Photo: Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn.

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.

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, the organization fighting Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards boondoggle, point us to the latest traffic "mitigation" from the Empire State Development Corporation, pictured above. Over at Pacific Street and Sixth Avenue in Prospect Heights, the sidewalk has been transformed into a motor vehicle travel lane. DDDB writes:

Yes, they've turned the sidewalk into a lane of the road. And as we took these photos we saw a number of confused pedestrians walking down the "road" and confused drivers wondering why they were supposed to drive on the sidewalk. It will be pure luck if nobody is hurt by this mess.

The Atlantic Yards construction project -- which still hasn't even gotten started -- is already turning out to be something of a minor disaster for pedestrians and cyclists. The Carlton Avenue bridge, a critical link in Brooklyn's bike network, was demolished months ago and isn't expected to re-open for years. Then there was that entire city block that Forest City leveled and turned into a surface parking lot for construction workers and future arena visitors.

Speaking of Atlantic Yards, there will be a pair of rallies against the project today in Downtown Brooklyn...

Now the good news: DOT is considering changes for the area -- especially the pedestrian crossings -- and the agency's ideas will get a public airing tonight at a presentation to Community Board 2. Community groups are encouraging Brooklynites to show up and share their suggestions. Here are the details:

DOT presentation to CB2 Transportation Committee
Tuesday, October 21, at 6 p.m.
St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights

Photo: Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn

Graphic of crashes and fatalities near Atlantic Terminal, 1995-2005: CrashStat

Given the New Jersey Nets' lackluster season (34-48 record, no playoff berth), the franchise is taking a page from another under-performer to unload tickets for next year. That's right: buy 2008-2009 season tickets and the Nets will return 10 percent of the cost in the form of "free" gas, which fans will presumably burn up on the way to all those home games. 'Cause with the Nets, it's not about winning or losing, or even how you play. It's about the free gas.

This promotion brought to you by the would-be savior of Brooklyn.

With development projects across the city threatened by an uncertain economy, critics of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project believe that a slowdown in construction could burden Prospect Heights with decades of blight. A slide show by the Municipal Art Society, called "Atlantic Yards or Atlantic Lots?," offers a bleak look into the future, like this rendering of neighborhood blocks destroyed for "temporary" surface lots that would accommodate some 1,400 cars.

MAS is calling on Governor David Paterson to suspend demolition in order to prepare an interim development plan, and has a link to a web form through which members of the public can contact Paterson directly.

Aerial photo by Jonathan Barkey.

Yesterday Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn posted this photo of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, as seen at 8:45 a.m.

"With Atlantic Yards's 17,000 new residents, and an 18,000 seat arena in use approximately 220 days per year, this gridlock would be the good ol' days," DDDB said.

Without major changes it won't get better for pedestrians or cyclists either. On Tuesday a woman was killed one block away, at Atlantic and Fort Greene Place.

From the Daily News:

A Brooklyn woman was mowed down and killed by a van while crossing the street Tuesday, police said.

A van struck Beverly Cattouse, 57, as she crossed Atlantic Ave. in Boerum Hill about 4 p.m. She died at Brooklyn Hospital Center. The driver of the van remained at the scene and was not charged with a crime.

The police account of Ms. Cattouse's death is on the Brooklynian forum, where one commenter describes the area as "hellacious." A look at Transportation Alternatives' CrashStat bears that out.

The blue and red markers indicate the number of pedestrian and bike involved crashes, respectively. Bike and pedestrian icons mark fatalities. 

Writes a commenter on the WABC web site:

drivers don't want to stop for you even if you have the right of way. there is just no regard for human life. everyone is in a rush to go nowhere.

Portland, Oregon, which has ascended the ranks of cities judged most walkable, bikable, and urbane, benefits mightily from its small 200-foot square blocks, which provide businesses more street frontage and people more streets on which to bike, cycle and walk. These short blocks did not create Oregon's and Portland's growth management and pro-transit policies, but they gave them terrain on which these policies could take root.

Contrast that to Salt Lake City. Its founder Brigham Young for some reason opted for one of the widest urban grids anywhere. (I've read he wanted teams of cattle to be able to turn around?) Its streets are laid out in a grid where each blocks is 660 feet square - which means that nine Portland blocks to fill up one Salt Lake superblock. This makes getting around Salt Lake City on foot very difficult, as I can personally attest.

New York City is somewhere in the middle, at least in Manhattan. Its numbered streets are set at a pedestrian friendly 200 feet apart while its avenues are set at a pedestrian unfriendly 800 feet apart, except where broken in two by Lexington, Madison or other mid-grid streets. This deficiency has long been noted, so if anything the city should have a set policy creating new streets when possible, and so to create shorter, more pedestrian friendly blocks.

But that is not the case. Instead the city and state often encourage one of the deadest institutions, the Superblock. Not content with blocks that are too large already, the city and state often team up to create even bigger blocks, and not even pedestrian friendly versions of those.

What exactly is a superblock? This term came into vogue in planning circles more than a half century ago to describe the then fashionable idea of demapping older street grid and creating one large blocks where before many blocks had been. It was thought that the old small blocks were outmoded, and did not fit a car-friendly culture. Jane Jacobs, among others, fired a stake into the heart of this idea, and now, theoretically at least, the superblock is dead. There are few defenders of it -- theoretically.

But practice is different than theory. Let's look at a few examples.

There's the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. While there are a lot of reasons to criticize this project, starting with the process that seemed to reverse the normal way development of a public parcel should proceed. But when you get down to urban design of the plan itself, it has entirely too few streets. Not only does it de-map some existing ones, it doesn't pick up the possibility of creating new ones so that this big area could be divided into smaller, pedestrian friendly blocks.

The Hudson Yards Development on the Far West Side of Manhattan is still evolving and it's far from clear what exactly will emerge there. But most of the proposed plans submitted by developers for the new area atop the West Side Rail Yards show towers set in parks or plazas. They seem more appropriate to an Edge City outside Dallas than in a dense urban city. Only the Brookfield plan, in its words, "honors the Manhattan street grid" by drawing several new streets across the site, and puts an emphasis on urban style buildings that front on streets.

Brookfield's Hudson Yards project plan essentially maintains Midtown Manhattan's street grid.

Why do developers haul out the superblock so quickly when designing current projects, and why do public officials let them, despite its near death in academic circles?

One common answer these days is terrorism concerns. Setbacks for more prominent buildings are often larger now, to allow for the placement of bollards and other protective measures. But there is a certain lack of logic here. After all, most New York City buildings do not have enormous setbacks from the street, so pushing that for newer buildings hardly deprives a terrorist of potential targets.

A stronger explanation to me lies in finance and issues of political power. Large concentrations of money affect development in New York City disproportionately, and such large concentrations of money often favor having large concentrations of land to work with. While it may be a disservice to the city to have a large, island-like superblock - traffic flow is disrupted, walking and bicycling trips are made more difficult -- to the developer, a superblock allows for wide floor plates, campus-like settings and a level of land use control that would not otherwise be possible. And since the government sector is weak, large developers often end up doing what suits them first, not the public.

I'm not expecting to get rid of all superblocks. But it is a fair question whether the city should make creating a pedestrian friendly city of short blocks with buildings close to the street a priority. We have the most pedestrian oriented city in the country, but too often we chip away at its essential attributes in this regard, rather than seeking to add to them.

Photosim by Eric McNatt and Jason Lee for New York Magazine.

 
A few weeks back Atlantic Yards Report posted a compendium of recent writings that point to the contradictions inherent in, and problems resulting from, parking requirements for urban development plans.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg's much-praised PlaNYC 2030 contains a glaring omission, a failure to address the antiquated anti-urban policy that mandates parking attached to new residential developments outside Manhattan, even when such developments, like Atlantic Yards, are justified precisely because they're located near transit hubs.

Transit-rich Manhattan isn't exempt from such requirements either, as the city fights in court to turn Hell's Kitchen parking maximums into minimums.

AYR cites a December New York Times op-ed, written by planners Alex Garvin and Nick Peterson, as one indicator that awareness of the parking paradox is entering the mainstream. And yesterday, Metro published a piece questioning the value of Community Benefits Agreements. Touted as a way to smooth possible tensions between neighborhoods and developers through a give-and-take planning process, some argue that CBAs are being abused by builders and the elected officials who support their projects.

This New York style of deal making worries California attorney Julian Gross. “The entire future of the community-benefits movement could be threatened by CBAs being sidetracked and taken over by developers and electeds who want to steer and channel the community participation,” he said. 

One result, in the case of Atlantic Yards and the new Yankee Stadium, is an influx of cars essentially legislated into neighborhoods that don't want them, even as the city preaches the virtues of sustainable growth. From that perspective, the hiring of DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and other planning dream-teamers can seem less a sign of hope than another symptom of the city's schizophrenic approach to urban mobility -- unless, whether due to publicity or change from within, a lot more stuff like this happens.

Photo: Photogrammaton/Flickr

Published in the latest edition of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (free registration required), Bender's provocative essay reacts to what he sees as a revisionist Robert Moses movement, typified by the recent book "Robert Moses and the Modern City," by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, and the accompanying museum displays earlier this year. Moses revisionists, Bender writes, believe the thriving New York of today would not exist were it not for the hard-nosed autocrat's bulldozing brand of tough love. Bender says those calling for "neo-Mosesism" are willing to forget -- or, worse, forgive -- the human cost Moses inflicted upon the city, rationalizing it as inevitable, or even necessary, much like Moses himself.

Bender disputes the neo-Mosesist claim that dependence on public process has lead to "urban paralysis," bogging down public works and stifling growth. Instead of Moses clones, Bender argues that cities need better ways to accept and utilize public input.

While it's hard to disagree with that, Bender missteps by citing the progression of Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards as rebuttals to the Mosesist ethic. Of the former, Bender writes:

Today, the recently approved Atlantic Yards project, a huge mixed-use development in central Brooklyn including an arena for professional basketball, proceeds, after a great deal of public discussion and review (albeit a controversial one) by government bureaucracies. 

It would be difficult to find many people, if any at all, from the public advocacy arena who would say Atlantic Yards has been anything other than a developer-driven monster from day one, with enough backroom machinations and public bullying to rank among Moses's most notorious projects. And though the reviled plan for a far West Side Jets football stadium was defeated, as Bender points out, neighborhood residents are suing the Bloomberg administration over its Moses-like quest to include over 20,000 parking spaces as part of new Hudson Yards development.

In fact, with unpopular projects like Atlantic Yards, Willets Point and the new Yankee Stadium surging forward, one could make the case that a new Moses era has long been underway.

To further cloud the picture, consider the positive works that have recently moved forward under edict -- be they relatively smaller ones, like pedestrian improvements to Jewel Avenue in Queens, or an enormous undertaking like congestion pricing. As Transport for London spokesman Alun Shermer said, "If congestion pricing had to go through a legislative process it probably wouldn't have happened." And in New York, it may well be that "populists" for hire end up killing it off.

So what's the solution?  More efficient, effective public involvement? Enlightened, benign dictatorship?  Or should we -- must we -- straddle that fence with some combination of the two?

Image: W.W. Norton

"Cyclists are so used to doing with scraps and they've been that way for so long that they are shocked when they get anything that satisfies their needs."

Barry Bonds may almost have the home run record, but the San Francisco Giants have another milestone that is much more admirable: the first free, convienent, attended bike parking facility at a U.S. stadium.

Over half of the people who attend Giants games do not travel by car, a somewhat remarkable fact in car-crazy California. (Note to Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards bosses: Look at what San Fran is doing to encourage people not to bring their automobile to the stadium).

As part of an arrangement with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, you can bicycle to a Giants game at AT&T Park, check your bike with up to 200+ other fans, and go catch America’s pastime. Kash, Valet Bike Parking Coordinator for SFBC, runs the operation and gives us the scoop. As you’ll see, fans overwhelmingly endorse it.

A regulation passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1999 states all events incurring a street closure require monitored bicycle parking if the event anticipates 2000 or more participants. This only makes sense in a city like New York, too. Why not encourage something like this at Madison Square Garden, Yankee or Shea Stadium? Or at the very least, some quality racks in a secure, protected location.

NYC DOT does not intend to pursue the implementation of the proposed 6th and 7th Avenue conversion to one-way operation. We respect the Community Board's desire to maintain the current configuration of these streets.

As you know, our proposed modifications on 4th Avenue were developed in context of complementary changes to 6th and 7th Avenue. We are currently evaluating whether our proposal on 4th Avenue is feasible without the one-way conversions of 6th and 7th Avenues. If the evaluation indicates that implementation is feasible, we will present our proposal for 4th Avenue in greater detail to the Community Board Transportation Committee.

No Land Grab adds:

The one-way conversion proposal was widely seen as a measure to help increase traffic throughput around the public-transportation-rich Atlantic Yards site, in advance of the construction of the arena - a charge the DOT denies.

The DOT claimed that, on the contrary, this proposal had been studied and was in the pipeline for many years, well before Atlantic Yards was hatched. The catch-22 is that, if that were true, then these proposed modifications would have to have been revealed and studied in the Atlantic Yards Environmental Impact Statement; they weren't.

The huge parking expansion associated with new Yankee Stadium construction has failed to attract any bids from private operators. The city has apparently scaled the seemingly uneconomic plan back by one 900-car garage, but instead of reducing it further, it is adding more public money to ensure that the new, smaller stadium has thousands of additional parking spaces around it.

The city's Economic Development Corp. wants to award $186 million in triple tax-exempt bonds for parking garage construction, significantly upping public subsidies for the project. Housing advocates say the shortage of such "private activity" tax-exempt bonding is one reason affordable housing construction in the city lags so badly. Meanwhile, news reports say the MTA is having trouble funding the Yankee Stadium Metro-North station that was added to the stadium project after criticism last year.

Developer Forest City Ratner is about to knock down historic buildings near downtown Brooklyn to construct the borough's biggest surface parking lot. On Sunday, April 15, Brooklyn Speaks, a coalition favoring a better Atlantic Yards plan, will hold a rally against the demolition and parking lot. "Providing 1,400 surface parking spaces next to the third largest transit hub in the city is not only unnecessary, it is contradictory to the whole rationale for the project's location," the Tri-State Campaign said in the event's announcement.

The issue of urban parking and traffic may yet be aired in court. The Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association's nearly two-year-old Clean Air Act lawsuit against NY City and State recently survived a round of dismissal motions. It claims that the 2005 Hudson Yards amendment to the NYC Zoning Resolution violated clean air law by relaxing the parking regulations below 60th Street without first fulfilling the terms of an agreement with the EPA. While the development says nothing about the strength of the allegations or potential outcome of the case, it bodes well that it will be heard and decided on the merits.

Last week, DOT quietly revealed that it was planning to narrow Fourth Avenue and transform Park Slope, Brooklyn's Sixth and Seventh Avenues in to one-way streets. Agency officials say that the the changes are being proposed for no reason other than "to make it safer for pedestrians crossing the street."

Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Avenues -- the streets that DOT wishes to redesign -- all terminate at the edge of the Atlantic Yards development. Naturally, many are wondering if DOT's plan has anything to do with Forest City Enterprises' basketball arena and 16-skyscraper mega-project.

Adding fuel to the fire is the Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Atlantic Yards project (Chapter 19-11) which proposes closing off the northbound side of Fourth Avenue between Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush to motor vehicles (which, actually, could be a really nice thing to do regardless). Could it be that DOT's Park Slope plan is aimed at shunting Fourth Avenue's Manhattan Bridge-bound morning traffic jam over to Sixth and Eighth Avenues?

We put the question to DOT. We'll let you know the answer when they get back to us.

Here is the relevant excerpt from the Atlantic Yards FEIS:

In this week's New York Observer, Matthew Schuerman talks at length with Laurie Olin, the landscape architect who may or may not have been teamed up with starchitect Frank Gehry on Forest City Enterprise's Atlantic Yards project "to compensate for Mr. Gehry's reputed lack of urban-planning skills." Schuerman writes:

Mr. Olin's role in the project is far more than figuring out what trees to plant, and it cuts to the very heart of the controversy: the placement of the buildings that enclose eight acres of open space, the closure of city streets, and accommodating 16,000 residents on 22 acres of land.

One of the more controversial aspects of the Atlantic Yards project, the Observer reports, is the plan to de-map:

a one-block stretch of Pacific Street, melting the two adjoining blocks together into a "superblock" - the type of mid-20th-century urban planning widely used in housing projects, but since discredited by Jane Jacobs and a whole school of so-called urbanists. They have argued that superblocks discourage the type of street life that makes places like the West Village so successful.

Olin is clearly not impressed with "taboos against superblocks and the tower-in-park design."

"If I put a street through here, I have less space for people and I have more cars," he continued. "When people say 'superblock'- what's wrong with what this is? Because I don't see how adding one car in here is going to make it a better space. I think space on streets is actually useless space."

The folks over at BrooklynSpeaks see it otherwise:

Streets define the public realm in NYC. Nearly every park in the city is surrounded by public streets. And streets themselves are places of activity and recreation. Far from being "useless space," Brooklynites use their streets to hang out on stoops and eat and drink in restaurants that spill out on to the sidewalk. Aside from parks and plazas, New York's public realm is its streets. The bottom line is that demapping Pacific Street would turn land that is now totally public into semi-private open space, mainly benefiting the developer and the future residents of the project, who will enjoy the use of parkland that won't be for all of us.

Jonathan Cohn of BrooklynViews was writing about this issue a year ago. He found City Planning Chair Amanda Burden's position particularly puzzling:

Last week, City Planning Chair Amanda Burden made a strong case for an open Cortlandt Street at the World Trade Center site. "We need our streets," she said, "we need connectivity, we need an open Cortlandt Street for light and air and to create normal blocks". But that's Manhattan. Brooklyn is different.

Jonathan Cohn at BrooklynViews is reporting that the current plan for Forest City Enterprises' Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn appears to preclude the possibility of someday building one of the Pataki Administration's favorite regional transit projects, the fabled "one seat ride" rail link from Lower Manhattan to JFK Airport (and Long Island). Perhaps some of the transportation pros and policy wonks here on Streetsblog can shed some light on this:

We have no reason to believe that the current plan for Atlantic Yards is making any provision for the rail link. The MTA's belated Request for Proposals for the disposition of Vanderbilt Yard indicated that the only operational issues that need to be considered are to provide additional storage; it made no mention of accommodating a possible future rail link. And in the Memorandum of Understanding between Forest City Ratner and the MTA, the required ongoing operational functions of Vanderbilt Yard are listed, but there is no mention of intent to provide for a future rail link. The only mention of the rail link in the EIS came in responses to questions, which basically state that the link was not studied since it will have its own EIS (Responses 29, 13-42). In other words, whatever will happen is of no concern to this project.

Cohn editorializes:

If the purpose and need of the Atlantic Yards project is that it will be so great for the region, so great that we should ignore the local neighborhood whining about density and such, why is there no transportation plan associated with it? While we're rediscovering Robert Moses, let's recognize what it was about big plans that helped the development of the region: Robert Moses realized that transportation was key. He opposed creating a venue event that would stop-up the flow of traffic in this area. Why don't we have a real intermodal project that orchestrates the trains, bus facilities, taxi stands and bicycles and yes, a possible rail link from Lower Manhattan to Long Island and JFK? Isn't there an opportunity to locate a state-of-the-art station here? Instead we have a plan to locate a plug of 3800 cars in an existing bottleneck.

The word is out, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is going to vote to APPROVE Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards proposal because Governor Pataki has allowed a stand-alone vote, not tied to other appropriations. Also Silver feels that the financial information provided yesterday (you know, the info that the Empire State Development Corporation still refuses to release despite several Freedom of Information Law requests and a subpoena) is good enough.

So much for yesterday's theorizing that Norman Oder's reporting stalled the project.

According to a source briefed on the matter, as of now, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver will not give final approval to the project before January 1st. There's word he still has financial questions about Atlantic Yards, which includes office and apartment towers and a sports arena for the Nets basketball team. Officially, a Silver spokesman says the speaker hasn't decided.

Financial questions about the project have escalated since the discovery by Norman Oder, author of the Atlantic Yards Report, that nearly half a billion dollars in projected public revenues had simply vanished from the Empire State Development Corporation's project plan. Oder reported:

The revised Atlantic Yards General Project Plan (GPP) issued last Friday by the ESDC contains one very significant change from the document released in July. Projected net new tax revenues have plummeted by $456 million. That's almost a one-third decline from the $1.4 billion figure announced five months ago. That's much more than a rounding error.

Oder was the only working journalist in New York City to notice the half billion dollar revision (though, apparently, Brooklyn Papers reporter Ariella Cohen was also working on the story which came out two days after Oder's). His scoop was significant enough that even the New York Times deigned to give the blogger credit. In an article titled "Agency Cuts Atlantic Yards Revenue Estimate," the Times reported:

The new estimate was included in a statement and other documents issued by the development agency on Friday, but the difference went unremarked in both the brief board meeting that preceded the approval vote and the news conference that Charles A. Gargano, the agency's chairman, held shortly afterward. Norman Oder, a journalist who has a blog devoted to the Atlantic Yards project, noticed the change later and wrote about it yesterday.

Granted, DDDB, community organizations and good government groups have been putting lots of pressure on Silver to delay the approval. And they cite a litany of reasons why the project needs a closer look. But you've got to hand it to Oder. If Silver does choose to delay approval of the project, Oder's $456 million scoop may be a reason why.

Norman "the Human Tape Rec'oder" Oder , the hardest working advocacy journalist in New York City, has really been digging in to the important but not-particularly-sexy issue of parking policy at Forest City Enterprise's proposed "Atlantic Yards" development in Brooklyn.

In July when the project's Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) was issued it included a plan to limit parking at the arena to vehicles carrying three or more people, except for an unspecified number of suites. The final EIS issued in November clarified that policy: Only about half of the parking space will be for HOV vehicles. "Five hundred spaces would be dedicated to suites and premium seating and would not be subject to the HOV parking requirements." From Chapter 19 of the FEIS:

To encourage higher occupancy in auto travel to and from the arena and to discourage single and two-person auto trips, approximately 600 of the 1,100 parking spaces available on-site for use by fans at a Nets basketball game would have a three or more person requirement after 5 PM on game days. This would be advertised for fans purchasing tickets on-line. The objective is to encourage increased vehicle occupancy by using a location incentive. The remaining 500 spaces would be dedicated to suites and premium seating and would not be subject to the HOV parking requirements.

Also from Oder's Atlantic Yards Report:

Transit-oriented development, except for construction workers

The Atlantic Yards project is being billed as "transit-oriented development," but the project Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) is notably defensive about a big parking lot for construction workers.

Interim surface parking & open space: the road not taken

Less than six months ago, Forest City considered a hybrid of both interim surface parking and temporary open space for the southeast block of the development--at least by 2010, after the lot had been used as parking for construction workers. The idea was rejected as impractical, since parking was deemed more necessary, according to the Atlantic Yards Final Environmental Impact Statement. So maybe it's the road not taken. Or maybe the concept remains, to be proffered as a compromise at crunch time, when the developer and the Empire State Development Corporation need to get Atlantic Yards past Sheldon Silver and the Public Authorities Control Board.

"There is disappointment, annoyance, and anger because there hasn't been any way for anyone to have a voice. Who is listening to the people living around Atlantic Yards?"

With the Pataki Adminstration scrambling to beat the buzzer and win approval for Forest City Enterprise's "Atlantic Yards" mega-project before the inauguration of Governor-Elect Eliot Spitzer, journalist Ezra Goldstein talks to Municipal Art Society President Kent Barwick about the problems that arise when communities are locked out of the development process in their own neighborhoods.

Municipal Art Society President Kent Barwick has been attacked for not condemning Forest City Enterprises plan to drop 17 high rises and a 19,000-seat basketball arena in the middle of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. He has also been criticized for being too concerned about process when, say his critics, the basic concepts behind the immense Atlantic Yards project are fatally flawed. To Barwick, however, process is paramount, and Atlantic Yards is the poster child for what goes wrong when process is ignored.

Barwick says that the people of Brooklyn and their elected representatives have been shut out of planning for Atlantic Yards and all major decisions have been made behind closed doors. The result is a poorly designed project that has polarized the community and that squanders both opportunity and public trust.

The project can be saved, he says, but only if people are given the chance not just to speak but to be heard. That would happen if the state recognizes that, properly, its client at Atlantic Yards is the citizens and government of New York City, not a private developer.

That is no radical notion, argues Barwick. It is law and policy embedded in regulations and the city charter, thanks in large part to agreements he and the MAS helped hammer out two decades ago after a prolonged battle with the Koch administration over the proposed sale to a private developer of publicly owned land on Columbus Circle.

The city, says Barwick, is obligated to solicit ideas from the public, develop a master plan, put out an RFP (a request for proposals) and then consider bids from several developers before it can give up a significant piece of land. More public hearings follow before construction is allowed to begin. It may be a cumbersome and imperfect process, Barwick admits, but in project after project, the end result has been far superior to the initial concept.

At Atlantic Yards, a private company developed plans for the 22-acre site before Brooklyn's communities had a chance to say a word, and long before a token RFP was issued. The community boards, guaranteed participation in neighborhood planning in the 1975 and 1989 revisions to the city charter, were completely shut out of the process, as were Brooklyn's democratically elected City Council members. The developer never publicly asked the advice of the highly capable (and taxpayer funded) staff at the Department of City Planning which had just completed a major rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn adjacent to the project's footprint.

The first time Brooklyn residents heard that Forest City Ratner Companies intended to build 16 skyscrapers and an arena in the middle of their borough, it was presented largely as a fait accompli. That was allowed to happen because the city had ceded responsibility for the site to the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), and the ESDC, bluntly, operates above the law. The ESDC has the power to override New York City law and policy, and that is precisely what it has done.

The ESDC was established in the 1960s as the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) with the best of intentions, says Barwick. Its primary function was to get economically mixed housing built outside poor neighborhoods, and "Governor Rockefeller recognized that you couldn't integrate society if you didn't have a way to break through local zoning laws. The UDC act gave the state the mechanism when necessary to break local zoning codes to achieve a higher purpose."

But, Barwick says, "that has evolved now into a situation where virtually all major projects in the state use the UDC act, because it is virtually impervious to challenge. UDC projects don't have to conform to local zoning, or pay any attention to historic preservation, and they give the state the power of eminent domain."

UDC projects also "bypass virtually every opportunity there is for citizens to voice their opinion."

Barwick describes the public hearings on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Atlantic Yards, which came more than two years after Forest City Ratner first presented plans for the site, as "the beginning and the end of the public process." The unelected, unaccountable officials at the ESDC can override even this small bit of public input because they have the power to ignore the final environmental impact statement.

Barwick describes multiple negative repercussions of this non-inclusive, top-down, closed-door process. Large segments of the community have been pushed into warring pro and con camps, and not just the state but also the developer have forsaken input that could have vastly improved the plans for Atlantic Yards.

"There is disappointment, annoyance, and anger because there hasn't been any way for anyone to have a voice," he said. "Who is listening to the people living around Atlantic Yards? There's nowhere for them to go and talk, and what processes there are have been anti-democratic and frankly discourteous, and no one should be astonished that many people are angry and disaffected."

As a result of the way Atlantic Yards has been mishandled, said Barwick, "a lot of people ended up either in an organized cheering section or sending in $10 donations to fund a lawsuit against eminent domain. I'm not demeaning either of these positions, but it's not exactly a public approval process leading to a better project."

Barwick insists that the project still can be turned around if the people are invited into the process. This faith in the benefits of citizen participation is the cornerstone of one of the Municipal Art Society's major ongoing initiatives: the Campaign for Community Based Planning. The campaign would mandate citizen involvement working through community boards to shape the future of their neighborhoods. (Not surprisingly, the campaign's web site provides links to the Atlantic Yards DEIS and General Project Plan as "exemplars of those things wrong with the existing system.")

"In our view, the potential for people to be involved in the future of their own neighborhoods is obvious," said Barwick.

In community based planning's ideal model, government decides on overarching needs, because, said Barwick, "there are some decisions that can only be made on a citywide or regional or state level, like where highways or subways should go, or how health care delivery systems should operate, or how much growth a community should be encouraged to absorb, or how many units of low-income housing need to be built.

"But once a central government has made major decisions, most of the other decisions are ones that local communities are better equipped to handle. They know the physical and human landscape better than anyone else. It is essentially a dialogue: elected government sets standards or targets, but how those targets are realized is determined locally."

It's not a plebiscite or a poll, Barwick insisted, and elected officials eventuarlly make the final decisions, but those decisions are wiser when the public is involved. "Of course it's a more cumbersome process than having [ESDC chairman] Charles Gargano and [Deputy Mayor] Dan Doctoroff in a room," he said, "but you also have a better result."

By Barwick's reckoning, he has sat through hundreds of public hearings over the years, which included a stint as chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. "I have never gone away from a public hearing without having learned something," Barwick observed.

Barwick describes how MAS gathered ideas from some 10,000 people after the destruction of the World Trade Center for its project, Imagine New York: Giving Voice to the People's Visions. Ordinary citizens, he said, had excellent ideas for what should be built on the WTC site-ideas that have been largely ignored by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, a subsidiary of the ESDC.

Barwick argues further that NIMBY (not in my backyard) is not the rule when the public gets involved, contrary to what is said by some defenders of ESDC involvement in Atlantic Yards. "We are aware of community based plans that have been implemented in more than 50 communities," he said, "and they have been much more responsive to absorbing growth than critics assume." (Community based planning is state law in Minnesota, and has been widely used in such cities as Seattle, Baltimore, Washington, and Rochester),

Barwick does not think it is too late to salvage at least part of Atlantic Yards. "I don't think this project is substantially designed in its later phases," he said, pointing out that it could be a decade before construction begins on much of the housing and retail space even if the ESDC rubber stamps the project this winter. "Battery Park City and Riverside South got redesigned several times before they got built," observes Barwick.

"There's no reason a new governor couldn't open up the process and get good design people involved. Even neutral architects I have talked to give a failing grade to the developer's plans for open space, retail space, circulation, and the like. I would like to see the governor create a board above suspicion that has the trust of the public to guide the project from here on out.

"I'm not saying [developer] Bruce Ratner is a bad guy or a crook. I don't think he is. But there's no public present. No public official present. This project is far too big and far too important to be left to a private developer. It must involve the public."

Get the process right, Barwick argues, and good ideas will follow. Get the process right, and Atlantic Yards could still be saved from itself.

For information on the Community Based Planning Campaign, see the Municipal Art Society web site and download their booklet, Livable Neighborhoods for a Livable City (PDF). Also see the Brooklyn Speaks web site. This article was originally published in the Park Slope Civic Council newsletter.

Photo renderings copyright of Jonathan Barkey

In the urban transportation pecking order, New York City's 2.4 million daily bus riders may very well occupy the lowest rung. At rush hour, you can walk faster than a crosstown bus. Shelters, benches and maps are optional. Schedules are a joke. Buses rarely get their own lane, and when they do, there is usually someone parked in it. It is, perhaps, the most perverse example of New York City transportation dysfunction that a single guy in an SUV with Jersey plates can keep fifty people from getting to work on time.

New York City's buses are run by the Metropolitan Transit Authority. For years, the city has essentially ignored buses, treating them as "a state thing." Yet, the MTA's buses run on streets that are managed and controlled by New York City's Department of Transportation. There is much that the city can do to make buses run faster and better.

During his 2001 campaign mayoral candidate Michael Bloomberg promised to establish an express bus system on the East side of Manhattan. Five years later, and after two and a half years of study, the Department of Transportation today announced the five bus routes that would be piloted as a part of the city's first Bus Rapid Transit program. One corridor was selected in each borough. DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall told the New York Times that "two of the routes would be in use by next fall, and plans call for the rest to be in use in 2008." The smart money says the Bronx will gets one of the first two routes and either Queens or Staten Island gets the other one.

So, what will Bus Rapid Transit look like in New York City? How will it work? Today's Times reports:

Stops would be spaced from one-half mile to a full mile apart. The bus lanes would be painted a special color, and the buses would get a distinctive paint job, to differentiate them from their pokier cousins. Cameras would be mounted on buses and bus stops to photograph trucks and cars blocking the bus lanes, so tickets could be sent to the vehicles' owners.

To help speed buses along, on some of the routes they will have devices that transmit their location to a computer system that controls traffic lights: a green light could be kept on a few seconds longer, or a red light could turn green a few seconds earlier, to let the buses pass. At some bus stops, passengers would pay their fare at sidewalk turnstiles rather than on the bus, to make boarding faster.

In other cities around the world, BRT has produced dramatic increases in bus speeds, reliability and ridership. Bogotá, Columbia is one of the biggest successes. BRT has been a key part of this city of seven million's rapid transformation from traffic-choked dysfunction to model of sustainable urban development. This is what Bogota's TransMilenio system looks like:

And here is a photo of the new Mobilien BRT system in Paris, France:

You will note one very significant difference between these two successful BRT system and the system being proposed for New York City. In Bogota and Paris, the buses are given their own, physically-separated right of way. While New York City's BRT system will be a significant advance over what we have now, the lack of physical separation has the potential to be a system-breaker. Without physical separation, that single guy in the double-parked SUV may still have the ability to delay the morning commute of 80 New Yorkers. Sure, Mr. SUV gets a $350 ticket (if he's not a government employee). You're still late for work.  

DOT believes that it can maintain BRT's right of way through enforcement and technology rather than street design. The internal study document that I got a hold of says that bus lanes will be prominent and distinct but that "enforcement will be critical to the success of dedicated bus lanes, as their will not be any physical barriers." The study goes on to say:

DOT has commenced coordination with NYPD to enforce dedicated lanes. In addition, other technologies and treatments such as bus lane cameras, on-board bus cameras, effective pavement and sign markings are being explored. A joint traffmic management center is under construction, which will be coordinated effort among State DOT, City DOT and NYPD.