Streetsblog New York City

New York in 1993 has been a topic of discussion since the New Museum opened its exhibit exploring the city of two decades ago. Now, another time capsule has been unearthed: a promotional video from Transportation Alternatives inviting New Yorkers to take part in Bike to Work Week.

While some things have remained the same — bike commuters can still score some free coffee and breakfast on Friday morning — the city’s streets and physical landscape have changed. Noah Budnick from Transportation Alternatives and Clarence Eckerson from Streetfilms both pointed out that some of the video was shot along the West Side Highway before Hudson River Park was built on land that had been parking lots.

For more information on the 2013 edition of Bike to Work Day, you don’t have to pick up your landline and call TA’s office. Instead, direct your computer (or phone) to the Bike to Work Day website for the complete schedule.

Next year, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge will mark its 50th anniversary. Although the structure was designed to accommodate pedestrian and bicycle paths, they were never included. Now, advocates are hoping a renewed push can close the gap in what they’re calling the Harbor Ring, a 50-mile loop around Upper New York Bay. This week, the initiative launched an online petition to Governor Cuomo, asking him to support the plan and move it forward.

Plans for a path on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge have been idle for years. A new petition asks Governor Cuomo to take action. Image: Ammann & Whitney, Department of City Planning

The petition is part of a renewed effort to build a path across the bridge after previous attempts stalled out. In 1997, the Department of City Planning commissioned a feasibility study by Ammann & Whitney, the bridge’s architect, to examine installing paths on the bridge. In 2003, Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed support for the plan. But a decade later, there are still only two times each year when New Yorkers can cross the span under their own power: the New York City Marathon, held every November, and the Five Boro Bike Tour each May.

Dave “Paco” Abraham, a Harbor Ring advocate, will be guiding Five Boro Bike Tour riders as they cross the bridge this year. ”Every year I’ve done the Five Boro bike ride,” he said, “Everybody stops on that bridge and takes a photo. It’s breathtaking. It’s why people go to the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s why the Walkway Over the Hudson [a rails-to-trails project in Poughkeepsie] opened.”

The same types of tourism, health, and transportation benefits those projects bring to San Francisco and Poughkeepsie make the project costs on the Verrazano worth the investment, said Abraham. ”We’re in the scale of tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions,” he said.

There are two MTA capital projects that could affect the path’s prospects. One is replacing and widening the upper deck to accommodate a bus and carpool lane; the other is the relocation ramps on the Brooklyn side between the bridge and the Belt Parkway. ”If they can take any way to incorporate [the path] into their capital projects one way or another, that would be wonderful,” said Meredith Sladek of Transportation Alternatives. A few weeks ago, a coalition of organizations including TA and the Regional Plan Association sent a letter to the MTA asking the agency to consider the path in its planning process.

Read more…

Today, Transportation Alternatives is launching CrashStories, a new website where pedestrians and cyclists can report crashes or near-misses with motor vehicle drivers on an interactive map. Developed by Hunter College city planning graduate student Aaron Fraint, the project aims to fill gaps in official data sources and offer a place for crash victims to be heard.

CrashStories asks pedestrians and cyclists to report crashes or near-misses on a map of New York City.

Data mapped by TA’s CrashStat tool, which originates from NYPD and is filtered by the state DMV and state DOT, tends to skew toward collisions with major injuries, leaving fender-benders and other, less severe crashes underrepresented in the data. “Everything else tends to get underreported or not reported at all,” said TA’s Jennifer Godzeno.

TA, said Godzeno, gets calls every day from people involved in minor crashes. ”If we can start to record that information in enough detail, then maybe we can start to intervene on streets or at intersections before tragedy even strikes,” Godzeno said.

The project grew out of a prototype developed for TA by Columbia University city planning students last year. Over the summer, Fraint was considering developing a similar tool as part of his fellowship at Hunter but couldn’t reach a broad audience to collect data. Meanwhile, TA was looking to move the prototype to the next level but didn’t have the internal capacity to develop the tool. In November, Fraint met with Godzeno.

“It was really the right place at the right time on both accounts,” Fraint said. “I don’t really have a way to reach 100,000 people the way they do.” Fraint and TA came to an agreement, and Fraint got to work. The service uses Shareabouts, a platform developed by Streetsblog’s parent organization, OpenPlans.

Fraint hopes to use the data to analyze the effectiveness of street designs. He also wants to compare CrashStories data to police crash reports. “Ideally, the same intersections would be identified as hot spots,” he said. Eventually, he hopes to launch CrashStories with partner organizations in other areas, and compare data between cities.

TA plans to use the tool as a component of its street safety advocacy, encouraging residents to enter their stories along particularly dangerous streets, providing information that can help convince decision makers to take action for safety.

“This site is a way to humanize the experience of having been in a crash or a near-miss,” while also putting the data to good use, said Godzeno. “Everybody tells us about this every day.”

At its annual membership meeting last night, Transportation Alternatives unveiled its transportation policy platform heading into the thick of this year’s election cycle. Primary day — September 10 — is less than six months away, and TA is calling on candidates in the mayoral and City Council races to include these principles in their campaign platforms:

1. Safe Neighborhood Streets For All: To ensure neighborhood streets offer safe space for local families, seniors and children to bike, walk and play, the City must fulfill local demand for Play Streets, 20 mph Slow Zones, bike lanes, Safe Routes to School and Safe Routes for Seniors in 50 neighborhoods a year.
2. Transportation Choice On Commercial Streets: To guarantee New Yorkers have the safe and convenient access to local businesses allowed by a robust variety of transportation choices, the City needs to provide protected bike lanes, Select Bus Service, bike share and pedestrian refuges and plazas on four major roadways in each of the city’s five boroughs each year.
3. Zero Tolerance Traffic Enforcement: To make New York City streets as safe as they can be, the New York City Police Department needs to enact a zero tolerance policy for dangerous driving by setting a multi-year goal of eliminating traffic deaths and cracking down on the deadliest traffic violations like speeding and failure to yield.

In June, TA will launch a website where supporters can send messages to candidates asking them to support safe streets. The site will also link to voter registration forms and information about the candidates.

Electeds and advocates have until June to push speed camera legislation through Albany, as the proposed NYC demonstration program was not part of this year’s state budget deal.

NYC's largest police union must be awfully pleased that Marty Golden has managed to block life-saving speed cameras, for now.

Speed cameras were included in the State Assembly budget. The program has the endorsement of Mayor Bloomberg, the City Council, and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. But despite overwhelming support from city government, State Senator Marty Golden joined the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in lobbying against the cameras, saying that speed enforcement should be the exclusive province of police officers.

Said Golden to the Daily News: “What we need are the actual police officers on the street. Cops on the street are what slows people down.”

In reality, traffic cameras are highly effective at reducing speeding, red light-running, and crashes. In D.C., speed cameras led to an 82 percent reduction in drivers exceeding the speed limit by 10 mph or more, according to Richard Retting, the director of safety and research at Sam Schwartz Engineering.

Regardless, as one of three Republicans in the Senate who represent the city, Golden has the power to head off whatever NYC-related legislation he doesn’t like, for whatever reason.

“The Senate was not supposed to be a problem, because so many of them aren’t from the city,” says Juan Martinez, general counsel for Transportation Alternatives. “The Assembly was supposed to be the issue.”

Though speed cameras now have the support of the Assembly, as of now there is no bill to move the program along this session. Martinez believes there’s still “a solid shot” that it will happen.

“Marty Golden does not know how to conquer speeding better than Ray Kelly does,” Martinez says. “That’s not a bad position to be in. Between now and the end of June, we just have to hustle harder.”

Speeding was the leading factor in fatal NYC crashes last year, according to NYC DOT. A 2009 TA study found that a NYC motorist could speed every day and get a ticket once every 35 years. Crash data compiled by Streetsblog show that since January 2012 at least five pedestrians have been killed by motorists in the precincts encompassed by Golden’s Senate district.

Multiple queries to Golden’s office have not been returned.

NYPD will increase the number of officers assigned to investigate serious traffic crashes, and will revise protocols that denied the possibility of justice to thousands of victims of vehicular violence, according to a letter from Commissioner Ray Kelly to the City Council. In another major shift, the department will stop using the word “accident” to describe traffic crashes, and the Accident Investigation Squad will soon be known as the Collision Investigation Squad.

Under long-standing NYPD procedures, drivers who injured pedestrians and cyclists, and who were sober and remained at the scene, were not investigated unless the victim died or was believed likely to die. This policy undermined or destroyed investigations into an untold number of crashes, including those that took the lives of Stefanos Tsigrimanis and Clara Heyworth. The new standards described by Kelly represent a significant step forward for the department’s crash response protocol, and should result in more investigations. However, they will apparently fall short of what is required by state law.

The number of crash investigators — currently 19 — will be increased, according to Kelly. The size of the increase is not known, but the Times reported Sunday that NYPD has for months assigned investigators to “dozens” of crashes that would not have warranted investigation under the “dead or likely to die” rule. The Times says “many” of those crashes have resulted in criminal charges.

Those charges could include reckless endangerment or third degree assault, says attorney Steve Vaccaro. Reckless endangerment requires proof that a driver was aware of a risk of seriously injuring someone else, Vaccaro says. “Third degree assault requires a lower level of culpable mental state. It requires that the driver not be aware of the risk, and the failure to perceive the risk was a gross deviation of what a reasonable person would have perceived.”

“I would think that third degree assault would be a major source of these criminal prosecutions, to the extent it’s true that NYPD is investigating cases outside of the dead or likely to die rule subset,” says Vaccaro.

According to Kelly’s letter, dated March 4, crash investigators will be “notified to respond when there has been a critical injury or when a Police Department duty captain believes the extent of injuries and/or unique circumstances of a collision warrant such action.” Critical injury status will be determined by utilizing existing FDNY EMS guidelines, defined “as a patient either receiving CPR, in respiratory arrest, or requiring and receiving life sustaining ventilator/circulatory support.” Changes in the NYPD Patrol Guide will provide officers with “additional guidance” when determining whether crash investigators should be notified, and will require patrol personnel to confer with EMS at the scene.

In cases that do not result in criminal prosecution, a summons for failure to exercise due care, or merely the gathering of evidence — functions limited to AIS — will be of great help to victims. But many crashes may still fall through the cracks.

Read more…

To read the Daily News analysis of 2012 summons data, you’d think NYPD has reckless driving completely under control. While the story throws out a lot of purportedly high figures, as usual the tabloid’s perspective is distorted by the windshield.

NYPD may have stopped as few as 19,119 speeding drivers in city neighborhoods in 2012. Overall traffic enforcement was down 20 percent from four years prior. Photo: Daily News

NYPD issued a total of 1,020,754 moving violations last year [PDF]. That’s down slightly from 2011 (1,062,889 total), and a marked drop from other recent years — roughly 1.2 million per year from FY ’05 through FY ’08. And as we’ve reported before, merely counting tickets is not helpful in measuring the extent to which motorists are breaking traffic laws.

NYPD wrote 71,305 speeding summonses in 2012 (down from 76,493 in 2011). We asked analyst Charles Komanoff for his estimate of how many instances of speeding there are in NYC in a year, based on the Transportation Alternatives 2009 finding that 39 percent of city motorists clocked with radar guns and speed cameras were speeding.

There are roughly 24 billion motor vehicle miles traveled per year citywide, says Komanoff. “If the average trip is four miles, we have six billion motor vehicle trips per year. If 20 percent of those trips have at least one ‘speeding moment’ — halving TA’s 39 percent figure, to account for study bias toward arterials — then 1.2 billion trips include speeding.”

Seventy-one thousand speeding summonses for 1.2 billion “speeding moment” trips would equate to just six summonses for every 100,000 trips during which a driver exceeds the speed limit, Komanoff says. Even with a significant margin of error, that’s a lot of motorists getting away with putting others at risk.

For some idea of how enforcement stacks up against violations in a specific neighborhood, our back-of-envelope calculation for Manhattan’s 34th Precinct found that, in Inwood alone, 5.3 million drivers a year could be ticketed for speeding, again based on TA’s 39 percent figure. The 34th Precinct issued 52 speeding summonses in 2012.

There’s more. The News reported that 52,186 speeding tickets were issued on highways. If that figure is counted among the 71,305 total, in 2012 NYPD stopped just 19,119 motorists for speeding through neighborhoods.

Read more…

Christine Quinn remains noncommittal on whether NYPD should investigate maimings and killings on NYC streets. Photo: James Estrin/New York Times/Redux

It was a year ago today that the City Council transportation committee, led by James Vacca and Peter Vallone Jr., convened a hearing on pedestrian and cyclist safety and the failure of NYPD to properly investigate traffic crashes.

“Driving in our city is a privilege, not a right,” said Vacca, to a room packed with victims of vehicular violence and their loved ones, safe streets advocates, and media. Of dangerous drivers, Vacca said: “I want to know what the police department is doing to track down these scofflaws. We have to bring these people to their senses. We don’t accept gun violence as a way to die. We shouldn’t accept traffic deaths as a way to die either.”

Vacca and Vallone listened sympathetically to hours of testimony from those whose lives were forever altered by traffic crashes, and whose misery was often compounded by an inept and indifferent NYPD. Council members learned that the department has just 19 officers assigned to its Accident Investigation Squad, and that no one else on the force has the authority to charge a motorist with careless driving, much less a serious crime, unless the officer witnesses a violation.

“There will be laws arising out of this,” said Vallone, who grilled NYPD brass alongside Jessica Lappin, Gale Brewer, Dan Garodnick, Steve Levin, Letitia James, Brad Lander, Dan Halloran, and Vincent Ignizio.

Five months later, council members introduced the Crash Investigation Reform Act. Among its provisions was the formation of a multi-agency task force charged with reforming NYPD crash investigation protocols, which allow thousands of serious injuries to go uninvestigated every year, in violation of state law.

Since last July, the Crash Investigation Reform Act has gone nowhere. Vallone has pretty much been a no-show on matters of street safety, while Vacca spent the rest of the year targeting delivery cyclists and working to make it easier for motorists to park.

Speaker Christine Quinn, whose imprimatur is essential to moving legislation through the council, has not taken a position on NYPD crash investigation reforms.

Read more…

This woman waiting for the M4 in Washington Heights may have to wait a lot longer: it is the city's least reliable bus. Photo: Susan NYC/Flickr

Since 2006, Streetsblog has provided red carpet coverage of the annual Pokey and Schleppie awards, given out by the Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives to the city buses with the slowest average speed and the least reliable service, respectively. This year, Manhattan buses took the crown in both categories.

Although the awards spotlight the routes most notorious for crawling through traffic, stopping at every block, and bunched three in a row, there is a bright spot: Select Bus Service has been living up to its promises — with more routes set to get the speedier service in the coming years.

In the survey, the Bx12 SBS on Fordham Road and Pelham Parkway traveled at 7.9 mph, 19.6 percent faster than the Bx12 local’s 6.6 mph. Meanwhile, on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, M15 Select buses moved along at 7.8 mph — 50 percent faster than the M15 local, which lumbered at 5.2 mph.

These numbers didn’t come from nowhere: Although not as robust as Bus Rapid Transit in other cities, SBS features limited-stop service, camera-enforced bus lanes, off-board fare collection and, in many cases, transit priority at stop lights. Buses without these improvements remain stuck in gridlock.

The result? This year, there is a tie for the Pokey award, with the M66 and M42 crosstown buses both clocking in at 3.9 mph. In a statement, Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign said these buses “would lose a race to an amusement park bumper car,” which can hit top speeds of 4.3 mph.

Straphangers and TA analyzed bus data citywide, and each borough has its very own Pokey award winner. The full list, plus the highly-anticipated Schleppie award results, after the jump.

Read more…

After a fatal crash in her district, a state representative from Queens is again calling on Albany to double fines for speeding, but with NYPD issuing few tickets, lax traffic enforcement continues to be the biggest obstacle to safer streets.

Assembly Member Barbara Clark

Barbara Clark, State Assembly Member from Queens Village, introduced a bill in May that would double speeding fines for violations that occur in “residential neighborhoods.” Clark spoke up for the bill most recently after a November crash that killed a motorist in Cambria Heights.

Clark told the Times Ledger that she introduced the bill after efforts to boost enforcement and the installation of speed humps failed to slow traffic.

“Not only have I pressed each and every commander of the three police precincts that cover the 33rd Assembly District for increased enforcement, but I have also again and again requested each and every commissioner of the Department of Transportation to install speed reducers at countless locations throughout the district,” Clark said.

“And while these efforts have led to both temporary periods of increased enforcement and the limited installation of speed bumps, an overarching solution has been hampered by institutional constraints,” she continued. “On the one hand, a sustained enforcement program has fallen prey to a police department lacking the personnel to consistently assign officers to it. On the other hand, the widespread installation of speed reducers has been prevented by a Department of Transportation restricted by its own rules and regulations as to where they can be placed.”

While NYC DOT has in recent years made great strides in engineering for street safety, traffic enforcement continues to be a low priority for NYPD. The 33rd Assembly District is policed by the 103rd, 105th and 113th Precincts. Those three precincts combined issued just 523 speeding tickets in all of 2011, according to NYPD data. With 346 speeding citations logged as of October, the precincts were on track to issue a total of 415 summonses in 2012.

Increasing fines may discourage speeding to some extent, says Juan Martinez of Transportation Alternatives, but a robust automated enforcement program would be more effective.

“A typical speeding ticket is between 100 and 300 bucks,” says Martinez. “Especially once you add in a state surcharge, it’s a hefty sum. And then to double that, that’s a deterrent.”

Though the speed camera program proposed for New York City would levy lower fines — $50 to $100 per violation — and would not attach points to drivers licenses, Martinez says the increased likelihood of receiving a ticket is key to altering behavior. “The real deterrent would be automatic enforcement,” says Martinez, “or at least more pervasive enforcement.”

Read more…