Streetsblog New York City

When measured by their impact on road wear-and-tear, trucking companies are not paying their fair share on the New York State Thruway.

The New York State Thruway Authority’s proposal to increase truck tolls by 45 percent is getting a lot of pushback from lobbyists and politicians in Albany, including Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. But not only do the Thruway’s truck tolls fall in the middle of the road when compared to tolls in other states, trucking companies in New York are paying a disproportionately low cost for the damage their vehicles cause to roadways.

The level of Thruway tolls matters to all New Yorkers because transit funding has a history of being diverted to plug holes elsewhere in the state budget. If the owners and operators of the heaviest, most damaging vehicles on the Thruway don’t pay their share for system maintenance, straphangers could be left indirectly footing the bill.

Today, the operator of a typical 18-wheeler pays $6.78 for every dollar a car driver pays on the Thruway in Orange, Rockland and Westchester counties. Across the entire Thruway system, trucks get an even better deal, paying ”only five times the rate of the average passenger vehicle,” according to Thruway Executive Director Thomas Madison Jr.

Under the toll increase, which would not apply to cars, trucks would pay $9.89 for every dollar in auto tolls. That might seem steep to most drivers, but consider the costs that go unpaid.

Although adding more axles to large trucks blunts their impact on the road, the average 18-wheeler weighs twenty times more than a two-ton automobile.

This is important because the damage inflicted on the road surface doesn’t increase linearly along with vehicle weight. In fact, wear-and-tear increases exponentially as vehicle weight increases. According to a report by Jacobs Civil Consultants for the Thruway Authority [PDF], an 80,000-pound, 18-wheel truck creates the same amount of damage as 9,600 passenger vehicles.

No one in New York is even thinking about an exponential increase in truck tolls, but the outsized impact of heavy trucks on road maintenance shouldn’t be forgotten as the toll hike, which only needs the consent of the Thruway Authority board to proceed, draws closer. If approved at this month’s board meeting, it could go into effect as soon as September 30.

Read more…

Photo: CrownHeights.info

The cyclist killed Tuesday by a truck driver on Bedford Avenue has been identified by NYPD as Emma Blumstein, 24.

Based on NYPD’s description of the crash, Blumstein was the victim of a left cross. According to police, Blumstein was traveling south on Bedford, while the driver was northbound on Bedford and turning left onto Empire Boulevard. Bedford Avenue has bike lanes in both directions at this location.

The crash occurred at approximately 11:27 yesterday morning. From CrownHeights.info:

The driver, who was visibly shaken, told CrownHeights.info that “she was just coming so fast and I was already into the turn; I just could not stop”.

The victim was run over by both the front and rear tires of the truck, and was pronounced dead at the scene by Hatzolah.

Photos from CrownHeights.info show NYPD crash investigators at the scene. “No criminality is suspected,” according to NYPD.

This fatal crash occurred in the 71st Precinct. To voice your concerns about neighborhood traffic safety directly to Deputy Inspector John Lewis, the commanding officer, go to the next precinct community council meeting. The 71st Precinct council meetings happen at 7:30 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month at M.S. 61, 400 Empire Boulevard. Call the precinct at 718-735-0527 for information.

The City Council district where Emma Blumstein was killed is represented by Mathieu Eugene. To encourage Eugene to take action to improve street safety in his district and citywide, contact him at 212-788-7352, mathieu.eugene@council.nyc.gov or @MathieuEugene.

Photo: CrownHeights.info

An informal survey conducted by the Daily News suggests that many trucking companies and truck drivers are ignoring the state’s four-month-old crossover mirror law, and that police are not enforcing the safety measure.

The father of Moshe Englender, killed by a truck driver in Williamsburg last May, says the law intended to prevent "blind spot" crashes is not being enforced. Photo: Daily News

The law requires that trucks weighing over 26,000 pounds that are driven on city streets be equipped with convex, or “crossover,” mirrors, which allow drivers to see what’s directly in front of them. “Blind spot” crashes claimed the lives of Brooklyn schoolkids Juan Estrada and Victor Flores in 2004 and grandmother Theresa Alonso of Staten Island in 2010. Support for last year’s iteration of the mirror bill grew after 5-year-old Moshe Englender was killed in May by the driver of a meat truck while playing on Heyward Street in Williamsburg.

The Englender family has filed suit against the driver and the company that owned the truck, the News reported yesterday. Said Wolf Englender, Moshe’s father: “The law has been passed and it’s not being enforced. The more we talk about it, the more we hope that it will prevent it from happening again.”

A News reporter standing on Canal Street near the Holland Tunnel counted 43 trucks that should have the mirrors, and found that about a third did not. NYPD summons reports do not itemize mirror violations, so it’s impossible to know how many tickets have been issued.

The mirrors are standard equipment on school buses, and have been for decades. For a 2010 story on what turned out to be an unsuccessful push for a mirror bill, Streetsblog found mirrors and assembly kits listed at prices ranging from $23 to $57, not accounting for bulk discounts.

We contacted the office of Marty Golden, who championed the mirror bill in the Senate, regarding the Daily News report. “Trucks equipped with crossover mirrors eliminate the truck driver’s blind spot and allow drivers to see pedestrians crossing in front of them,” Golden said in an e-mailed statement. “Strict enforcement of this law is necessary to reduce pedestrian fatalities and injuries in New York. Failure to enforce this law will prevent us from saving lives and keeping New Yorkers safe on our streets.”

Federal safety officials missed their own deadline Friday for making new rules about dangerous trucks.

A 76-year-old man in LA county was hit by a truck while riding his bike in 2008. Republicans want to keep current trucking laws in place that Democrats and others say lead to driver fatigue, causing accidents like this one. Photo: Aitken Aitken Cohn

October 28 was the original deadline by which the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was supposed to announce new hours-of-service regulations for trucking, but in the end, they gave themselves another month to do it.

The pending change is the result of a lawsuit brought by Public Citizen, the Teamsters Union, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the Truck Safety Coalition against the FMCSA to tighten the standards. They have agreed with the FMCSA to change the current 11-hour driving day and the 34-hour rest period before starting a long workweek to a 10-hour driving day, keeping the 34-hour “restart” but with new restrictions.

The 11-hour rule was a “midnight regulation” made during President George W. Bush’s final days in office, according to the Teamsters. The Bush administration increased the workweek from 60 to 77 hours of driving and reduced the restart period from 50 hours to 34.

The Teamsters say truck crashes cost the nation $20 billion in 2009, and that truck driver fatigue is a major factor in truck crashes. Some statistics indicate fatigue is a factor in 30 to 40 percent of truck crashes, though the FMCSA itself puts the number at 5.5 percent.

“We will continue to push for a rule that protects truck drivers, instead of the greed of the trucking industry,” said Teamsters President Jim Hoffa when the court case was decided two years ago. “Longer hours behind the wheel are dangerous for our members and the driving public.”

The problem isn’t limited to highways. Six percent of pedestrian fatalities and nine percent of bicyclist fatalities in 2009 were caused by crashes with large trucks, according to the NHTSA. Between 1996 and 2005, crashes with large trucks accounted for almost a third of all cyclist fatalities in New York City, according to a joint report by NYC agencies [PDF].

Read more…

Truck traffic in Maspeth. Photo: slowpoke_taiwan via Flickr.

Speaking at the Municipal Art Society’s annual summit this afternoon, outgoing Port Authority chief Chris Ward said he wouldn’t be sending any parting shots at the New York region’s leaders, but he didn’t hold back from proposing some big and bold ideas. With only a few weeks left at the Port Authority, Ward issued a call for the construction of a cross-harbor freight tunnel and a rail freight distribution system for the city, as well as the abandonment of container shipping at the Red Hook terminal in Brooklyn.

“The city is bedeviled by intraregional truck trips,” said Ward. Having large diesel trucks criss-crossing the dense, congested region 364 days a year, he said, “is an economic and environmental crisis.”

“We must, we must finally realize small-scale rail freight distribution within this city,” he declared, noting that under his leadership, the Port Authority had acquired facilities in New Jersey needed to eventually build a long-desired cross-harbor rail freight tunnel. Beyond that, said Ward, the region needs to develop small, clean vehicles capable of carrying freight the last mile from rail stations to final destinations.

Ward also argued for a rethinking of the Brooklyn waterfront, which he called the last great challenge for the city from a planning perspective. “[The] Red Hook [shipping terminal] has to move down to the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal,” Ward said. “Red Hook is the wrong location.” Container shipping there, he said, is both inefficient from a transportation perspective and standing in the way of the city’s other plans for the waterfront, including the eventual development of the southern portion of Governor’s Island. “You will not be able to get the needed amount of people, whatever the use is, to Governor’s Island as long as you have a container terminal there.” With the container port moved, he argued, new transportation infrastructure could connect Red Hook and Governor’s Island and spur major new development in the area.

Read more…

Streetsblog has been gathering responses to yesterday’s release of PlaNYC 2.0. This is the second installment. Read the first part here.

Joan Byron, director of policy at the Pratt Center for Community Development, told us the update to the city’s sustainability plan includes some promising developments on the truck traffic front. She noted that some of the biggest differences between the revised PlaNYC and the original have to do with freight transportation:

PlaNYC 2.0 re-affirms the city's commitment to stop relying on truck-based waste transfer stations located mainly in the South Bronx and Brooklyn.

PlaNYC 2.0 includes a lot more specifics about freight than 1.0 did. The big projects it references — the Port Authority’s Cross Harbor Rail Freight Study, rail and barge upgrades at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal and at the 51st and 65th Street (Brooklyn) yards, and incorporation of rail improvements in the rebuild of the Hunts Point Produce Market — are already committed or underway, but it’s still significant that the plan calls them out. And it’s great that the city will be gathering more data about food-related freight movement, because the patterns of long-haul, regional, and local food movement have changed a lot in recent decades, and will continue to change, as food production continues to simultaneously globalize and to localize.

It’s great that there’s some space given to local truck congestion issues. I’d like to see more about pilot projects, and also a commitment to better data gathering and analysis by NYCDOT. There’s shockingly little information available now about types of goods being trucked within the city, their origins and destinations, specific time and other constraints affecting different subsectors, etc. Without a better understanding of the problem, it’s hard to know where the opportunities are for innovative solutions.

The Pratt Center cares about freight movement for a couple of reasons. Low-income communities and communities of color bear a disproportionate share of the impacts of both local and long-haul trucking. And truck-dependent industries — food production, construction, service and repair (of everything from TV cable boxes to big-building mechanical equipment) are important blue-collar employers that offer some of the best remaining pathways into the middle class for New York’s workforce. So there are environmental and economic justice reasons to make freight movement work better citywide.

Byron singled out the PlaNYC update’s section on transporting trash as a good sign:

It’s also a great relief to see explicit treatment of solid waste in this version of the plan, including a re-affirmation of the city’s commitment to implementing the Solid Waste Management Plan by moving ahead with planned marine transfer stations in Manhattan. Shifting away from truck-based garbage export will enable the city as a whole to reduce carbon emissions associated with solid waste disposal. And fairly sharing the burden of managing our trash gives all of us a stake in reducing our total tonnage. The status quo, relying on truck-based transfer stations located mainly in the South Bronx and Brooklyn, has kept the problem out of mind and out of sight for the wealthiest New Yorkers whose consumption contributes the most to the problem.

Theresa Alonso, 64, was killed by a truck driver in June 2010 when the light changed as she crossed Richmond Terrace in Port Richmond. Photo: Daily News

A little-known bill that could save lives has cleared the State Senate Transportation Committee.

Under S.3151, sponsored by Brooklyn Republican Marty Golden, trucks weighing over 26,000 pounds that are driven on city streets would be required to have convex (or “crossover”) mirrors allowing their drivers to see what’s directly in front of them.

This sounds like common sense, but according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data cited in the bill, 71 percent of pedestrians killed by large trucks in 2005 were “initially impacted from the front of the truck.”

When a truck driver sits at an intersection or turns a corner, a pedestrian can get caught in the “blind spot” created by the height of the truck’s hood. Collisions of this type killed Brooklyn schoolkids Juan Estrada and Victor Flores in 2004 and claimed the life of grandmother Theresa Alonso in Staten Island last summer. Between 1994 and 2003, 204 New York City pedestrians were killed and 4,698 were injured by collisions involving trucks.

The crossover mirror is nothing new; it’s been standard equipment on school buses for decades.

As was the case last year, when it passed the Assembly, a coalition of street safety advocates is urging senators to adopt the bill. John Quaglione, a spokesperson for Senator Golden, told Streetsblog: “As of right now, the legislature is focused on the approving a state budget by the April 1 deadline. The legislation [S.3151] has support within both houses of the state legislature and there is a chance that this may be the year that this bill becomes law in New York State.”

To reduce double-parking, DOT is adding dedicated loading zones in the morning along much of this Church Avenue strip. Image: NYC DOT

The fight for scarce street space is always fierce in New York City, and as DOT’s efforts to install bike and bus lanes across the city have revealed, the most contested zone of all is probably the curbside. On commercial streets, drivers can’t get enough of the underpriced on-street parking while businesses want curbside access to load and unload deliveries. The result is rampant double-parking, cruising, and ultimately congestion — slowing down buses and creating more dangerous conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. In some cases, local displeasure about curbside dysfunction manifests itself as opposition to seemingly unrelated livable streets improvements, like the Fifth Avenue bike lane in Park Slope.

Image: NYC DOT

With a new program on Brooklyn’s Church Avenue, DOT is trying to solve at least one part of the puzzle. Starting in mid-January, 40 parking spaces on Church Avenue will be dedicated exclusively for deliveries from 7 a.m. to noon on weekdays. On the block between 18th and 19th Streets, truck loading will be available until 3:00 p.m.

With 65 percent of all deliveries to the neighborhood already taking place before noon, according to DOT, the idea is to give trucks the space they need at times when they’re just going to take it anyway. If successful, all the area’s deliveries could be made in the dedicated spaces within the time window. Theoretically, no trucks would double-park, morning or afternoon.

One group that should be particularly excited: the 38,000 weekday riders on the B35 bus, the sixth busiest route in the city. They’re paying the price for the fact that at least one Church Avenue lane — and there’s only one in each direction — is blocked by double-parkers for a quarter of the day, according to DOT.

The program has strong backing from local businesses. According to Community Board 14 chair Alvin Berk, a few years ago, the Church Avenue BID came to the community board with a proposal to bring ParkSmart to the stretch, raising meter rates during peak demand hours. “At the time, its utility hadn’t been demonstrated,” said Berk (the program has since been shown to cut traffic and increase the number of cars that are able to park), so the board proposed an alternative.

First, two-hour metered spaces were reduced to one-hour, with the intention of increasing turnover. The new delivery zones are the final part of that plan. “We’re very optimistic about it,” said Berk, who added that ParkSmart could be back on the table if this program doesn’t show results after a year or so. The BID has also endorsed the plan.

The cross over mirror, on the right, allows truck and school bus drivers to see in front of their hood. Photo: Moblog.

Governor Paterson has called a special session for the legislature next week, and it’s full of big, tough bills. For example, both David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo are urging legislators to close a $315 million deficit, an action which could again steal dedicated funds from the MTA. Education funding is also on the docket.

But here’s a small, simple way for Albany to save lives next week. Right now, the drivers of large trucks have a huge blind spot right in front of the cab. That puts pedestrians, and especially small children, in danger.

In 2004, Brooklyn fifth-graders Juan Estrada and Victor Flores were killed by a truck driver as they were walking home from school. They were crossing Third Avenue with the light as the truck turned right. The driver, John Olson, later said he never even saw the kids.

This cause of death is all too common. Seventy percent of all pedestrians killed in collisions with large trucks were struck by the front of the truck, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [PDF].

There’s an inexpensive and easy fix. “Cross over mirrors” are convex mirrors positioned on the front of the truck that let the driver see into that blind spot. The mirror and the assembly kit list at between $23 and $57, not counting bulk discounts.

Here’s where Albany comes in. There’s a bill, S2057, which would require all trucks driving on New York City local streets to install cross over mirrors. That’s already the law for school buses, and the law for large trucks is almost across the finish line. It’s been in the works for years, and thanks to a strong push from the New York City DOT, the bill already passed the Assembly and the Senate Transportation Committee, where it didn’t receive any nays. All it needs is the full Senate to take it up and then the governor’s signature.

Read more…

The lack of an eastbound toll on the Verrazano allows trucks to make three major crossings without paying tolls, creating a counterclockwise loop of truck traffic. Image: Sam Schwartz.

The one-way tolls on the Verrazano Bridge have been a major cause of truck traffic in New York City since they were instituted in 1986. Though numerous efforts to restore two-way tolls have failed over the last two and a half decades, technological progress may finally bring victory within reach. Congressman Jerry Nadler thinks that the MTA’s moves toward cashless tolling could make two-way tolls politically feasible, and he’s trying to pass the federal legislation necessary to allow them.

The one-way tolls concentrate truck traffic in the city along specific routes and hit some communities — like Chinatown — especially hard. Trucks from New Jersey can drive into Staten Island, cross east on the Verrazano for free, drive up the BQE or Brooklyn local roads to the free Manhattan Bridge, then cross Lower Manhattan and head back to New Jersey for free through the Port Authority’s tunnels, which impose no tolls heading westbound. This long counterclockwise circle can save trucking companies a fortune in tolls, while endangering and clogging up New York City’s streets for everyone else.

“A two-way toll would eliminate the flow of trucks entering New York City via Staten Island in order to escape the charges on the Hudson River bridge and tunnel crossings,” said Nadler, who represents hard-hit Lower Manhattan. “With the MTA now poised to test new toll-collection technologies, which are likely to be implemented across the region, all New Yorkers will reap the benefits and the MTA will generate new revenue that it sorely needs.”

You may be wondering: How did such a senseless policy get enacted in the first place? The answer: Staten Island politics. Residents were sick of the long lines of traffic building up behind the tollbooths on the Staten Island side of the bridge, spewing exhaust near their homes.

In response, Congressman Guy Molinari, with strong support from Senator Al D’Amato, stuck a provision into federal transportation law forbidding two-way tolling across the Verrazano in 1986. Eliminating the eastbound charge meant that tolls only caused back-ups on the bridge itself and in Bay Ridge. The MTA was opposed to the move at the time, and the following year reported increased traffic through Lower Manhattan and millions in lost toll revenue as a result of the switch.

Read more…