• Thursday, April 3 - Queens CB2: A street conversion of Barnett Avenue to a one-way westbound from Woodside Avenue to 39th Avenue, and a request for speed bumps at several locations along Skillman Avenue.
  
• Tuesday, April 8 - Manhattan CB7: Traffic calming on West 106th Street, including buffered bike lanes in both directions.
• Thursday, April 10 - Brooklyn CB8: Redesign for Vanderbilt Avenue between Dean Street and Grand Army Plaza, including the addition of bike lanes and Greenstreets medians.

Opposition is expected to the Queens and Manhattan projects, especially over potential loss of parking. As evidenced by the recent failed effort to pedestrianize Prince Street, it is important that as many advocates as possible, particularly those who live in the respective districts, come to these meetings.

More project proposals are planned for later this month and into May. Streetsblog will keep you posted.

Livable streets advocates in Northern Manhattan are proposing a cycle track, similar to the one on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, to link the Hudson River and Harlem River Greenways at 200th/Dyckman Street in Inwood.

Dyckman currently has bike lanes at its east and west ends, but the stretch between Broadway and Nagle Avenue is four lanes of auto traffic with parallel parking on both sides. When an item showed up on Community Board 12's Traffic and Transportation Committee agenda suggesting DOT might be poised to add bike lanes from Broadway to Nagle, Maggie Clarke got to work.

Clarke, who has a Ph.D. in environmental science, has been an active Inwood organizer since the 1970s. She was a key player in establishing the RING Garden, transforming the Lt. William Tighe Triangle at the intersection of Dyckman and Broadway into a community-supported treasure and making Inwood home to Manhattan's second Greenstreets site. Clarke has not seen the city's plans, if any, for Dyckman Street (neither has Streetsblog -- we have a message in to DOT as of this writing), but says that, because of harrowing traffic, a simple restriping would be a "waste of paint, unless it was a prelude to something bigger."

One idea for "something bigger" was presented by Clarke and other Inwood residents at the CB 12 T&T committee meeting earlier this month. Modeled on the Ninth Avenue cycle track, Clarke and a small group of neighbors proposed a two-way separated bike lane on the north sides of Riverside Drive and Dyckman Street, buffered by a narrow green median, connecting the Henry Hudson and Harlem River Bike Paths.

The Tread Bike Shop, across the street from Dyckman's sidewalk cafés

Clarke, herself a cyclist who has for years led rides originating at the RING, sees such a facility as a natural fit for Dyckman and Riverside. In addition to the obvious benefit of connecting the east and west side Greenways in such a way, Upper Manhattan is already a destination -- or at least a pit stop -- for cyclists who come from as far away as central New Jersey, Clarke says. Inwood Hill and Ft. Tryon Parks flank Dyckman Street, and the RING is adjacent to the proposed cycle track route, on a more serene stretch of Dyckman to the west of Broadway, where cafés set up outdoor seating in the summer. Dyckman even has its own thriving bike shop. Then there's the community benefit of turning a hazardous, unsightly strip of asphalt into a calmer, greener neighborhood asset.

At issue, however, is parking. Community board members are concerned about a loss of spaces, though DOT is now studying a proposal to add more (free) parking on Dyckman's west end, where there are already bike lanes, near the Dyckman Marina. Clarke is hoping that this, as well as her group's proposal to replace parallel parking with angled spots, would minimize or eliminate a net parking loss, and therefore might appease the board and others who would surely howl at the prospect. If not, her group's "Plan B" is to three-lane Dyckman, trading one traffic lane for parking, which could of course rile opposition as well.

DOT Deputy Borough Commissioner Maurice Bruet, who attended the CB 12 Traffic and Transpo meeting, was reportedly impressed to see such a citizen-driven proposal -- and the three-lane plan in particular, as it would allow for wider lane widths -- but said that any work resulting in a net parking loss would require community board approval. Committee Chair Mark Levine described board members as "interested but cautious."

Dyckman east of Nagle Ave has asphalt to spare

Clarke has also been in touch with the offices of Council Member Robert Jackson and Borough President Scott Stringer, both of which expressed interest. She was told by the T&T committee that the project would require "stakeholder" input and cost estimates from DOT to move forward, but she isn't sure when, or if, she can expect to hear from the CB or DOT again. She says Bruet told her the neighborhood should come forth with more design suggestions.

"If DOT wanted a separated bikeway connector, they'd design it," says Clarke. "If there was a beautiful, green, state of the art bike facility up here, it would be a magnet for even more bikes."

Photos by Brad Aaron

It rained yesterday, sending stormwater streaming down New York City streets and through sewer grates. The runoff mixed with wastewater in the system and overloaded treatment facilities, causing raw sewage to spill into the city's waterways.

Sound like an ecological disaster? It can be triggered by as little as one tenth of an inch of rainfall in one hour. Called Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO), this toxic broth also contains chemicals leached from roofs and pavement. 27 billion gallons of CSO pour into city rivers and bays every year. Until recently, there was no concerted effort to prevent it.

One of the more unsung PlaNYC initiatives aims to drastically reduce CSO, in part by managing streets more wisely. Certain traffic calming measures, it turns out, can not only make streets more ped-friendly, but also help make the city's rivers clean enough to swim in. To accomplish this, PlaNYC calls for retooling the Parks Department's Greenstreets program, and we are starting to see the results.

At their best, Greenstreets -- the pint-sized green spaces that Parks began planting in 1996 -- have served as modest traffic-calming measures, displacing asphalt with patches of greenery that send cues to slow down. The new breed goes a few steps further: They combine advanced stormwater capture techniques with more overt traffic-calming devices, like neckdowns and bulb-outs.

You can find one of the first new Greenstreets at 110th and Amsterdam in Morningside Heights. It occupies a long, wedge-shaped sidewalk extension along the southwest side of Amsterdam, widening from mid-block to occupy two traffic lanes at the intersection. This feature is called a "blockbuster," and it prevents southbound traffic from driving the wrong way down Amsterdam, which runs one-way below 110th.

Stormwater is captured by a drainage pipe on the north side of the blockbuster (right), where it is channeled under the sidewalk and into the soil of the planting bed. Any excess is stored in a chamber beneath the soil, where the plants can soak it up in times of drought.

"That's less water that our sewer system has to deal with," says Bram Gunther, the head of Forestry and Horticulture at Parks, who has been instrumental in implementing the new Greenstreets. He points out that by storing the water for later use, this Greenstreet won't require Parks to send a water truck out on the street to keep it maintained. "Anytime you get to recycle water, that's a good thing."

Gunther's team began work on stormwater-capturing Greenstreets about two years ago. When PlaNYC was announced in 2007, he says, "it dovetailed perfectly, and the scope of [the project] increased by an order of magnitude."

Because stormwater capture requires construction that goes deeper than previous Greenstreets -- and because the new Greenstreets entail more sidewalk extensions -- a host of city agencies have to cooperate, including Parks, DOT, Environmental Protection, and Design and Construction. The PlaNYC mandate minimized red tape and allowed construction to ramp up.

The site at 110th and Amsterdam before the Greenstreet was built.

"It's kind of exceptional," says Dr. Paul Mankiewicz of the Gaia Institute, an expert on stormwater capture who has consulted for the city. "You've got real cooperation between the agencies."

This spring Mankiewicz will lead an evaluation of the first batch of "greener" Greenstreets, measuring just how well they capture runoff. There are now between 10 and 20 of them to look at, with 30 to 50 more in development.

Mankiewicz says Greenstreets will play a big part in the city's overall stormwater capture strategy, which also includes building green roofs, laying down permeable pavement, and planting a million trees. By his estimates, Greenstreets could eventually handle "somewhere greater than 10 percent of all excess stormwater, maybe much more."

In addition to Greenstreets, new surfaces can absorb stormwater and mitigate the urban heat island effect, which reduces condensation and runoff (image from Chicago DOT's Green Alley Handbook).

The program has been lauded by environmental advocates. Carter Craft, director of programs and policy at the Waterfront Alliance, thinks the early returns are promising.

"Tying stormwater capture with traffic-calming makes absolute sense," he said, "because you won't get another chance [to tear up the street] for five to ten years."

Craft has been helping the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability determine sites that can be used to intercept runoff. While pleased with the progress on stormwater capture to date, he's reserving final judgment. "It's a success story if all the public agencies can maintain their focus and keep it going. Many of us are optimistic, but it's too early in the implementation phase to judge."

As we were reminded this morning, not every neighborhood welcomes a new Greenstreet. But the City Council took a big step toward advancing the concept two weeks ago, when it passed a resolution to create a citywide stormwater management plan based on the outline in PlaNYC. Mayor Bloomberg is expected to sign the bill into law.

New York still has a lot of ground to cover to catch cities like Seattle, which captures 90 percent of its excess stormwater. Although we get hit by bigger storms, explains Mankiewicz, we also enjoy a geological advantage. "There are huge amounts of sand and gravel under the soil," he said, perfect for absorbing stormwater. "We need to make a connection between the surface and the deeper soil beneath."