Streetsblog New York City

For a while it didn’t seem certain, but after a critical vote earlier this month, it looks like California’s on track to build high-speed rail. And, I’ll be the first to admit, California — with two large, global metros just a few hundred miles apart — is a great place for it.

Despite some reservations about the costs and feasibility of the plan, people all over the country who care about sustainable transportation were generally happy to see America moving forward. But in Wisconsin and Ohio and Florida, the news was bittersweet. James Rowen at Milwaukee-based blog the Political Environment again mourned the $810 million in federal passenger rail invested spurned by Governor Scott Walker. (Shortly after Walker’s decision, the LA Times gleefully wrote, “Thanks a billion, cheeseheads.”)

As great a day as it was for sustainable transportation, it also concerned me a little. Ohio and Wisconsin forfeiting billions for high speed rail to California is perhaps the clearest illustration yet of the growing divide between regions willing to invest in a livable future and those that are not.

It seems that America is on two divergent paths. Progressive cities are engaged in something of an arms race to design neighborhoods and build infrastructure to enhance the quality of life. In Portland, they have streetcars, light rail, and neighborhood greenways. In New York, expertly-planned public plazas are making the central business district more attractive and reclaiming neighborhood streets for pedestrians. Soon the city will add a world-class bike-sharing system to go with its growing network of protected bike lanes. Seeming to recognize how these projects help to attract talent and investment, Chicago jumped in the game last year, with newly-elected mayor Rahm Emanuel promising to build 100 miles of separated cycle tracks and moving quickly to improve the city’s bus network.

Meanwhile, Ohio and Wisconsin — where talent and investment are no less needed — seem to have chosen a different path. Their Luddite governors are responsible for the painful loss of rail funds. And while there are counterexamples — Cincinnati and its streetcar, or Madison and its bike-share system — these places are moving much more slowly to adopt the kind of infrastructure that’s making places like New York and San Francisco increasingly desirable.

The obstacles in these regions are many. At the top of the list, you have harmful political decisions — typified by the unilateral rejection of passenger rail by Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich. And political resistance is reinforced when locals who prefer transit and walkability move away, as young, college-educated Midwesterners have been wont to do.

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Get your cameras ready, Streetsbloggers. It’s time to show Department of City Planning Director Amanda Burden what city-mandated parking garages are doing to the streets in your neighborhood.

In most of New York, it’s illegal to build anything of a certain size without a certain amount of parking, thanks to 1960s-era mandates in the city zoning code. Despite ample research showing that parking minimums encourage car ownership and cause traffic, DCP claims otherwise and clings to the position that these mandates are necessary.

Traffic isn’t the only cost of parking minimums, and under Burden DCP has at least acknowledged two other important ways they harm the city. Parking minimums increase the cost of housing, as the commissioner has stated, and parking on the ground floor erodes the pedestrian environment.

In some areas, DCP is beginning to rewrite the city’s archaic zoning regulations to try and prevent parking from taking the place of ground-floor retail, lobbies, stoops, and other uses that connect buildings to the sidewalk. On Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, where a 2003 rezoning led to a wave of development with ground floors dominated by ventilation ducts and even surface parking, DCP reversed course. In June, the department put out new rules forbidding curb cuts across the sidewalk, barring parking along the ground floor street frontage and encouraging retail uses. A draft rewrite of the parking regulations for much of Manhattan would eliminate a key incentive to build ground floor parking. In these select locations, Amanda Burden is making good on her widely-touted commitment to quality urban design.

Most of the city isn’t so lucky, however. In Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, parking is required in new developments. In practice, because developers often find it impractical to build underground parking, that often means the city is reserving ground floors for parking. Instead of new development fostering an engaging public realm, pedestrians encounter blank walls and curb cuts. The good news is that DCP is in the process of revising parking regulations for the “inner ring” of neighborhoods around the Manhattan core, which presents an excellent opportunity to stop forcing these dead spaces on neighborhoods everywhere.

Writing about parking regulations can get dry, so Streetsblog is going to start making the case visually. We need your help for our new photo series: “Pedestrian Burdens.”

Send us pictures of buildings in your neighborhood where parking harms pedestrian space, whether it’s a ground-floor garage, an egregious curb cut, or an ugly surface lot. Bonus points for buildings covered by parking minimums (larger buildings in Upper Manhattan or the other four boroughs) and built during the Bloomberg administration. Email your photos to tips@streetsblog.org and make sure to include the address of the buildings. We’ll feature the best on Streetsblog, building a visual case for Amanda Burden and DCP to act decisively on this critical urban design issue.

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When the Department of City Planning put forward its rezoning of Park Slope in 2003, one of the earliest of the now 111 rezonings under Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, it was intended to help turn Fourth Avenue into “a grand boulevard of the 21st Century.”

The sought-after residential development has started to take place, but at street level, there’s been widespread disappointment with the results. Instead of providing a healthy pedestrian realm, the ground floor of many new developments has been taken up by ventilation equipment and even a surface parking lot.

In response, the Department of City Planning has put forward a new set of rules intended to ensure that as Fourth Avenue develops further, it does so in a way that invites people to walk along the street.

At least half of the ground floor frontage of each new building along Fourth would be required to be retail, and parking wouldn’t be allowed anywhere along the ground floor street frontage. Requirements for a certain amount of glass storefronts would provide opportunities for window-shopping, while strict restrictions on curb cuts across Fourth Avenue sidewalks will give pedestrians more space and comfort.

With the endorsements of local Council Members Brad Lander, Stephen Levin and Sara González, the plan is likely to move relatively smoothly through the land use review process over the next few months.

The underlying zoning, including bulk, use, and parking requirements, will remain the same along Fourth. However, many of the worst offenders of the last development cycle would not be up to code under the new regulations.

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New Yorkers think their city is very livable, a new survey conducted by the Municipal Art Society shows, but livability isn’t equitably distributed across the five boroughs. To make the city truly livable, said panelists today at an MAS conference, New York needs to figure out how to bring its best features to all neighborhoods.

Overall, New Yorkers like their city: 84 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied or very satisfied with living in New York City, and 82 percent said the same about their neighborhoods.

Perhaps part of that satisfaction comes from living in the American city least dominated by the automobile. The two neighborhood characteristics that New Yorkers were most satisfied with were access to transit (93 percent) and neighborhood walkability (85 percent).

However, the MAS survey showed huge disparities in the degree to which New Yorkers find their neighborhoods to be livable. Overall, while 22 percent of African-Americans and 29 percent of Latinos were dissatisfied with their neighborhoods, only nine percent of whites were. Only eight percent of whites disagreed that their neighborhood was a good place to walk, while 18 percent of African-Americans and 19 percent of Latinos disagreed.

In the words of MAS Urban Fellow Mary Rowe, “If you’re white, you’re male, you’re under 45, and you’re making more than 75K, the city’s working well for you. Duh.”

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When the MTA service cuts took effect last month, 570 bus stops around the city suddenly became a collective no-man's land. Buses weren't pulling up to the curb anymore, creating an irresistible vacuum for motorists. If you belong to a neighborhood message board or listserve, you may have come across a few dispatches from car owners salivating over the prospect of more parking.

Maybe it's impolitic to discuss how to use this space while the pain of the service cuts still stings, but the NYPD isn't waiting to manage all that real estate: They've stopped ticketing motorists for parking in the bus stops. Acres of space that used to accommodate transit riders are now de facto parking spots.

We reported in May that this is mostly what the city has in mind anyway. DOT's plan is to turn most bus stops into parking spaces, or convert them to loading zones where deemed necessary. At a meeting of Brooklyn Community Board 6 last night, a DOT representative reiterated the department's intention to primarily use the bus stops for storing private vehicles. He also expressed some openness to installing bike parking in the bus shelters, but not on the street itself.

While the loading zones will help reduce double-parking, it looks like we're still on track for a significant redistribution of public space that won't benefit the 55.7 percent of New York households which don't own a car. 

It doesn't have to end up this way. In San Francisco, the city took some highly visible steps to convert defunct bus stops to non-automotive uses. Some bus stops were re-purposed as bike corrals, with secure parking for six to twelve bikes at each stop. Elsewhere, they used the free space to shuffle around the street's parking spaces and install a "parklet," a temporary public plaza built along the curb.

This is an important time to act on the idea, exemplified by Summer Streets, that streets form the bulk of the city's public space and belong to everyone. Here are a few treatments that would make life better for New York's car-free majority:

• At dangerous intersections, shift the parking spaces around so that the pedestrian crossings are daylighted, allowing drivers and peds to see each other better
• If a BID or other group can maintain the space, set it off with planters and add some seating
• On streets with lots of foot traffic, designate official zones for food vendors
• We said it before but it just makes so much sense: bike corrals

DOT has figured out how to do some pretty ingenious things with newly available curbside space, and really, the only equitable way to divide up these stops would be to devote most of them to car-free uses. New Yorkers who don't own cars shouldn't be shut out of using our old bus stops.

Every summer, New Yorkers face a dire shortage of tube socks. Or so you'd assume if you walked through the city's 300-odd street fairs. Though some fairs are cherished local institutions, the majority are corporate cookie-cutter affairs. That's a real wasted opportunity in a city so starved for public space. 

With so much room for improvement, the Center for an Urban Future asked 24 New Yorkers what they'd do with the city's street fairs. Though particular proposals spanned the entire spectrum of the possible, nearly all agreed that street fairs need to be tied more closely to their particular community and that the city needs to allow more experimentation.

With notable exceptions like the acclaimed Atlantic Antic festival, most of New York's street fairs are nearly indistinguishable. Fully half of all permits to sell food at street fairs are held by only 20 vendors, according to a 2006 study by the Center for an Urban Future.

To make matters worse, dissatisfaction with the current crop of street fairs, which anger many residents by blocking traffic and creating piles of garbage, has led to a moratorium on new street fairs. That means that what you see is all you're going to get. There's no competition from new kinds of fairs.

To top it all off, the city loses money on every street fair because of overtime costs for police officers. Something's got to change.

Most people interviewed highlighted the importance of tying the street fair to the local community. "New York has very distinctive neighborhoods," said Kent Barwick, president emeritus of the Municipal Art Society, "so it seems to me that we should encourage elements of street fairs that are distinctive." The most praised fairs -- the Ukrainian Festival in the East Village, International Pickle Day on the Lower East Side, the Queens Art Express -- all drew their inspiration, and their vendors, from the surrounding community. 

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Nearly 200 Jackson Heights residents marched on their community board last Thursday night to support the expansion of car-free public space in their neighborhood. That feat of organizing helped win the approval of Queens Community Board 3 for a summer-long 78th Street Play Street, reversing the stance of the board's transportation committee.

The play street debuted in the summer of 2008, but up until this year, it's only been in effect on Sundays. Now the street will be free from traffic for the entire months of July and August.

The play street occupies the block of 78th between Northern Boulevard and 34th Avenue, functioning as an extension of the heavily-used Travers Playground, which many parents in the neighborhood say is overcrowded during hot summer months. "We've got to find creative ways to increase the green space in the neighborhood," said Dudley Stewart of the Jackson Heights Green Alliance. "We're second to last in city districts as far as green space is concerned." Jackson Heights residents have used the play street for activities from chalk painting and ball games to learning to ride a bike.

Extending the play street to last through the summer was one of the planks in Daniel Dromm's campaign for City Council last fall. "Without him, it would have been almost impossible to have this happen," said Stewart. Since taking office, Dromm has leafletted neighbors and commissioned a traffic study on the play street. The summer-long extension also enjoyed support from City Council Member Julissa Ferreras, Assembly Member Michael DenDekker, Senator Jose Peralta, and U.S. Congressman and Queens Democratic Party Chair Joe Crowley.

Even so, the transportation committee of Community Board 3 voted against extending the duration of the play street, claiming that it would bring crime and noise to the neighborhood after dark, eliminate parking spaces, and block emergency vehicle access. 

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Walking through parts of New York can feel like walking through a tunnel. The city's ubiquitous sidewalk sheds -- typically blue scaffolding holding up green plywood to protect pedestrians from construction overhead -- corral people into cramped, dark spaces wherever development or building repairs are underway. There are about 6,000 of these sheds throughout the city.

Now the city hopes to start phasing them out. The NYC Buildings Department and the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects announced the winner today of their competition to redesign the sidewalk shed: "Urban Umbrella," by 28-year-old design student Young-Hwan Choi.

Choi's design has a number of advantages over current sidewalk sheds, which have been the standard since the 1950s. It leaves much more of the sidewalk free for pedestrians and eliminates the cross-bracing that prevents people from getting on or off the sidewalk anywhere but at intersections. The design also figures to be, quite simply, more pleasant. It lets in significantly more light and air to the sidewalk.

Businesses will be encouraged but not mandated to use the "Urban Umbrella." Since Choi's sidewalk shed has lower maintenance costs than the current model and hides less of the building, the city expects that those incentives will eventually lead to widespread adoption of the design. 

More images after the jump...

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The City Council will hold hearings on new rules for tour bus operators next Monday.

Int. 742 would have companies switch from open-air amplification of tour guides to headphone-based systems in buses with unenclosed upper decks or open windows. Int. 836 would require submission of operating plans, including routes, trip times and frequency, to the Department of Consumer Affairs, which would forward the plans to council members and community boards in affected districts.

Though it isn't spelled out in the bill, Int. 836 is ostensibly intended in part to minimize bus traffic on narrow residential streets, increasing pedestrian safety and, like Int. 742, reducing the buses' negative impact on neighborhoods.

Both bills are supported by the group Our Streets Our Lives (formerly Tour Buses No -- Tourists Yes), which worked last year to prod the Department of Environmental Protection to enforce tour bus emission standards. Group member Barbara Backer says most licensed tour buses are now in compliance with those rules. Of the new proposed regs, Backer says: "With re-routing no one will lose one job, tourists will still be able to visit the same businesses, and the re-routing will mean less disruption for local residents. Buses can use their hop-on-hop-off feature on major thoroughfares and still convey the same number of people to the same areas they do now."

Monday's hearing, a joint session of the council's consumer affairs and transportation committees, gets underway at 10 a.m.

As of this writing, the Committee on Environmental Protection is considering Int. 622, which would require school buses to be fitted with filters to reduce kids' exposure to diesel exhaust, and would mandate that buses be retired after 16 years. The Natural Resources Defense Council has been tracking the measure, and has background here.

The City Council is considering a bill to keep excessively loud motorcycles from stopping, standing or parking on city streets.

Intro 416-A would require motorcycles in New York to be equipped with EPA-stamped exhaust systems -- a federal mandate since 1983, but one that is rarely enforced. Though replacing or altering EPA-approved mufflers is against the law, installations of louder after-market equipment are common.

NoiseOFF, a Queens-based org dedicated to combating noise pollution, writes:

Modified motorcycles can reach noise levels in excess of 100db(a); a level that easily triggers an involuntary stress response commonly known as "flight or flight." This results in the secretion of adrenaline, with ensuing spikes in cardio-respiratory rates, muscle tension, and elevated blood pressure. For affected residents, the never-ending cycle of noise constitutes a serious health issue.

"It is already illegal to ride with loud pipes in NYC," says NoiseOFF founder Richard Tur. "Intro 416-A is designed to allow better enforcement of the law."

A similar local ordinance was adopted in Denver. The New York iteration is sponsored by Council Member Alan Gerson. It would allow for graduated fines for repeat offenders, as well as confiscation of illegally-equipped motorcycles.

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