Streetsblog New York City

Fast Company is the latest media outlet to trumpet the decline of driving, with a look at the phenomenon dubbed “peak car use.”

In an article titled “We Are Approaching Peak Car Use,” the magazine examines an Australian study [PDF] which found driving rates are falling in a number of cities in Europe, North America and Australia.

Explanations include rising fuel prices, the increasing appeal of urbanism, and another interesting theory: that many urban areas have reached the limit people are willing to drive as part of their daily commute (about one hour).

The study authors conclude that traffic engineers need to change their models and rethink the assumption that traffic will increase annually.

Meanwhile, new data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics adds to the body of research about the decline in driving — but whether that amounts to “peak car use” is worth further consideration. The report shows a leveling off in vehicle miles traveled, beginning at the end of 2007.

Between 1980 and 2007, urban vehicle miles traveled increased 133 percent, or almost five percent annually. But from 2007 to 2009, urban driving held steady. The change in driving in rural areas was more impressive. Rural vehicle miles traveled declined four percent from 2007 to 2009 after increasing at an average rate of two percent annually between 1980 and 2007.

These numbers don’t point to a cause. But the decline in driving aligns pretty well with the greatest period of economic contraction in a generation. And driving declines have long been linked recessions. Which leaves us wondering, is the decline part of a lasting trend, or does it just reflect a cyclical pattern tied to the economy?

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NYCDOT’s annual scorecard, the Sustainable Streets Index, adds more information about how New Yorkers get around every year. In addition to regular statistical snapshots of the city’s transportation system, like transit ridership or traffic speeds culled from GPS devices in taxis, this year’s version adds neighborhood travel profiles. Compiled from interviews in eight neighborhoods, these profiles to show just how little New Yorkers rely on cars to get around.

The recent news is not good, however. In 2009, the decade-long trend toward greater transit use reversed slightly, according to the report. Motor vehicle traffic increased by 0.3 percent while transit ridership fell 2.5 percent. DOT attributed the change to the effects of the recession, increased transit fares, and lower gas prices.

Preliminary 2010 numbers show what appear to be the joint effect of the uneven economic recovery and last year’s devastating fare hikes and service cuts. Subway ridership bounced back by one or two percent through October, but bus ridership continued to fall.

While the report is almost entirely a data-driven look backward, with regards to transit ridership it offers a dark warning about future trends:

The big if, however, lies in the area of overall bus and subway service. Given continued State budget shortfalls and pressures on the MTA budget, it is unclear whether the recent pattern of MTA service cuts and fare increases can be broken. In addition, the current MTA Capital Program remains only partially funded. Without firmer financing of the city’s transit system, the gains of the past decade are clearly at risk.

A new feature of the Sustainable Streets Index, the neighborhood travel profiles, offers in-depth looks at how people arrived at eight city neighborhoods and why they went there. In Union Square, for example, only four percent arrived by driving, along with another five percent in taxis. In contrast, roughly half of all people walked there and a third took the subway. Another four percent rode the bus and two percent biked.

Given that 70 percent of the people surveyed were there to shop or eat out, it’s safe to say that making parking more abundant isn’t the key to helping businesses in Union Square prosper. Similar data compiled on other commercial strips could help assuage many merchant concerns about re-appropriating parking spaces for busways, bike lanes, or pedestrian improvements.

In neighborhoods across the city, only a small share of people drive to their destinations. In Jackson Heights, only six percent of interview subjects had driven there, while 65 percent walked. At Fordham, only eight percent had driven, while the largest number — 42 percent — had taken the bus.

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A new study commissioned by the city finds that air quality in Times Square has notably improved since the 2009 installation of pedestrian plazas on Broadway.

Street-level readings taken by the New York City Community Air Survey, a city-wide air quality monitoring program created as part of PlaNYC, show that “concentrations of traffic-related pollutants were substantially lower than measurements from the year before and were less than in other midtown locations.” From a media statement announcing the findings:

The report confirms that major sources of air pollution generated in New York City are vehicle traffic and buildings burning high-sulfur heating oils. Additionally, in Times Square, concentrations of nitrogen oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), two pollutants closely associated with traffic, were among the highest in the city. After the conversion to a pedestrian plaza, NO pollution levels in Times Square went down by 63 percent, while NO2 levels went down by 41 percent.

“The new Times Square is a showcase for New York’s vitality and energy, rather than for congestion and pollution,” said NYCDOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan. “The changes here have been big wins for safety, mobility and business. Now we can see that they have delivered great environmental gains as well.”

The city says that some 250,000 pedestrians enter Times Square every day.

Data from the survey were released ahead of the next edition of PlaNYC and will be used to “inform” unspecified new air quality initiatives. The PlaNYC reboot is set for April 21.

Among the fans of the new Times Square are former President Bill Clinton, who joined Mayor Bloomberg today in announcing a merger of their climate groups, the Clinton Global Initiative and C40. Regaling reporters with tales of the Times Square of old, writes City Room:

Mr. Clinton concluded by recalling that when he was a college student, he was agile — and reckless — enough to dodge the cars zipping through Times Square.

Today, thanks to the pedestrian mall, he said, there is no need. “Now you can be my age and walk in Times Square and not get run down. That is pretty cool, too.”

Canal Street, to put it mildly, is due for a makeover. The street is clogged with traffic from the Holland Tunnel and the un-tolled Manhattan Bridge. Pedestrians jostle for space on the packed sidewalks, and they’re especially at risk of getting hit by a car, according to the city’s Pedestrian Safety Study.

Fortunately, the funds are in place for an eventual reconstruction and re-imagination of the street, thanks to federal World Trade Center emergency relief aid. To help determine how to design Canal Street, which must strike a balance between serving the local community and the regional transportation system, NYMTC, the region’s metropolitan planning organization, has been engaged in a nearly decade-long process of studying the area and drawing up recommendations for the corridor.

In a report released last Thursday [PDF], NYMTC recommends making Canal Street friendlier for pedestrians by adding significant amounts of sidewalk space. But larger changes, in particular the creation of a carpool lane in the Holland Tunnel, weren’t included. According to the NYMTC report, NYCDOT has agreed to use the recommendations to inform its plans, though a DOT spokesperson said only that the agency was reviewing the findings.

The Canal Area Transportation Study process began in 2002, and the first phase ended with some relatively small improvements to the area, like high-visibility crosswalks, new signage, and temporary improvements near Allen Street. Since 2005, the second, larger-scale phase of the study has been underway, bringing together all the regional transportation agencies as well as others with a stake in the project.

The NYMTC team studied a wide array of congestion-busting ideas for the corridor. Some, like two-way tolling on the Verrazano Bridge or congestion pricing, were dismissed because they required legislative approvals well outside the project’s scope. Transit expansions, like bringing the PATH train north from the World Trade Center or building light rail on Canal, were rejected as too costly. Some ideas were nixed because they lacked community support or because they conflicted with New York City’s Street Design Manual. Other ambitious proposals, like keeping traffic off side streets including Pell, Doyers, Mosco, and Mulberry, were referred to the appropriate agency for further study.

What’s left still has a lot to like.

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Students at Brooklyn’s PS 261 have clocked motorists traveling on Atlantic Avenue at an average midday speed of 38 mph — and as high as 50 mph. While the city’s 30 mph speed limit is a mystery to most New Yorkers, the students knew they were watching people break the law and put others in danger.

As part of a new program through NYC DOT’s Office of Education and Outreach, these fourth graders recently picked up some lessons about traffic safety (and math and physics), like the fact that stopping distances increase exponentially with vehicle speeds. Their teacher, Colleen Greto, said a jaw-dropping moment came when kids chalked out 160 feet — the stopping distance for cars traveling at 40 mph — on the ground of their schoolyard.

Just knowing the speed limit makes these kids experts on driving safety compared to most people who live in this city. “You guys know more than seven out of ten New Yorkers,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told the class at a press event yesterday announcing the program.

The new curriculum is a departure from longstanding street safety education tactics, which portray car traffic as an implacable force of nature. The underlying premise is that there’s more to safety education than looking both ways before you cross the street.

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You may have wondered, while watching a Streetfilm or reading a post on Streetsblog, where we got the term “livable streets.”

The answer can be found in the work of Donald Appleyard, a scholar who studied the neighborhood environment and the ways planning and design can make life better for city residents. In 1981, Appleyard published “Livable Streets” based on his research into how people experience streets with different traffic volumes.

Today we’re revisiting Appleyard’s work in the second installment of our series, “Fixing the Great Mistake.” This video explores three studies in “Livable Streets” that measured, for the first time, the effect of traffic on our social interactions and how we perceive our own homes and neighborhoods.

Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow her down. Who’s got a better commute?

Shockingly, the standard method for measuring traffic congestion implies that the second driver has it better. The Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report (UMR) only studies how congestion slows down drivers from hypothetical maximum speeds, completely ignoring how long it takes to actually get where you’re going. The result is an incessant call for more highway lanes from newspapers across the country.

An important new report from CEOs for Cities, though, has laid out major problems with the UMR. It shows how commuters in compact regions, whose daily trips look hellish based on the UMR, actually spend far less time in the car than residents of sprawling metro areas.

The misleading metrics in the UMR are a convenient bludgeon for the highway lobby. According to report author Joe Cortright, the UMR serves as “a drumbeat saying we need to spend a lot more on expanding capacity. It gets used in political speeches, it’s used in lobbying.”

The key flaw is a measurement called the Travel Time Index. That’s the ratio of average travel times at peak hours to the average time if roads were freely flowing. In other words, the TTI measures how fast a given trip goes; it doesn’t measure whether that trip is long or short to begin with.

Relying on the TTI suggests that more sprawl and more highways solve congestion, when in fact it just makes commutes longer. Instead, suggests CEOs for Cities, more compact development is often the more effective — and more affordable — solution.

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The officer who drove the wrong way down Jay Street and injured a cyclist near the foot of the Manhattan Bridge last month will face three misdemeanor counts filed by the Brooklyn District Attorney.

Louis Ramos, an officer with the 84th Precinct, was behind the wheel of a squad car with his partner, Paris Anderson, when they struck 61-year-old Yu Tong Chan at the intersection of Jay and Sands Street, which sees some of the heaviest bike traffic in the city. Chan was knocked off his bike and sustained a broken nose. He later reported the incident, but the officers did not.

Surveillance footage posted by 1010 WINS shows the officers hit Chan, then exit their vehicle for about four minutes before driving away. According to the Daily News, during this time the officers "helped the victim to the sidewalk and gave him tissues to clean the cuts and abrasions on his face, arms and legs." Both explained their failure to report the collision by claiming that they thought Chan had fallen off his bike after being startled by the lights and sirens of the patrol car.

The Brooklyn DA has charged Ramos with reckless driving, reckless assault, and leaving the scene of an accident. The arraignment will be held tomorrow.

The New York City Council moved on two big pieces of environmental legislation last Wednesday. One bill was introduced which would require landlords to participate in a major public experiment to reduce asthma rates. A second, which passed the full council, aims to keep dangerous chemicals out of city parks. Both could be important steps forward for preserving our environment and promoting public health, but you just have to ask, what happened to the internal combustion engine?

New Yorkers shouldn't have to live in homes where garbage, mold and rats cause asthma, and they shouldn't have to play in parks where PCBs are 110 times the level considered safe. For the city to have a truly clean and healthy environment, elected leaders needs to do more about pollution from cars.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, vehicle emissions contribute more than 80 percent of the total cancer risk from air pollution. The health effects of tailpipe emissions are highest within 500 feet of congested major roadways. The homes of two million New Yorkers are inside that high-risk area, according to another EDF report. In Brooklyn, 35 percent of playgrounds are in the danger zone. EDF also estimates that Queens County has the tenth worst diesel pollution in the country.

More than a million New Yorkers have been diagnosed with asthma, and the harm from automotive pollution is felt most acutely in disadvantaged communities. "Communities living close to highways, high traffic volume and congestion tend to have higher asthma rates and hospitalizations," said Soledad Gaztambide, transportation justice coordinator for the United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park. "These communities are mostly low-income communities and communities of color."

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