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.

Forest City Ratner, the Empire State Development Corporation and the City of New York can do better than paving acres of surface parking next to the new Brooklyn arena for an indefinite time to come. Photosimulation: Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council/Jonathan Barkey

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.

***

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.

There are a number of reasons so many people drive to even the most urban stadiums. Ticket holders tend to have larger disposable incomes, for example. And the transportation decisions of someone who might only come into the city a few evenings a year are always going to look different from those of a daily rush-hour commuter.

As a result, stadiums have long tried to accommodate drivers. Most famously, the Dodgers left Brooklyn a half-century ago in part because Walter O’Malley decided that having only 700 parking spaces at Ebbets Field made it too hard to attract fans — or the right fans. The historical irony now, of course, is that O’Malley wanted to build his new stadium and new parking next to the Atlantic Yards site; stymied then by Robert Moses, both the stadium and the parking are being built now.

That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t make stadiums that fit snugly into an urban context. “The Verizon Center is a very good example,” said Cheryl Cort of Washington D.C.’s Coalition for Smarter Growth.

Ovechkin jerseys are everywhere after Capitols fans crowd the Metro platform after a game at the Verizon Center. Most fans ride transit to the games. Photo: Clydeorama via Flickr.

The Verizon Center, home to the Washington Wizards and Capitals, was built in a somewhat run-down section of downtown Washington and has played a part in revitalizing the neighborhood. “It’s a venue with a broad variety of activity, so it really is feeding the businesses a sustainable diet,” said Cort.

Sitting on top of a major transfer station, “the vast majority of people arrive by Metro,” said Cort. The Verizon Center itself estimates that around 60 percent of visitors get there on transit.

Just as important as making it easy to get to a game or concert on transit is not making it too easy to drive there. Cort said that the Verizon Center built a small amount of off-street parking along with the stadium, but hardly enough to serve the bulk of the fans. What’s more, “the city came in and has done quite a bit of very aggressive management of on-street parking,” she said. “You’re not going to find a free parking space near the Verizon Center.” Rather than cut out at 6:30, the parking meters in the area stay in effect until 10 p.m. and charge a premium rate.

Cort also praised the transportation plans at the new Nationals Park, located just blocks from the US DOT headquarters. “It’s worked well,” she said. There’s special routing for both trains and buses on game days and bike valet parking at the stadium, for example. There was also a heavy public education campaign to make people aware that parking in the area was limited. The message, said Cort, was, “If you don’t know you have a parking space, don’t come and look for one.”

Nationals Park is also at the center of two of D.C.’s big new transportation initiatives. Nationals Park was one of two pilot locations for D.C.’s performance parking program, which instituted variable, demand-based pricing for on-street spaces. Eventually, plans call for Nationals Park to be served by D.C.’s new streetcar system, making it that much more transit-accessible.

In Boston, America’s greatest ballpark has taken great strides away from being overly car-oriented. In 1996, 68 percent of the visitors to Fenway Park drove, according to David Nelson, a transit planner who presented his research on transit access to Fenway Park to the American Public Transportation Association last year. Fenway was doing better than most other American parks, but given its location in a relatively dense urban neighborhood, not better enough. Since then, however, steady progress has been made toward improving non-automobile access to the park.

“Transit ridership is up due to several factors,” said Nelson. Most importantly, attendance is significantly up compared to the 1990s, while the parking supply has been static or declining. The Red Sox have sold out every game since May 2003, but those extra visitors haven’t had any extra room for their cars. In fact, a wave of new development in the area, spurred in part by the Red Sox finally deciding against building a new stadium, has replaced former parking lots.

At the same time, significant improvements in transit accessibility have benefited Fenway. According to Nelson, the nearest T station has been renovated to improve its capacity, the cars on the Green Line are larger, and more commuter rail trains run to the adjacent Yawkey station every day.

Wally the Green Monster celebrates the opening of a new subway station near Fenway park, one of many factors that have boosted transit ridership at Fenway Park. Photo: MassDOT via Flickr.

Other changes are coming down the pipeline, too. A new Yawkey station will more than double the number of commuter rail trains that can use the station each day. And the neighboring town of Brookline — the border is only a few blocks from Fenway — just made a big move on parking policy. On game nights, parking meters in the areas nearest the park will charge a normal rate for the first two hours of parking but jump up to a full $10 per hour after that. The idea is that those parking to go to dinner would pay the normal rate, but those trying to go to the game pay roughly the same as the market price at nearby lots.

Fenway could still do better, of course. Jackie Douglas, the director of Boston’s LivableStreets Alliance, suggested that high-quality bike parking, perhaps along the model of the bike cages the MBTA is installing at transit stations, would help people ride to the game. She also hoped to see the Red Sox use their massive popularity to actively promote riding transit, walking, or biking to the game.

In Nelson’s presentation, he suggested that bundling transit passes with game tickets, giving priority street access to buses in the area, and providing shuttles from non-adjacent transit lines could also help boost transit ridership higher on game nights.

Still, the progress at Fenway has been very real. Said Douglas, “The T is definitely packed.”

Tonight’s public forum on the Atlantic Yards project gets underway at 7 p.m. at Atlantic Common, 388 Atlantic Avenue, between Hoyt and Bond. Stay tuned for more ideas on how the site can be as transit-oriented and pedestrian-friendly as possible.

Four hundred bike parking spots will help, but oceans of surface parking could still make the new Nets arena a traffic magnet. Image: Jonathan Barkey and the Municipal Art Society.

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.

Plans to create a "temporary" 1,100 space surface parking lot, shown here in the lower left, are at issue in the latest fight over Atlantic Yards. Image: Jonathan Barkey and the Municipal Art Society.

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.”

The incredibly traffic-free bird's-eye rendering of the Barclays Center plaza. Image: SHoP Architects

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:

Map of pedestrian and cyclist injuries and fatalities: CrashStat

Here’s what that looks like on a typical day, captured in time lapse video from Tracy Collins:

All that traffic is only going to get worse. As Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn noted in his response to Ratner’s announcement, Brooklyn could be stuck with the “interim” plans for the Atlantic Yards site for a very long time. Which means, for the foreseeable future, huge surface parking lots on the east side of the arena generating lots and lots of car trips. Those parking lots don’t appear in Forest City Ratner’s renderings. But this does:

The bustling crowd, including kids on bikes and dog walkers, who will brave Brooklyn's most dangerous streets to get to Ratner's plaza. Image: SHoP architects

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.

The Vanderbilt Rail Yards and the rump of the Carlton Avenue bridge. Photo: threecee/Flickr

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.

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.