Streetsblog New York City

In every community district along the proposed Nostrand Avenue bus rapid transit corridor, fewer Brooklynites are driving to work compared to the beginning of the last decade...

Brooklyn commuters — already some of the biggest transit riders in the country — are opting for transit at ever higher rates. New numbers from the Center for the Study of Brooklyn at Brooklyn College, first highlighted by City Limits’ Brooklyn Bureau, crunch Census data to reveal the evolving commuting patterns in the borough’s 18 community board districts. (To see the citywide breakdown of these numbers by state legislative district, check out Streetsblog’s prior coverage.)

Given the weight that community boards exert over street designs like new bus lanes or bike lanes, the figures are a valuable resource as Brooklyn neighborhoods consider projects to improve surface transit and street safety.

Take plans for Select Bus Service along Nostrand Avenue, set to launch this year. Though the improved bus service will speed up the commute for the B44′s 41,000 daily riders with dedicated bus lanes, off-board fare payment, and bus bulbs, at least one community board along the route has voted against the proposal. “Why would you even take the bus?” one Community Board 15 member asked.

At debates like those, marshaling facts about the district that the community board is supposed to represent can be valuable. Of all the community boards along Nostrand, CB 15 represents the fewest transit riders, the Brooklyn College data shows. But even there, more commuters take transit than drive, and the gap is growing. Between 2007 and 2009, 47.8 percent of CB 15 residents rode transit to work; during the same period, only 38.7 percent drove. In 2000, 46.1 percent took transit while 44.3 percent took their car.

The story is the same up and down Nostrand Avenue. In every community district, driving is down (below 17 percent of commuters in both Greenpoint/Williamsburg and Crown Heights). In all but one, transit is on the rise, and in every district, more commuters use transit than any other mode.

When the Nostrand SBS launches this summer, there’s sure to be a fresh round of griping about lost parking spaces and less space for private car travel. When that happens, this Census data should serve as a valuable reality check.

...while transit use is up everywhere except community district 9.

Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson reported a smooth ride to work.

Despite severe weekend flooding, city transit was for the most part up and running by the morning rush. Meanwhile, cyclists are tweeting on bike route conditions.

Did you make it to work today? How did you get there? We’d also like to hear commute stories from anyone who worked or volunteered during the storm.

Please, talk amongst yourselves.

Addendum: Central Park is the domain of pedestrians and cyclists until further notice (h/t @mikepstein).

Weather.com: Be afraid.

As it turned out, Tuesday’s earthquake didn’t have much of an impact on New York commuters. Washington, DC, however, was a different story. WAMU (via Transportation Nation) reported “some of the worst traffic jams since 9/11.” Meanwhile, dcist noted a surge in bike-share use:

Capital Bikeshare tweeted this morning that it recorded 5,847 rides yesterday, an increase of 1,090 from the day before. Of those rides, 1,246 came between 2 and 4 p.m., compared to the 812 during that same timeframe on Monday. If you think about it, Capital Bikeshare’s 1,121 bikes distributed at the 116 stations throughout the District and Arlington are now an integral part of any plan for mobility or evacuation in case of an emergency in the city.

Terry Bellamy, the director of the District’s Department of Transportation, admitted to the Washington Business Journal’s Mike Neibauer that, despite a lesser traffic nightmare than during winter snowstorms, the region just can’t handle the massive traffic exodus that invariably follows an emergency. If you’re in a car, you’re probably screwed.

Now comes Hurricane Irene. Though the storm could of course weaken or shift away from the city, Mayor Bloomberg announced this morning that agencies are “preparing for the worst.” Across the Hudson, Mayor Dawn Zimmer is urging Hoboken residents to leave town (or at least move their cars). The MTA, for its part, is reportedly battening down the hatches and bringing in extra personnel. Irene updates are lighting up the Streetsblog Twitter feed; evacuation maps and “go bag” chatter are the order of the day.

All of which means… what? How, if at all, are the week’s terrestrial and aerial turbulence affecting your mobility? Opinions on urbanity? Bottled water supplies? Let us know in the comments.

A Brookings report ranks the New York region 13th in transit accessibility. Can that be right?

Does the New York City region really rank only 13th in the nation in providing transit access to jobs? Has it truly been bested by a top five of Honolulu, San Jose, Salt Lake City, Tucson and Fresno? That’s what a new report from the Brookings Institution claims, but don’t worry New Yorkers, there are very good reasons to second-guess that conclusion.

The report, which Streetsblog Capitol Hill’s Tanya Snyder recapped earlier today, is an impressive piece of research. Brookings built the largest database in its long history and developed some pretty sophisticated tools to analyze it. Some of the data points that Tanya pulled out in her piece add tremendously to our understanding of the connection between transit and land use across the country. That said, when it comes to ranking the top cities, the findings are a little too counterintuitive to be true.

Notably, there appears to be a weak connection between the cities with the best transit access to jobs, as ranked by Brookings, and the cities where commuters actually use transit. New York City came in 13th in the first ranking despite being far and away the top in the latter.

According to Census data gathered by Brookings itself, 30.5 percent of New York region commuters take transit to work. Compare that to Honolulu, where only 7.5 percent of commuters ride transit, or the four runners-up at 3.1 percent, 3.0 percent, 2.5 percent and 1.3 percent. It’s not even close.

In other words, whatever Brookings is measuring in this report doesn’t seem to be particularly important for the men and women who actually decide whether to hop on a bus or in the car each morning. Whether it’s poor off-peak transit service, easy parking at home and at work, or even just transit-skeptical local cultures, something is making it so that access to jobs by transit doesn’t translate into actually making use of it.

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Fewer New Yorkers are driving to work than they did a decade ago, according to Census data Streetsblog reported on last December. But that same data shows that the citywide car ownership rate increased by 1.7 percentage points over the same period.

Among all NYC households, 46 percent own cars, according to Census data gathered between 2005 and 2009, compared to 44.3 percent in 2000. Factoring in Census data on the number of cars each household owns, that adds up to about 120,000 more cars in New York City.

We put together a spreadsheet (which you can download here) comparing new Census data on car ownership to information from the 2000 Census. (The main dataset in the spreadsheet is the percentage of car-free households in each legislative district, so negative changes are actually increases in the car ownership rate.)

The growth in car ownership was spread across the state, with increases in 126 out of 150 Assembly districts. Altogether, the statewide car ownership rate rose by about 1.4 percentage points, slightly less than in New York City.

The Bronx saw the most notable upticks in car ownership. Four of the five Assembly districts with the largest increases in car ownership rates were in that borough: AD 85 (Marcus Crespo, Soundview), AD 86 (Nelson Castro, Fordham), AD 77 (Vanessa Gibson, Morris Heights), and AD 84 (Carmen Arroyo, Mott Haven). All of those districts started from a relatively low baseline of car ownership. In AD 85, which saw the biggest jump, for instance, car ownership rose from 29.1 percent to 35.8 percent.

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Job growth has been concentrated outside Manhattan in recent years. Transit service hasn't kept pace.

Over the last decades, the economic geography of New York City has begun to shift. While Midtown and Lower Manhattan remain job centers without peer, more and more of the city’s jobs are located outside of the central business districts. As employment shifts into the other boroughs, however, the transit system hasn’t shifted with it. That means longer waits and worse service for many New Yorkers, especially for low- and middle-income workers, according to a new report from the Center for an Urban Future.

To connect people to jobs and expand economic opportunity in the city, the authors write, bus service must improve dramatically and transit must become a “kitchen table issue” for a broader range of New Yorkers.

Increasingly, New Yorkers’ commutes don’t take them into Manhattan. In the Bronx, for example, between 1990 and 2008 the number of commuters traveling to Manhattan grew by 12 percent. The number of commuters going to work inside the Bronx, in contrast, grew by 25 percent and the number traveling to neighboring Queens or Westchester increased by 38 percent. In fact, the Bronx was the only borough to add jobs during the great recession. The pattern, which repeats itself in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, is clear: commuting no longer means traveling into Manhattan.

With the subway system designed to funnel people in and out of Manhattan, New Yorkers rely on bus service to take them to these new jobs. Bus ridership is up 60 percent since 1990. But increased ridership and increased traffic congestion mean that bus trips are slower than ever. Last year’s service cuts, which hardest on bus riders, only exacerbated the situation. It’s no wonder, therefore, that New Yorkers’ commute lengths just keep increasing. The problem is particularly acute among low-income New Yorkers, whose homes and jobs are more likely to be in transit-poor neighborhoods and who can’t afford to drive.

The shoddy state of bus service to New York’s new jobs is a major obstacle to economic opportunity.

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The new protected bike lane on Columbus Avenue remained unplowed at around 9:30 this morning. Photo: Noah Kazis.

Mayor Bloomberg was determined not to be shown up by the second major snowstorm of the season, while Jay Walder advised against non-essential transit trips (the Times reports that all subways are running). It seemed the plows were out in force last night in Inwood, though there was six to eight inches on some sidewalks this morning.

Leave your commute stories in the comments.

Significantly more New Yorkers are counting on trains and buses to get to work than at the beginning of the decade, according to new information from the U.S. Census. The data confirms the trend toward transit identified in NYC DOT’s Sustainable Streets Index and offers a fascinating portrait of how New Yorkers’ commute habits have changed in the last 10 years. Streetsblog’s analysis shows that commuters are shifting away from the automobile across the state.

With the recent release of this Census data, it’s finally possible to get fine-grained stats that can be compared to the 2000 Census. That means a wealth of new information about how people in different parts of New York get to work. Looking through the data, one thing jumps out: Transit-rich New York City is leading the way in a shift toward more sustainable transportation.

To crunch the numbers, we put together a spreadsheet, which you can download here (warning: the formatting is still a little rough around the edges), comparing the new data to information from the 2000 Census. It shows the change in commuting patterns in all the state’s legislative districts. One caveat: this data is from 2005 through 2009, so it includes boom times and the recession, and does not reflect any changes caused by this year’s transit cuts.

The percentage of commuters who drive to work decreased in 134 out of 150 Assembly districts, and 57 out of 62 State Senate districts. All of these districts saw shifts toward transit, walking, or working from home. Across the state, the share of commuters who drive to work fell from 65.5 percent in 2000 to 61.6 percent in 2009, a sizable shift. In New York City, the number fell from 32.9 percent to 29 percent.

The biggest shifts toward sustainable transportation occurred in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Here are the most significant changes in individual Assembly districts, which occurred in neighborhoods where relatively few people drove to work in the first place:

• In Fordham rep José Rivera’s district, driving mode share decreased from 29.3 percent to 21.9, a shift of 7.5 percentage points. Just under 700 fewer commuters drove to work, while around 7,500 more took transit, 850 more walked to work and 1,000 more worked from home.
• In 2000, 35 percent of Alec Brook-Krasny’s Bay Ridge and Brighton Beach constituents drove to work. Now less than 28 percent do.

Read more…

Regardless of age or riding ability, everyone should have the option of incorporating a safe, convenient, and healthy bike trip into their daily commute — especially in compact cities where the distance between people’s homes and workplaces tends to be short and bikeable.

In New York City, the DOT is making bike commuting a more attractive choice for a wider variety of people by installing a network of “next-generation” bike facilities. The city has moved past striped bike lanes and on to innovative configurations like two-way, parking-protected on-street bike paths that separate cyclists from traffic and keep lanes clear of obstructions.

Commutes that were unthinkable to most New Yorkers a few years ago are becoming attainable, and cycling into downtown Manhattan is on the rise. To keep up with the changes and find out where the best and safest routes are, one resource that helps is the NYC Cycling Map. You can use this freebie to not only link up with the best streets for biking in your neighborhood, but also to find alternatives and experiment with your riding. You’ll be amazed how easy — and safe — it can be.

So, to inspire and cajole you into trying out a two-wheeled trip to work, I decided to hop on my Batavus Dutch cruiser and show you my new commute from Jackson Heights, Queens all the way to the Streetfilms offices in lower Manhattan via the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a hardy 11 miles each way, and yet almost 90 percent of the journey is on some variety of marked bike route. Even better, about five miles is on completely separate car-free bicycling paths. It’s no wonder that many days I arrive at work in a zen-like state.

Each dot represents ten commuters going to work at JFK. The many red dots represent drivers, a majority of those going to the transit-poor airport. For a larger version, check out this PDF. Image: Pratt Center

Last week’s MTA fare hikes marked the latest setback in a string of bad news for New York City transit riders. But with the launch of Select Bus Service on the East Side of Manhattan this week, some advocates are looking ahead to further opportunities to enhance the city’s surface transit network. The Pratt Center for Community Development just released its Transportation Equity Atlas, a set of maps detailing the critical need for more transit options, particularly in New York City’s low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

Overall, Pratt shows that New York City’s transportation system doesn’t serve low-income residents nearly as well as it should. 750,000 New Yorkers have a commute longer than an hour each way, for example, and two-thirds of them earn less than $35,000 a year. Only six percent of those long commutes are made by those earning over $75,000 a year.

There’s a racial divide, too. Black New Yorkers, on average, have trips to work that take 25 percent longer than white New Yorkers. Hispanic New Yorkers’ commutes take 12 percent longer than white New Yorkers’ commutes.

“If you work in a service or a manual job, you’re more likely to work in a place that is also not well-served by transit,” explained Pratt’s Joan Byron. ”I think there hasn’t been much of a focus in transportation planning around blue collar and service job clusters in New York City.”

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