Streetsblog New York City

Streetsblog continues our series on City Council candidates with a look at the race for District 22 in Queens, which covers Astoria, Ditmars-Steinway, and northern Jackson Heights. The seat has been held by Peter Vallone, Jr. since 2002; he is now running for Queens Borough President.

Two Democratic primary candidates – Democratic District Leader Costa Constantinides and anti-crime activist Antonio Meloni – are joined by a Republican candidate, former New York Young Republican Club President Daniel Peterson. Danielle De Stefano is also listed as a candidate by the New York State Board of Elections.

Streetsblog sent questionnaires to the campaigns to get a better understanding of where the candidates stand on transit, traffic safety, and transportation policy. We begin in alphabetical order with responses from Costa Constantinides and will run Daniel Peterson’s answers in a separate post. Antonio Meloni responded to Streetsblog’s questionnaire, but did not provide answers for publication. Danielle De Stefano did not respond.

Streetsblog: A proposal for a pedestrian plaza at 30th Avenue, 33rd Street and Newtown Avenue was defeated by opposition from Community Board 1 and Council Member Vallone. Do you think public plazas, like the ones installed in other neighborhoods throughout the city, provide a benefit to the community?

Costa Constantinides: Generally, I think that public plazas provide tangible benefits to their neighborhoods. With a few exceptions, many of the communities in western Queens don’t have park space within walking distance. Without shared public spaces where friends and neighbors can congregate, a community has no place to vent and breathe. As a Council member, I will work with the community to create more public spaces that meet the needs of both residents and small business owners.

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In anticipation of primary day on September 10, we continue our series on City Council candidates with a Q&A with civil rights lawyer Yetta Kurland, who’s running to represent District 3. The district covers Midtown, Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, and the West Village, and it’s currently represented by Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Yesterday we posted responses from District 3 candidate Corey Johnson. A third candidate, Alexander Meadows, did not respond.

Streetsblog: Protected bike lanes on 8th and 9th Avenues involved extensive planning efforts with CB 4. Does the district benefit from the bike lanes and pedestrian islands? Would you like to see similar treatments on other avenues in the district?

Yetta Kurland: Protected bike lanes and pedestrian islands are a benefit to the Lower West Side in a number of ways. Most prominently, bicycle safety, traffic calming, shortened pedestrian crossing distance and reduced particulate emissions. The most urgent need for bicycle lanes in Manhattan is currently on 5th/6th Avenues, as bicycle transit is still dangerous in the middle of the island.

Campaign season in New York is already well underway. And when New Yorkers vote in the primary election on September 10, it won’t just be for the next mayor. They’ll also be choosing City Council members, borough presidents, the comptroller, and the public advocate.

In a series of candidate interviews, Streetsblog will be focusing on contested City Council races. In addition to proposing and voting on legislation, council members recommend Community Board appointees and occupy a powerful bully pulpit that can make or break proposals for safer streets and effective surface transit. Witness Dan Dromm’s support for “Diversity Plaza” in Jackson Heights, Melissa Mark-Viverito’s advocacy for East Harlem protected bike lanes, and Brad Lander’s defense of the Prospect Park West bike lane. Conversely, look at Peter Vallone, Jr.’s obstruction of a pedestrian plaza in Astoria, or the bellyaching from Staten Island’s Vincent Ignizio that’s made it harder for bus riders to use Select Bus Service.

On the West Side, three Democratic City Council candidates — Community Board 4 Chair Corey Johnson, civil rights lawyer Yetta Kurland, and Community Board 2 member Alexander Meadows — are vying to replace Christine Quinn, who is vacating the District 3 seat she first won in 1999. The district covers Midtown, Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea and the West Village, an area that has been a hotbed of livable streets progress, from protected bike lanes to pedestrian plazas to parking reform.

Streetsblog sent questionnaires to the campaigns to get a better understanding of where the candidates stand on transit, traffic safety, and transportation policy. We begin in alphabetical order with responses from Corey Johnson and will run Yetta Kurland’s answers in a separate post. Alexander Meadows did not respond.

Streetsblog: Protected bike lanes on 8th and 9th Avenues involved extensive planning efforts with CB 4. Does the district benefit from the bike lanes and pedestrian islands? Would you like to see similar treatments on other avenues in the district?

Corey Johnson: I was proud to partake in the Community Board 4 planning efforts that resulted in the bike lanes and street redesign including sidewalk expansions and on-street bike parking. There are still areas with outstanding safety concerns that I will continue to push DOT to address but I stand behind dedicated bike lanes as part of a more comprehensive plan that includes increasing mass transit options, reducing congestion, and enforcing traffic laws for cyclists, as well as for cars and trucks.

SB: The City Council will soon vote on changes to the Manhattan Core parking regulations. What direction would you like to see off-street parking policy take in the future?

CJ: In July 2012, I wrote a letter to City Planning Commission Chair Amanda Burden expressing the opinion of CB 4 that opening accessory parking to transient public use will negatively affect the pedestrian safety and quality of life in residential districts and encourage the building of excessive parking capacity. We need to reinforce the current market trends towards reduced parking demand and increased transit use, rather than add to parking availability that encourages driving and car oriented development and undermines the clean air and health objectives of PlaNYC 2030.

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At its annual membership meeting last night, Transportation Alternatives unveiled its transportation policy platform heading into the thick of this year’s election cycle. Primary day — September 10 — is less than six months away, and TA is calling on candidates in the mayoral and City Council races to include these principles in their campaign platforms:

1. Safe Neighborhood Streets For All: To ensure neighborhood streets offer safe space for local families, seniors and children to bike, walk and play, the City must fulfill local demand for Play Streets, 20 mph Slow Zones, bike lanes, Safe Routes to School and Safe Routes for Seniors in 50 neighborhoods a year.
2. Transportation Choice On Commercial Streets: To guarantee New Yorkers have the safe and convenient access to local businesses allowed by a robust variety of transportation choices, the City needs to provide protected bike lanes, Select Bus Service, bike share and pedestrian refuges and plazas on four major roadways in each of the city’s five boroughs each year.
3. Zero Tolerance Traffic Enforcement: To make New York City streets as safe as they can be, the New York City Police Department needs to enact a zero tolerance policy for dangerous driving by setting a multi-year goal of eliminating traffic deaths and cracking down on the deadliest traffic violations like speeding and failure to yield.

In June, TA will launch a website where supporters can send messages to candidates asking them to support safe streets. The site will also link to voter registration forms and information about the candidates.

Four of the Democratic mayoral candidates appeared on MSNBC with Chris Hayes Sunday morning, and for a short while the subject turned to transit. About two minutes into this segment, Hayes prompted former City Council member Sal Albanese to discuss his proposal to band together with other mayors to lobby Washington for more transit funding. John Liu, Bill Thompson, and Bill de Blasio then took turns discussing their various ideas for getting the feds and/or Albany to direct more funding to the city’s transit system.

The funding issue, however, is mainly Governor Cuomo’s problem to solve, not the mayor’s. The one major transit issue that the next mayor can actually control — namely, prioritizing space for transit on NYC’s streets — didn’t come up on the show. Time was limited, of course, but it would have been great to see someone pivot to the issue of improving surface transit.

Select Bus Service has shown that something can be done to speed up New York’s notoriously pokey buses. The next mayor could do much more, by building better bus lanes and by bringing improvements to routes throughout the bus network on a faster timetable. The Nostrand Avenue SBS project, for instance, has been in the public planning phase for more than three years, and the first SBS improvements for Queens are still in development.

New Yorkers make more than 2 million bus trips every weekday. That’s a lot of voters who know what it’s like to ride a bus that gets bogged down in traffic, or to wait forever for a bus that’s been thrown off the posted schedule. So let’s hear the candidates talk about how they’ll make life better by delivering faster, more reliable bus service.

Friday’s transit forum hosted by Transit Workers Union Local 100 and a coalition of rider advocacy groups offered an opportunity for a more more detailed discussion of transit policy than this year’s mayoral race has seen so far. While the candidates offered few specifics about how they would improve transit for the millions of New Yorkers who depend on trains and buses, clear differences emerged, especially on the question of how to increase funding for the debt-ridden MTA.

Five Democrats — former City Council City member Sal Albanese, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Comptroller John Liu, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and former comptroller Bill Thompson — were on hand, as were former Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión, running on the Independence Party line, and Manhattan Media publisher Tom Allon, running as a Republican. Conspicuously absent was Republican Joe Lhota, whose resume includes a recent one-year stint as MTA chair.

The transit issue that the mayor can control most directly is the allocation of street space. How much real estate should be dedicated exclusively to transit, so riders don’t get bogged down in traffic? More than anyone else, the mayor has the power to decide.

Albanese had the most specific proposal, calling for 20 new Select Bus Service routes by 2018. De Blasio said he wants more Bus Rapid Transit outside of Manhattan, citing a JFK-to-Flushing route as an example. When Streetsblog asked after the forum if the Bloomberg administration has been implementing the SBS program quickly enough, de Blasio said he didn’t know enough to say if implementation was going slowly, but that the implicit answer is “yes” because his vision calls more more BRT in the outer boroughs.

Carrión, who called for a new goal of providing 30-minute commutes from the city limits to the CBD, cited the Select Bus Service route on Fordham Road as a successful transit enhancement, noting that it has won over merchants who were initially skeptical. Quinn and Thompson, meanwhile, spoke about improving bus service, but not specifically about SBS or BRT. And Liu said that Bus Rapid Transit should be part of the city’s transit mix, but didn’t get more specific than that.

On the issue of funding the MTA, the mayor has far less direct control than the governor and the state legislature but still commands a powerful bully pulpit that can set the agenda.

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Via the Kansas Cyclist, here’s a campaign ad from St. Louis mayoral hopeful Lewis Reed that would seem strangely inconceivable in NYC’s current political climate.

Reed, currently president of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen (the equivalent of being City Council speaker in NYC), is challenging three-term incumbent Francis Slay in a primary election coming up on March 5.

Reed’s online campaign bio prominently features his role in launching Bike St. Louis, an effort to create safer streets for bike commuting and to connect the city’s parks with bike routes. This 30-second spot, though, has nothing to do with policy specifics. It’s all about imagery, and the predominant images are Lewis Reed biking the streets of St. Louis and hauling his bike up the stairs in the halls of municipal power (and high-fiving people). Do you think his team focus-grouped the spot?

Matt Flegenheimer got five leading mayoral candidates on the record about bike lanes for a story in the Times today, and one of the encouraging things about it is that you can start to see the candidates running against each other (and not just the three-term, lame duck incumbent) on bike policy.

It’s still early in the race, but here’s what the Times story tells us about these five so far:

John Liu: Probably going to wipe out some bike lanes in Brooklyn and Queens if he’s elected. Doesn’t believe the Quinnipiac, Marist, or Times polls that consistently show about two-thirds of New Yorkers support bike lanes. Apparently he would put more faith in a poll commissioned by bike lane opponents. (May we suggest this one, which found… about 3-2 support for the Prospect Park West bike lane.) But it’s okay, he’s an avid biker!

Joe Lhota: Open to bike lane removal where he sees fit. Like where? Well, he’s under the impression that bike lane stripes are somehow interfering with buses on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, but it’s been common knowledge since before the bike lane was installed that double-parked cars and traffic congestion are the real problems. Lhota even tweeted about the non-problem of the Fifth Avenue bike lane on the evening Hurricane Sandy struck, so, with beliefs this irrational, who can say what other streets would fall victim?

Bill Thompson: Here’s where things start to look up. Thompson seems to have made progress on this issue since his 2009 mayoral bid, when he said he would rip out the Grand Street bike lane. Now he’s telling the Times he’s not going to remove any bike lanes and would consider expanding the bike network if bike-share proves successful.

Christine Quinn: No firm statement about bike lane expansion, but she supports cycling in general and bikes on days off at the shore. City biking seems to be a different matter. While she claims too much credit for DOT’s public process for bike lane implementation (the agency was doing thorough outreach for bike projects before the City Council mandated community board review in 2011), she also acknowledges the enthusiasm for bike lanes in her district.

Bill de Blasio: Gave the Times a statement, posted in full on the public advocate’s site, which is a departure from recent remarks to the Brooklyn Paper that appeared to be heavily influenced by opponents of the Prospect Park West bike lane. De Blasio now says unambiguously: “I fully support bike lanes and I want to see them continue to expand around the city. They are clearly making many NYC streets safer.” Gone is the assertion that the data on bike lanes is “biased.” But his appeal for “proactive outreach” overlooks all the ways the current DOT has opened up the planning process, with web-based planning portals gathering ideas for street improvements in Jackson Heights, and community-based efforts like the Grand Army Plaza Coalition finally having a seat at the table.

If you want to get more specifics out of Quinn or de Blasio, both will be attending a Downtown Independent Democrats candidate forum in Tribeca tonight at 6 p.m.

A few quick thoughts on the news that MTA Chair Joe Lhota is going to leave the agency at the end of week to clear the way for a mayoral run…

There are basically two angles to consider. One is that the MTA is about to lose its chief executive, yet again, after a brief but effective tenure. When Lhota replaced Jay Walder at the end of 2010, the major concern was that the region was losing someone who rose through the ranks at the world’s most complex transit agencies and gaining a former deputy mayor with no transit jobs on his resume. Despite his lack of transit expertise, Lhota turned out to be a good person to have in charge. He kept making headway on Walder initiatives like the expansion of real-time transit data, and his handling of the post-Sandy recovery process produced a spectacularly rare outcome: a public relations victory for the MTA. If he’s using the MTA chair position as a springboard to politics, Lhota must have been doing something right. It won’t be easy for Andrew Cuomo to fill the void.

The other angle, which I think is more significant, is that a sitting MTA chair entering the mayoral race is bound to elevate transit as an electoral issue. We can speculate all day long about what a hypothetical Lhota mayoralty would mean for transit, but just by running, he’ll guarantee that trains and buses get more attention than in a typical NYC mayoral election, which tends to reduce transportation to a second- or third-tier issue.

We’ll see whether New York City voters get a substantive discussion of major transit issues — the MTA’s punishing debt burden, the opportunities to significantly improve the city’s surface transit network — or just an amplified version of the usual MTA blame game, with Lhota serving as the other candidates’ punching bag. But with Lhota in the mix, transit can’t be ignored in the 2013 campaign.

Public interest journalist Stuart Silverstein at FairWarning.org has uncovered the fact that red states (defined as those that went for Mitt Romney in the last election) have higher traffic fatality rates than blue states (those that went for Barack Obama). The correlation is striking, Silverstein says, but he’s at a loss to explain it:

The 10 states with the highest fatality rates all were red, while all but one of the 10 lowest-fatality states were blue. What’s more, the place with the nation’s lowest fatality rate, while not a state, was the very blue District of Columbia.

Massachusetts was lowest among the states, with 4.79 road deaths per 100,000 people. By contrast, red Wyoming had a fatality rate of 27.46 per 100,000.

Silverstein asked a few sources to weigh in — including Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” and former federal auto safety researcher Louis V. Lombardo — but they couldn’t quite put their finger on what’s going on.

“It may be something we don’t have a definitive answer for,” Lombardo said.

“This is someplace where you would not expect to see a partisan divide,” Frank said.

I’m not nearly as smart as either of these guys, but I couldn’t help noticing that there are different travel patterns in the (mostly rural) red states and the (more urban) blue states. Perhaps that has something to do with it.

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