Streetsblog New York City

The city's first pop-up café, in the Financial District, is heavily used and good for local business. Photo: Ian Dutton

Brooklyn’s only proposed pop-up café won the approval of Community Board 2 last night in an 18-10-1 vote, allowing the city to replace on-street parking with public seating. This pop-up is sponsored by the Ecopolis Café on Smith Street, which will pay the cost of building the temporary public space.

The Ecopolis pop-up had received unanimous approval from the board’s transportation committee, according to member Mike Epstein. At the full board meeting, however, Epstein said that just about every comment or question on the topic came from opponents of the proposal. Most were concerned about parking. Some were assuaged by the fact that DOT has allowed community boards to have complete veto power over pop-up cafés in their neighborhoods, Epstein reported, meaning that the board could ensure that there would never be more than one on a given block.

In Lower Manhattan, the city’s first pop-up café increased business at the two sponsoring restaurants by 14 percent. Even so, vocal opposition from Sean Sweeney and his SoHo Alliance led the local community board to turn down six of seven proposed pop-ups for SoHo and Greenwich Village last month.

The Park Slope Patch (an AOL publication, for what it’s worth) did a few word-on-the-street interviews on Prospect Park West, asking passersby what they think about the bike lane. Not everyone they talked to thinks the lane is needed — it’s about 50-50, giving critics a disproportionate say relative to their numbers. But note that even the guy who calls the lane “stupid” thinks the NBBL-conjured safety criticism is hogwash.

Moisha's Discount Supermarket is set to expand with city assistance, but it'll be building more parking than supermarket. Image: Google Street View.

Wondering why the city is subsidizing 18,000 square feet of parking for a project that’s supposed to make fresh food more accessible to low-income New Yorkers? Political favors seem to have something to do with it.

Moisha’s Discount Supermarket is receiving $2 million in tax incentives to expand its operations and build parking for 45 cars under the FRESH program, intended to bring fruits and vegetables into underserved neighborhoods. But according to a report in the Daily News, there are 10 markets within five blocks of Moisha’s and all of them sell fresh produce. The News points to $41,690 in donations from Moisha’s owners to local politicians as an alternative explanation for Moisha’s tax breaks.

An article in City Hall News, which has been taken off their website (we’re looking into why), suggests more direct impropriety. They report that the district manager of Brooklyn Community Board 12 testified to the city’s Industrial Development Agency that his board was completely behind the Moisha’s expansion. But a member of CB12 said the board had never discussed the issue. The district manager and Moisha’s owners are reported to have close ties to Assembly member and local power broker Dov Hikind.

Assembly Member Dov Hikind speaking against pedestrian refuges on Fort Hamilton Parkway at a CB12 meeting last November.

All too often, political patronage is what determines how much parking New York City decides to build. From the city’s decision to give more parking to the Yankees in return for a luxury suite in left field to the Finance Department’s overruling of rank-and-file assessors to grant a politically-connected Jamaica parking operator non-profit status and millions in tax exemptions, too much of the city’s mushrooming parking supply is built and subsidized because of sweetheart deals.

Even when political favors aren’t at work, however, it’s usually still politics that determines how much parking gets built, not any kind of thinking about transportation policy. Parking is routinely thrown in as a “sweetener” for new development, something that a developer or the city can offer a neighborhood to accept growth.

It’s exceedingly rare for parking decisions to be made on the grounds of how much more traffic a garage will induce or how much air pollution it will add. No wonder the city keeps building acre after acre of it.

Moisha's Discount Supermarket is set to expand with city assistance, but it'll be building more parking than supermarket. Image: Google Street View.

Thanks to New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, the residents of Midwood are about to enjoy a wider selection of produce and kosher foods. Under the FRESH program, Moisha’s Discount Supermarket is slated to receive just under $2 million in tax breaks to double its size and provide more grocery options to the underserved community [PDF]. Along with 15,000 square feet of supermarket, however, the neighborhood will be receiving 18,000 square feet of parking.

According to Moisha’s application for city support, most of that parking will be built on the roof of the new store. According to the city Industrial Development Agency’s notice of public hearing, however, it will be regular surface parking taking up half of the 36,000 square foot lot. Either way, that much parking is overkill for Moisha’s.

The supermarket’s environmental assessment, for example, estimates that 18,000 square feet is enough space for 45 cars, but that a maximum of 40 vehicular trips could be generated by the store in any given hour. In other words, by the store’s own calculation, unless most customers are spending hours at a time shopping, it’s providing more parking than it would at any point have driving customers. Other options abound: In addition to plain old walking, Moisha’s is located around four blocks from the F train at Avenue N, and the store’s website advertises its delivery service.

Perhaps more importantly, the entire purpose of the FRESH program is to make high-quality and affordable groceries available to residents who don’t have access to them. People who drive to the supermarket aren’t so constrained by what’s available in the neighborhood. That’s why the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines households as living in a food desert if they’re more than a mile from the nearest grocery store and they don’t have a car. FRESH-supported supermarkets are in that sense supposed to cater to those on foot, on bike, or on the bus.

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Cross-posted from Brooklyn Spoke

I’m not one for conspiracy theories.  9/11 was not an inside job, Oswald acted alone, the Moon landing was real, and Elvis is still dead.

When it comes to all of the bike lane hate that seems to be spewing forth from various corners of this city, and Brooklyn in particular, I feel the same way.  Norman Steisel probably has a better chance of getting calls to Marty Markowitz returned than you or I, but I wouldn’t begin to suggest that Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes is in communication with Marty’s office on matters of strategy.  If they were, I think their war plan would at least appear to be coherent.

To wit, see if you can follow this logic:

• There are two sets of data: the DOT’s and NBBL’s.
• On the same day the DOT counted 863 cyclists using the Prospect Park West bike lane, Neighbors For Better Bike Lanes collected video surveillance showing only 470 bikes, a difference of about 54%.
• Such a huge discrepancy is beyond the realm of statistical variation.
• Therefore, the DOT is making up bike counts out of thin air.
• If the DOT makes up bike count numbers, then none of their data can be trusted.
• The NBBL data can be trusted.

This is somewhat reasonable, especially if you’re inclined to not trust the DOT.  But just when it seems like it all makes sense, along comes Marty Markowitz with his own logic:

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Rabbi Mosha Adler

An 83-year-old Israeli rabbi was struck and killed by a driver in Brooklyn yesterday.

Voz Iz Neias reports that Rabbi Mosha Adler, from Jerusalem, was hit on Avenue J and East 10th Street in Midwood, and died at Lutheran Medical Center.

An NYPD spokesperson confirmed a Wednesday collision at that location, and said the victim was declared “not likely to survive,” having suffered lacerations to the head. Queries to DCPI and Brooklyn’s 66th Precinct, which we were told handled the call, yielded no further details.

The location where Rabbi Adler was mortally wounded lies in David Greenfield’s City Council district and is represented by Dov Hikind in the state Assembly. We await their video statements expressing outrage over this tragedy and the continuing loss of life on Brooklyn streets.

The Brooklyn Paper reported today that police precincts across the borough, following orders from the top of the department, will soon embark on an enforcement campaign targeting cyclist infractions. A Streetsblog source who’s spoken to the 78th Precinct verified that a coordinated effort to step up cycling enforcement is in the works.

Suggestion: To avoid cycling enforcement based on windshield perspective, assign bike cops to bike enforcement detail. Photo: Joe Shlabotnick/Flickr

We’ve written here before that from a public safety perspective, more cyclist enforcement only makes sense as one piece in a broader effort to police traffic safety, especially by targeting the most dangerous behavior on the street, like motorist speeding and failure-to-yield.

But it looks like the orders from One Police Plaza are just about cycling infractions. As outrageous as it is to see NYPD devote more resources to bike enforcement when kids are getting critically injured by hit-and-run drivers, there’s still a helpful way to do it and an ineffective, counterproductive way to do it. The question now is whether officers will recognize the difference.

Police could enforce norms that make sense — no wrong-way riding, no riding through crosswalks when pedestrians have the right of way, no biking on crowded sidewalks. Or they could catch people in dragnets, ticket every cyclist who treats a red light as a stop sign, no matter how cautiously, and otherwise harass people without actually encouraging safer behavior. What’s it going to be?

If you want police to, at the very least, enforce cycling rules with some common sense, I recommend attending your local precinct community council meeting. Each precinct holds one every month — a public forum to convey your concerns to the officers who police your neighborhood (find out when and where). The best thing you can do to get NYPD to pay attention to the lawless driving that’s really endangering people’s lives is to tell them about it.

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.

Plans to create a "temporary" 1,100 space surface parking lot, shown here in the lower left, are at issue in the latest fight over Atlantic Yards. Image: Jonathan Barkey and the Municipal Art Society.

The latest round of the knock-down drag-out fight over the Atlantic Yards project is underway, and it’s all about parking. At issue is a potential 1,100-space surface parking lot that would be located between Pacific and Dean Streets, just west of Vanderbilt Avenue. That lot has been portrayed as temporary, “interim” parking by the Empire State Development Corporation and project developer Forest City Ratner, but could sit there generating traffic for up to 25 years. Last week several groups filed a motion to halt construction until the environmental impacts of the project are studied more fully.

The basic question is whether the environmental review for Atlantic Yards needs reworking in light of the fact that development could take up to 25 years, rather than the ten-year construction schedule originally put forward by ESDC and Ratner. (Be sure to check out the invaluable Norman Oder for all the details.) If construction is really going to take an extra fifteen years, the argument goes, the true impacts on things like traffic, noise, and air quality weren’t ever disclosed, in violation of environmental law. That argument got a boost in the courts a few weeks ago, and the legal battle now hinges on whether or not to halt construction.

For the BrooklynSpeaks coalition, the 1,100 space “interim” parking lot is at the heart of the issue. As Oder reports, their lawyer suggested that construction on the Barclays Center basketball arena might be allowed to continue “but all other work, including any attempt to convert Block 1129 to a parking lot, should be absolutely enjoined unless and until there is full compliance with SEQRA.”

“They were supposed to put the parking underground,” BrooklynSpeaks member Jo Anne Simon explained. A quarter-century of surface parking wasn’t part of the deal.

Though Simon said that BrooklynSpeaks has tried not to debate suitable uses for the Atlantic Yards site, she did suggest that surface parking wasn’t an acceptable option. “Something that’s an amenity for the community,” she suggested, “maybe some interim open space.” Simon also added that some additional demolition would still be required to pave over the block, “and that we’d like to see not happen.”

Security camera footage shows Sunday's deadly hit-and-run in Bensonhurst, in which a New York City firefighter is under suspicion but has yet to face charges. Image: NY1.

Four pedestrians have lost their lives on New York City streets since Thursday. Two of the crashes were hit-and-runs and a third killed a four-year-old child. A cyclist is also in critical condition after a man who wasn’t licensed to operate the tractor trailer he was driving struck her on a Bushwick street Friday morning.

At 12:30 a.m. Sunday, Manuel Tzajguachiac was crossing 65th Street at 20th Avenue in Bensonhurst, according to the Post. As he crossed the street, the driver of a BMW SUV struck and killed him. The impact sent the victim flying through the air but the driver never even stopped, the Post reported. Tzajguachiac moved to the United States six months ago from Guatemala, where his wife and son still live.

The SUV is known to belong to firefighter Pat Quagliariello, whose brother is an NYPD detective. Though Quagliariello told the police that the car was his a few hours after the crash, he isn’t saying whether he was driving the vehicle. Police released Quagliariello because they couldn’t prove he was the driver, according to the Daily News. He has been suspended pending the results of the investigation.

Later that morning, a delivery truck driver hit and killed a pedestrian on Morton Street near West Street, in the West Village. The police said that they have not identified the victim, though the Wall Street Journal reports that he was Dario Digiano, a 21-year-old from Belleville, New Jersey. The driver fled the scene and police are still trying to find him.

At around 2:00 a.m. this morning, a Duane Reade truck driver hit and and killed a pedestrian as he crossed Eighth Avenue at 56th Street.

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