Streetsblog New York City

Via Norman Oder at Atlantic Yards Report, here’s a variety of parking scofflaw that we’ve never come across before on Streetsblog.

In the video, an early morning car commuter, presumably someone working on the nearby Barclays Center arena project, apparently decides that the last parking space on this block of Pacific Street (between Sixth Avenue and Carlton Avenue) is too small to accommodate his SUV, so he makes his own free parking by uprooting a No Standing sign. Oder says the vandalism and flouting of parking regs is symptomatic of the un-monitored violations around the Atlantic Yards construction zone, including trucks double-parking and idling.

This isn’t the first time that Atlantic Yards workers have torn out this particular No Standing sign, thereby adding about four or five illegal on-street spaces, according to Atlantic Yards Watch. In fact, the maker of this video predicted that the sign “would be destroyed within one day of installation again,” and he was right.

And you thought placards were the ultimate in free parking entitlement.

In June we wondered whether Forest City Ratner would make the most of the Barclays Center’s potential as a destination for pedestrians, transit riders and cyclists. Recent developments are less than encouraging.

Gib Veconi noted a couple of weeks back on Atlantic Yards Watch that a July proposal from Ratner to NYC DOT regarding bollard placement shows that sidewalks around the arena may be much narrower than what Ratner and the Empire State Development Corporation originally led the public to believe.

“Effective width” refers to the portion of the sidewalk used by pedestrians for travel after a buffer zone (or “shy distance”) on each side of the sidewalk is subtracted from its design width. A 1999 study by the U.S. Department of Transportation describes the shy distance as two feet on each side of the sidewalk.

According to the FCR plans, among the sidewalks other than those next to the pedestrian plaza in front of Barclays Center, three of four have narrower effective widths than were analyzed in the project’s 2006 environmental impact statement.

Veconi notes that the sidewalk on the south side of Atlantic Avenue east of the arena entrance now has an effective width of 5.5 feet, or 40 percent of the 13.5 feet presented in the EIS. “This sidewalk will presumably be traveled by large groups of arena patrons leaving the Atlantic Avenue exit en route to arena parking to the east, and borders busy Atlantic Avenue. No bollards are shown to be installed along this section of sidewalk.”

In addition, Veconi points out that the Dean Street bike lane will be situated between a thru-traffic lane and parking bays designated for pick-ups and drop-offs, putting cyclists in the path of merging vehicles.

Public comments on the Ratner bollard plan will be accepted through September 22. See Veconi’s post for more info and links to numerous relevant docs.

Ready or not, come September 28, 2012, Brooklyn will once again be home to a major professional sports venue. The Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards is scheduled to open by next fall, while progress on the rest of Forest City Ratner’s mega-development is lagging far behind. In the words of local City Council Member Letitia James, “All we’re getting is an arena and a large parking lot.”

James’s conclusion is perhaps a bit premature, as Norman Oder has noted at the Atlantic Yards Report, but the basic premise is right: The arena is moving ahead while the rest of the project languishes, and for a while the arena may stand all alone. The primary transportation planning challenge facing the area is how best to move the tens of thousands of people who will want to watch a basketball game or concert to and from the site in a way that is safe, sustainable and appropriate to an urban environment.

The fundamentals for a smart solution are there: The Atlantic/Pacific hub makes the area better-served by transit than almost anywhere else in the United States. Right now, though, the picture is more mixed. The state recently released its transportation plan for the arena, a plan largely in line with past promises from both the Empire State Development Corporation and the developer Forest City Ratner, which is intended to mitigate the increased traffic that the crowds heading to an arena event will bring to the surrounding neighborhoods. Many of the features, like free subway fares for certain Nets ticket holders and 400 secure bike parking spaces, will help make the Barclays Center more transit-oriented and bike and pedestrian-friendly.

But the developer is planning to build an 1,100-space surface parking lot, killing street life and inducing driving. And with some of the borough’s deadliest streets left in place as enormous traffic arteries, walking and cycling will remain overly dangerous, potentially keeping features like a temporary plaza from being much more than a hard-to-reach traffic island.

Between developer Forest City Ratner, the Empire State Development Corporation and the city government, the capacity exists to make the Barclays Center a standard-setting example for urban arenas around the country, if only they have the will. At a public meeting tonight sponsored by several electeds and neighborhood groups, leading local architects and planners will lead a workshop to envision alternatives to the surface parking lots currently planned for the site.

What are the options? Streetsblog is going to explore how the transportation mix serving the new arena can emphasize transit, biking, and walking, creating the conditions for a quality pedestrian environment. First, we’re taking a look at what some other urban stadiums are doing to promote sustainable transportation, and then in a later post we’ll see what top planners think needs to happen to make this arena work for Brooklyn.

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Getting sports fans to come to games without driving is an uphill task. Madison Square Garden is perhaps the ultimate urban stadium. It sits on top of Penn Station, the busiest transit station in the United States, and according to the New York Times, does not have its own dedicated parking lot. Even so, only 52 percent of people headed to Knicks or Rangers games in 2003 arrived by transit or on foot. Everyone else drove.

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Well, this doesn’t make up for the eminent domain abuse, inexcusable subsidies-slash-dealmaking, crappy urban design and extensive surface parking acreage, but the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay reminds us that the Brooklyn basketball arena financed by Bruce Ratner, Mikhail Prokhorov, and the taxpayers of New York State will include 400 bike parking spaces.

Gay’s report on yesterday’s media event announcing the arena’s opening date of September 28, 2012 has some sharp commentary on NYC’s media-fueled bike bashing:

On Monday I rode my bike in Brooklyn, because I live there, and because that’s what terrible people do in Brooklyn — load up their hemp backpacks with baguettes and copies of “Das Kapital” and ride their bikes everywhere, ruining civic life in New York City.

But lo, the outlaw behavior gets crazier. I rode my Satan bike in a Satanic bike lane to see the Nets.

P.J. O’Rourke take note: This is great satire.

With the opening of the 18,000-seat arena less than 18 months away and the Nets saying that it will host 200 events a year, 400 bike parking spaces will come in handy. But what about those oceans of surface parking? There must be a better way to plan for people to get to the arena than to invite thousands of car trips to one of the most transit- and bike-accessible sites in the entire city. Streetsblog will be taking a closer look at the Atlantic Yards transportation equation in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned.

The latest round of the knock-down drag-out fight over the Atlantic Yards project is underway, and it’s all about parking. At issue is a potential 1,100-space surface parking lot that would be located between Pacific and Dean Streets, just west of Vanderbilt Avenue. That lot has been portrayed as temporary, “interim” parking by the Empire State Development Corporation and project developer Forest City Ratner, but could sit there generating traffic for up to 25 years. Last week several groups filed a motion to halt construction until the environmental impacts of the project are studied more fully.

The basic question is whether the environmental review for Atlantic Yards needs reworking in light of the fact that development could take up to 25 years, rather than the ten-year construction schedule originally put forward by ESDC and Ratner. (Be sure to check out the invaluable Norman Oder for all the details.) If construction is really going to take an extra fifteen years, the argument goes, the true impacts on things like traffic, noise, and air quality weren’t ever disclosed, in violation of environmental law. That argument got a boost in the courts a few weeks ago, and the legal battle now hinges on whether or not to halt construction.

For the BrooklynSpeaks coalition, the 1,100 space “interim” parking lot is at the heart of the issue. As Oder reports, their lawyer suggested that construction on the Barclays Center basketball arena might be allowed to continue “but all other work, including any attempt to convert Block 1129 to a parking lot, should be absolutely enjoined unless and until there is full compliance with SEQRA.”

“They were supposed to put the parking underground,” BrooklynSpeaks member Jo Anne Simon explained. A quarter-century of surface parking wasn’t part of the deal.

Though Simon said that BrooklynSpeaks has tried not to debate suitable uses for the Atlantic Yards site, she did suggest that surface parking wasn’t an acceptable option. “Something that’s an amenity for the community,” she suggested, “maybe some interim open space.” Simon also added that some additional demolition would still be required to pave over the block, “and that we’d like to see not happen.”

Yesterday Forest City Ratner released images of the temporary public plaza slated for the triangle between Flatbush and Atlantic, and you’ve gotta appreciate the spin coming from the developer and his design team. Wedged between two epic traffic sewers, without much noticeable provision for shade or shelter, it will become, in the words of Bruce Ratner, “one of Brooklyn’s great public spaces.” (Until an office tower gets built in its place.)

Not convinced that the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic is conducive to any sort of public activity? Here’s Greg Pasquarelli of design firm SHoP, courtesy of the Brooklyn Paper:

Pasquarelli insisted that “the plaza [will] become a meeting place, and the focus of the neighborhood.”

When asked, Pasquarelli admitted that there would be considerable noise from the traffic on Atlantic and Flatbush avenues, but no more than in other urban plazas.

“There’s a lot of traffic around Union Square, with Broadway,” he said. “This plaza will feel safe and open.”

As of this month, there’s only one lane of moving traffic on two sides of Union Square. Ratner’s plaza will be enveloped by traffic, and unless you approach from Prospect Heights, you won’t be able to walk to it without crossing some of the deadliest streets in the city:

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Atlantic and Flatbush time lapse from tracy collins on Vimeo.

This time-lapse film by Tracy Collins at Not Another F*cking Blog is a telling indictment of poor pedestrian conditions at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. And depending on how Bruce Ratner's new sports arena is built out -- the groundbreaking is set for this week -- things could get much worse.

As exemplified by the crosswalk hogs in the video, this is a terrible environment for pedestrians right now. If and when the arena arrives, two things will happen: thousands of pedestrians will arrive via transit to get to games -- the more the better, but they'll need more space; and more people will be driving here, especially if there's a huge surface parking lot.

Note that Forest City Ratner has not answered questions about all the "interim" surface parking it intends to construct. Scroll down this post for a thorough list of related unresolved issues from the Dean Street Block Association, care of Norman Oder.

Norman Oder at Atlantic Yards Report has the details from Wednesday's public meeting on street closures and traffic changes near the footprint of Bruce Ratner's Brooklyn arena project. With construction apparently on the verge of ramping up significantly, local electeds, NYCDOT, and representatives of developer Forest City Ratner engaged in a Q&A session as notable for what was left unsaid as for what was revealed.

Forest City Ratner did discuss its failure to reopen the Carlton Avenue bridge. This missing piece of the Prospect Heights/Fort Greene street grid -- a critical link for cyclists who use the Manhattan Bridge -- was originally expected to be rebuilt two years after closing in January 2008, with Forest City facing a three-year deadline to complete the work before incurring penalties. Now the reconstructed bridge is unlikely to open until 2012 at the earliest, and Oder reports that Forest City's explanation, along with its timetable, keeps on shifting.

Largely unmentioned at the meeting was Forest City's intention to construct more than a thousand "interim" surface parking spaces on the site, mostly to store vehicles belonging to their employees and construction workers. Since all this new parking could sit around generating traffic and blighting the landscape for quite some time, neighborhood groups want to know exactly how much would be constructed, and how it will be priced and managed. They didn't get any answers on Wednesday.

For more on the meeting, head over to Atlantic Yards Report.

State officials announced yesterday that, starting sometime around February 1, they intend to close three blocks of the Brooklyn street grid to accommodate construction of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards arena project. Fifth Avenue between Flatbush and Atlantic and two non-consecutive blocks of Pacific Street are slated to be condemned.

An announcement circulated by Brooklyn CB 6 yesterday characterized the changes as "permanent closures," but Dan Goldstein of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn is calling that label premature. "It's the inevitability ploy," he said, noting that the closures seem timed to take effect immediately after a January 29 court decision on the state's seizure of properties in the project footprint. "At the very least they have to close the streets in a way that they can re-open them if they're forced to."

If the closures do take effect, it's about to get a little harder to move between Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, and Park Slope, no matter how you get around. Ratner's project has already forced cyclists heading to the Manhattan Bridge to find detours around one of the safest and most convenient routes, thanks to the 2008 closure of the Carlton Avenue bridge (for which there is no end in sight).

Now, these proto-superblocks will degrade the street grid further. Will pedestrians be barred from any of the sidewalks on the affected streets? The Empire State Development Corporation, overseer of the project, hasn't responded to Streetsblog's inquiries.

After yesterday's post showing the sidewalk appropriation going on at Pacific Street and Sixth Avenue as part of Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards project, DOT sent an email explaining why this is happening:

We approved a plan at this location to permit two-way traffic using a portion of the sidewalk during sewer installation for approximately 12 weeks. This kind of arrangement is not unique and has been used on projects such as the Second Avenue Subway and on major projects on 34th Street in Queens or Richmond Terrace on Staten Island. We inspected the location this morning and instructed the contractor to replace the wooden barrier with one made of concrete and to extend it in both directions while maintaining at least a five-foot-wide pedestrian walkway, and to install additional signs as was part of the original, approved plan. We will continue to monitor the area.

I'm still wondering why the east-bound lane of traffic can't just take a detour onto Sixth Avenue.