On Delancey Street, DOT will extend sidewalks at every intersection with a star, with the largest expansion at the north side of Delancey and Clinton. On the south side of Delancey, a service road will be converted to pedestrian space. Image: NYC DOT

The crosswalks will be getting shorter on Delancey Street — one of the city’s deadliest corridors — thanks to a new safety plan from the Department of Transportation [PDF]. At 14 of 19 crossings between Clinton Street and the Bowery, neckdowns will extend the sidewalk into the street, making the distance across the extremely wide street a bit more manageable. While DOT found ways to add pedestrian space where it could, however, the department rejected options, some of which were very popular, that would interfere with the heavy traffic headed to and from the Williamsburg Bridge.

The changes to Delancey focus on the dangerous blocks approaching the Williamsburg Bridge. Cyclist Jeffrey Axelrod and pedestrians Patricia Cuevas and Dashane Santana were killed by drivers along these blocks in the last year alone. Over a five year period, 129 people were injured in traffic crashes at both Delancey and Essex and Delancey and Clinton.

The most extensive changes will come at Delancey and Clinton, the intersection right by the bridge entrance. Right now, the distance across Delancey is an incredible 165 feet, including a 30 foot median. “It begins to look more like a highway than a normal street,” said DOT bicycle and pedestrian director Josh Benson. “It gives a perception to motorists that they’ve entered a new environment, that it’s not a neighborhood street anymore.”

On the north side of Delancey, the sidewalk will be extended into the street a full 49 feet using paint and planters. The first lane coming off the bridge is a right-turn only lane, and there’s no reason for the space directly in front of it to remain open to traffic. “What we can do is capture that space, formalize it, and make it safe for people to walk to that place in the crosswalk,” said Benson.

Across the street, the service road for Delancey will be filled in and turned into pedestrian space: 14,160 square feet between Norfolk and Clinton.

On the other end of the corridor, at Bowery, another large neckdown will be installed at the southern end of the intersection. As Kenmare becomes Delancey at that intersection, each half of the street abruptly widens from two lanes to four. That means there’s a lot of extra road space, some of which is being reclaimed for pedestrians. The road will now widen to four lanes more gradually.

Under a new traffic pattern, drivers will be allowed to turn onto the Williamsburg Bridge from Clinton Street. Click to enlarge.

DOT also plans to allow drivers to turn onto the bridge from Clinton Street, which will be turned into a one-way northbound street between Grand and Delancey. The goal, said Benson, is to reduce the number of blocks drivers travel through the neighborhood when they go from the FDR Drive to the Williamsburg Bridge. Additionally, the presence of turning cars at Clinton Street might make eastbound Delancey drivers honor that red light more than they do currently. Bike access on Clinton would be maintained with a two-way bike lane.

Three new left turn restrictions would reduce turning conflicts where Delancey intersects with Chrystie, Allen, and Essex. Half of all pedestrians hit on Delancey Street are struck while they have the walk signal, according to Benson.

The improvements will be in place by June, when construction work ends on the bridge and a permanent traffic pattern is back in place.

Generally, the improvements earned commendations from local residents.

“This is more than I actually expected and I’m very pleased about it,” said CB 3 transportation committee chair David Crane. The improvements also won support from the Delancey Street Safety Working Group, made up of State Senator Daniel Squadron, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Council Member Margaret Chin, Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh, and Council Member Rosie Mendez.

Many, however, wanted to see additional safety improvements that DOT was unwilling to make. “We continue to feel that the lights to cross Delancey need to be lengthened,” said April Lewis, a member of the community organization Manhattan Together.

Benson, however, said that while DOT is studying retiming the signals, no major changes are in the works, lest Williamsburg Bridge traffic be negatively affected. “There might be a second here, a second there,” he said. “Making a radical shift in that could have some pretty significant impacts on traffic flow.”

“You are talking about, basically, appeasements,” responded one man standing at the back of the room. “The philosophy would be cars over people.”

Similarly, many community members complained that the traffic enforcement agents stationed at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge wave through traffic without the slightest regard for pedestrians or walk lights. When the agents are stationed there, said Crane, “there effectively is zero pedestrian crossing time.”

Also off the table was any reduction in space for traffic on or off the bridge. DOT won’t change the core width of Delancey Street while all that bridge traffic is pouring over it. For now, one can only wonder what the agency might have been willing to do had congestion pricing passed Sheldon Silver’s Assembly in 2008, or if the Fare Hike Four hadn’t killed bridge tolls in the State Senate in 2009.

The Delancey Street Safety Working Group will continue to meet, however, so more safety improvements could be added at a later date. “It is rare to get a government agency to move so aggressively and so quickly, and also to do it hand in hand with the community,” said Squadron, who added that more needs to be done. After the meeting, he mentioned bicycle safety and the quality of the median as two potential areas for improvement. “This is not the end of this,” he said.

The city's first 20 miles per hour slow zone, in the Claremont neighborhood of the Bronx, uses "gateway" treatments to slow drivers entering the zone. Neighborhoods across the city want to be the next to get the new safety treatment. Photo: Noah Kazis

The deadline to apply to NYC DOT for a neighborhood slow zone is tomorrow, and groups from many different corners of New York are making their case for bringing a 20 mph speed limit and traffic calming measures to their neighborhoods.

“We are hearing from people applying for zones all over the city,” said Lindsey Ganson, Transportation Alternatives’ safety campaign director.

One exciting application comes from the Bronx Helpers, the team of middle and high-schoolers who have been fighting for safety improvements near their school at 172nd Street and Townsend for two years. The group started by asking just for a stop sign, collecting over 1,000 signatures from their neighbors. When DOT rejected their request without explanation, the group teamed up with TA, measured speeding with radar guns and counted pedestrian volumes, and changed their request to emphasize traffic calming.

Now the Bronx Helpers are working through DOT’s new slow zone program to try and get neighborhood-wide safety fixes. “We thought it was a great opportunity to expand and make the whole area more pedestrian-friendly,” said Bronx Helpers staff member Molly Berman.

The group applied for the entirety of the Mt. Eden section of the Bronx, located between 174th Street, 170th Street, the Grand Concourse and Jerome Avenue. With four schools, two daycares and a senior center in the area, it’s a neighborhood with lots of pedestrians who need safer streets.

Signing on in support of the slow speed zone are a slew of neighborhood groups and some prominent political figures. Three school principals wrote letters of support, as did a tenants’ rights organization, Bronx Community Board 4, and the Deputy Borough President, Aurelia Greene.

Also writing in support of the proposal is Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.”I believe it is clear that their proposed Slow Zone — from 10th to 174th and Grand Concourse to Jerome Avenue — is based on strong stakeholder engagement and presents compelling evidence of the need for greater pedestrian safety,” de Blasio wrote in a letter to DOT.

In Rego Park, Queens, Council Member Karen Koslowitz is championing the neighborhood’s slow zone application. The Rego Park Green Alliance submitted the bid for the triangle between Woodhaven Boulevard, 63rd Drive and the Long Island Railroad tracks. In addition to writing DOT, Koslowitz promised to bring the department on a tour of the neighborhood, said Yvonne Shortt, who has helped lead the push for the slow zone.

“I applied because on December 22, I saw a girl almost killed by two cars speeding and traveling in opposite directions on the narrow streets of Alderton,” Shortt told Streetsblog. “That was the last straw.” Residents and local businesses alike have signed her petition showing neighborhood support for slower speeds. Shortt argued that her neighborhood’s residential character makes it a good fit for the 20 mph zone. “Cars don’t realize how narrow the streets are. They’re already going too fast.”

The Fort Greene Association has perhaps the most ambitious proposal, asking for not one but two separate slow zones. “It didn’t seem fair to exclude one neighborhood,” explained Laura MacNeil, a member of the association’s livable streets committee.

MacNeil said that the genesis of the slow speed zone requests came in a survey she sent out to neighborhood residents last fall, asking about their transportation priorities for the neighborhood. Traffic calming came in at number one, both among residents on larger avenues and smaller residential roads. ”The slow zone seemed like a great way to systematically address a lot of the concerns that were mentioned,” MacNeil said. In a follow-up survey specifically about the slow zones, MacNeil heard from a number of residents asking for the slow zone to extend out to their block, but not from a single person opposed to the idea.

Among local leaders, too, the slow zone has significant support. City Council Member Letitia James, Assembly Member Joseph Lentol, and the Myrtle Avenue BID have all signed on in favor of the slow zone, as have a number of block associations.

In other neighborhoods, groups that want to apply have had a difficult time working within the rules governing this first round of slow zones. The Brownsville Partnership, for example, almost didn’t submit its application for a slow zone since it is neither a civic association, BID, or community board, said Nupur Chaudhury, who is managing the Partnership’s “Creating Healthy Places” project. Today the organization secured the local community board as a partner, and will file a joint application for a Brownsville slow zone, she said.

On the Upper West Side, it was the geography of the neighborhood that proved challenging. DOT is looking for areas roughly five blocks by five blocks, with clear geographic boundaries inside of which are only residential streets. On the Upper West Side, where most of the north-south streets are busy commercial arterials, such a location was hard to find, said Upper West Side Streets Renaissance organizer Lisa Sladkus.

Given the nature of the neighborhood, said Sladkus, her organization is pushing instead for a neighborhood-wide 20 mph speed limit, as was reported by the Columbia Spectator. That kind of change would fall well outside DOT’s current practices, but Sladkus is hoping to build support among schools and senior centers and then the community board.

Slow zone applications have been submitted or considered in at least three other neighborhoods, according to TA’s Ganson. David Sheppard, whose fiancee Sonya Powell was killed by a speeding driver, is working on an application for the Wakefield neighborhood of the Bronx, where she was hit. You can sign the Prospect Heights Development Corporation’s petition supporting their slow zone proposal here. And at a Park Slope Civic Council forum on slow zones, 90 percent of people were in favor of installing one on their street.

“These zones will have a dramatic impact on safety in the selected communities and will raise awareness about the dangers of speeding citywide,” said Ganson. “The demand for them in just the first year of the program has been extraordinary.”

New Yorkers submitted dozens of suggestions for bike-share station locations in Chelsea alone. Next week, local residents are invited to a Community Board 4 meeting to determine where stations will go. Image: NYC DOT

When bike-share launches this summer, 10,000 new public bicycles will be available at 600 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The stations will typically be located about 1,000 feet apart from each other, ensuring a quick walk to a public bike from anywhere below 79th Street and in northwest Brooklyn. The exact location of the stations — this corner or that one, on the street or on the sidewalk — is largely up to each neighborhood to decide. The hyper-local planning begins next week at a workshop for the Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen neighborhoods [PDF] and continues throughout the service area over the next two months.

Last fall, DOT officials said that public comments will help determine where to place bike-share stations. Community boards can say “the following locations are ‘hell no’ for whatever reasons,” DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt told Manhattan CB 2 last October. The stations have to be spaced appropriately and follow certain guidelines — no stations on narrow sidewalks or in parking spaces on busy avenues, for example — but within those constraints locals will get to choose where the bikes go.

Next Tuesday, the city’s first bike-share planning workshop will take place. Hosted by Manhattan Community Board 4, State Senator Tom Duane and Assembly Member Richard Gottfried, the event will be an important opportunity for people who live or work in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen to help shape this significant addition to the New York City streetscape. The difference between a bike-share system where most stations are on the sidewalk and one where most stations are in the curbside lane may be determined at these meetings, for example.

After Tuesday’s meeting, the next workshop will be the following week and cover Manhattan Community Board 2′s district: SoHo, Tribeca and the West Village. For a full and up-to-date listing of the workshops, including time and location, head over to DOT’s bike-share timeline.

A redesign of this Atlantic Avenue on-ramp to the BQE should make walking to Brooklyn Bridge Park easier and safer. Image: Google Maps

Just one of the many problems with running an interstate highway through the heart of an urban area is what to do with the on-ramps and off-ramps. Motorists accustomed to freeway speeds, or eager to reach them, can drive more aggressively than normal and without as much regard for pedestrians and cyclists. At one on-ramp to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, where increasing numbers of people are crossing to reach the new Brooklyn Bridge Park, DOT hopes to make things safer with a new intersection design and an end to right turns on red [PDF].

DOT proposes putting a new traffic island in the middle of the Atlantic Avenue/BQE on-ramp. The island cuts the crossing distance for pedestrians, previously 80 feet, into two pieces, creating a safer path for those headed to the park.

The redesign shortens crossing distances for pedestrians and prevents illegal turns across their right-of-way. Image: NYC DOT

Extending back from the island will be a line of bollards and striping to more clearly divide the right turn lane from the through lane: no more right turns from the left lane. The drivers waiting in the right turn lane will also have to wait for a proper green light to turn onto the highway. The intersection had been one of the few in the city where right turns on red were allowed, though only during the morning rush.

Last year, DOT reduced the right-turn-on-red hours at the on-ramp, but neighborhood leaders including City Council Member Brad Lander and State Senator Dan Squadron continued to push for additional safety upgrades.

Additionally, east-bound drivers turning left onto the highway ramp tended to illegally run a red light due to a confusingly placed traffic signal, according to DOT. In the re-design, a second traffic island with a new signal should make it clear to left-turning drivers that they have to wait for a green light.

The transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 2 approved the plans for the on-ramp earlier this week by a vote of 11 to 0.

During the same meeting, DOT also presented some changes [PDF] to its plans for safer Brooklyn Bridge Park access at Old Fulton Street. There, additional safety improvements like new sidewalk extensions at the intersection of Vine and Doughty Street and an extended median on Old Fulton were paired with the elimination of one sidewalk bulb-out due to community input.

A line of yellow parking sensors, each roughly the size of a hockey puck, lines a block of East 187th Street in the Bronx. Photo: Noah Kazis

New York City took a significant step today toward modernizing the way it allocates scarce curbside parking spaces, but it remains to be seen whether the city will embrace the full potential its new parking tech.

At a press conference in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx this morning, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca announced the installation of 177 parking sensors. Using magnets, the sensors can detect not only the presence of a vehicle, but the moment individual cars enter or leave spaces and the “magnetic signature” of individual vehicles. The sensors can be linked to parking meters and to enforcement officers in real-time.

The city hopes to use this batch of sensors to test out a smartphone app showing drivers how many on-street spaces are open on a given block. But more transformative changes like using the sensors to rationalize parking pricing, as in San Francisco, or to beef up parking enforcement as is common in Europe, aren’t yet in the works for New York City.

For the next three months, the city will just be checking to see whether the sensors can stand up to “the rigors of the streets of New York,” said Sadik-Khan, including inclement weather and street-sweeping.

If the sensors are tough enough, the city expects to unveil its parking app sometime around April. For a given stretch of spaces, the app will tell drivers whether there are fewer than two spaces available, two to three, or four or more. “We’re making it easier for drivers to park,” said Sadik-Khan. Neither the parking regulations in the area nor parking enforcement will change, she said.

A mock-up of a potential design for DOT's parking app was presented at a conference last November. At that point, Transportation Commissioner Sadik-Khan promised that the sensor technology would also be used to dynamically price on-street parking.

Vacca applauded the efforts to make parking easier. “We want people to come to Arthur Avenue,” he said, referring to the nearby Italian commercial corridor. “When you can’t get that parking space, you want to turn around and go back where you came from.”

Other cities around the world use parking sensors to do far more than lead drivers to an open space, however. San Francisco’s SFPark program, for example, uses similar technology to price on-street parking in line with demand: Parking rates are raised or lowered to ensure there’s usually one space open per block. Los Angeles’s ExpressPark system, launching this spring, will add enforcement into the mix, using the sensors to guide traffic officers to the areas where they’ll be most needed. In Paris, both traffic enforcement officers and drivers receive a text message when their meter has expired, a policy that the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy identified as helping reduce the use of private automobiles there.

New York has its own program, called ParkSmart, to align curbside parking prices with demand, and the city has shown interest in the full range of applications for parking sensors. When the Bloomberg administration notified companies in 2010 that the city was interested in next-generation parking tech, DOT hoped to not only use sensors for dynamic pricing and enforcing meter violations, but to crack down on placard abuse as well. And last November, Sadik-Khan told a tech conference that New York City’s smart parking technology would be used to manage the price of parking. But it’s not clear from today’s announcement whether data from the new sensors will be used to help set meter rates.

When asked whether those functions were still being pursued, Sadik-Khan said, “That’s not the intention right now.” She did say that once the city had parking data reliably coming in, there will be “all sorts of opportunities.”

The pilot project was paid for entirely by three vendors potentially interested in bidding on a larger project: Streetline, ACS, and IPsens. The sensors, which go two to a space, cost $250 each, though the city would likely get a bulk discount if it pursued a large-scale implementation.

By installing eight bike racks, DOT created a “daylighting” effect, improving visibility at the intersection. The bike parking is much less intrusive than parked cars and helps everyone at the intersection see everyone else. Oh yeah, and now there are a dozen new places to park bikes without taking away any space from Smith Street’s busy sidewalks.

For another look at on-street bike parking, check out Streetfilms’ 2008 tour of Portland, Oregon’s bike corrals.

The Bronx's second Select Bus Service route is planned for Webster Avenue, marked as #1 on this map of high-priority routes for bus improvements. Image: NYC DOT/MTA

A new crop of bus routes is moving into the pipeline for implementation as Select Bus Service. The MTA and NYC DOT are in the initial stages of bringing SBS to the Bronx’s Webster Avenue, where the most unreliable bus in the borough runs, and to Brooklyn’s Utica Avenue, the second-busiest bus route in the city.

The innovations of SBS — pre-paid boarding, dedicated bus lanes, priority at traffic signals — have sped buses and attracted new riders on Fordham Road, First and Second Avenues, and 34th Street. And they can work on bus lines all over the city. So as the first round of SBS implementation comes to a close (lines on Nostrand Avenue and Hylan Boulevard are scheduled for completion in the next year or two), the development of new routes is a welcome signal that the MTA and NYC DOT are committed to bringing bus improvements to more New Yorkers.

The city’s first Select Bus Service line launched on Fordham Road in the Bronx in 2008, and it’s been a smashing success. Bus speeds increased by 20 percent and ridership by 30 percent. So expanding SBS to more routes in the borough is a no-brainer. The choice of the Bx41 for the upgrade was first reported in the Daily News yesterday.

“There was a lot of support in the Bronx for doing a route along Webster Avenue,” an MTA spokesperson told Streetsblog. “This would be a full-fledged SBS route with all the features offered by the Bx12 and the M15.”

Running down Webster, the Bx41 has relatively high ridership — 7.6 million annual riders — but was ranked the most unreliable bus in the borough this year by the Straphangers Campaign. Perhaps in part because of all that bus bunching, ridership on the route has been in free fall. The Bx41 saw one million fewer trips in 2010 than in 2009, according to the MTA.

There’s no roll-out date for the Bx41 yet, according to the MTA, and any eventual route will need to go through a public review process.

Though there’s no mention of Webster Avenue on the joint NYC DOT/MTA website dedicated to SBS, there is a new page on that site marking the start of planning for bus improvements along Brooklyn’s Utica Avenue.

Both Webster and Utica Avenues were identified as targets for bus improvements in a 2009 joint DOT/MTA study mapping out potential routs for the second phase of Select Bus Service. Each was considered an “underserved area”: a corridor that was far from the subway yet densely developed.

Along Utica, it’s not yet clear what shape the bus improvements would take. DOT started conducting a study on both transit and traffic safety conditions this October — in addition to carrying 16 million annual bus riders, Utica is also one of Brooklyn’s most dangerous streets — and the study will be complete this spring, according to the website. The study only covers a stretch of Utica a bit longer than a mile, however, between St. John’s Place and Church Avenue. Once the study is complete, DOT will develop a menu of options to improve safety and transit service and present them to the public.

An intersection redesign at Ocean and Parkside Avenues will close a Prospect Park entrance to automobiles. DOT predicts the change will prevent ten people from being injured every year. Image: NYC DOT

After years of neighborhood activism, the Department of Transportation plans to install much-needed safety improvements at the dangerous intersection of Ocean Avenue and Parkside Avenue, at the southeast corner of Prospect Park. By closing a park entrance to automobiles, DOT will simplify the intersection and shrink the space dedicated to traffic, preventing an estimated ten injuries per year [PDF].

On average, 20 people are injured every year at the corner of Ocean and Parkside, placing it in the top two percent of the most dangerous intersections in Brooklyn, according to the Department of Transportation. The juncture of two wide avenues is complicated by the further intersection of a park drive entrance. The five-point intersection is right next to a subway station; thousands of people cross the street to get to the train every say.

Neighborhood residents have been pushing for a safety fix for years; Streetsblog first covered their campaign in 2008. Now, the redesign is set to be put in place by July, 2012, according to local activist Carrie McLaren, who attended a meeting about the project with DOT Tuesday night.

The key to the safety improvements is closing the park drive entrance to automobiles. That shift allows DOT to create some new pedestrian space and realign the heavily-traveled crosswalks. By putting the crosswalks closer to the points where drivers execute their turns, the redesign should make motorists more aware of people walking across the street. That should help reduce the incidence of dangerous failure-to-yield violations: More than half of the pedestrian crashes at the intersection took place when the pedestrian had the walk signal.

All told, the redesign will shrink the space between the crosswalks from around 6,900 square feet to 3,400 square feet. DOT is predicting big safety gains: By their estimate, the number of crashes and injuries should drop by half, preventing ten people from being injured every year.

“I’m thrilled with the plan because it closes off the park entrance to cars, shrinks the intersection, and makes it much easier for everyone involved to travel safely,” said McLaren.

The city doesn’t expect closing the park entrance to increase congestion. Currently, the entrance is only open to traffic for two hours on weekday mornings, and only 360 vehicles use the entrance on a given day. That’s just one percent of all the traffic passing through the intersection in a day; DOT doesn’t project significant traffic disruptions as a result.

To put it a different way, in the same two hours that 360 cars enter the park at that corner, 1,300 pedestrians walk across the intersection of Ocean and Parkside.

In addition to making safety improvements, DOT is also reworking curbside regulations on Parkside Avenue to make room for a larger bus stop and delivery space for a supermarket.

NYC DOT's screenline bike count has doubled since 2007. Full graphic available in this PDF.

The New York City Department of Transportation recorded an eight percent increase in the number of people biking into Manhattan below 50th street this year. The bike count has now doubled since 2007, when the city’s first on-street protected bike lane was installed on Ninth Avenue.

This year’s increase is less than the double-digit increases of recent years, and it appears to have been hampered by construction work on the Manhattan Bridge, which has forced cyclists to detour onto the Bowery, with all its barreling truck traffic, on inbound trips. The city released a preliminary bike count in the spring that found a bigger increase — 14 percent — before the construction detour took effect.

NYC DOT’s screenline count measures cyclists crossing the four East River bridges, the Hudson River Greenway at 50th Street, and riding the Staten Island Ferry. It’s the best hard count of cycling activity available but doesn’t capture bike trips outside the city core.

In addition to the new bike count, NYC DOT announced that it is expanding its program to convert defunct coin-slot parking meters into bike parking. The department has transmogrified 175 meters so far and plans to convert thousands more. They are currently reviewing responses to an RFP seeking to repurpose 6,000 meters as bike racks.

“Our infrastructure needs to keep pace with new demands on city streets,” transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said in a statement. “By transforming obsolete parking meters into off-the-rack bike parking, we are recycling old facilities to meet this growing need.”

An additional 6,000 bike racks would represent nearly a 50 percent increase over the current total of 13,000. While the number of racks has skyrocketed in the last few years, DOT needs to make up for the loss of tens of thousands of decommissioned parking meters that functioned as de facto bike parking spaces.

With today’s announcement, DOT seems to have hit one of the benchmarks in its Sustainable Streets strategic plan, which set out to double bicycling rates compared to 2007 levels by 2012. The next target: Tripling the 2007 baseline cycling rate by 2017.

Dwayne Marshall, an East Harlem elementary school student, was one of many neighborhood residents who stood up in support of protected bike lanes last night. Photo: Concrete Safaris

At a long and at points contentious public hearing last night, a clear majority of speakers came out in support of protected bike lanes on First and Second Avenues in East Harlem. In addition to local residents, the public health community came out in force to demolish the opposition’s claim that installing bike lanes could worsen the neighborhood’s asthma rates.

Community Board 11 had previously voted overwhelmingly in favor of the lanes, then rescinded its vote in the face of business opposition. Last night’s testimony sets the stage for another vote on the project, perhaps in January.

More than 30 people spoke in support of the bike lanes, while only seven spoke against. The larger audience, a packed room of over one hundred, seemed to have a similar proportion of supporters to opponents. Local activist James Garcia also brought a petition with 850 signatures in support of the bike lanes, an amount he said only took seven hours to gather.

The community’s elected leadership continued their sustained fight to bring safer streets to East Harlem.

“Our public roadways are a public amenity that belong to every single individual who lives in our community,” said Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito, who stayed for the full three-hour hearing. She argued that building complete streets not only protects people who already bike but also helps seniors cross the street and lets parents feel comfortable having their kids get on bikes. “I believe very strongly that this is a social justice issue. Our community doesn’t deserve any less than any other community, and our children don’t deserve any less.”

“As cycling becomes more popular among city dwellers,” State Senator José Serrano said in a prepared statement read by an aide, bike riders “deserve to have safe travel like pedestrians or drivers.”

The bike lanes had two strong bases of support in the neighborhood’s student population and in the public health community. Speaking first last night in order to be able to make it home for bedtime were seven elementary school students from the Concrete Safaris afterschool program. “Biking is good because you don’t get diabetes and pollute the air,” said a girl named Abigail. “I think East Harlem should have bike lanes. You get a ticket if you ride on the sidewalk and it’s extra-scary when you have to ride in a car lane,” argued Dwayne Marshall.

Three students from the Coalition School for Social Change, a high school located on First Avenue, also spoke in favor of the lane. They had participated in a DOT-led visioning process for the street and saw the bike lanes as part of a larger project to enliven the street and improve safety. “We would love them,” said one student. “Please approve them so that we can ride our green wheels safely to schools.”

Last night’s speakers also debated the public health implications of installing protected bike lanes. East Harlem suffers from elevated rates of asthma, diabetes and obesity, so health is a top concern for most families there. Erik Mayor, the owner of local business Milk Burger, again appealed to those concerns in arguing against the bike lanes. “The traffic conditions will get worse. It’s common sense,” he claimed. “Greater congestion creates greater emissions from vehicles.”

However, a parade of experts each testified that the lanes would, in fact, improve public health. “There is no evidence to suggest that bike lanes increase asthma rates,” said Joanne Eichel of the New York Academy of Medicine. “On the contrary, we know that riding a bike has extraordinary health benefits.”

Discussing both the expected safety improvements from the protected lanes and pedestrian refuge islands and the increased physical activity that comes from more walking and cycling, Eichel said the installation of the bike lanes would be “a major step toward improving the health of people of all ages in the community.”

La’Shawn Brown-Dudley, the deputy director of the Department of Health’s local district public health office, said her office hadn’t seen bike lanes worsen asthma anywhere in the city, but did see them as a way of encouraging healthy lifestyles. “We at the Health Department support the inclusion of these bike lanes,” she said. The bike lanes also won endorsements from Javier Lopez, the director of the New York City Strategic Alliance for Health, and two Mt. Sinai pediatricians, Kevin Chatham Stevens and Cappy Collins.

The opposition to the bike lane was fierce, if not widespread, and included every anti-bike lane trope in the book. “I love bicycles, it’s just not for First Avenue,” argued Frank Brija, the owner of Patsy’s Pizzeria who wanted to move the lanes to Pleasant and Paladino Avenues, which run for ten non-contiguous blocks east of First.

Mayor not only argued that the bike lanes would worsen traffic, but that they would block ambulances, prevent plowing, endanger senior citizens and sit unused. Rejecting evidence that the lanes work well in other countries and other New York neighborhoods, Mayor responded, “That’s not El Barrio, that’s not East Harlem, that’s not Spanish Harlem.” Mayor even cited the opposition of former transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall to the Prospect Park West bike lane to claim that DOT’s data couldn’t be trusted.

When bike lane opponent Pablo Guzman started to complain that bike lane supporters — the elected officials, DOT representatives, and students — were allowed to speak ahead of the regular order of speakers, the event briefly broke out into chaos. Charges of slander flew and the core of bike lane opposition led by Brija and Mayor stormed out of the room.

Mostly, though, the environment was one of thoughtful speeches and good nature. Harry Bobbins, a cyclist and bike lane supporter, even brought two Patsy’s pizzas in to show the bike community’s support for local businesses.

One issue raised that clearly needs more work, for example, is the parking regulation along First and Second Avenue. Though the installation of the bike lanes will include some new loading zones, the majority of the parking along the two avenues will remain unmetered alternate side parking, which DOT Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione called “very unusual for a commercial corridor.” The lack of meters means double-parking is worse than it needs to be and finding a short-term parking space much harder. Metering the spaces “would be a tremendous benefit,” said Forgione, but not an action DOT will undertake without community support.

Altering the parking regulations was also a key post-implementation adjustment put into place along Columbus Avenue, one which helped calm an angry business community and create a popular new piece of infrastructure. “We had a learning curve,” said Mel Wymore, the former chair of Community Board 7, who spoke in favor of the bike lanes based on his experience on the Upper West Side. “I think you’ll see more and more, as bike lanes become the norm in New York City, just like in Times Square, all the businesses say business actually improves because of the life on the street.”

With a strong majority in support of the bike lanes, last night’s public hearing probably helped build some momentum for the community board to return to its previous stance of support for the project and for DOT to eventually move forward on installation. “The vast majority of the people in this room are very supportive of the lanes,” noted Forgione at the end of the hearing.

The hearing also provided a lesson for Diego Quiñones, a resident who was hit by a car while cycling on First Avenue in July. “Wow,” he said. “Change is scary, huh?”

Well, in a lot of ways they made the same mistakes that Marcia Kramer and her producers at CBS2 tend to make when the subject turns to pedestrian plazas and bike lanes.

For the people-on-the-street quotes, they turned to motorists, not the people enjoying the plazas or the cyclists riding in the new lanes. They put Sadik-Khan and Michael Bloomberg on the defensive for her “brash,” “imperious” style, never acknowledging the ample public demand for safer street designs or the community board votes in favor of them. They gave airtime to Louise Hainline’s discredited bike counts on Prospect Park West. They never mentioned the fact that most New Yorkers don’t own cars, or that bikes and buses can move the same amount of people as automobiles while consuming much less space.

Still, the piece had a few things going for it.

1. Broadway at Times Square looks great without cars.
2. They gave Sadik-Khan time to speak. I’m sure a lot of material ended up on the cutting room floor, but the DOT commissioner makes a clear, compelling case on camera for redesigning congested city streets.
3. Bloomberg provided a choice quote about why it makes sense to give people more transportation options.
4. I’m speculating here, but the average person watching at home probably came away thinking that training a spy camera on a bike lane from your apartment is not the behavior of a well-adjusted adult.
5. The one-two punch from Gridlock Sam and Sadik-Khan at the end said it pretty clearly: A hundred years of car-centric design have not made streets function any better; we need to do things differently.

But then came anchor Brian Williams, blithely dismissing the case for change that Smith’s piece had been building toward. An avid horsepower aficionado, Williams seemed to revel in his ignorance of how traffic works (“Those cars, they’re not going to stay home!”) and almost openly rooted for bike lanes to be torn up. The larger truth — that traffic will only get worse unless you give people better options for getting around — apparently escaped him.

A protected bike lane and pedestrian refuges could tame the dangerously wide First Avenue in East Harlem. Photo: James Garcia

Next Tuesday, Manhattan Community Board 11 will take up the extension of protected bike lanes on First and Second Avenue up to 125th Street in East Harlem. This is the critical safety project that the owners of Patsy’s Pizzeria and Milk Burger tried to derail at a recent CB 11 meeting by claiming that it would make asthma rates worse.

The protected bike lane proposal has a long history at CB 11. After the city backed off its initial promise to extend the East Side bike lanes to 125th Street in 2010, residents came out to a community board meeting and demanded to know why DOT wasn’t giving them the same safety improvements that downtown neighborhoods received. Supporters of the project persisted, delivering thousands of handwritten letters to City Hall laying out why protected bike lanes and pedestrian refuges will benefit East Harlem. When DOT came back to the community board this year with plans to build the project next spring, the proposal passed 47-3.

Taming the dangerously wide avenues didn’t sit well with the owners of Patsy’s and Milk Burger — Frank Brija and Erik Mayor. Both men sit on the community board and were able to engineer a vote to rescind the earlier approval of the lane. Brija and Mayor claimed, among other things, that devoting more space to biking would lead to worse asthma rates in the neighborhood.

Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito strongly backs the project, as does CB 11 chair Matthew Washington, and residents who worked hard to bring safer streets to their neighborhood aren’t giving up.

If you would like to speak up about why reclaiming space from traffic on extra-wide streets is healthy for East Harlem, here’s where to go:

Tuesday, December 6 at 6 p.m.
Taino Towers, 240 E. 123rd Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues)
Red Carpet Theatre, 1st floor

Hint: There's no rack for the bike.

A few weeks ago muni-meters began popping up on the streets of Inwood. Naturally, this made me wonder if the city had considered turning the neighborhood’s defunct coin-op meters into bike racks.

DOT has converted discarded meter poles into racks in other parts of the city, and livable streets advocates have long noted Inwood’s lack of bike parking. According to the CityRacks map, there are 19 racks in Inwood, all of them on or within a block of Broadway. (The disappearing shelter, as far as I know, has not resurfaced north of Dyckman Street, though after it was removed DOT said it would seek another location nearby.)

We queried DOT on the possibility of Inwood meter conversions in mid-November, and again this week. We’ll update this post when we hear back.

Considering how much progress has been made toward sustainable transportation since 2006, it seemed like an odd question at first. But a closer look shows that nearly all of that progress has been made by one agency: NYC DOT.

DOT has re-designed and re-engineered miles of city streets for safety. DOT has created acres of new public spaces, a new urban art program and programs like Summer Streets and Weekend Walks that have helped redefine the way New Yorkers see their streets. The agency has given people better transportation options by installing 260 miles of bike lanes in the past four years alone, and launching three new Select Bus Service routes with the MTA.

Aside from SBS, the MTA’s recent innovations and improvements for transit riders have been few and far between: the addition of real-time arrival signage in 153 stations, real-time bus information on a few pilot routes, and in-station transfers at a handful of stations. The positive changes have been overwhelmed by severe service cuts and round after round of fare hikes.

It is tempting to say the difference between the effectiveness of the DOT and the MTA is due to budget alone. The MTA has had to cope with a continuing budget crisis brought on by the economic collapse, repeated Albany raids, and a crushing debt load. But Ward’s answer might be more telling: “Wars are lost when the people fighting them lose the capacity to see the outcome they desire. Runners don’t stop running because they are tired, they stop when they don’t think they’ll be able to reach the finish line.”

The Bloomberg administration was already laying the groundwork for its long-term sustainability plan, PlaNYC 2030, during Stringer’s first conference in 2006. PlaNYC laid out an ambitious set of goals to meet the challenges posed by the city’s growth and simultaneously improve the city’s environmental sustainability. Shortly after the Mayor announced PlaNYC in 2007, he appointed Janette Sadik-Khan as the new Commissioner of NYC DOT, to ensure that the plan’s meaty transportation goals would be met. Building on PlaNYC, Sadik-Khan worked with her staff to create a strategic plan with even more concrete goals, many of which were entirely within the power of DOT to implement. The vision set forth in Sustainable Streets has helped guide the agency and encourage its staff to press ahead.

Stability and excellence in leadership matter. The city has had one mayor since 2006 and DOT has had essentially one commissioner (though Iris Weinshall spoke at Stringer’s 2006 conference, it was already clear to most insiders that she was on her way out). In contrast, the state has had three governors and the MTA has had four different executives since the 2006 conference.

The MTA has struggled through these repeated changes in leadership. Neither Governor Andrew Cuomo nor incoming MTA Chair Joe Lhota have articulated much vision beyond performing triage on a hemorrhaging budget. Even Jay Walder, the previous MTA chair who made some crucial progress at the agency, articulated his policy vision in a document entitled “Making Every Dollar Count.”

Both the MTA and the DOT are enormous agencies. Some would liken them to cruise ships. It takes strong, consistent leadership and a clearly articulated vision to steer these ships and to keep them — and the staff who comprise them — on course. Politics will always be challenging, and it seems like budgets will be tight for a long time to come. How do we avoid the failure that Ward talks about? The government executives and transportation leaders who can create a strategic vision for getting things done even in trying economic times are the ones who will not just finish the race, but win it.

Dani Simons has worked as communications director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and Transportation Alternatives, and is the former director of strategic communications for NYC DOT.

The "gateway" treatment at Longfellow Avenue and 167th Street marks the lower speed limit with prominent signage and stenciling on the street. A new speed hump is just visible in the background. Photo: Noah Kazis

The city’s first “neighborhood slow zone” officially opened this morning, bringing a 20 mph speed limit and new traffic calming treatments to the residential Claremont neighborhood in the Bronx. Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, joined by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca and local District Manager John Dudley, announced that the 20 mph zones would soon be coming to neighborhoods across the city. Starting today, residents and community boards can apply for their own slow zone.

The new Claremont zone covers the roughly 35 city blocks bounded by 167th Street, 174th Street, Southern Boulevard and West Farms Road/Boone Avenue. At each entrance to the zone, street signs flank the road announcing the 20 mph limit and that it is a residential area. Inside the zone, stencils and street signs continue to trumpet the lower speed limit. Nine new speed humps have been added to five already in place, which Sadik-Khan said makes the zone largely self-enforcing. In London, slow-speed zones incorporating traffic-calming treatments are preventing dozens of deaths and serious injuries each year.

Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., City Council Transportation Committee Chair Jimmy Vacca and District Manager John Dudley announced the opening of the Claremont neighborhood slow zone. Photo: Noah Kazis

“To some people, this neighborhood is nothing more than a shortcut,” said Sadik-Khan. That attitude, she noted, has had deadly results. In the last five years, 46 people were killed or seriously injured in traffic crashes in the larger community district between 2006 and 2010. The slower speeds would restore the streets to the community, she said. “Our streets are for New Yorkers. They’re where we live, where we play, where we shop.”

“The slow zone is now one where pedestrians will feel safe,” said Diaz, who said he’d been hearing complaints about safety in the area since he served in the state Assembly. Diaz touted the fact that the program would be expanding to other neighborhoods. “This is not going to stop at Claremont,” he said.

Vacca, too, celebrated the safety improvements. “They will save lives,” he declared. In addition to the speed bumps slowing down cars, he urged motorists to respect the speed limit voluntarily. “Look at your speedometers and see how fast you’re already going, and then slow down,” he said.

The form to get your own neighborhood slow zone is already live on DOT’s website, where the agency lays out the characteristics that will lead to successful applications. DOT is looking for zones that include schools, daycare centers, senior centers, and mostly residential uses, taking up an area roughly five blocks by five blocks and set off by clear boundaries, such as parks or major roads. The city wants to keep the slow zones separate from commercial areas, bus and truck routes and hospitals and fire stations.

Applications must come from community boards, business improvement districts, civic associations or elected officials, and are due by February 3. The first round of slow zones will be selected in March, according to DOT, and installed over the course of next year.

More photos of the slow zone below:

New speed humps are paired with closely spaced signs announcing the bumps and the speed limit. Photo: Noah Kazis

Even where speed bumps weren't placed, striping narrows travel lanes for drivers and stencils remind them of the lower speed limit. Photo: Noah Kazis

More passengers are taking the M15 along First and Second Avenues, where Select Bus Service launched last year, while overall ridership in Manhattan is down. Image: NYCDOT/MTA

Yesterday, we reported on the impressive gains in speed and ridership along the First and Second Avenue Select Bus Service route. Since then, NYC DOT and the MTA released their official progress report on the project. It’s full of graphics that show the boost for bus riders even more clearly.

Along the full M15 route, Select Bus Service shaves nearly seven minutes off the time spent at bus stops and five minutes off the time stuck in traffic. Image: NYCDOT/MTA

Select Bus Service cut the length of a full trip down the M15 route by 12 minutes. Seven of those minutes were saved at bus stops thanks to faster, all-door boarding, while five were thanks to dedicated, camera-enforced lanes keeping buses clear of traffic.

Those improvements have attracted about 10,000 more daily riders to the SBS than the old M15 limited, while ridership on the M15 local is down about 5,000. All told, it comes out to a nine percent increase in ridership on the corridor, suggesting the SBS buses are picking up some former M15 local riders as well as thousands of New Yorkers who didn’t care to wait for the old limited.

Ridership is actually down slightly on the local, with Select Bus Service is far more popular than the limited was. Image: NYCDOT/MTA

A few months ago, motorists could drive across the asphalt here. Today it's a pedestrian zone linking the public space at the center of Grand Army Plaza to the Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch. Photos: Ben Fried

Gathering at the new public space beneath the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch at Grand Army Plaza this morning, city officials and community leaders celebrated the reclamation of asphalt for people at the crossroads of Brooklyn. One of the borough’s iconic places is finally a destination that people can get to comfortably, thanks to a slate of pedestrian and bike improvements NYC DOT completed this summer.

“For too long, Grand Army Plaza has been an 11-acre vicious circle of traffic,” said DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. The improvements include enormous new pedestrian islands at the north side of GAP, swaths of asphalt re-purposed as public space and resurfaced with sand-colored gravel, and new crosswalks and bike connections. Sadik-Khan said it added up to more than a football field of new public space, which will “unlock the gateway to Prospect Park.”

DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. Behind her, left to right, are Council Member Tish James, Council Member Steve Levin, Assembly Member Hakeem Jeffries, Prospect Park Alliance director Emily Lloyd, and State Senator Eric Adams.

Community leaders and civic groups began mobilizing for a safer, livelier, and more accessible Grand Army Plaza in 2006, with the formation of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, or GAPCo. A series of site visits and public workshops followed, defining the problems with GAP and outlining principles to fix it. GAPCo had a receptive audience at DOT, which began to phase in safety improvements in 2008 and revealed a more comprehensive plan in 2010, the fruits of which were on display today.

Grand Army Plaza is “Olmsted and Vaux’s brilliant solution for integrating Flatbush Avenue with Prospect Park,” said GAPCo’s Rob Witherwax. “Over the last 150 years, the balance tipped from park to street. We tried to tip it back.”

Council Member Tish James was an early supporter of GAPCo’s efforts and praised DOT’s implementation this morning. “I grew up in Park Slope, and Prospect Heights was my backyard,” she said. “It was always difficult to navigate these streets. You took your life in your hands. Today it was easy. Today it was calming.”

No one knows about all the organizing, ideas, and coordination that went into this project better than Witherwax, who ticked off the groups that came together to improve GAP: The Prospect Park Alliance, the cultural institutions who collaborate under the banner of the Heart of Brooklyn, three local community boards, the Park Slope Civic Council, and others. “DOT could just as easily have said, ‘Thank you, we’ll get back to you later,’ but they didn’t,” Witherwax said. “They made our vision happen.”

Before: The intersection of Flatbush and Vanderbilt.

After.

Before: There was no way to walk across the vortex at the northwest segment of GAP.

After.

The south side of Grand Army Plaza is seeing a lot more walking and biking since the most recent round of DOT improvements.

The substantial changes celebrated today probably won’t be the last public space improvements to GAP. Michael Cairl of the Park Slope Civic Council pointed out several underutilized areas that could serve as functional, active public spaces with a few simple design touches.

Then there’s the question of the Plaza Street bike lane, originally envisioned as a two-way, protected route functioning as a hub for safe cycling, branching out to other spokes in the bike network. Plans for the Plaza Street lane are currently in limbo after DOT’s initial unveiling in 2010.

GAPCo will also be working with the cultural institutions near GAP, the Greenmarket, and the Prospect Park Alliance on programming the newly-accessible public spaces. “We’ve made spaces where things can happen, which we didn’t have before. Now the question is, ‘What’s going to happen here?’” said Witherwax. “The table is open for suggestions.”

What would you do with this space?

At a conference last Friday, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan showed this slide featuring the app for SFPark and announced that New York City's own smart parking system would be ready next year. The image on the right appears to come from Spanish firm Libelium.

New York City is moving forward with plans to use sensors to improve parking management, along the lines of San Francisco’s pioneering SFPark system. The program will be unveiled next year, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced at a conference on transportation and technology held last Friday at Columbia University.

For now, DOT is only dropping tantalizing hints about the program. During her presentation Sadik-Khan showed an illustration of parking sensors and an SFPark smartphone app guiding drivers to open parking spaces. When asked by an audience member whether the new system would only be used to alert motorists to parking opportunities or to manage the pricing of on-street spaces as well, Sadik-Khan replied, “both.”

Using sensors to manage the price of parking could be transformative. SFPark covers eight San Francisco neighborhoods and roughly one-quarter of the city’s metered spaces. Data gathered from sensors embedded in the road, enables the city to adjust meter prices with the goal of ensuring that there is always one parking space available on each block, reducing the traffic caused by cruising.

Last year, DOT put out a request for expressions of interest in a program that could be even more far-reaching. At the time, the agency expressed interest in a system that could not only enable dynamic pricing of parking, but also automatically alert the NYPD to parking meter violations, crack down on parking placard abuse and synchronize with pay-by-phone technology.

DOT did not respond to Streetsblog inquiries seeking more information about Sadik-Khan’s announcement, so it is not yet clear how robust a program will be rolled out next year. The possibilities, though, are substantial.

Kids celebrate Walk to School Day in Harlem in October. Photo: NYC DOT/Flickr

DOT today launched a new initiative to help students stay physically active by walking to school.

Schools that register for the Walk Ways program will be offered lesson plans on educating students about the benefits of walking and assistance from DOT in developing walk-to-school routes.

Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan was joined by Ed Koch at P.S. 64 in the East Village for today’s kick-off event, where the former mayor read from “Eddie Shapes Up,” a children’s book written by Koch and his sister Pat Koch Thaler about “an overweight student’s path to getting healthy by eating better and exercising more.”

In a press release, Koch singled out recent DOT street safety enhancements for praise.

“The most marvelous sight in New York City is to see youngsters, adolescents and adults cycling on the many bicycle paths we now have which separate bikers from vehicular traffic,” said Koch, who installed (and removed) the city’s first protected bike lanes in the early 1980s. “It is glorious to watch, and I wish I were young again to participate.”

School registration info and campaign materials are available on the DOT web site.

Earlier this month NYC DOT set off on a bike-share information tour, giving an introduction to the city’s plans for a public bike-sharing system to every community board in the proposed service area. Bike-share plans got an enthusiastic reception from the Manhattan CB2 Transportation Committee. And it turns out that the full board backs the program too. On October 20, CB 2 voted 41-0 for a resolution stating that the board “fully supports DOT’s new Bike Share program.”

Next up on the bike-share tour: Manhattan Community Board 8. The transportation committee will hear from DOT this Wednesday at 6:30. If you want to bring bike-share to the Upper East Side, you might want to speak up at this community board, where bike improvements seldom have an easy go of it.