Two surface parking lots are set to be developed into a new downtown for Staten Island. But even in this transit-rich location -- the ferry, bus terminal and railroad are all visible in the lower right of this satellite image -- NYCEDC is making parking a priority. Image: NYCEDC

St. George Staten Island could become the region’s next great downtown. That’s the plan over at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is about to redevelop two waterfront sites immediately adjacent to the ferry terminal.

Yet even though EDC touts the unparalleled transit access at the sites, which are currently surface parking lots, and its desire to make this a pedestrian-friendly development, the agency is requiring that any development include a huge amount of parking. Not only would every surface space have to be replaced, but EDC intends to accommodate anyone who wants to drive to the developments and find a parking spot.

EDC makes the case for a vibrant urban development at St. George as well as anyone could in its request for expressions of interest, released yesterday:

The adjacent Ferry Terminal is Staten Island’s transit hub linking 70,000 daily commuters with the Staten Island Railroad, 20 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (“MTA”) bus lines, and the Bay Street and Richmond Terrace bikeway…

It is widely recognized that the neighborhood represents a great opportunity for Staten Island to accommodate significant population growth (Staten Island is expected to grow by +65,000 people in the next twenty years, including 35,000 seniors and 17,000 young adults) and establish the kind of vital downtown that has long eluded Staten Island but emerged in municipalities stretching from Jersey City to Long Branch.

Indeed, this is an ideal location for dense, downtown-style development. New Urbanist leader Jeff Speck even identified the site as crying out for construction in a presentation to the City Planning Commission in January of last year.

Yet EDC wants the island’s transit center and would-be downtown to make room for a sea of parking, which will draw more traffic to the neighborhood streets, eat up space that could be used for housing or offices, and degrade the pedestrian environment. At this stage in the development process, it’s not clear exactly how many spaces the new development might contain. But all the spaces in the enormous surface parking lots would have to replaced one for one, ensuring at least a full floor of parking almost by definition. On top of that, EDC expects that additional parking be provided for all “the expected demand produced by the proposed development.” With 14 acres up for development, that could be quite a lot of spaces indeed.

In the past, EDC has used the formulas embedded in the environmental review process to predict demand for parking; those formulas have contributed to thousand-space lots at the New Domino development in Williamsburg and Riverside Center on Manhattan’s West Side, among others.

That level of parking isn’t necessary. Only 63 percent of Staten Islanders drive to work. If the borough were to secede from New York City, it would have fewer car commuters, as a percent, than Portland or Los Angeles, and just a hair more than Chicago. Moreover, St. George is on track to become even more transit-rich than it is today; the city is currently studying the creation of a bus or rail rapid transit line along Staten Island’s north shore.

The prioritization of parking comes from the very top. In a press release announcing the development plans, the only official to mention parking was Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself. “The potential to develop these sites while maintaining the availability of parking – combined with projects at the Homeport, Howland Hook, and at the Ferry Terminal – will be a catalyst for the further revitalization of the North Shore, as well as the entire island.” EDC would not comment for this story beyond pointing us to the official press release.

The city’s belief that a “vital downtown” is compatible with parking requirements flies in the face of experience. Downtown Manhattan was largely developed prior to the enactment of any parking regulations; today a strict parking maximum is in place. Downtown Brooklyn is largely zoned so that commercial development does not require off-street parking; developers and elected officials in the area have been pushing hard for the residential requirements to be eliminated as well.

Jersey City, ostensibly one of the city’s models for St. George, took the opposite approach to parking in revitalizing its downtown. “Jersey City’s an interesting model for the area around the ferry terminal, since both places are transit-rich, with access to ferries, buses, and rail,” explained Steven Higashide of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. “In most downtown developments in Jersey City, developers aren’t required to provide any parking and there’s instead a parking maximum. That makes it less costly to build and makes it easier to create a lively streetscape that isn’t interrupted by parking lots and overrun with traffic.”

EDC isn’t the only guilty party in St. George. The St. George special zoning district, proposed by the Department of City Planning in 2008 and passed later that year, increased residential parking minimums to 100 percent and forbid developers from subdividing properties to waive the requirements. Keeping Staten Island suburban, even in its downtown, is official city policy.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz is hoping that a new hotel can replace excess parking near Yankee Stadium. Photo: Crain's.

As the operator of the taxpayer-financed Yankee Stadium parking garages heads toward default, there’s no longer any question that providing so much parking in such a transit-rich location was a mistake on the scale of Carl Pavano’s contract. The decision to give up $2.5 million in city taxes and $5 million in state revenue has proven a poor investment indeed. The question, at this point, is what comes next.

One idea, from Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., is to convert one of the garages into a hotel. “One of the older garages is perfect for hotel development,” said John DeSio, a spokesperson for Diaz. Diaz advocated for a new Bronx hotel in his State of the Borough address two weeks ago, saying that “a new hotel would create hundreds of good-paying jobs offering health benefits, pension plans, and a chance for its workers to have a better life.”

While the garages were built on what used to be public parks, the South Bronx is unlikely to see that parkland return. “We have to come up with a plan that not only benefits the neighborhood but is palatable for the bondholders,” explained DeSio. The bondholders will have to okay any new use for the garages, so it will have to be a revenue-generator.

In terms of parking policy more broadly, DeSio said that while there aren’t any major developments where parking is an issue currently being considered by the borough president’s office, “I’m sure that we’d have to take to heart what happened here in the future.” (Plans for a new East Bronx mall anchored by a Target are too preliminary to comment on for now, he said.) DeSio also suggested that the private sector will notice this high-profile case of wasting resources on providing an excessive supply of parking.

Photo: Crain's

Anyone could have seen the deal was a loser from the start — that a sports stadium served by subways, buses and a new commuter rail station, a stadium that would have fewer seats for fans, would have no need to increase parking stock by 55 percent. Then there was the dirty business of seizing public parks, and counting on the fact that the garages would attract drivers year-round — drivers who would be willing to pay more to park at the stadium than at the nearby Gateway Center mega-mall — to an area that neither wanted nor needed more car traffic. It was a scheme so predictably wrong that no private developer wanted any part of it.

Among those privy to the nuts and bolts of the deal, it seemed the only ones oblivious to the fact of its eminent failure were former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion and the folks at the New York City Industrial Development Agency, the financing arm of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. In an act of blind faith or incestuous backroom dealing — take your pick — the IDA issued well over $200 million in triple tax-exempt bonds to the non-profit (ha ha) Bronx Parking Development Corporation to build and operate the garages.

Four years later, as Crain’s reports, the garages are a bust — with “more competition than any party involved anticipated,” they “were never more than 60 [percent] full on game days.” Bronx Parking is expected to default on the bonds, and the neighborhood has thousands of unused parking spaces where there was once public parkland.

The potential irony has some in the community seething.

“Our community loves its parks, and we could always use more,” said Pastor Wenzell Jackson, chairman of Bronx Community Board 4, which includes the stadium and the surrounding area. “Now there’s just empty parking garages that are not benefiting the community.”

Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. and others are hoping to draw a hotel to the area, which would presumably make use of some of the excess stadium parking. Bronx Parking officials, meanwhile, blame cheaper rates at Gateway Center, and “Metro-North and its new train station … which the company said is reducing the number of cars — the very purpose for building the station (with public money).” But not everyone considers more traffic a solution.

“The first step should be to reconsider how they’re using these parking lots,” said Lourdes Zapata, senior vice president of SoBro, the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp. “Looking at them exclusively for parking is a shortsighted way of looking at development in this area.”

“Shortsighted” — a generous word for a billion-dollar subsidy based on a foundation of extortion and cronyism, rather than sound economics and community interest.

Moisha's Discount Supermarket is set to expand with city assistance, but it'll be building more parking than supermarket. Image: Google Street View.

Wondering why the city is subsidizing 18,000 square feet of parking for a project that’s supposed to make fresh food more accessible to low-income New Yorkers? Political favors seem to have something to do with it.

Moisha’s Discount Supermarket is receiving $2 million in tax incentives to expand its operations and build parking for 45 cars under the FRESH program, intended to bring fruits and vegetables into underserved neighborhoods. But according to a report in the Daily News, there are 10 markets within five blocks of Moisha’s and all of them sell fresh produce. The News points to $41,690 in donations from Moisha’s owners to local politicians as an alternative explanation for Moisha’s tax breaks.

An article in City Hall News, which has been taken off their website (we’re looking into why), suggests more direct impropriety. They report that the district manager of Brooklyn Community Board 12 testified to the city’s Industrial Development Agency that his board was completely behind the Moisha’s expansion. But a member of CB12 said the board had never discussed the issue. The district manager and Moisha’s owners are reported to have close ties to Assembly member and local power broker Dov Hikind.

Assembly Member Dov Hikind speaking against pedestrian refuges on Fort Hamilton Parkway at a CB12 meeting last November.

All too often, political patronage is what determines how much parking New York City decides to build. From the city’s decision to give more parking to the Yankees in return for a luxury suite in left field to the Finance Department’s overruling of rank-and-file assessors to grant a politically-connected Jamaica parking operator non-profit status and millions in tax exemptions, too much of the city’s mushrooming parking supply is built and subsidized because of sweetheart deals.

Even when political favors aren’t at work, however, it’s usually still politics that determines how much parking gets built, not any kind of thinking about transportation policy. Parking is routinely thrown in as a “sweetener” for new development, something that a developer or the city can offer a neighborhood to accept growth.

It’s exceedingly rare for parking decisions to be made on the grounds of how much more traffic a garage will induce or how much air pollution it will add. No wonder the city keeps building acre after acre of it.

Moisha's Discount Supermarket is set to expand with city assistance, but it'll be building more parking than supermarket. Image: Google Street View.

Thanks to New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, the residents of Midwood are about to enjoy a wider selection of produce and kosher foods. Under the FRESH program, Moisha’s Discount Supermarket is slated to receive just under $2 million in tax breaks to double its size and provide more grocery options to the underserved community [PDF]. Along with 15,000 square feet of supermarket, however, the neighborhood will be receiving 18,000 square feet of parking.

According to Moisha’s application for city support, most of that parking will be built on the roof of the new store. According to the city Industrial Development Agency’s notice of public hearing, however, it will be regular surface parking taking up half of the 36,000 square foot lot. Either way, that much parking is overkill for Moisha’s.

The supermarket’s environmental assessment, for example, estimates that 18,000 square feet is enough space for 45 cars, but that a maximum of 40 vehicular trips could be generated by the store in any given hour. In other words, by the store’s own calculation, unless most customers are spending hours at a time shopping, it’s providing more parking than it would at any point have driving customers. Other options abound: In addition to plain old walking, Moisha’s is located around four blocks from the F train at Avenue N, and the store’s website advertises its delivery service.

Perhaps more importantly, the entire purpose of the FRESH program is to make high-quality and affordable groceries available to residents who don’t have access to them. People who drive to the supermarket aren’t so constrained by what’s available in the neighborhood. That’s why the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines households as living in a food desert if they’re more than a mile from the nearest grocery store and they don’t have a car. FRESH-supported supermarkets are in that sense supposed to cater to those on foot, on bike, or on the bus.

To the city’s credit, the FRESH program makes important nods toward the inconsistency of large parking lots in its supermarkets. In addition to providing tax incentives, FRESH also cuts parking minimums for participating stores: The first 15,000 or 40,000 square feet of the store, depending on the location, don’t require any parking under FRESH.

Taking those guidelines into account, it appears Moisha’s is probably providing all that excess parking — which is sure to induce more driving in the neighborhood — of its own accord, rather than because of any city-mandated minimums.

Even so, Moisha’s is a perfect example of how when it comes to parking, EDC needs to do better. EDC calculates, for example, that helping Moisha’s expand will create around $3.7 million in new tax revenues over 25 years, but the agency doesn’t break down how they reach that figure.

That leaves important questions unanswered. For instance: Would the Moisha’s project provide more economic benefit if, instead of devoting so much space to car storage, EDC helped them build housing or additional retail space? EDC did not respond to Streetsblog’s request for that information.

The well-connected Jamaica First Parking garage earned a slew of tax exemptions, ostensibly for reducing traffic congestion. Image: Google Street View.

Raking in millions by inducing more traffic on Jamaica’s congested streets? It’s charity, says New York City, and the business that does it should not pay taxes.

A local non-profit with politically powerful friends managed to get its off-street parking garages classified as tax-exempt, despite being used exclusively for commercial purposes. The Daily News’ Juan Gonzalez has the scoop about the shady set-up:

The firm, Jamaica First Parking LLC, got the unusual exemption for its 2,000-space parking system from the city’s Finance Department in 2007.

The garage company is a subsidiary of Greater Jamaica Development Corp., a nonprofit tied to several major Queens political figures, including the Rev. Floyd Flake, a former congressman and ally of Mayor Bloomberg, and Rep. Gregory Meeks.

Gonzalez goes on to detail the many pieces of the city’s machinery that work together to subsidize both the car owners who use the garage and the political interests of local elected officials.

There’s the Finance Department, which over the objections of rank-and-file tax assessors granted property tax exemptions for the garages. There’s the Economic Development Corporation, which gave the garages $13 million in tax-exempt bonds.

And then there are the politicians. Gonzalez lists Congressman Meeks and his powerful predecessor, Reverend Flake, but they’re not alone in supporting these tax-free garages. The project also received the support of Council Members Leroy Comrie and James Gennaro and their former colleagues Archie Spigner, Thomas White, and David Weprin.

From a transportation perspective, another scandal is the big lie that makes this possible: that building parking actually reduces traffic congestion. That’s the excuse that the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation’s spokesperson gave to explain why parking garages serve a public purpose and therefore deserve tax-exempt status.

It’s also the assumption written into the state’s environmental review law, which presumes that a given number of people will always drive, and that getting them into a parking space faster will actually reduce traffic. In this world, the same number of people will drive no matter how many parking spaces exist.

Of course, in reality parking has a huge effect on the decision to own a car and to drive. That’s common sense — if you can’t park a car somewhere, you can’t drive there — and it’s also been backed up by rigorous research. For example, one study found that guaranteed personal parking in Jackson Heights led residents there to drive far more than residents of Park Slope, even though Park Slope households have higher incomes and higher rates of car ownership.

The sweetheart deal for this Jamaica parking garage is further evidence that City Hall has failed to convey the message that building and subsidizing parking leads to driving and goes against the sustainability goals of PlaNYC. Parking policy may play a bigger role in PlaNYC 2.0, hopefully including strong policies that bring EDC and the Finance Department into line. It could go a long way just by stating that the city no longer believes that parking garages reduce traffic congestion.

The Rockaway ferry, shown here, wasn't able to survive even with city subsidy. Photo: New York Times.

A few more details about the city’s new subsidized East River ferry service were revealed at a Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance panel yesterday afternoon, including the route’s stops and hours. Mostly, however, the panel offered advice on what it will take to make ferries successful and provided some valuable context for the public discussion about waterborne transit.

New York City Economic Development Corporation Vice President David Hopkins offered a little more information about the city’s upcoming East River ferry route. The route will be privately run but publicly subsidized; the city is currently in negotiations with operators. How much it will end up costing the city, and how much it will cost riders, wasn’t mentioned. According to a report in Crain’s Insider today, the city subsidy could approach $20 per passenger. (For comparison, in 2009 the total cost per passenger of weekday New York City Transit bus service was $2.73, with an average fare of $1.14 [PDF].)

The ferry will have “transit-like routing,” according to Hopkins, running both north- and southbound along a path from Hunters Point South in Long Island City, to India Street in Greenpoint, to North 6th Street and South 8th Street in Williamsburg, to Fulton Ferry, and then to Manhattan. With the current levels of waterfront development, he said, there isn’t yet the market for the point-to-point service that has proven successful from New Jersey to Manhattan.

Hopkins also said that the service would run at least every 20 minutes during peak hours, less frequently than City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden said that morning. The service would run seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Finally, Hopkins emphasized that this ferry program is meant to be a pilot. The city’s ongoing ferry study, which is measuring demand for a much larger set of routes, is still underway, and this two- to three-year program is intended to lay the groundwork for a potential expansion, allowing EDC to test demand, marketing strategies, ticketing systems, and their ability to connect ferries with other modes of transport.

The rest of the panel painted a picture of the market for ferry transit in New York, and its opportunities and challenges. Pierre Vilain, a vice-president at engineering firm HDR, contended that the ferry market is already very strong. Not only is the regional ferry system, including both private routes and the city-operated Staten Island Ferry, the largest in the country, but it’s also unusually profitable on the private side. “The system is unique when you compare it to passenger ferry services anywhere in the world, I believe,” said Vilain, “in that it’s primarily self-sustaining from the farebox.”

Though many ferry services have met with failure — most notably the recently shuttered city-subsidized service from the Rockaways — others have captured large shares of the market. The successful routes are mainly those that cross the Hudson. In New Jersey’s Hudson and Bergen Counties, said Vilain, around half of all Manhattan-bound commuters take the PATH, but another 30 percent take ferries.

One important factor in the success or failure of ferry service is the quality and price of the competition. “You cannot compete against subsidized mass transit when you’re not subsidized mass transit,” said Tom Fox, the founder of New York Water Taxi. His ferry route from Haverstraw to Yonkers failed despite subsidy because it simply couldn’t beat the Metro-North Railroad on north-south service.

Just as important is competition from the automobile. Hopkins suggested that in Seattle, where he’s from, the health of the ferry system is directly related to investment in roads and bridges. “The solution in Seattle was don’t build a bridge, and that’s how you ensured ferry traffic,” said Hopkins. The ferries “wilted away when we built our bridges and tunnels.”

Another key to success will be integration with existing transit. Vilain pointed out that nearly all current ferry commuters both live and work near the ferry terminals. In general, he said, “you’re not going to get a lot of market capture when you start moving away from the pier on either the origin or the destination side.” However, he noted that along certain NJ Transit lines that feed effectively into Hoboken, ferry ridership continues up the tracks.

Other panel members agreed. “The real key to all of this is integration with the MTA,” said Fox, describing the success of integrating London’s ferries with the Oyster Card payment system. Hopkins pointed to the need to work with the MTA at the 34th Street pier, “especially when they upgrade that line to BRT.”

Finally, there was strong interest in figuring out how to make the ferry system serve more than just commuters. Paula Berry, the harbor district director for NYC and Co., the city’s tourism arm, suggested that the ferries be used to link the city’s new waterfront parks and create a unified experience. An experiment she ran last summer found a market for recreational ferry riders during midday hours.

Similarly, former MWA program director Carter Craft said that the Rockaway ferry might have been able to succeed if it hadn’t had to run empty after dropping off morning commuters. He thought that school and camp groups could have taken the ferry back to the Rockaways for field trips, adding a new market.

You can't tell from this EDC rendering, but Willoughby Square Park will sit on top of a garage with 694 parking spaces. Image: NYC EDC.

If you’ve ever wished you could dodge more cars and inhale more exhaust on your way to the park, Downtown Brooklyn’s next green space is for you. It will be built on top of a garage with nearly 700 underground parking spots.

Last Thursday, the city’s Economic Development Corporation released a request for proposals to build Willoughby Square Park, a new public space set to open on Willoughby between Duffield and Gold. Instead of using city funds to build the park, EDC is building 694 parking spaces underground and getting the garage’s developer to pay for the park construction.

City officials have repeatedly referred to the new public space as Brooklyn’s Bryant Park. Like Bryant Park, it will be privately run and surrounded by towers. But here’s one major difference: Bryant Park sits on top of the stacks of the New York Public Library, not an enormous garage. Two decades ago, the city was thinking creatively about how to combine an ambitious park restoration with the storage of 3.2 million books and 500,000 reels of microfilm. These days, the city seems intent on combining its development and public space plans with the storage of congestion-causing, streetlife-suffocating private vehicles, even in incredibly transit-rich downtown Brooklyn.

The merger of park and parking garage is no surprise in an EDC-sponsored project. The agency has recently been in the headlines for building so much parking at Yankee Stadium that the developer may default on its bonds, and EDC president Seth Pinsky once told Streetsblog that providing too little parking at a project would be “the worst thing we could do.” You can also point the finger at the Department of City Planning, which put forward the idea for a park over a garage in its 2004 rezoning.

Fordham Plaza, one of the city's busiest transit and retail hubs, but also one of its most dangerous, is slated for a major redesign [PDF] by NYCDOT and the Economic Development Corporation. Highlights of the badly-needed overhaul include a massive increase in public space, a slew of safety improvements for pedestrians, and a block-long bus- and bike-only street.

Currently, Fordham Plaza is one of the most important public spaces in New York City. It has rich transit access, with the third-busiest Metro-North station in the system and eight bus lines, including the city's first Select Bus Service route. According to DOT counts, the retail corridor along Fordham Road sees as much foot traffic as Herald Square or Penn Station -- more than 80,000 pedestrians over the course of 12 hours.

Traffic collisions injuring pedestrians (red) and cyclists (yellow). The biggest red dot is the intersection of Fordham Road and Webster Ave.

Despite those assets, however, Fordham Plaza doesn't work the way it should. Its northwest corner, the intersection between Fordham Road and Webster Avenue, is the third most dangerous intersection in the city. According to CrashStat, between 1995 and 2005, drivers injured 116 pedestrians and cyclists and killed one pedestrian. Whether on their way to shop, to work, or to class, pedestrians are hemmed in by excessive asphalt. 

This plan should go a long way toward making Fordham Plaza the safe and vibrant place it ought to be. Many streets next to the plaza would get serious traffic-calming measures, with wider sidewalks helping pedestrians to cross streets. All told, the plan adds a full 15,750 square feet of pedestrian space to the area. 

At the heart of the plaza, Park Avenue would no longer extend north of 189th Street, opening up room for a large, contiguous public space. Third Avenue would become a one-block busway between 189th Street and Fordham Road, with sharrows to connect the bike network south of the plaza to the Fordham University campus. A slip lane at the hazardous Fordham and Webster intersection would be converted to sidewalk space.

Filling in the plaza (left) will reduce some conflicts between pedestrians and buses, which currently plague the site (right), but it will still be very tempting for pedestrians to cross Fordham Road midblock.

The plan isn't a cure-all, however. One reason there are so many injuries in the area is that the quickest way between the Metro-North station and the bus stops is to walk across Fordham Road mid-block. It seems likely that many pedestrians will continue to do so. On Third Avenue, bus and bike traffic will be funneled together without any dedicated space for cyclists.

The redesign comes at the same time as a Department of City Planning proposal to rezone much of the neighborhood. The rezoning calls for more intensive development than is currently allowed near this transit hub. Together, these changes could transform the area. 

Next up for the Fordham Plaza overhaul, which is currently in the conceptual design stage: a detailed plan by DOT for permanent construction

Pedestrian space in the re-designed Fordham Plaza, overlaid on the present plaza.

The Queens Plaza North bike lane will run in a center median. Image: NYCEDC

Protected bike paths are coming to Queens Plaza as part of a major redesign of the area by the city's Economic Development Corporation. Construction work to transform the dangerous, overwide streets and surface parking at "the gateway to Queens" has been underway for about a year. In a project update presented to the board of the Long Island City BID last month, EDC detailed the substantial bike and pedestrian improvements that are in the works [PDF].

Currently, Queens Plaza is a snarl of traffic around three surface parking lots, hardly a fitting entrance to Queens. EDC plans to turn the plaza into a one acre park while putting in place a major street redesign. Construction started last summer and will be finished in 2012, thanks partly to a boost from federal stimulus dollars.

When the project is complete, cyclists will be able to travel safely between Vernon Boulevard and Northern Boulevard, at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge. Between Northern Boulevard and 23rd Street, said EDC VP Tracy Sayegh, cyclists will be able to ride along a ten-foot, two-way fully separated bike lane running in a landscaped median along Queens Plaza North. A pedestrian path will run adjacent to the bike lane.

Between 23rd Street and 21st Street, said Sayegh, less space is available, so the plan calls for a shared bike-ped path. That multipurpose path will then be extended to Vernon Boulevard in the second phase of construction, following the route of an existing, but inadequate, path. EDC worked closely with DOT to plan the street redesign, and the lane is designed to connect with the rest of the Queens bike network.

The redesign features ample pedestrian safety improvements, too, said Sayegh. Signal retiming will give people more time to cross the street while new medians will serve as pedestrian refuges on both Queens Plaza North and Queens Plaza South. Currently, she said, most pedestrians cross those streets using a subway station overpass rather than brave the at-grade crossing.

It's encouraging that this project removes three parking lots and doesn't replace the parking elsewhere. In a neighborhood with so much attractive transit, said Sayegh, the city should be supporting non-automotive modes of travel. If the market demands parking, she said, the market will build garages, as it does across the river in Midtown. That statement seems to be a major departure from the standard EDC position on parking, which includes vigorous public sector activism to ensure that parking is provided beyond what the market demands.

As of this month, Bronx Parking Development LLC owes the city $8.7 million in back rent and interest. That tab will soon grow to more than $10 million because city officials have allowed the firm to defer the rest of this year's rent as well.

Meanwhile, Bronx Parking, which has no connection to the Yankees, has yet to pay a nickel in property taxes.

The House That Subsidies Built: It's now in the city's financial interest to see more traffic overwhelm the streets around Yankee Stadium. Photo: Simon Akam/Bronx Beat

The larger point is that the current situation proves the folly of the initial parking subsidies. Perversely, if the city is ever going to see revenue materialize from these monstrous garages, it's in their interest to see more cars drive to Yankee Stadium and flood the streets of the South Bronx. That pretty much sums up why a city that's purportedly committed to a sustainability plan should never subsidize parking.

Closing the greenway gap would provide an uninterrupted bike path from Ward's Island to the South Street Seaport. Image: The East River Greenway Initiative

The city would sell the western part of Robert Moses Playground, a rectangle of asphalt at the corner of 41st and First Avenue. An area that attracts occasional recreational use would be annexed. Space used for a dog run, handball and basketball courts would not be touched. In turn, the U.N. would pay the city $150 million, mainly for the right to construct a new building the same height as the current U.N. tower. The funding would be used to complete the East River waterfront esplanade and plug the greenway gap.

A succession of local electeds spoke in favor of the deal, including State Senator Liz Krueger, Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh, City Council Member Daniel Garodnick, and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who told the crowd, “I want to ride my bike there.”

The details of the plan were fleshed out by Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe and Madelyn Wils of the NYC Economic Development Corporation.

Benepe said the new greenway segment would be a no-frills affair, like the recently completed connector on the Hudson River near Riverside Park. He also emphasized that without funding from the U.N. land deal, the project could not move forward. In addition to closing the greenway gap, he identified a package of public space enhancements the city can provide to offset the loss of part of Robert Moses park:

1. As part of the deal to close the greenway gap, the city could improve pedestrian access to the waterfront at several points.
   
   Expanding Asser Levy Park into the roadbed of Asser Levy Place, between 23rd and 25th Street, which adds roughly the same amount of parkland as would be lost;
2. Converting the former Con Ed site at the 38th Street pier into a park, which could be paved over and devoted to the same uses as the annexed segment of Robert Moses Playground;
3. Improving pedestrian access to the waterfront, including, potentially, an overpass at 51st street;
4. Greening certain areas of the Queens Midtown Tunnel plaza, which might make those areas suitable for some form of recreation.

According to Wils, the window of opportunity to act on this deal is brief. The U.N. is looking to decide where to build their new tower this year, and while they prefer the Robert Moses Park site, they have other options at their disposal.

When it came time for the public to weigh in, comments applauding the deal outnumbered opposition by about two to one, according to my rough tally. (Full disclosure: I testified in favor of the deal in my capacity as a member of Upper Green Side.)

Most opposition stemmed from nearby residents who claimed that Robert Moses Playground is an irreplaceable space for playing ball games -- uses that would seemingly be preserved in the deal described by Benepe. A few others lumped the new U.N. building together with towers planned by developer Sheldon Solow for a nearby site, which they argued would change the character of the neighborhood.

The next step comes tomorrow, when Community Board 6 discusses the proposal and is expected to put forth a resolution including the conditions they would place on their support for any plan. If the conditions are too onerous to be feasible, it could scuttle the deal. If they’re practical and reasonable, legislators can say they have the full support of the community for a specific plan, which they can enshrine in the legislation necessary to enable the completion of the greenway.

A rendering of plans for Lafayette Avenue, with a planted median, standard painted bike lanes, and amenities along an expanded sidewalk. Image: NYCEDC

The redesigns of Lafayette Avenue and Hunts Point Avenue, as well as new waterfront park space at Hunts Point Landing, will all begin construction this summer, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Those streets will receive landscaped medians, expanded sidewalks, and new bike lanes. Work on Food Center Drive, which will include the first physically protected bike lane in the Bronx, is scheduled to begin this fall.

Implementation is close enough that people are getting excited about each construction truck that comes to the area, even though so far the crews are just doing regular road maintenance, said Miquela Craytor, the executive director of Sustainable South Bronx and a longstanding advocate for the greenway. 

Construction of the Randall's Island connector, which will eventually tie the South Bronx Greenway into the Manhattan bike network, is scheduled to begin in fall 2011, according to EDC. Adding a biking and walking path from the South Bronx to Randall's Island will give residents better access to the island's recreational facilities and provide a safe route to the new bike lanes planned for First and Second Avenue in Manhattan. When the connector is finished, said Craytor, the greenway will be between a quarter and a third complete.

What's about to be built differs somewhat from the original plans for the greenway, first put forward in 2006. In particular, plans to place pedestrian and bike paths along a median on Lafayette Avenue have been revised, with space for biking and walking shifted to the side of the street at the request of the Fire Department and the Department of Environmental Protection.

"We ended up putting quite a bit of that streetscaping to the sidewalk and expanding the sidewalk," said Craytor, noting that the center median will remain planted with trees and shrubs. She isn't particularly disappointed. "We successfully pushed back and ensured that the concept of slowing down traffic and narrowing the street was increased," said Craytor. "This will be an area for people, not vehicles."

More pictures below the fold:

The Randall's Island Connector, running underneath an AMTRAK trestle, will create a new link to bike or walk between the South Bronx and Manhattan. Image: NYCEDC

New public space at Hunts Point Landing, at the southern end of the Hunts Point peninsula. Image: NYCEDC

The Crossings at Gresham brought transit-oriented development to Portland's suburbs, opening the door for financing to flow to similar projects. Image: Myhre Group Architects.

Metro -- Portland's regional government -- decided that wasn't good enough. They bought the site outright. Then Metro proceeded to double down on the original plans for the project, which it called The Crossings. Four stories became five, making the development the tallest building in Gresham. Condos became a mixed-use development with ground-floor retail, sidewalk cafés and engaging street-level facades.

There was still one big problem: financing. Charlotte Boxer, director of commercial real estate at Pacific Continental Bank, was skeptical of Metro's project. "What would draw people to live there, or what would make a retailer decide to lease there?" she asked. "There was substantial risk on Metro's part and on ours as the lender, because we had no comparables to go to that would say this would work." For the project to succeed financially, they'd have to charge rents 25 percent higher than the going rate in Gresham, for a type of development no one had ever tried there.

In many parts of America, efforts to build transit-oriented, walkable communities are foiled because financing can't be secured for projects that differ from the templates lenders have become used to since World War II. In Salt Lake City, for example, the local government's push for transit-oriented development has been stymied because local banks won't lend to projects without huge parking lots.

Why do lenders balk at development that reduces car dependence? In a word, inertia. "The lending industry appears to be very conservative, if your definition of conservative is doing the same thing this year as you did five years ago," said David Goldstein, the co-director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's energy program and an expert on environmental real estate financing. Because banks have no institutional memory of lending to transit-oriented development, they are reluctant to do so going forward.

In Portland, officials and activists have begun to escape this cycle. The policies they've pursued to foster walkable development are instructive for many American cities looking to grow without making traffic congestion worse.

Even in transit-rich New York, economic development officials have subsidized developers who import car-oriented standards. They are happy to secure favorable lending terms, underwritten by the U.S. government, for multi-story parking decks. It's safe to say that goals like enhancing the pedestrian environment or attaining sustainability targets are not motivating these decisions. Portland development officials do things differently. When planners there decided that urbanism and sustainability were good outcomes, they went out and started convincing lenders to change the way they do business.

Megan Gibb runs Metro's transit-oriented development program, which works with developers and offers financial incentives for TOD. The Crossings, for example, received discounted land, tax breaks, and other financial incentives from Metro. "Our whole program is to build more market-comparables," said Gibb. "The more TOD projects there are, the more it builds on itself." Each project that gets built makes the next one easier to finance.

Gibb also highlighted the centrality of public-private partnerships to Portland's success. According to Gibb, banks normally look at standard, car-oriented development models and say, "We know this worked in the past. Why would we want it to be any different?" When the public sector commits to smart growth, however, bankers instead see that the government "thinks this is really important and is willing to put their money where its mouth is." For financial institutions that are often quite risk-averse, government action provides the security necessary to move forward.

John Warner, who manages most of the TOD projects at the Portland Development Commission, argues that at first, government may have to push the envelope to convince banks that walkable development pays off. "Until you've got examples that lenders can look back in time at," he said, "you have to be doubly conservative and oversubsidize something to prove the concept." Warner added that in Portland, where lenders have bought into a consensus about the need for sustainable development, they've been able to walk back many subsidies.

At The Crossings, Metro's vision -- and incentives -- turned the project into reality. Financially, it's a complete success, with 100 percent occupancy and a sizable waiting list. It's won awards for transit-oriented design and earned the praise of Gresham's residents and politicians. Perhaps most importantly, however, it set an example.

Boxer, the initially skeptical executive at Pacific Continental Bank who provided The Crossings' financing, now says she is "very proud to say I have financed the project." She also calls it "truly pioneering," providing a model for how to bring walkable development to suburban locations. The Crossings, itself possible because of the successful projects that preceded it, helped pave the way for more and better transit-oriented developments that followed.

The Beranger condos, a new transit-oriented development in Gresham, wouldn't have been possible without The Crossings' success. Image: Gresham Downtown Development Association.

Moving forward, then, Portland will have to craft policies that expand the comfort zone of lenders. Gibb and Anderson saw shared parking and car-share as tools to mitigate banks' fears about financing projects with fewer parking spaces than normal.

There are also structural reasons that banks avoid transit-oriented development, which can't be overcome by building a few market comparables. Because profits from transit-oriented development tend to materialize more slowly than from typical suburban development, new financing methods are needed to make TOD more attractive to lenders. And of course, banks respond to the regulatory environment. Portland makes many developers adhere to principles of walkable development near transit lines.

It's true that Portland area bankers have yet to embrace the full range of development needed to reduce car-dependence. But as the region attempts to grow sustainably, it benefits immensely from development officials like John Warner, who talks passionately about "the community organizing needed to get all the stakeholders on board with the absolute necessity of transit-oriented development." While here in New York, where growth is ostensibly shaped by a citywide sustainability plan, the chair of the local Economic Development Corporation still thinks that not providing enough parking is "the worst thing we could do."

NYC Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert Lieber. Photo: New York Daily News

Lieber has been a central figure in the administration's planning and development policy since taking the helm of EDC in 2006. In December 2007, he assumed his current post, succeeding PlaNYC architect Dan Doctoroff. From mega-developments like Hunter's Point and Willets Point to smaller rezonings around the city, Lieber's had a hand in guiding what gets built in New York City, and where.

Lieber's replacement will inherit responsibility for two of the city agencies doing the most to add more traffic to New York City's streets. DCP has shown no inclination to reform parking policies that devour real estate, inflate housing prices and increase car ownership rates across much of the city. EDC continues to subsidize projects that add massive amounts of parking for no justifiable reason. All this new off-street parking creates incentives to drive, generating traffic that impedes bus service and degrades the appeal of streets for walking and bicycling. These policies stands in clear opposition to PlaNYC's goal of reducing automobile use and prioritizing sustainable transportation.

The next deputy mayor for economic development can complete some of the biggest missing pieces in PlaNYC. Here's what two of New York's leading transportation advocates say Lieber's replacement can do for sustainability.

Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White highlighted the Economic Development Corporation as particularly in need of a sustainability shakeup. "The EDC's inexorable march towards more parking and car-oriented development is tarring the mayor's otherwise green record," said White. "This is the mayor's last, best chance to reverse course and bring land use policy into alignment with PlaNYC."

Lieber's successor could do more to make New York City's growth both environmentally sustainable and socially equitable, said Tri-State Transportation Campaign director Kate Slevin.

"In stark contrast to his environmental and transportation policies, Mayor Bloomberg’s development policy has largely favored the elite," she said. "Loosening parking policies for the richer half of New Yorkers who own cars, pushing forward large, controversial development projects, and allowing suburban-style development to occur in transit-dependent neighborhoods all point to the need for a different approach from the new deputy mayor."

Slevin put forward one development project she'd like to see Lieber's replacement put his muscle behind -- tearing down the Sheridan Expressway. "The replacement of the underutilized Sheridan Expressway with affordable housing and parks," she said, "is one of the city’s best opportunities to promote economic development and smart growth in a manner that benefits the working and middle classes."

The mayor's office says that no decision has been made yet about who will replace Lieber, but the speculation has begun. Crain's reports that current EDC head Seth Pinsky could be a top internal candidate, but that Bloomberg may follow his recent hiring pattern and choose another outsider like Howard Wolfson or Stephen Goldsmith.

The BQE trench divides a neighborhood in two, spewing noise and air pollution. Photo: NYCEDC [PDF]

Between 1950 and 1964, Robert Moses gouged a path across two boroughs to build the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. In Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, the BQE slices through the urban fabric in the form of a below-grade trench, which has given many residents of those neighborhoods hope of covering that section of highway. As more people have moved to the west side of the ditch, the pressure to do something has mounted, but the BQE trench won't get capped any time soon.

Before the BQE trench was built, the neighborhood had a fully connected street grid. Image: NYCEDC

The damage inflicted by the highway on residents' ears and lungs, however, could still be lessened, and some of the lost street connections can be restored. Right now, locals put up with traffic noise as high as 76 decibels -- at 80, you're subject to long-term hearing loss -- and dangerously elevated levels of asthma-causing particulate pollution. Their neighborhood is effectively split in two. A study sponsored by Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, who secured $300,000 in federal funds, offers a few partial solutions to "fix the ditch."

The project team developing the study held its first community planning session last week, and the Brooklyn Eagle reports that improved bike-ped connections across the highway, noise-reducing walls, and environmental remediation measures are the favored changes. (This is a separate project from the reconstruction of the BQE in downtown Brooklyn, which could have major implications for the local and regional transportation system.)

The NYC Economic Development Corporation is leading the study, in partnership with NYCDOT and a host of consulting firms. The goal for now is to produce a plan that can be shopped around for additional funding. After two more community meetings, the lead planners will put out a conceptual design and engineering report in July. In the fall, they'll issue three alternative plans for the trench. The money isn't in place yet for the redesign itself. 

Neither is funding available for capping the trench, which could create new real estate for public space or private development. Seattle famously decked over part of I-5 to create Freeway Park, and Los Angeles is considering doing something similar where the 101 Freeway divides downtown. Though the Eagle reported that many residents near the BQE trench still hold out hope for such a bold scenario, planners don't expect to have access to the kind of money needed for more than incremental changes.

Instead, the EDC report [PDF] calls for traffic calming and wider sidewalks along the access roads on each side of the trench, where excess street space leads to speeding cars. It also proposes bridges over the trench that are safer and more aesthetically pleasing, and structures along the highway to absorb noise and pollution. Here are a few examples of what's on the table.

Potential models for calming traffic along either side of the BQE trench. Photos: NYCEDC

Pedestrian bridges from around the world could serve as templates for new walkways and bike connections over the trench. Photos: NYCEDC

Green walls would block noise, absorb some pollution, and make the highway look less awful. Photos: NYCEDC

Flushing Commons will add a lot of parking -- and cause more traffic congestion -- in the heart of downtown Flushing. Image: Inhabitat.

EDC's 1,600-space requirement comes from just three numbers, according to an agency spokesperson:

1. Flushing Commons will be built on the site of a municipal surface parking lot with 1,101 spaces.
2. The minimum parking required by the Department of City Planning, based on the Flushing Commons development plan, is around 700 spaces.
3. The city is adding an additional 200 parking spaces to a nearby municipal lot.

EDC reasoned that Flushing Commons shouldn't eliminate any of the parking that already existed and that the planning department's parking minimums were a good guideline for the new development, so they added 1,100 and 700. Then they subtracted the 200 new off-site spaces, and voila, they decided that the project required 1,600 spaces. 

That kind of thinking leads straight to car-dependency. "EDC's approach to this reflects an implicit policy that New York City should become more auto-oriented," said UPenn professor and parking policy expert Rachel Weinberger. "By preserving existing spaces while adding additional spaces they are ensuring that more trips will be made by car."

What's particularly striking about EDC's math is that it's completely isolated from all other considerations. The strain on Flushing's streets, which are already clogged with congestion, wasn't a factor. The PlaNYC goal of reducing transportation emissions by 44 percent by 2030 wasn't a factor. Officials apparently never stopped to think about the potential housing, retail or community uses that could have been built instead of some of the 500,000 square feet given to vehicle storage. Even the project's financial feasibility, which we noted yesterday was threatened by such a large parking mandate, wasn't a factor.

In other words, EDC calculated its parking requirement in a vacuum, without considering the true costs. Performing some first-grade math with three numbers does not constitute a real parking policy.

The economic development specialists at EDC may not think it's their job to consider transportation, or land use, or sustainability, but the agency is already setting the city's parking policy through its RFPs, which bind many of the largest developments in the city. It must start making those parking policy decisions within a broader context.

In fact, that's what PlaNYC was supposed to require. In his 2007 speech announcing PlaNYC, Mayor Bloomberg said that his staff "realized that you can’t formulate a land use plan without thinking about transportation." All the relevant agencies were expected to collaborate with the shared goal of building a sustainable city.

That includes EDC, which the original PlaNYC report gave direct authority over a dozen initiatives, from expanding ferry service to improving the electric grid. Unfortunately, at Flushing Commons, like so many other EDC projects, PlaNYC goals don't seem to have even entered the equation.

NYCEDC required a suburban level of parking at the Flushing Commons development. Image: Rockefeller Group Development Corporation.

The project, known as Flushing Commons, is a mixture of retail, housing, and office space slated for downtown Flushing, one of New York's fastest growing business districts. It's also one of the most transit-rich areas in Queens, making it a prime location for great walkable development.

But Meyer's project is slated to include a suburban level of parking, which will induce shoppers to drive to an area  that's already overrun by traffic. And if some Flushing leaders get their way, the project will include even more -- and cheaper -- parking.

Meyer believes the area is ready for walkable development, but notes that 50-year-old beliefs about transportation and development still prevail. "We're almost in a time warp," he said, adding that "Flushing is not the way it used to be," but "emotions and misconceptions" lead people to think excessive parking is a necessity.

Zoning rules require 700 spaces at Flushing Commons, according to Meyer, but the project will build far more -- 1,600 spaces -- because the parking-obsessed Economic Development Corporation demanded that level of parking. 

Flushing Commons would build up to 620 residences, 275,000 square feet of retail space and 234,000 square feet of commercial space just two short blocks from the busiest subway station outside Manhattan. The site is served by 21 different bus routes and is a short walk from the third-busiest pedestrian intersection in all of New York. The property, currently a 1,100-space surface parking lot, is owned by the city, hence the active involvement of EDC. 

"This is not a single-use suburban development site," said parking policy expert Rachel Weinberger, co-author of a recent report on parking innovation in American cities. "And yet EDC seems to be once again pushing suburban-style development standards."

In addition to the 1,600 parking spaces, the city has convinced the developers to add 200 spaces to a nearby municipal lot. Still, many residents and local merchants say that isn't enough.

In fact, at the typical 350 square feet per spot, the parking is already set to consume more space than the retail and office space combined, a real waste in such a transit-rich location. If more parking gets built, Flushing Commons will become a parking garage with mixed-use development attached, rather than the other way around.

Flushing Commons would replace a city-owned surface parking lot in the heart of transit-rich downtown Flushing -- and build even more parking in the process. Image: Google Maps.

The addition of so much parking will be mitigated by the developers' decision to price it more effectively, which is what really seems to be upsetting some in Flushing. Currently, the lot only charges $1 per hour or $4 per day, which Meyer says just leads to commuters filling the spots all day. "You don't put a commuter lot in the heart of a burgeoning central business district," he said. "'The High Cost of Free Parking'? Flushing's the poster-child for that."

In order to attract more shoppers, Meyer's firm is instead increasing the amount of short-term parking and pricing parking at higher rates, though still slightly below market prices.

This attempt to get motorists to pay the cost of the parking they use has elicited some of the loudest complaints. Then-Council Member John Liu spoke out against charging more for parking as early as 2007.

Putting a rational price on parking should temper demand, allowing the developer to build fewer spaces. But EDC's requirements have pre-empted any attempt to give less space to vehicle storage. (EDC should learn from previous mistakes, like the Gateway Center mall in the Bronx, where parking isn't free and most customers walk to shop, leaving parking spaces unused, eating up land and money.)

Streetsblog has a request in with NYCEDC about why the agency required so much parking at a site so well-served by transit.

Less parking at Flushing Commons wouldn't just promote livable streets, it would also make it easier to build at this transit-rich location. "The parking is a money loser -- we know this because the original plan included even more parking, which was cut back to make the project profitable," said Weinberger. 

Given the demands from EDC, however, building less parking isn't an option at Flushing Commons. Shoup-quoting developers can only do so much for sustainable growth when the city itself demands that up-and-coming downtowns like Flushing emulate suburbia.

A Nextbike kiosk in Tubingen, Germany. Image: Eldersign via Flickr.

With bike-share systems launching in three major American cities this year, the question naturally arises: Does New York have an appetite for bike-sharing?

Patricia Bayley and Martin Mazza say yes. Students at Barcelona's IESE, one of Europe's top business schools, Bayley and Mazza intend to open a bike-sharing company in New York City.

Along with a third student, Adrian Lui, Bayley and Mazza were recently selected as finalists in the "NYC Next Idea" business model competition. Sponsored by the NYC Economic Development Corporation, the competition invited graduate students from around the world to compete for seed money and free space in one of the city's business incubators.

Both Mazza and Bayley are veteran New York City cyclists. While studying in Barcelona, they've had ample time to observe Bicing, Barcelona's bike-share program. They think they can do better. "We can learn from their mistakes," said Mazza. Added Bayley, "One of the big problems here in Barcelona is that the city is on a hill. People are renting them at the top and dumping them at the bottom." Inspired by both the success and the shortcomings of Bicing, they see a market in American cities, especially in flat, tightly-knit New York.

Paul DeMaio, the consultant who writes the Bike-Sharing Blog, thinks that Bayley and Mazza's idea has potential. "For-profit bike-sharing services exist in Europe," he said, "so the U.S. could be ripe for entrepreneurs to introduce this model of bike-sharing here." DeMaio noted that even private-sector bike-sharing firms have to work with local governments, particularly on station placement.

After an event at the New School last night, NYCEDC president Seth Pinsky told Streetsblog why his organization's projects include so many parking spaces. "The worst thing we could do," he said, "is create projects that create a parking need and then not provide that parking."

Predictions about "parking need," however, are consistently flawed. At one of the EDC's own projects, the Gateway Center in the Bronx, far more shoppers take transit than developers predicted, leaving the parking lot underutilized and creating a hostile environment for people who walk. In the words of parking guru Donald Shoup, "In trying to foretell the demand for parking, urban planners resemble the Wizard of Oz, deceived by his own tricks."

According to Pinsky, EDC takes its figures for parking demand straight from the legally-mandated environmental review process. So, some of the problem here is embedded in that process, which has prompted calls to revise local environmental review laws [PDF].