an efficiency argument. It seems that, at the end of the day, the case for congestion pricing must rest on efficiency grounds: the efficiencies of driving, of transit, and of urban density in general are vastly improved when at least some of the “externality costs” of traffic congestion are internalized into the price charged for the most congestion-causing trips.

But even if “We are the 99 percent” isn’t a suitable rubric, the impact of the Occupy movement may still ease the path to a political and legislative majority for congestion pricing. A huge obstacle cited by veterans of the 2007-08 congestion pricing fight was that many of the clearest beneficiaries — straphangers and bus riders — identified with car owners and thus failed to give the toll plan full-throated support. This “aspirational” thinking isn’t the sole province of congestion pricing; it is seen in the tepid support of low- and middle-income voters for the highly progressive estate tax, for example. Four years ago, it helped keep transit commuters on the sidelines and enabled opponents of congestion pricing to claim the high ground.

Now, however, OWS has raised awareness of the true extent of economic inequality in America. It may also be renewing pride in belonging to the working and middle class, and helping to redefine the American dream as something more enduring than a fancy house and a shiny car. If this more-communitarian consciousness can be harnessed to the fight for congestion pricing, we advocates might have a decent shot next time.

Michael Kimmelman

For once in a Times story on bicycling, there’s no fear-mongering about lawless bikers or hand-wringing about misused street space. That’s partly because the article is rendered as criticism rather than reportage and thus doesn’t require “balance.” But mostly it’s because the writer, Michael Kimmelman, formerly the Times’ chief art critic and, as of July, its architecture critic and senior critic to boot, clearly wouldn’t stand for it.

“New Yorkers should love bicycling,” Kimmelman begins. At the conclusion of the piece, he writes: “This [cycling] was the only way to travel.” Between these bookends is an autumn day spent riding from the West Side on the Hudson River Greenway, through Midtown to the Lower East Side, over the Williamsburg Bridge, along the Brooklyn waterfront, back to Manhattan by ferry, up First Avenue, to and through Central Park and then home, with abundant pauses to eat, converse, consider, and, yes, stop at red lights.

Much of the ride is in the company of Janette Sadik-Khan. Mercifully, the DOT Commissioner isn’t likened to Robert Moses or Jane Jacobs but is allowed to be herself: “a keen bicycler… the driving force behind the city’s new bike lanes and now also a piñata for their vocal opponents.” Opponents whom Kimmelman rebukes for their myopia even as he invites them to join him:

It’s too bad that so many New Yorkers still complain about the bike lanes’ contribution to the inconvenience of urban driving instead of promoting them for their obvious role in helping solve the city’s transportation miseries, and for their aesthetic possibilities. I don’t mean they’re great to look at. I mean that for users they offer a different way of taking in the city.

That passage conveys a lot: not just that it’s time for “Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes” and their tabloid enablers to get off Sadik-Khan’s back and get a life — or, better, a bike — but that there’s a new voice at the Times’ bully pulpit: one for whom architecture isn’t just buildings but is the fabric in which structures, spaces and society intersect and interact.

In recent columns, Kimmelman has extolled “the power of place” in fostering political protest from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, and has written of the value of melding green design with quality architecture in public housing in the Bronx. In his piece today, Kimmelman plants his critic’s flag squarely amidst New York’s contested streets, and states openly that bicycling is “a no-brainer” — not just “for the obvious health and environmental reasons and also because cycling can be the swiftest way to get around,” but because bicycling lends our city “civic diversity.”

“Great cities offer up as one of their distinguishing virtues [a] combination of serendipity and complexity,” Kimmelman writes. Accordingly, he doesn’t sugarcoat cycling’s pitfalls, but recalls “plenty of accidents over the years… crashing into double-parked cars, abruptly opened taxi doors and reckless riders,” and grumbles about the traffic-blocked bike lanes and “crosstown madness [that left him] cursing the downsides of cycling.” But even that, he implies, is a price worth paying to find “New York unspooled as a series of surprises.” Cycling “provide[s] a natural mix of intimacy and distance. On a bike, the city shrinks.“

Kimmelman does hit a bump, attributing to Jacobs rather than the mid-century urban thinker Lewis Mumford the crucial insight that “new highways only create more traffic as cars multiply to meet increased capacity.” No matter, it’s grand seeing Moses’ obsessive program of more and wider highways exposed as magical building; hearing Sadik-Khan describe the concept of safety-in-numbers for cyclists as an “architecture of safety”; having Kimmelman himself proclaim that “the bike lanes are about urban livability and about encouraging the sort of street culture that, as Jacobs reminded us, a healthy and democratic city depends on“; and reading his shout-out to London’s “traffic-congestion fee program for drivers of the sort that New York was wrong to reject.”

I’m probably making too much of Kimmelman’s essay. One article, even in the Times, doesn’t a revolution make, and the enemies of livable streets will probably ignore it anyway. Take it, then, as a harbinger of the livable streets revolution that, though fitful, is now firmly underway.

Communications-Based Train Control can relieve crowding throughout the subway system, Albany permitting. Photo: ianqui/Flickr

As the Times and Second Avenue Sagas reported, L train riders will start benefiting from more frequent service next summer, when the MTA adds trains on the weekends, which have seen an 84 percent jump in ridership since 2005. But the major advance in service, which promises to relieve crowding on some of the most jam-packed rush-hour trains in the system, will come at the end of 2012, when the new CBTC signaling system is slated to be completed.

Like most transit improvements here, the implementation will be slow and will come with some service disruptions. But the short-term pains will be well worth this major upgrade to NYCT’s antiquated signal technology. Whereas the century-old system now in use relies on block signals with colored lights alongside the track to tell operators if they’re too close to the train ahead, CBTC uses radio signals to locate all of the trains on the line. With this information, on-board computers can calculate the distance between trains precisely and in real time, letting operators run trains closer together without compromising safety.

With more trains per hour, wait times will diminish and trains should be less crowded — allowing for increased ridership as the experience of riding the subway becomes more convenient and pleasant. Adding just one train per hour adds space to move another 2,640 people. That translates to fewer times waiting while a packed train goes by, and fewer elbows in your ear when you board.

Unlike service changes that can be put in place virtually overnight, CBTC requires years of investment via the MTA’s capital program. The new signaling system on the L is the product of substantial investment starting in the mid-1990s and continuing today. Along with investments in new subway cars and buses, station repairs and upgrades (including elevators), and track replacements, CBTC is one of the “workhorse” projects that together require far more MTA capital expenditures than megaprojects such as East Side Access and the Second Avenue Subway. And rightly so — CBTC is destined to improve the speed and comfort of rides all over the city.

The L train improvements, in fact, don’t fully convey what CBTC can accomplish. The line doesn’t have the “tail tracks” (extra space for turning trains around) at Eighth Avenue that would be needed to allow double-digit percent increases in train throughput.

The next two CBTC installations do have room, and these shouldn’t be made to wait any longer for the extra capacity CBTC will allow. Riders on the 7 train desperately need the added service, especially now that the Flushing Main Street station is the city’s tenth busiest with 18.6 million rides last year. The current five-year capital program includes funds to fully equip 7 train tracks and cars for CBTC. The MTA has also targeted the Queens Boulevard lines (E, F, M, and R trains) for CBTC installation — a process starting in 2013 and intended for completion during the next capital program, which is supposed to begin in 2015. Some stations on this line are among the system’s most crowded, with over 6 million rides per year. Jamaica Center teems with over 11 million. The MTA can complete these improvements, provided it gets financial support from the governor and the legislature and escapes the budget raids that Albany has imposed with alarming regularity lately.

Although the seeds for implementing CBTC and improved service on the L train were planted almost two decades ago, the project wouldn’t be coming to fruition without the watchdog efforts of legislators like Sen. Daniel Squadron, who has made transit provision a priority and called on the MTA in July to address weekend overcrowding on the L train. The MTA’s thoughtful response to Sen. Squadron, which highlights CBTC, could mean that the authority is turning a corner in responding to riders’ needs. Perhaps the impact of this project will help other elected officials and the public at large to grasp their interest in supporting the capital program with a sustainable funding stream — one that lets innovations like CBTC take the pressure off jammed subway lines.

According to surveys, local businesses benefit from the livable streets improvements at Union Square, and data shows there's less speeding without affecting congestion for the worse. So why does the Manhattan Institute claim that projects like this are part of a "war on cars"? Photo: c34/Flickr

The beauty of “livable streets” and of the movement bearing its name is that it unites under one rubric what had long been largely separate concerns — better bicycling, safer walking, affordable transit, inviting public spaces, urban sustainability. The term also recasts a negative as a positive, turning what could appear invasive — “getting people out of their cars” — into something situational: creating streets for people.

Try telling that, though, to the folks at the Manhattan Institute, who this week published a spectacularly retrograde piece, Idle in Manhattan, by one Herbert London, retired academician and one-time NY State Conservative Party candidate for governor. Writing in the Institute’s City Journal, London trots out one canard after another: Londoners “grudgingly” tolerate congestion pricing … “Most bicyclists in Manhattan are delivery carriers” … “In one hour [at the First Ave. bike lane] I counted just two bicycles” … “the mayor[‘s] efforts to control traffic … have only increased congestion.”

It takes about a minute of fact-checking or direct observation to rebut these claims. But what’s striking about (Herbert) London’s diatribe isn’t just its counterfactualism, but its willful ignorance of how livable streets change the way urban transportation systems function.

Pondering the genesis of the Bloomberg administration’s bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, London can’t conceive that the mayor was connecting the dots between physical activity, fighting obesity and downsizing health-care costs. Or had learned from his planning and transportation commissioners about cities in Europe where active transportation (biking and walking) accounted for as many as half of all trips, and workers, residents and tourists alike flocked to the city centers. Or thought it was worth putting a handful of districts on a road diet to see if the maxim that turning more street space over to cars produces more gridlock, could be run in reverse.

No, according to Herbert London, the mayor’s attempt to try out livable streets practices in New York is proof that “the Bloomberg administration has declared war on the automobile.”

Yet the facts show that city drivers aren’t victims of the emerging street paradigm, they’re beneficiaries — not just in Midtown, where car speeds have risen following introduction of the Broadway plazas, but throughout the Manhattan Central Business District.

Where the official report to the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission found that “GPS data for October 2007 show that taxi trips average … 8 mph within the CBD as a whole (below 60th Street), between 8 am and 6 pm,” taxi GPS data from October 2010 now put the average at 9.5 mph. In percentage terms (which is where, mathematically, travel time savings accumulate), this 1.5 mph gain is huge — enough to save commuters and truckers over 50,000 hours a day. Even applying very conservative “values of time,” that’s half-a-billion dollars a year New Yorkers are holding onto by not sitting in traffic.

What brought this change? The recession is partly responsible, for sure, but in previous downturns traffic congestion never eased to this extent. There are a host of other likely factors — the reinforcing effects of three decades of capital investment in mass transit, the rising use of unlimited farecards, a shift of the zeitgeist toward both active transportation and transit-friendly smartphones, and, yes, the provisions being made for walking and cycling, including the public plazas and bike lanes sneered at by Mr. London, which allow New Yorkers to get around more and drive less.

The irony is that not long ago, the Manhattan Institute was actively engaged in untangling threads like these. In 2006, it commissioned transportation savant Bruce Schaller to examine the gridlock-busting potential of congestion pricing, and it presented his findings at a major forum. The buzz from that meeting, along with a Times op-ed by Bruce (now a deputy commissioner at NYC DOT) and his then-colleague Hope Cohen (now at RPA), helped set the table for the mayor’s PlaNYC push the following spring. But that was before conservatism congealed into resistance and denial, and urban livability became anathema to the right wing.

[T]he future of New York’s cash-poor transit system, depended on by millions of riders a day, has now fallen directly to Mr. Cuomo, who must pick a successor.

The passage is spot on, but for this missing note: The city and region’s 8 million train, bus and subway riders aren’t the only people who depend on public transit. So do a million or more daily motor vehicle users, who will find themselves in ever-worse gridlock if fare hikes and under-investment lead even a small fraction of transit passengers to switch to automobiles.

How much worse will traffic congestion get if transit deteriorates? A lot, potentially. Consider a combination of higher fares and reduced service sufficient to bring about a 5 percent decline in subway use, so that weekday trips by subway to the Manhattan Central Business District, currently averaging 2,160,000 a day, shrink by 110,000. My modeling suggests that while a majority of those trips will relocate or simply disappear, an estimated 35,000 of them will continue to be made, in cars.

Auto trips to the CBD will increase in this scenario by nearly 30,000, allowing for cars with more than one person. While numerically that increase is much smaller than the drop in subway use, the increased volume of traffic will depress already abysmal travel speeds in the Manhattan core by more than 4 percent and slow traffic on the CBD approaches by an average of 1-2 percent. The estimated “time costs” of these new delays: nearly $600 million a year.

Is this scenario realistic? Sadly, yes. According to my travel-and-traffic modeling, it wouldn’t take much in the way of fare hikes and service cuts to bring about a 5 percent cut in subway trips. Here’s one way it could happen:

Raise fares (generates $230 million)

• Raise price of unlimited-fare Metrocards by 10 percent
• Eliminate current 7 percent bonus on $10 or higher pay-per-ride Metrocards

Cut service and investment (saves $440 million total)

• Cut $40 million from subway operations
• Cut $400 million a year from MTA capital program

The above combination is all it would take for 5 percent of subway riders to bail and collectively put 30,000 more CBD-bound car trips on the road. Now let’s add up this scenario’s pluses and minuses.

Pluses: Transportation authorities gain $560,000,000 a year

• MTA cost savings: $440 million
• MTA revenue gain: $90 million ($230 million from fare hikes, less $140 million from decreased ridership)
• MTA and Port Authority toll windfall (from increase in tolled tunnel trips): $30 million

Minuses: Public loses $995,000,000 a year + other uncalculated costs

• Motor vehicle users’ time losses from increased congestion: $590 million
• Transit users’ time losses from service cuts: $170 million
• Environmental costs (more pollution, crashes, noise, etc.): $135 million
• Lost longevity as heavier traffic discourages biking and walking: $100 million
• Job losses from increased congestion and cutbacks in transit operations and improvements: ??
• Lost economic activity from fewer person-trips to the CBD: ??

For every dollar saved by the MTA, the resultant drop in subway usage costs city and suburban residents nearly $1.80 in time, health and quality of life, with drivers’ lost time alone ($590 million a year) more than offsetting the MTA’s net gain ($560 million). And this accounting, which holds across a range of scenarios, omits costs due to lost employment and commerce.

From an overall societal standpoint, then, transit disinvestment is a big loser — a point that Dick Ravitch, Ted Kheel and other civic leaders labored for decades to get across to both City Hall and Albany. Ironically, many of the folks with the most to lose never even swipe a Metrocard.

The trek up was easy enough. I left my Wall Street office around 4:20, zipped the half-mile to the southern entrance of the greenway, and pedaled for a solid hour to the Dyckman Street northern terminus. No cars, of course, and, because I left before rush hour, no bike gridlock on the greenway either. From Dyckman it was a short hop to the ballfield at Seaman and Isham, just in time for the 5:30 first pitch under a pearl blue sky with a gorgeous view of the Henry Hudson Bridge in the distance.

The view from the greenway. Photo: Charles Komanoff

Late in the game, though, the wind started picking up. By the last inning, dust was swirling across the field, and the whistling trees and clattering parking signs were heralding a heavy-duty storm. I tucked my wallet and phone in a plastic bag left over from lunch and stashed them safely in my knapsack just as Downtown’s pitcher threw strike three for the final out. Another parent offered my family a ride home. I would bike.

My watch said 7:20. Drops of rain were spattering before I reached Dyckman. No way I’m not getting soaked, and no rain gear, damn! To compose myself, I thought back to other rides I’d done in heavy rain — through an Adirondacks thunderstorm in 2008, a drenching ride the next year to Franklin Lakes, NJ and back. Those were 60 miles, and this was nothing.

As I trudged up the stairs leading back to the greenway, my mind dredged up a painful memory from my suburban childhood. Whenever it poured on schoolday mornings, my mom would drive me to the bus stop (three short blocks!) and make me stay inside (with the engine running!) until the school bus came. Though she parked discreetly around the corner, I was still terrified that the other kids standing in their slickers would glimpse me in the car. Whether they saw me or not, I still felt humiliated.

The hell, then, I thought, as I slowed for the corkscrew turn leading to the GWB lighthouse, let the heavens rain down. Except that they didn’t. Though the sky overhead stayed steel gray, the clouds in the west were lifting to let the sun through. The rain tapered off and then stopped altogether. By the time I reached the bend at the water treatment plant, the horizon was aglow. I turned to the east, and there it was: a huge rainbow.

As I said, the rest of the ride was a blast. The strong tailwind made pedaling a breeze, and the churning of my legs kept me warm as I smashed through puddles. I didn’t quite beat my family home, but I felt as though I’d journeyed somewhere — not just through a dozen miles of Manhattan, but through fifty years of time.

Let the Times and their reporters luxuriate in the “guilty pleasure” of driving in Central Park. I’ll take my bike, and the elements, any day.

Twenty-First Ave. and 62nd St., Borough Park, Brooklyn: What happened here? Image: Google Maps

1. How fast was the BMW traveling when Aileen and her bicycle first came into view?
2. How fast was the driver going when he struck her?
3. How far from the point of first impact did Aileen’s body come to rest?
4. Was the 26-year-old driver alone, or were there others in the car?
5. Was she hurrying for some reason, or distracted?
6. Has the driver’s smartphone been impounded and checked to see if she was phoning or texting at the time of the crash?
7. Is the area of Borough Park in which the crash took place residential, as it appears from an Internet view?
8. How long and far from the collision might a driver who had been visually scanning the road have seen Aileen?
9. Which party was traveling on 21st Avenue, which appears wider and perhaps more prone to fast driving than the cross street, 62nd Street?
10. Does the driver have a record of moving violations?
11. Whose testimony was the basis of the NYPD statement that Aileen ran a red light?
12. Did anyone other than the driver witness the crash? Has the NYPD taken their evidence?

Every one of these questions is answerable, although none were answered in the press accounts, which nevertheless drip with the customary “victim guilty, case closed” quality of articles about bicyclist fatalities. All of these questions, I submit, are relevant to finding fault — a process that, though painful, is essential, as it is in every serious-injury or fatal traffic crash, to the arduous task of reforming traffic engineering, enforcement, jurisprudence and behavior.

The foundation of any meaningful investigation of the crash that killed Aileen is found in the first three questions. Driving faster than 30 mph on ordinary streets such as the two that intersected here is both prohibited by law and a statistical separator between surviving being struck by a car, and not. Higher driving speeds also increase crash likelihood by making visual scanning less effective, shortening drivers’ reaction-time window, lengthening stopping distance, and impeding detection of the vehicle by other road users.

Presumably the NYPD Accident Investigation Squad, the unit charged with analyzing fatal crashes in NYC, has by now measured skid marks, other road markings, damage to the BMW and bicycle, and the locations where Aileen and her clothing, iPod, etc. came to rest. From these metrics, the AIS may have already calculated, at least approximately, the driver’s speeds prior to and during the collision. Yet there is almost zero chance that these data from Aileen’s crash will enter the public record. The NYPD guards AIS reports virtually as state secrets. In 2000, when my organization Right Of Way was researching our “Only Good Cyclist” report on fatal NYC auto-cyclist crashes [PDF], prying loose AIS reports for a mere 14 crashes required multiple iterations of our Freedom of Information request, plus a dozen subsequent calls and letters. Several similar requests proffered later were rejected.

Questions 4 and 5 go to the driver’s state of mind and, while purely circumstantial, may suggest a possible motive to speed or otherwise drive carelessly. Though neither hands-free phoning nor texting while driving is illegal in New York State (the latter is a secondary not primary driving offense), the driver’s quality of attention is still a critical parameter, which justifies Question 6.

Question 7 draws on the legal obligation of drivers to observe a standard of due care. (Section 1146 of the State Vehicle & Traffic Law directs “Drivers [to] exercise due care to avoid colliding with any bicyclist, pedestrian or domestic animal upon any roadway.”) By law, then, operating a motor vehicle in a residential neighborhood requires being on alert for people walking, running, playing, cycling, etc. Question 8, another for the Accident Investigation Squad, seeks to determine if a lawful driver (speed limit, due care, etc.) could have averted striking a cyclist who had ridden through a red light.

Questions 9 and 10 return to the subject of the driver’s cognition and conduct, while questions 11 and 12 seek to address the vexing and perhaps unresolvable issue: Who had a green light and who ran a red — Aileen or the driver? I suspect that this question will never be settled. Self-interest requires the driver to claim that he had right of way. And while any eyewitnesses should be tracked down and interviewed, bystander accounts aren’t always reliable, and it’s not unreasonable to worry that cultural biases about drivers and bicyclists could inadvertently color their accounts. At the least, though, if the only reported account is the driver’s, its bias should be acknowledged and its testimony disregarded.

No answers will bring back Aileen, whose tragically abbreviated life was so vibrant and promising. But determining the circumstances of her fatal crash as definitively as possible is important to the public discourse and, ultimately, public policy, that determines whether our streets will be dangerous or livable. Between the Post’s “Tragic teen struck and killed was biking against light: cops” and an alternative headline, “Joyrider in BMW was speeding when he rammed teen on bike,” lies a world of difference. For now, we don’t know which applies. Without data that the NYPD may have but won’t give out, we probably never will.

Unmentioned by police, elected officials or the media in coverage of recent traffic deaths: Private dump trucks have the highest pedestrian kill rate in NYC. Photo: DNAinfo/Jennifer Glickel

This morning brought news of the death of Laurence Renard yesterday evening on the Upper East Side. The 35-year-old French fashion stylist was crushed under a dump truck that turned from 90th Street onto First Avenue and into her path. While details are sketchy, as usual, Renard presumably had the right-of-way over the turning truck, which a witness said “came around the corner like a bat out of hell.” Nevertheless, the only charge filed thus far is for driving with a suspended license.

Renard’s death is eerily similar to that of Jason King last month. King, a 21-year-old student who also worked at nearby E.A.T., had been crossing Madison Avenue at 81^st Street when he was run over by a dump truck being driven illegally in reverse. “No criminality was suspected” in King’s death, the NYPD told Streetsblog then, despite a report that King was in the crosswalk when the truck driver backed over him and dragged him thirty feet before stopping. The driver was not charged.

Meanwhile, reports are surfacing of a traffic-related death two weeks ago in Queens Village. According to CBS2, 72-year-old Robert Hudson suffered a fatal heart attack after a dispute that began when police attempted to cite his wife Doris for not wearing a seat belt. Mrs. Hudson claims that officers forced her husband to walk a half-mile home to retrieve her ID, although police officials contend Mr. Hudson did so of his own volition. Regardless, shortly after returning and driving off, and likely stressed from the encounter with NYPD, Mr. Hudson suffered a massive seizure and died at Franklin Hospital.

What links these deaths, beyond their human tragedy, is a traffic “safety” ideology that blames victims instead of perpetrators, fetishizes silver bullets like seat belts and bike helmets at the expense of promoting a genuine safety culture, and misdirects enforcement toward trivia and away from the actual sources of danger. Consider:

• Robust statistical analysis established over a decade ago (PDF, pp. 33-34) that private dump trucks had the highest NYC pedestrian-kill rate per mile driven — a distinction they almost certainly hold today. Yet no city or state initiatives have ever targeted dump truck driver licensing, enforcement or prosecution.
• Turning-into-crosswalk kills more pedestrians than any other driver maneuver, the same analysis found. Yet failure to wear seat belts — a behavior that, unlike dangerous driving, puts no other persons at risk — is accorded far more enforcement and “education” than the legal necessity to yield to pedestrian in crosswalks.
• Bike lanes make streets and roads safer for all users, including pedestrians and motorists. Yet a proposal for a protected First Avenue bike lane, which might have induced the driver who killed Laurence Renard to take his turn more slowly, was withdrawn last June, a possible victim of the drumbeat of criticism that has enveloped DOT’s program to expand the city’s bicycle network.

Just as gun sales reportedly rose after the Tucson shooting rampage, look for politicians like Brooklyn Senator Carl Kruger to react to the deaths of King and Renard by redoubling efforts to rein in pedestrians; and for know-nothings like gossip columnist Cindy Adams to resort to shameless name-calling in the Post’s vendetta against DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

Better, perhaps, to recall the wisdom of Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Sadly, these words will offer little consolation to the families and friends of Renard, Hudson and King.

Kheel was an ally of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

Ted became famous in the 1950s and 1960s as the mediator who settled newspaper strikes, railroad strikes and other high-stakes disputes. He was a fixture in The Times — his square jaw and determined face signifying probity and civic virtue. But much of his finest work was done out of the spotlight. It was Ted’s heretical but constant agitation to allocate surplus toll revenues from Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority to the financially ailing public transit agencies, that in 1968 led NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to combine the TBTA with the Transit Authority and the commuter railroads into the MTA — and destroy Moses’s power to fund highways and starve transit.

Ted’s transit advocacy rested on what he called “the fundamental principle that car travel and mass transit are interrelated, like two sides of an equation. There should be a balance,” he wrote, “but instead, our system is enormously, unconscionably out of balance,” causing road gridlock on the one hand and inadequate transit service on the other. Ted fought for five decades to correct that imbalance, with stories in New York magazine like “How To Stop Cars from Devouring the City” [PDF]; with a self-financed lawsuit [PDF] to overturn bond covenants through which the Port Authority enjoined itself from expanding mass transit, that Ted pursued all the way to the Supreme Court (losing on a tie vote); and, in his final years, with an even more audacious venture that would draw me into his orbit and point the way to a new transit revolution with the potential to surpass that of 1968.

In early 2007, already well into his nineties, Ted asked transportation engineer George Haikalis to examine whether congestion pricing could generate enough revenue to finance free mass transit throughout the five boroughs. Yes, free, not just to help drive a stake through traffic gridlock but to establish urban transport as an essential public service, on a par with public education and safety, while giving working people the equivalent of a pay raise. George hired me onto his team, and by fall I had fashioned a skeletal spreadsheet model that appeared to answer Ted’s question affirmatively: a $16 congestion toll, charged 24/7, would allow 100 percent free buses and subways [PDF].

On a brilliant October Sunday, I went to Ted’s Fifth Avenue office and showed him my work. Ted loved the model, which he dubbed the “Balanced Transportation Analyzer.” What really stays with me from that day, though, was Ted’s ringside recollections of events that had rocked New York City and State and even the nation. As Central Park’s blazing colors softened into shadow, Ted and I relived fifty years of history: the fateful 1966 transit strike, Lyndon Johnson’s dangling of Supreme Court seats in front of prospective nominees, and implacable personages from TWU chief Mike Quill to Rockefeller and JFK.

Komanoff and Kheel looking forward to free transit.

That day three years ago marked a personal turning point. With Ted’s active guidance and the generous support of his Nurture Nature Foundation, I threw myself into fleshing out the BTA and becoming an advocate for Ted’s vision of free transit. The work has been by turns frustrating and exhilarating. Frustrating because we lacked the political muscle to get our more-nuanced congestion pricing approaches considered alongside the plans advanced by Mayor Bloomberg in 2007-08 or the Ravitch Commission in 2008-09. But exhilarating because the BTA has blossomed to where it can handle time-of-day-varied toll and fare plans and estimate the resulting revenues and travel time savings. (The current BTA spreadsheet can be downloaded here; requires Excel 2007 or later.)

The BTA also reveals the extent to which the proverbial “one additional car trip” to the CBD slows down other vehicles on the road: by several hours (the aggregate of the seconds of road delay imposed on hundreds or thousands of cars and trucks), worth $100 of lost time, plus or minus, depending on time of day and week. This novel element, a kind of “foundation stone” of congestion pricing, attracted the interest of financial blogger Felix Salmon and Wired magazine. Felix’s article in the June Wired conveys Ted’s prescient grasp of the extent to which the social costs of car use far outweigh fiscal support for transit:

Now 95 years old, Kheel has been trying to improve New York’s traffic for more than half a century. He is obsessed with the economic damage that cars do to cities — damage that’s much greater than most people realize… in a New York magazine cover story arguing against another fare increase [he wrote]: “Any balanced analysis will surely prove that the taxpayer actually pays, for every person who chooses to drive to and from work in his own car, an indirect subsidy at least 10 times as great as the indirect subsidy now paid the mass-transit rider.”

When the article was published, in June, I went to Ted’s apartment and read it aloud. We beamed, seeing our handiwork manifested in print. Ted had cast his bread upon the waters and seen it returned as mathematical validation. I had found, in this protean man, both a patron and a kindred spirit.

Ted’s Nurture Nature Foundation has subsequently retained renowned environmental campaigner Alex Matthiessen to spearhead education and outreach to fulfill Ted’s vision of tolling driving to finance transit. With deep deficits in Albany and at the MTA placing free transit off limits for the time being, Alex is reconfiguring free transit as Sustainable Transit and helping make Ted’s and my plan even more synergistic and compelling. The mutually reinforcing elements — time-varied tolls to drive to the CBD; medallion taxi charges so that outlying boroughs and counties don’t subsidize Manhattan; off-peak transit discounts; targeted improvements in transit service today while supporting the MTA capital plan for tomorrow — promise 20 percent improvements in CBD travel speeds along with a time-out from the endless spiral of fare hikes. (Several versions of the plan are on display in the “Results” tab of the BTA; see earlier link.)

“I’ve been to the mountaintop,” Martin Luther King declared in his sermon in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated. “And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” Ted Kheel, a political ally and financial supporter of Dr. King’s, was privileged to live a long and full life. He may not have made it to the promised land of free transit. But Ted did as much as anyone to bring New York to the mountaintop of a transportation system that subordinates the damages caused by the auto to the needs of public transit and the multitudes who benefit from it.

Thank you, Ted, for letting me walk with you in the last part of your journey.

Hi Steve –

I wrote you two years ago, contrasting your column in the Post disparaging the Grand Street bike lane, with my son’s and my positive experience riding the lane to a movie theater in the East Village. You wrote back, sticking to your guns but with regard for my point of view. I appreciated the exchange.

Are motorists becoming more observant of cyclists on NYC streets? Photo of 78th Street: BicyclesOnly/Flickr

Now, two years on, “it’s deja vu all over again!” You’re still railing against City DOT’s street redesigns intended to make walking and bike-riding easier and safer; and I’m still biking to the same theater with my kid, this time with my younger son, age 12.

I want to tell you that our ride yesterday from Tribeca to East Houston Street and back was even better than the ride I described two years ago.

First, the Grand Street bike lane was more passable than on the 2008 ride. Yes, we had to maneuver around a couple of double-parked cars and a few pedestrians pushing carts and stuff, but fewer than before.

Second, we now had the Chrystie Street bike lane to take us from Grand to Houston, and the Forsyth Street lane to cruise back down. Having separated bike lanes for long stretches of the rides made a huge difference.

Best, though, was the way drivers related to me and my 12-year-old. Each time we had to swing around a stopped car, drivers gave us the space we needed. As I indicated in my 2008 letter, I don’t necessarily need a wide berth from cars to feel safe on two wheels, but my son does.

Steve, I think there’s a change going on in drivers’ attitudes toward people they share the streets with. I began seeing it a decade or so ago, in terms of less frequent “aggressive turning” into pedestrians crossing with the right of way — a perception that is mirrored in the notable drop in pedestrian fatalities citywide.

Now I’m seeing it in regard to bike riders, too. I suspect the sheer presence of more cyclists — our numbers are up almost 60 percent from just 2007 to 2009 — is leading drivers to be more observant. The fact that it’s now NYC policy to encourage cycling may also be filtering down to the level of individual behavior, as well.

Here’s where you come in, Steve. How about trying to see our streets from another point of view — the walker’s and/or cyclist’s, not just the driver’s? Some published words of accommodation from you could contribute to reduced conflict, less road danger, and enlargement of the sphere in which we New Yorkers get along with each other.

We’ve got bikes of all different types and sizes at my house, and I’d be happy to set you up with one for a Sunday ride sometime.

The movie is on me.

Best,

Charles

PS: Yesterday’s movie was “127 Hours,” the riveting story of a hiker who had to go to extreme lengths to extricate himself from a Utah slot canyon. My kids and I have hiked other slots not far from there — a feat I can manage thanks to the physical and mental benefits of cycling here every day.

For the majority of people who use Times Square, Broadway is much broader than it was before the city re-purposed space from vehicles to pedestrians. That's not how the Times has framed the project. Photo: Payton Chung/Flickr

Framing affects the struggle over street space as well. Tabloid headlines about “kamikaze cyclists” and “two-wheeled terrorists” in the 1980s literally framed bike messengers as Public Enemy #1 and emboldened Mayor Ed Koch to try to ban bicycling in midtown. Road widenings are still customarily branded as “improvements” rather than simply identified as expansions. Most news outlets report plane crashes as crashes but call car crashes accidents.

With this in mind, let’s train a verbal lens on the New York Times’ full-page treatment yesterday of the Broadway road diet.

The article, by Times transportation reporter Michael Grynbaum, is exemplary in many respects. It thoughtfully lets transportation guru Jeff Zupan declare that the stepwise transformation of Manhattan’s central thoroughfare is boosting the status of pedestrians throughout town:

“It’s given people a different feeling about walking in the city, that the pedestrian isn’t a second-class citizen who has to always be on the lookout of getting run over.”

On the key issue of traffic flow, Grynbaum notes that Broadway’s “awkward three-way intersections with other avenues created gridlock,” and he has Janette Sadik-Khan explain that “We’re making the [street] network work like it was supposed to.” To back up the DOT Commissioner’s appeal to New Yorkers to embrace Broadway as a “green ribbon,” Grynbaum invokes “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, whom he dubs “the éminence grise of the city’s traffic circles”:

“It sounds counterintuitive that removing a street can make things better. But it was a mistake in 1811 when they left Broadway in as a traffic street.”

Educational indeed… for readers who make it to the tenth paragraph. But earlier, more prominent passages may imprint a less appetizing picture on other, perhaps more typical readers:

[U]nder the Bloomberg administration, Broadway has been transformed, from a grand avenue that ferried automobiles on a scenic route through Midtown to a narrow passageway with barely more room for cars than a sleepy street in Greenwich Village. (second paragraph)

The Great White Way … has been diminished by a bicycle lane and a green-painted, traffic-free section intended for pedestrians …” (caption)

In two years, roughly three and a half miles of the street’s moving lanes have vanished … For the first time in New York’s modern era, Broadway no longer offers a continuous path from the Bronx to the Battery. (third paragraph)

And, in case anyone missed the point, the full-page diagram tracing the street from Columbus Circle to below Madison Square Park is headlined “Not So Broadway.”

The takeaway, then, is mixed. Readers who go the distance are treated to the wisdom of NYC’s leading transportation lights. But those who merely inhale the first few bits learn that Broadway has been “diminished” even though only the motorized lanes have shrunk; and that parts of the once-Great White Way have “vanished” rather than been repurposed. The “grand avenue” renowned as a “scenic route” through the heart of the city is no more — the implication being that New York itself is being made less grand, even, gasp, “pedestrian.”

Perhaps inadvertently, the piece’s heavy reliance on talking heads may serve to reinforce another negative frame: that Sadik-Khan and other city officials are “imposing” alien ideas on New Yorkers, even though the midtown business community — through the Times Square Alliance — generated the initial momentum for the pedestrian reclamation of Times Square, and even though we know public opinion of the transformations is quite favorable.

The article’s true soul may reside in the lone everyman quoted, whom Grynbaum describes as “a daily car commuter from Queens who was parked on Broadway at 33rd Street the other day“:

I know they’re trying to beautify the city, but it’s killing the drivers. It’s frustrating. They don’t want you to drive into the city.

This fellow comes off as reasonable, even sweet. Yet his “daily car commute” costs other New Yorkers — truckers, bus riders, and his fellow drivers — a collective 3-4 hours in lost time valued at $100 or more each day. Framing the city’s ongoing traffic disaster in these terms may be crucial to maintaining Broadway as a permanent “green ribbon,” not to mention winning the rest of the livable streets agenda, from pedestrians’ rights to traffic pricing, that can make New York a city fit for working and living.

Photo: pneedham/Flickr

Not every “disappeared” bus or subway trip will materialize as a car trip, of course. Some trips will be made on foot, by bike or by sharing a car, and some others won’t happen at all. But the number of additional car trips caused by the cuts and hikes will be significant, as will the increase in gasoline to fuel them.

I’ve estimated the impacts, using the BTA spreadsheet that has been written about here and was profiled recently in Wired magazine. I inputted an average 7.5 percent bus and subway fare hike along with a five percent increase in the time required to complete an average transit trip. (That's a rough "proxy" for the effects of increased crowding and unsanitary conditions as well as of longer waits between buses and trains and longer walks caused by eliminating some lines.)

The result: by inducing additional car trips as well as reducing the fuel-efficiency of all vehicles due to worsened traffic congestion, the transit cuts and hikes will lead New Yorkers to use an extra 13.5 million gallons of gasoline per year.

On top of that, the hybrid cab requirement would have been expected to save 31.3 million gallons, or almost two-and-a-half times as much as deteriorated transit will cost.

The point isn’t to compare the two -- in a more politically accountable world, the taxi rule would go forward while the transit cuts and hikes would be stayed -- but to show that both impacts are roughly in the same ballpark. In our society, political inertia, whether manifested as government neglect or as judicial narrow-mindedness, tends to reinforce energy consumption and oil dependence.

In this connection, it's worth noting that a well-designed congestion pricing plan -- one that surpassed the Bloomberg plan in scope and, I would argue, cured its political deficiencies -- would, at least on paper, reduce motor vehicle fuel use in the city by an estimated 77.3 million gallons of petroleum per year. That’s between double and triple the taxi-fleet savings. Yet while the associated benefits, in terms of less ecosystem destruction and reduced public pressure (or political cover) to wage war in Asia or elsewhere, would be impressive, they account for less than one percent of the overall expected societal benefit from such a plan. That’s testament not to the low price we pay for oil dependence but to the magnitude of the other benefits, chiefly travel-time savings followed by increased physical activity, that smart and imaginative congestion pricing could bring to our city.

Photo: So Cal Metro/Flickr

With an average of 23.8 peds or cyclists killed per hundred million miles driven, garbage trucks had by far the highest fatality rate in the study, exceeding the all-vehicle average of 1.7 killed per hundred million miles by a factor of 14. Within the garbage truck category, the per-mile rate of killing pedestrians and cyclists was two-thirds higher for private haulers than for NYC Department of Sanitation trucks.

Six hours before Rivera was killed, operators of a Philadelphia garbage barge ignored a radio distress call from a stalled “duck boat” and rammed it, killing two tourists and sending 30 more into the Delaware River, the National Transportation Safety Board revealed yesterday.

Investigators from the NTSB, the federal agency chartered with determining causes of transportation accidents and formulating recommendations to improve transportation safety, are combing the Delaware River for clues in the duck boat-barge smashup. Yet none can be seen in Bushwick, just as no NTSB personnel have looked into any of the 100 or so other garbage truck-related pedestrian and cyclist fatalities dating to the mid-nineties.

The public associates the NTSB principally with investigating air crashes, and to a lesser extent with rail, marine and pipeline incidents. Yet the safety board’s charter (PDF, section 1131) also requires it to:

Investigate... and establish the facts, circumstances, and cause or probable cause of... any other accident related to the transportation of individuals or property when the Board decides [that] the accident involves problems of a recurring character. (emphasis added)

Citing this mandate, I wrote on behalf of Right of Way to NTSB chair Jim Hall in 1997, asking his agency to analyze what I said were “Two types of accident causation [that] are particularly recurrent in recent bicyclist fatalities in New York City: Dooring and interference from heavy trucks.” My letter was passed to the director of the USDOT Office of Environment, Energy and Safety, who dutifully cited ongoing agency programs while ignoring my plea to intervene in dooring and truck incidents. Further entreaties to Mr. Hall and other staffers at both USDOT and the NTSB were equally unavailing.

Yet even without federal support, municipalities are hardly powerless to reduce heavy truck dangers to cyclists and pedestrians. As the Portland (OR) Office of Transportation reports, fleets can be required to equip heavy trucks with “under-run” protective devices such as metal plates and guide bars to prevent cyclists from being dragged under the truck wheels. “Aspheric mirrors” can reduce truckers’ blind spots, without the visual distortion found in standard convex mirrors.

Proactive policing could summons operators for reckless maneuvers such as unsignaled turning, aggressive passing and rapid backing -- practices that are relatively rare for NYC Sanitation drivers but appear endemic among less-regulated private haulers. Taking the long view, taxes on packaging and disposable products, along with policies encouraging families to avoid manufactured food in favor of fresh food, could shrink dump truck traffic at the source by reducing the need for garbage collection in the first place.

But don’t look for Jim Hall to help. Hall, who stepped down from NTSB in 2001, is being groomed by the cellular communications industry to be the public face of a new lobbying campaign to fend off federal restrictions on use of mobile devices by drivers (watch the PowerPoint). The campaign, billed as The Drive Coalition (Drivers for Responsibility, Innovation and Vehicle Education), suffered a setback last week when criticism by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood forced them to shelve their rollout, according to Transportation Nation.

Perhaps safety campaigners should dust off that 1997 Right Of Way letter and send it to LaHood.

The NYPD investigation into the 2008 crash that killed cyclist Rasha Shamoon relied heavily on interviews with the driver and his passengers.

Data that can reveal driver choices such as speed and braking in the crucial seconds preceding a crash; and driver accountability that police and prosecutors historically have been loath to enforce, in part because crash reconstruction has lacked sufficiently firm evidence.

U.S. automakers began installing "event recorders" in new cars in the 1990s to defend against lawsuits over air bag deployment, and most cars built since 2004 have some sort of data recording device. But the current NHTSA standard for black boxes is optional, and recommends that they record only five seconds of data preceding crashes. Which makes it noteworthy that the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers told Congress last month that it won't oppose making the standard mandatory and extending the recording period to a full minute. That interval should be sufficient to give crash investigators information to assign culpability, and, where the facts warrant, for prosecutors to indict and juries to convict.

The first use of black box data to convict a reckless driver in New York State was in Rochester in 2004. Here’s how the Times reported it:

After Danny G. Hopkins’s Cadillac CTS rear-ended Lindsay Kyle’s Dodge Neon at a traffic light in Rochester a year ago, witnesses said Mr. Hopkins had been zooming down the road, and crash investigators who examined the condition and location of the wreckage estimated that Mr. Hopkins was traveling 65 to 70 miles an hour at the point of impact. But in a trial that ended on Oct. 7, a witness emerged with more to say: that four seconds before the crash, it had been traveling 106 m.p.h. The witness in the case was an event data recorder, an automotive equivalent of the black boxes used to reconstruct plane crashes. A jury convicted Mr. Hopkins of second-degree manslaughter, a crime whose elements include recklessness and which carries a penalty of up to 15 years in jail.

The Monroe County assistant district attorney told the Times, “Clearly the black box technology played a large part in the jury’s finding of guilty.” Six years later, why aren't DA's routinely mining black boxes for data?

One reason is the limited data from black boxes noted earlier. Another is the low staffing for, and status of, traffic justice in police departments and prosecutorial agencies. But the biggest obstacle has been the huge weight accorded privacy concerns, a penchant inadvertently played up by the 2004 Times story headline, “Does Your Car Have a Spy in the Engine?” As U.K. road safety campaigner John Whitelegg once noted, the public’s right for protection against lethal driving has been trumped by motorists' "right" to protection from the risk of being found guilty of breaking the law.

Much of this could change if, as appears likely, Congress writes a black-box standard into the auto safety bill. As I wrote six years ago [PDF], with the notable exception of DWI, which can be conclusively demonstrated in a roadside breathalyzer test or by measuring the driver’s blood alcohol content, irrefutable evidence implicating negligent drivers has been expensive or impossible for the state to obtain. Indeed, the difficulty of conclusively assigning responsibility for vehicle crashes helped give rise to no-fault insurance in the 1960s, paving the way for the no-fault ethos that helps make our streets and highways killing zones.

Putting reckless driving on a par with drunk driving, both legally and culturally, is a key building block for safe and livable streets in New York and across America. A strong federal black-box standard could be a major step.

The full quote appears after the helpful lede reporting that 10 times as many New Yorkers walk to work as take taxis:

A higher proportion -- nearly half -- of New Yorkers take mass transit, more than in any other city in the country. Nearly 37 percent use the subway and 11 percent commute by bus.

Not even half of us commute via mass transit? Not so, which the veteran reporter Sam Roberts, the paper’s resident NYC historian and demographics buff, could have seen by turning over the numbers he drew from a March report [PDF] by the city-financed Center for Economic Opportunity:

• Roberts failed to adjust the report's percentages (which appear on page 81) for the nearly half-a-million commutes whose mode was unidentified. Remove them from the denominator and the share of identified work trips made by subway or bus goes from 47.6 percent to 53.3 percent -- a majority.
• Trains (commuter rail) and ferries qualify as mass transit just as much as subways and buses. Add their shares to subway and bus, and mass transit’s percentage of NYC commuting rises by two points to 55.3 percent.
• Most transportation planners nowadays place walking, cycling and telecommuting together with transit under the rubric of "green modes" -- a term popularized by the British sustainable transport expert Rodney Tolley in his 2003 anthology, Sustainable Transport: Planning for Walking and Cycling in Urban Environments. Aggregating the green modes' shares in the CEO data, they account for 69.9 percent of New York City commuting.

See this simple spreadsheet for the various percentage breakdowns. The real finding is that between two-thirds and three-fourths of our work trips are made without an automobile. If you’re curious, the 30 percent non-green share breaks down thus: drive solo, 23.6 percent; carpool, 5.5 percent; taxi, 1.0 percent; motorcycle, 0.0 percent (actually, 0.048 percent). Bottom line: Non-car commuting outnumbers car commuting by more than two-to-one.

Also of interest are the CEO report’s data on commute costs. The $48.47 weekly mean cost to drive alone to work translates to a daily cost of around $10; subtract gas, applicable tolls and depreciation, and the implied cost to park may be less than $5 a day. This suggests one or both of two things: even in New York, where the astronomical cost of land is reflected in everything from rent to the price of food, parking continues to be the heavily subsidized exception; or the data in the CEO report don’t include parking, period, as one informed commenter has suggested.

Another angle absent from Roberts's story is the delay costs each commute trip imposes on other travelers by taking up street space and slowing down other traffic. Of course, these vary greatly depending on time of day and location. I’ve estimated that during the morning rush period, each mile driven by a single car slows other traffic to the extent that all road users in the Manhattan Central Business District (other drivers, truckers, and bus passengers) collectively lose time worth $16. (The delay cost per mile driven outside the CBD is $3.)

True, some aspects of green-mode commuting also impose time costs on others -- think of the delays caused by bus riders swiping MetroCards, subway passengers holding up the closing doors, or cyclists slowing down other traffic. Further quantification awaits, but these costs almost certainly average at least an order of magnitude less, per trip, than commuting by car.

For starters, the botched bombing makes it extremely unlikely that the NYPD will ever be called to account for its shameful Earth Day confiscation of bicycles chained to racks and fences along the presidential motorcade route on Houston Street. While this may seem small in the grand scheme of things, some cycling advocates had been nursing hopes that this gratuitous act might be the lever to finally pry open the department’s sorry record of indifference and hostility toward cyclists.

Indeed, throughout the unending Giuliani-Bloomberg era, it has been nearly impossible to get elected officials and the media to question any exercise of police power, short of overt violence or profiling. Even so, two veteran journalists told me last week that they were looking into the Houston Street incident, and one City Council member, public safety committee chair Peter Vallone, addressed some tough questions about it to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. Now, however, with politicians and the press falling over each other to congratulate the cops, the chances of a meaningful probe appear nil.

Since 9/11, each attempted attack, no matter how clumsy, has precipitated some new disturbing intrusion into the public’s sphere of free movement. As the week began, the Supreme Court announced that, due to “security concerns,” visitors would no longer be allowed to enter via the court’s front door, through the imposing marble columns and under the totemic words “Equal Justice Under Law.” While the timing was coincidental, the announcement was another step toward sacrificing the American public square, with its cherished rites and freedoms, on the altar of security.

Inevitably, then, the Times Square incident will influence how officialdom prioritizes the dangers society faces -- a process in which the decks have always been stacked against livable streets.

To take one example from the files, a dozen years ago the National Transportation Safety Board mounted a full-scale investigation into a fatal helicopter crash in the East River while federal and city officials alike disregarded entreaties from advocates to investigate cyclist fatalities caused by dooring mere miles away. Around that time, Congress was grilling auto and tire manufacturers for “mismatches” that put joyriding SUV owners at risk by making rollovers more likely; yet the far more common lethal mismatch involving occupants of sedans struck by rigid-frame, high-riding SUVs went ignored.

In the case of the Times Square incident, even the cynics among us have been taken aback by the attention given to what appears to have been an astoundingly amateurish plot. Sifting through the blather about bullets dodged, we find that the various chemicals and hardware stashed in the Nissan Pathfinder were almost certainly incapable of inflicting mayhem on a large scale. According to a former NYPD bomb squad expert interviewed last Sunday, even if the device had functioned, “it would [have been] more of an incendiary event” than an explosion.

Nowadays, however, nuances such as these all but disappear under the weight of a decade of post-9/11 conditioning. Thus, the Times, in a front-page piece on Monday portentously titled, A Dread Revived: Terror in the Trunk, solemnly intoned that the ever-lurking threat of a car bomb was finally “brought home.” Lost in the cheap gravitas is that for more than a century car-borne threats have been striking home on every U.S. highway, street and sidewalk. Those victims usually, though not always, come in ones and twos.

There was the evening in December 2001, just months after 9/11, when a disoriented driver plowed his SUV into shoppers in front of Macy’s, killing seven. Earlier, there was the horrific spring day in 1992 when a driver mistook the accelerator for the brake pedal and killed five people and maimed dozens more inside Washington Square Park. Unlike the Pathfinder, these “car bombs” actually detonated.

It is true, as livable streets advocate Ken Coughlin reminded me the other day, that “there are two different kinds of terror here: the intentional kind where the idea is to scare a populace or government into submission; and the unintentional kind, where the outcome is often death, injury and fear but there is no other guiding hand than the failure of officials to pay adequate attention.”

Ken’s construct is valuable, yet under the grinding weight of tragedy after tragedy -- toddlers run over by an unattended van in Chinatown; a beloved Bronx community activist knocked off her bike and under a bus by a car door; moms, churchgoers, students struck down -- the distinction gets blurry. Consider Frances Cioffi, who on 9/11 ducked out of the 36th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower for a coffee just minutes before the first plane struck, only to be killed a few blocks away in 2008 by an SUV that a police officer said was traveling at 60 miles an hour. Grappling with the irony, I wrote, in a provocatively titled post, The Terrorists Have Won:

The driver who succeeded where al-Qaeda failed... has no known ties to Osama bin Laden. He does not come from Afghanistan, but Long Island. He is not a mullah or an imam, but the founder and CEO of a financial software company.

My bluntly stated point isn’t so different from Ken’s: Terror comes in many guises. Terrorist wannabes aside, in New York City, year in and year out, it comes 200 times a year to pedestrians and bicyclists, most of whom would still be alive [PDF] if the driver who struck them had adhered to traffic laws.

And so it goes. Dangerous driving deemed devoid of murderous intent is okay; bicycles hitched to “security-sensitive” fences are not. Putting law-enforcement personnel on bloated “anti-terror” details is an appropriate use of police; assigning them to enforce traffic laws protecting pedestrians and bicyclists is not. “Narrow escapes” such as Saturday evening in Times Square merit blanket coverage; the everyday bullying of millions of walkers and hundreds of thousands of bike riders is, well, everyday.

There is this ray of hope, however: in just three years, NYCDOT has made remarkable progress in re-purposing our streets in ways that may reduce the threat of car and truck bombs. While the creation of pedestrian spaces in Midtown, including Times Square, has been the agency’s most visible project, its emergent legacy also includes a cultural shift in the kinds of activities and vehicles considered appropriate in our city, particularly in the dense, transit-rich urban core.

We need not eliminate motor vehicles outright -- “don’t ban cars, bill them,” might be a rallying cry for congestion pricing. But changing the terms on which they are permitted into the city -- and by which they conduct themselves while there -- could be a path for improving security in the broadest sense.

Several years later, as I was helping finish up TA's Bicycle Blueprint, I gave myself a much harder task: to estimate the number of cycle trips in all of New York City over the course of a year. "We are traffic" was the new mantra, and it was time to take bicycle quantification to the next level.

The lone available datum, though, was DOT’s "screenline" count of 10,930 bikes crossing into or out of Manhattan south of 50th Street on a single day in 1990. I held my breath, made a bunch of heroic assumptions (e.g., how many Central Business District cycle trips never cross the screenline for each one that does, how cycling’s share of each borough’s total traffic compares to the CBD), and built an algorithm that extrapolated the screenline figure to the entire city.

My estimate: In 1990, 75,000 New Yorkers took a total of 265,000 cycle trips each day. Despite the guesswork, even a rough estimate was preferable to leaving the screenline figure to represent cycling citywide.

Fast forward to this year, when TA asked if I could update my estimates. I dusted off the algorithm and plugged in DOT’s latest screenline count, taken in 2009. The apparent finding was that on an average day last year, 236,000 people rode bikes for 1.8 million miles. Last month, though, when the Times’ David Goodman asked me to walk him through my calculations, I spotted a glitch: the city’s bicycle infrastructure and demographics had changed -- in particular, the CBD's share of overall city cycling had almost certainly fallen -- but I hadn’t updated the ratios by which I extrapolated from trips crossing the screenline to trips within the CBD and in the boroughs. Realizing this, I backed away from my numbers, which contributed to the budding controversy here on Streetsblog and in the Times.

To firm up my numbers, I devoted much of last week to expanding and tightening my model.

To more precisely account for the dropoff in cycling in the fall and winter, for example, I drew on estimates of seasonal variations from Charlie McCorkell, the engineer and bike store impresario who has been observing cycling trends here since the 1970s. Charlie also helped me quantify weekend cycling, which bumps up the averages (as does nighttime cycling, which the DOT also doesn’t count).

Most important, I downgraded my ancient estimate of the ratio of cycling inside the CBD to screenline-crossing cycling, and I set Brooklyn's bicycle mode share closer to Manhattan's. (Figure 3 in Rutgers Professor John Pucher’s impressive new paper on NYC cycling [PDF] was also helpful on that score.)

The revised model produces these numbers:

• On an average day in 2009, an estimated 201,000 different people rode bicycles in New York City. Their trips covered almost 1.7 million miles.
• Estimated bicycle miles traveled are now (in 2009) 2.5 percent as great as motor vehicle miles traveled in the five boroughs. Based on that estimate, and averaged across the city’s streets, highways and greenways, 1 out of 41 vehicles in motion is a bike.
• With three-year increases (2006 to 2009) of 75 percent in the number of people riding and 82 percent in bicycle miles, cycling in New York is booming like never before.

The last finding comes directly from the DOT’s screenline counts (PDF, see page 2), which are now taken on ten different days and show an average increase of 79 percent for the same three-year period. My estimates of 75 percent more NYC cyclists and 82 percent more city cycling pivot directly from that screenline increase, and will have to stand as a proxy for overall growth in cycling until the DOT broadens its bicycle counts.

I regret waiting so long to update the assumptions in my model, and I apologize for sowing confusion. But I’m heartened by the attention. We used to say, in the bygone days of bicycle advocacy, that a guy taking a bike ride could invent a cure for cancer and the “b-word” would keep the story out of the papers. Now the world is interested in bicycling quantification, and I’m delighted.

Can the model be improved? I’m sure it can. I invite you to take a close look at my algorithm, and I look forward to comments and suggestions. Of course, the best response would be for DOT to expand its counts geographically, not to mention seasonally. Part of mainstreaming cycling, as we termed it in the Bicycle Blueprint’s subtitle, is removing the guesswork from estimating it.

Until then, or until a better extrapolative model appears, I offer my estimate for 2009 of approximately 200,000 daily cyclists as rough but reasonable. And I believe the three-year increase rate of 75-80 percent is solid. The boom in NYC cycling is real.