Streetsblog New York City

The Greenstreet at 110th and Amsterdam helps keep sewage out of city rivers and features a beefed-up, traffic-calming "blockbuster."

It rained yesterday, sending stormwater streaming down New York City streets and through sewer grates. The runoff mixed with wastewater in the system and overloaded treatment facilities, causing raw sewage to spill into the city's waterways.

Sound like an ecological disaster? It can be triggered by as little as one tenth of an inch of rainfall in one hour. Called Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO), this toxic broth also contains chemicals leached from roofs and pavement. 27 billion gallons of CSO pour into city rivers and bays every year. Until recently, there was no concerted effort to prevent it.

One of the more unsung PlaNYC initiatives aims to drastically reduce CSO, in part by managing streets more wisely. Certain traffic calming measures, it turns out, can not only make streets more ped-friendly, but also help make the city's rivers clean enough to swim in. To accomplish this, PlaNYC calls for retooling the Parks Department's Greenstreets program, and we are starting to see the results.

At their best, Greenstreets -- the pint-sized green spaces that Parks began planting in 1996 -- have served as modest traffic-calming measures, displacing asphalt with patches of greenery that send cues to slow down. The new breed goes a few steps further: They combine advanced stormwater capture techniques with more overt traffic-calming devices, like neckdowns and bulb-outs.

Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan continues to assemble an impressive management team.

Following in the footsteps of Bruce Schaller and Jon Orcutt, Project for Public Spaces vice president and transportation program director Andy Wiley-Schwartz is heading over to 40 Worth Street where he will be reporting to Deputy Commissioner Schaller at DOT's new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. There they will be working to implement the transportation and public space objectives set out in Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC.

Wiley-Schwartz starts at DOT on Monday. While there has been no official announcement of his hiring or his title, word has it Wiley-Schwartz will be working on new public space initiatives, which seems like a natural fit, given his experience at PPS. With DOT's recent focus on reclaiming under-utilized bits and pieces of street space as public plazas and with tremendous grassroots energy in places like Hell's Kitchen, SoHo, Gansevoort, Grand Army Plaza, Williamsburg and even the occasional, random on-street parking spot -- it seems like "public space initiatives" could be a pretty exciting job description at DOT right now.

Wiley-Schwartz has been a contributor here at Streetsblog. At PPS he specialized in working with Departments of Transportation and community groups all across the U.S. on downtown street enhancement, traffic calming and bicycle and pedestrian projects. He is a national lead in the Context Sensitive Solutions movement, an articulate advocate and just a really pleasant guy to work with. Here is an excerpt from his PPS bio:

He specializes in helping communities rebuild their neighborhoods and cities by leveraging transportation funding into the development of public spaces, including streets and other transportation facilities, in part by focusing on strategic partnerships and programming.

Andy's current projects include PPS's New Jersey Smart Choices program: an outreach, education and training program to help municipalities plan and make sustainable land use decisions in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Transportation. He is also working with the Times Square Alliance in New York City, the City of Elmira, NY to revitalize the area under and around a railroad viaduct downtown, and advising the City of Indianapolis on their plan to build a "Cultural Trail" through their central business district.

And, no, this is not an April Fool's prank. It's June, people.

Some light reading from the Christian Science Monitor before tomorrow's rumored Office of Long-Term Planning & Sustainability conference:

The city's Department of Environmental Protection, which manages the city's freshwater supply and wastewater -- 13,000 miles of pipe, total -- formed a task force to look at the long-term effects of climate change. Among other things, the DEP was concerned by the damage storm surges might inflict on a city surrounded by water. Although city officials declined to discuss concrete solutions for this article saying they were still in the "assessment" phase, scientists foresee potential fixes ranging from raising key infrastructure and building dikes, to flood gates and temporary seals over tunnel entrances. One group proposes raisable flood barriers large enough to protect all of Manhattan Island.

And the winner of a recent competition for engineers and architects to envision New York City in 2106, ARO, doesn't attempt to keep the water out. Rather, they envision building in, on and around it.

Word has it that the Bloomberg Administration's new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability will unveil its first work product this coming Wednesday, November 15. It looks like this initial public announcement will be oriented more around the problems that the new office is thinking about and working on rather than the solutions. The solutions, I am told, may start to emerge as a part of the Mayor's State of the City speech in January.

There are high hopes that tomorrow's public unveiling, whatever it may show, begins to lay the groundwork for a serious traffic reduction program in New York City, perhaps in the form of London-style congestion charging. With this year's elections out of the way there is no longer any worry that the inevitably difficult public discussion of congestion charging might force a gubernatorial candidate into a corner. Governor Elect Spitzer's vow to raise subway fares only as a last resort almost guarantees an MTA fiscal crisis in the coming months. Might a fiscal crisis also serve as the impetus for a congestion charging push? Among political insiders there is a feeling that the only possible way to sell congestion charging to New York is in response to a serious crisis. In other words, the Doctor needs to make it clear that the patient is sick and needs to make dificult, but ultimately fulfilling, lifestyle changes.

We have heard that the Partnership for New York City's secretive, years-long congestion charging study is far along in its analysis and modeling. The project is being masterminded by Janette Sadik-Khan at Parsons Brinckerhoff (pictured right). A serious candidate for DOT commissioner when Michael Bloomberg was first elected mayor, Sadik-Khan's resume includes a stint as the Director of the Mayor's Office of Transportation for New York City during the Dinkins Administration. Transportation consultant Bruce Schaller is also working on a congestion charging study for the conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute.

All of which leads us to a more pressing issue: Can anyone out there come up with a better name for it than "congestion charging?"

Traffic Relief Zone, anyone?

In his weekly radio address yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg discussed some steps his administration is taking toward a sustainable future, including the creation of an Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, and a Sustainability Advisory Board, which held its first meeting last week.

Long-term sustainability is of course right up Streetsblog's alley. Correspondent Charles Komanoff donned his policy-wonk hat last week and came up with an Economist's Agenda for a Sustainable NYC. These recommendations draw heavily on the concept of creating financial incentives and disincentives to encourage people to make the right choices as they consume energy and natural resources. We're hearing through the grapevine that the advisory board is paying close attention.

Komanoff's recommendations:

• Price Peak Power
• Unbundle Electricity
• Price the Roads
• Price the Curbs
• Abolish Privileged Parking
• Universal Bottle and Bag Deposits
• Tax Carbon, Not Commerce

Details are on the other side of this link.