Streetsblog New York City

How green is our mayor? Fielding a question on his weekly radio show about using the city's underground tunnels to move freight, Michael Bloomberg this morning went off on cyclists who bring their bikes on board the subway. City Room has the quote:

There are messengers who do it. Some of them take their bikes, which drives me crazy, cause I’ve just never agreed with the M.T.A. I know bicyclists will now ring the phones off the hook, but they are just too big, particularly at rush hours -- I just don’t think they should allow it. But I’m not running the M.T.A. …

While the mayor, who rides the 4/5/6 line to work, is not in charge of the MTA, he does control the city's streets. Could it be that many East Side cyclists are driven underground by a lack of adequate biking facilities?

It's disappointing that Bloomberg, who seems to understand the value in providing dedicated spaces to ride, doesn't see a connection here. If he wants fewer cyclists on his train, protected bike lanes for the East Side would be a good place to start.

Whatever your stance on the Ravitch Commission's MTA rescue plan, the broad inequities of allowing New York transit service to deteriorate while fares rise 23 percent are stunning. The doomsday budget passed earlier this week would affect vastly more New Yorkers than bridge tolls or congestion pricing, burdening those who can least afford the added delay and expense.

The Regional Plan Association and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign came out with a strong one-two punch yesterday that frames this disparity in no uncertain terms, countering the shopworn drivel we've been hearing in defense of the "driving public."

These fact sheets from the RPA chart the doomsday service cuts by borough. The maps are helpful and alarming -- visual confirmation that pretty much everyone who rides the train can expect longer waits and more crowded conditions. Bus riders from eastern Queens to lower Manhattan will see routes eliminated and less frequent service. I see that in my neighborhood, Windsor Terrace, the B75 is slated for extinction, shunting more riders onto the F train.

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While we appear to be hurtling toward a future of less reliable transit service, at least those of us with cell phones will be able to plan accordingly:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) today launched an email and text messaging system that will notify registered customers of planned and unplanned service changes at any of the MTA's family of transportation agencies... The system will be fully operational tomorrow morning.

Using the MTA's website at www.mta.info, customers can register to receive alerts about any combination of subway lines, bus routes, rail lines, bridges or tunnels. They can choose to receive them 24/7, or only during a particular time of day or week.

Eat your heart out, Twitter.

Via Transport Politic, some encouraging transit news from Iraq, where the mayor of Baghdad recently announced plans to move ahead with the city's first subway lines. The Guardian reports:

One of the new proposed subway lines would run 11 miles from Shia-dominated Sadr City in the east to Adhamiya in north Baghdad. The other would traverse 13 miles and link mixed central Baghdad to the primarily Sunni western suburbs.

Both lines would have 20 stations each and run through a patchwork quilt of sectarian neighbourhoods, which largely remain divided, despite the security improvements. Bombs still rattle Baghdad daily, but on a much smaller scale than the violence that ravaged the capital throughout 2006-07.

Naturally, huge question marks remain about a project that's been tabled repeatedly over the years due to disruptive violence. But is there a better metaphor for a unified Baghdad?

"If anyone suggested a train back then, they would have been sent to one of Saddam's old mental homes and never heard from again," said an incredulous Umm Fatimah, 41, from the suburb of Karada. "Even now it does seem a bit crazy, but not as crazy as then."

Another Karada resident, Nazem al-Qasemi, said something had to be done to sort out Baghdad's chronically clogged arterial roads. "Look at it," he said, waving a hand at a gridlocked roundabout. "Even if this is just talking, at least it's giving us hope."

Graphic: Osamu Abe via Transport Politic

In today's Times, Richard Brodsky weighs in on the pitfalls of shortchanging capital needs in the face of the immediate MTA budget crisis.

"The need for investment in the system is gargantuan," said Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat from Westchester County who is chairman of a committee that oversees the authority. "Twenty-five years from now what we do on the capital plan will resonate much more loudly than what the debate is going to be about fare increases."

"It would be a terrible mistake to take whatever resources may be available and use them all on the operating side," Mr. Brodsky said.

The key words here: "whatever resources may be available." As the MTA contemplates eliminating bus routes and subway lines in addition to raising fares, we have not yet heard a proposed solution from Brodsky, who promised Streetsblog in April that he and his colleagues, having killed congestion pricing, would "continue ... good faith efforts to deal with the real problems of congestion and mass transit funding."

We have a message in with Brodsky's office in hopes of getting his views on potential service cuts, fare hikes, and the possibility that the Ravitch Commission will recommend measures that he has opposed in the past, including congestion pricing.

This cartoon, by Tom Toles of the Washington Post via Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space, refers to DC subway funding, now under attack from conservative "think tanks." But it could just as easily apply to transportation and public works projects across the country, which continue to be largely overlooked despite their prior role as job generators in otherwise hard times.

In today's New York Times, Jim Dwyer poses a question that some city transit advocates have to this point discussed only in hushed tones: "Is it really such a great idea to be digging subway tunnels in Manhattan?"

Given the logistical difficulties and escalated costs of boring underground, Dwyer points to an alternative (link added).

Only now are city and authority officials beginning serious exploration of using the surface of the city, rather than its underside, for mass transit.

One idea is to dedicate portions of big streets and avenues to protected bus lanes, physically separated from other traffic. Riders would pay their fares before they boarded. An experiment to do that in the Bronx has made a big cut in travel time, said Joan Byron, director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center for Community Development.

Such systems are called bus rapid transit, and the cost to build them is $1 million to $2 million per mile, Ms. Byron says, compared with $1 billion per mile for the Second Avenue subway.

“If you just took the cost overruns for one year on any of the megarail projects, that would pay for a handsome bus rapid transit network,” she said.

As Streetsblog readers know, the Pratt Center, headed by current Brooklyn City Council candidate Brad Lander, has advocated a BRT build-out for some time. After the jump, an excerpt from the Center's testimony [PDF] before the Ravitch Commission.

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The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would provide emergency funding to local transit systems facing simultaneous increases in ridership and fuel costs. The legislation is now stalled in the Senate and the Bush Administration has expressed concern that "transit operators risk becoming permanently reliant upon this type of assistance." Meanwhile, when it comes to subsidizing Midwestern farmers, ethanol producers, and the operating costs of America's fleet of private motor vehicles... well, here's how Michael Daly of the Daily News summed it up in his column yesterday:

New York City has long sent the feds billions more in taxes each year than we get back in services. To give you an idea of one place the money goes, here is what the feds gave corn farmers to tend their fields in a two-year period: $36 billion.

Here is what we got to run the subway: 0

The feds have been reasonable when it comes to helping out with big projects like the new subway and train tunnels that never get done. But, we get not a penny toward the day-to-day cost of transporting 4 million straphangers.

I interviewed Larry Hanley a couple of weeks ago. He's the former Staten Island bus driver (famous for getting up in Rudy Giuliani's grill, among other things) who now serves as a Vice President of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Negotiating contracts across the Northeast, Hanley is seeing smaller transit systems in places like Lancaster, PA and Albany, NY struggling with increasing operating costs at a time when they are also experiencing record increases in ridership.

With New Yorkers facing a pair of fare hikes and a deteriorating transit system, Hanley is arguing that federal funding in mass transit is an investment in local economies, green jobs, the environment and national defense. "We've got a Saudi Arabia's worth of energy savings beneath the streets of New York City," Hanley said. "It's called the subway."

Photo: Crowded bus in Champaign-Urbana by Benchilada on Flickr.

This recent constituent e-mail shows that Council Member Jessica Lappin's lukewarm support for congestion pricing seems to have turned into full-fledged support now that the proposal has no chance of being implemented (taking a page out of Assemblywoman Joan Millman's book). In Lappin's defense, she did vote for pricing when it came before the council. But it might have been helpful had she found her voice a few months -- or even weeks -- before the plan went to Albany.

Thank you for contacting me in support of Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing proposal. As you probably are aware, on March 31, the City Council approved a home rule message authorizing the state to approve Mayor Bloomberg's plan. The vote was 30 members in support and 20 against. I voted in support of the proposal. However, neither the State Assembly nor the State Senate acted in time to move this plan forward.

Anyone who drives in New York understands that congestion is a major problem, particularly in the Central Business District (CBD). Heavy traffic doesn't just anger and inconvenience drivers. It impacts our economy and environment as well. It is estimated that congestion costs the city $11.6 billion worth of lost business revenue, productivity, operating costs, and fuel and vehicle costs. In addition, because of our poor air quality, New York City asthma hospitalization rates are more than twice the national average.

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With the fate of congestion pricing likely to be decided over the weekend, we're going to beat this drum some more this afternoon.

Yesterday we heard that Assembly Member Deborah Glick's office told a constituent the congestion pricing bill could lead to worsening air quality. (Because, you know, building mass transit infrastructure will cancel out all the particulate pollution that pricing will keep out of the air.)

If Glick ends up basing her decision on that tortured logic, here's a look at what she would deny her district [PDF], according to the Campaign for New York's Future:

• 46 new subway cars, primarily for the E and F lines
• 3 additional buses for the M20/M104 Routes
• 5 additional buses for the M101/102/103 Routes
• 6 additional buses for the M15 Route
• 9 additional buses for the M1/M2/M3/M4 Routes

Those are just the short-term enhancements that will be implemented before congestion pricing goes into effect. (And it's worth repeating that the data comes from CFNY's district fact sheets, an excellent tool to help bolster your argument when you call your reps.)

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