Streetsblog New York City

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.

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...

The confluence of Flatbush, Atlantic, and Fourth Avenues is a traffic nightmare of epic proportions right smack next to a huge transit hub and shopping center. (We hear some sort of arena and housing complex might get built there too.) Crossing the street here is an unwelcome adventure for thousands of pedestrians every day, and biking is out of the question for the vast majority of cyclists.

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

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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.

Read more...

Forest City's Atlantic Yards project would create two massive superblocks in Prospect Hts., Brooklyn

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.

Read more...

 
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