Streetsblog New York City

A reader passed along this photo of a new sign announcing that Fowler Square, a small triangle of grass in Fort Greene, is in line for a public space upgrade courtesy the Fulton Area Business Alliance and NYC DOT’s plaza program. Head to the Facebook group advertised on the sign and there’s more information. The next public workshop to help design the space, for example, will be on Thursday, February 16, at 6:00 p.m.

In past meetings, Community Board 2 endorsed the idea of a plaza wholeheartedly, according to a report in the Brooklyn Paper. Supporters haven’t always made a strong showing: At one meeting, some residents complained that by cutting off through traffic on a block of South Elliott Place and creating more space for pedestrians, the plan would “countrify” an urban area.

James Vacca should know better.

On Tuesday, the City Council passed his bill requiring the Department of Transportation to consult with the Department of Small Business Services, among other agencies, whenever it implements major changes to a street. Vacca gave this explanation of the bill’s significance: “Many of the bike paths, many of the pedestrian plazas negatively impact small businesses and their ability to survive in the City of New York.”

Say what?

Just about every single plaza that DOT has built or approved (see here, here, here, and here) is sponsored by a local business association. The tiny handful that are not still have prominent local sponsors like Heritage Health and Housing in West Harlem. We reached out to Vacca’s office to ask him to specify some of the “many” plazas that have hurt small business. So far, there’s been no reply.

As chair of the City Council Transportation Committee, Vacca has a talented staff to make sure he understands the issues. So why does he keep mangling them in public?

Vacca can’t plead ignorance. At a hearing on public plazas in his own committee earlier this year, Vacca heard from representatives of four business groups: the 34th Street Partnership, the Dumbo BID, the Pitkin Avenue BID, and the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation. Each of them raved about the plazas.

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More than 70 people packed into the New Lots Triangle in East New York this morning for the official ribbon cutting of a new public space, but perhaps the most important sign of the plaza’s popularity wasn’t the big crowd but the senior citizens who had simply stopped there to sit down and drink a cup of coffee.

The plaza, which was completed around six weeks ago, closed a short block of Ashford Street between Livonia and New Lots Avenues. That enabled the Department of Transportation to connect a tiny, 800 square foot triangle in the middle of the street to the sidewalk, creating a new 3,800 square foot space.

All that new public space was in heavy use today, as visitors were treated to a DJ playing hip-hop and reggae, a Thanksgiving turkey raffle, and the gospel choir of the local America Come Back to God Christian Academy, seen above singing “The Best Is Yet To Come.”

But even before the event kicked off, East New York residents were enjoying the movable furniture in place. Ceciline Frank was walking past the area with a friend and decided to sit down and drink a coffee. “It’s a different environment,” she said of the plaza. “It’s an upliftment for us here.”

Eddie Di Benedetto, the owner of a local pizza parlor and the head of the New Lots Avenue Triangle Merchants Association, which sponsored the plaza, said businesses have already seen a boost from the new pedestrian space. “They love the fact they’re having tables and chairs,” he said. The plaza, he predicted, will become “a crown jewel of our community.”

According to Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, in 18 months the plaza will be upgraded from its current design, which uses granite blocks and planters to mark off the space, to a more permanent form.

The New Lots Triangle sits directly below the final stop on the 3 train in Brooklyn, and the station exit lets deposits people onto what used to be a narrow sidewalk. “You would get off the number 3 and actually step right off into traffic,” said Sadik-Khan. The plaza, she said, creates “a great new welcome mat for the community.”

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The Municipal Art Society’s second annual survey on livability, released today, provides still more opinion data showing that New Yorkers want to see more bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. They’re more conflicted, however, when it comes to new, large-scale development.

The MAS poll, a survey of 1,000 residents performed by the Marist Institute, found that a preponderance of New Yorkers think that both bike lanes and pedestrianized streets make their neighborhoods better places to live. Bike lanes proved more popular, with 56 percent saying they improved livability and only 17 percent opposing them. Even the bold proposal of closing streets entirely to traffic had a citywide approval rating of 42 percent to 29 percent. Previous polls have shown similarly sizable levels of support for bike lanes.

MAS found more conflicted feelings toward new, dense development. While 62 percent of those surveyed believed that “large real estate development” is a good idea, an equal number said that development should “maintain the character of the neighborhood.” Bronx residents were much more willing to embrace development while Staten Islanders and Manhattanites were the least.

As MAS found last year, New York City’s staggering levels of inequality are reflected in New Yorkers’ opinions towards their neighborhoods. “We continue to see some underlying discontent, especially among people living outside Manhattan and those with lower incomes,” said MAS president Vin Cipolla. “It’s clear that citywide organizations like MAS need to step up our individual and collective efforts and presence in neighborhoods and forge new partnerships with community-based organizations to address these issues.”

Clarence sends over this photo of the newly car-free block of 37th Road between 73rd Street and 74th Street in Jackson Heights. Since this picture was taken, the asphalt on this block has been coated with an epoxy-and-gravel surface, and it looks like a two-way bike path will be striped on one side of the street.

The new plaza is part of a package to improve pedestrian safety, bike safety, transit effectiveness, and traffic flow in the commercial core of Jackson Heights, which DOT has been working on with neighborhood residents since the beginning of the year. You can track the changes and give DOT your comments through the online portal for the project.

By taking out a troublesome diagonal from the Manhattan grid, the Green Light for Midtown program improved street safety and retail business while creating new public space at one of New York City’s most iconic locations. Pedestrian injuries are down 35 percent and injuries to motorists are down 63 percent, even while traffic is flowing more smoothly than ever. Pedestrian volumes are up 11 percent in Times Square, bringing business to area shops and catapulting Times Square to the second-most expensive retail area in the city.

Yet all anyone ever seemed to talk about were the lawn chairs.

That particular media obsession may finally be ready for retirement, though. NYC DOT and the Department of Design and Construction released plans for the permanent reconstruction of Times Square last night, as reported by DNAinfo. The entire roadway is going to be rebuilt for the first time in 50 years, said DOT spokesperson Seth Solomonow, repairing the utilities beneath the street. Instead of putting the asphalt back in place, however, the city will be installing a plaza designed for pedestrians from the ground up.

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Last Monday, DOT workers laid down gravel and epoxy on top of the asphalt on a block of Putnam Avenue, transforming the area between Fulton Street and Grand Avenue from through street to public space. On Sunday, Clinton Hill came out to celebrate. The opening weekend block party was captured by local documentary maker Adele Pham, who distilled two minutes and 12 seconds of pure feel-good video.

“People can enjoy it now, and have been since about five minutes after the street was closed,” said Phillip Kellogg, the manager of the Fulton Area Business Alliance, which sponsored the plaza. Five minutes after the work crews left, he said, a skateboarder was trying out the new space. Immediately after tables and chairs were put out, locals brought out their chess sets. People escaped the heat of the laundromat and waited for their loads to finish out in the fresh air. “Everybody’s been giving it a thumbs up,” said Kellogg.

The plaza, still only a week old, has so far been the boon for business that the FAB hoped it would be. “Enhancing the pedestrian experience along Fulton makes it more appealing to walk on Fulton Street, to shop and come to our restaurants and get dinner or a drink,” said Kellogg. That theory was put to the test on Sunday and passed with flying colors, he added, convincing even the skeptical businesses that the plaza works, so far. “The deli sold a lot of soda and seltzer. The cafés were jam-packed, with lines out the door.”

Because Fulton cuts through the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill grids diagonally, said Kellogg, there are lots of underutilized triangular spaces created at three-way intersections. In addition to the Putnam plaza, which was built quickly with less permanent materials, FAB is also sponsoring the Fowler Square plaza, at the intersection of Fulton, Lafayette Avenue and South Elliott Place, which is going through the DOT’s formal plaza program and will be built with higher-quality materials. Right now, Fowler Square “is the kind of place where people just walk through on the way to somewhere else,” said Kellogg. “It’s really important that people realize that it’s theirs.”

Transportation Alternatives and the New York Chapter of the American Association of Family Physicians today released a letter to Mayor Bloomberg, signed by 140 medical professionals from a broad spectrum of specialties, praising the city’s bike and pedestrian infrastructure as essential to the health of New Yorkers. It’s a solid counterweight to the hysteria surrounding the recent Hunter College bike-ped crash study:

Considering that streets and sidewalks make up 80 percent of New York City’s public space, the pedestrian plazas, car-free spaces, neighborhood bike networks and world-class bicycle lanes you have created are vital to the public health of our city. In piloting Safe Routes to School and Safe Streets for Seniors programs, reducing car hours in our largest parks and producing events like neighborhood play streets and Summer Streets, you are pioneering the redistribution of our public space for health’s sake.

While one can imagine a tsunami of ink engulfing the city if over a hundred doctors and other providers had joined up to condemn bike lanes and public plazas, with media types refusing to print a positive word about measures that are making streets safer, it will be quite a feat if this ringing endorsement pierces the news cycle.

Read the text of the letter after the jump; see the original with signatures here.

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Meet the city’s newest public space: Putnam Plaza. The epoxy and gravel surface just went down on the block of Putnam Avenue between Fulton Street and Grand Avenue in Clinton Hill. Seating and tables should arrive before the week is out.

NYC DOT is implementing this pedestrian plaza in partnership with the Fulton Area Business Alliance. We’ll have a detailed story on the project in the days ahead. For now, enjoy the pictures courtesy of our tipster.

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It’s been a year since DOT made more room for pedestrians and cyclists around Union Square, and a recent survey shows a neighborhood happy with its new public spaces.

Feedback from businesses and residents led DOT to back away from its original proposal to, among other things, close two blocks of Union Square West to drivers during part of each day. Recognizing that remaining opponents were hopelessly intransigent, the local community board ultimately approved the plan by a vote of 24-1. By last September the changes were in place. In addition to installing roomy new public plazas, the city extended the protected bike lane on Broadway through 17th Street and around Union Square.

In August the Union Square Partnership collected surveys from 60 area businesses asking what they thought of the redesign. Thirty-six said it was a “good thing,” 21 had no opinion and three thought it was a “bad thing” [PDF]. Even the three who disapprove admitted that it hadn’t hurt their business. According to the New York Times, no businesses or store managers complained to elected officials, either.

“The vast majority of visitors in the district arrive on foot and public transportation, therefore the enhanced pedestrian environment has made the area more attractive to shoppers and diners,” explained Jennifer Falk, the executive director of the Union Square Partnership.

Most important, the streets are safer. On Broadway north of the square, for example, DOT reports the share of vehicles speeding dropped from 28 percent to 12 percent after the redesign [PDF]. Pedestrians crossing 17th Street at Broadway were given more than twice as much time to cross a street that is almost half as wide as before.

At the same time, motor vehicle speeds were not negatively affected by the changes. Taxi speeds fell by four percent on Fifth Avenue but rose by 14 percent on 18th Street, where the worst congestion was predicted by project opponents. On Park Avenue, speeds rose by marginal amounts.

Business people who were previously opposed came around to the plan, said Falk. “Their major concerns — increased traffic congestion, difficulty finding parking, delivery problems — never came to fruition,” she said. “Vehicles adapted to the new traffic patterns without disrupting normal flows.”

A broader Partnership survey, which included area residents, employees and visitors, found that 74 percent liked the new traffic pattern, with only 16 percent opposed.

DOT made some alterations after installation and plans to make more adjustments. Already, a few signals have been re-timed. A traffic calming neckdown was removed at 17th and Park while another was shaved down to make for easier vehicular turns at Broadway and 22nd. To alleviate crosstown traffic congestion, DOT is considering installing additional turn lanes at certain locations.