Streetsblog New York City

For now, this is as good as it's going to get for cyclists who approach the Manhattan Bridge via Jay Street. Image: DOT

To make biking between Brooklyn and Manhattan safer and more appealing, one thing that needs to be addressed is access to the Manhattan Bridge from downtown Brooklyn. With the high volume of traffic between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and local streets, the area can be both dangerous and confusing, especially if you haven’t biked these streets before.

A new proposal from DOT [PDF] to improve bike access along Jay Street and connecting streets will offer minor improvements. The incremental steps received a unanimous 7-0 vote, with one abstention, from Brooklyn Community Board 2′s transportation committee last Tuesday evening.

Tillary Street, on the block between Adams and Jay Streets, saw 15 severe injuries (eight of which were pedestrians or cyclists), as well as one pedestrian fatality, from 2006 to 2010 — a higher injury rate than 90 percent of Brooklyn streets. That earned it a ”high crash corridor” designation from DOT.

Although the long-term plan [PDF] for this block involves a two-way protected bike path on the north side of the street, similar to the existing configuration on Adams Street between the Brooklyn Bridge entrance and Cadman Plaza West, the proposal that received a supportive vote on Tuesday is less ambitious. It would stripe a five-foot wide bike lane on eastbound Tillary Street to complement the existing westbound striped lane. General travel lanes would be narrowed, but the eastbound side of the street would retain three moving lanes plus a left-turn lane.

On Jay Street itself, the existing southbound striped bike lane would be joined by a northbound counterpart, matching the configuration on Jay Street south of Tillary. This section of Jay Street currently has a lot of double-parking, and some bike advocates are concerned that the new bike lane would simply be occupied with parked cars. According to reader Ian Dutton, at Tuesday’s meeting committee chair Hemalee Patel noted that many of the cars parked on Jay Street use government placards, and that the existing parking set-up was not serving community needs. DOT staff said they would examine the curb regulations on Jay Street.

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The two-way protected bike lane on Tillary Street in Downtown Brooklyn is blocked. Photo: Trammell Hudson on Flickr

Tillary Street between Adams Street and Cadman Plaza East is a critical connection for cyclists from Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Red Hook to the Brooklyn Bridge, with a protected bike lane separating them from drivers on the extra-wide street.

While the two-way lane has long been a favorite of illegal parkers, for the past week or two it’s been blocked by construction barriers, according to reader Trammell Hudson, who sent in this photo. As a result, cyclists are shunted into a lane of general traffic, and the sudden closure forces some cyclists to ride against traffic approaching the dangerous intersection with Adams Street.

A section of the street collapsed in recent weeks, and while DOT has done some work on the site, more work is needed, according to Gene Corcoran of the U.S. District Court, which is located on this block of Tillary Street. Streetsblog has an inquiry in with DOT to learn more. We’ll let you know if we hear anything.

Update: According to DOT, as of this morning there’s now a bike detour here that separates cyclists from car traffic. The detour will be in effect until DOT and DEP fix the depression in the road.

All smiles at today's ribbon-cutting for Willoughby Plaza in Downtown Brooklyn. Photo: Stephen Miller

NYC DOT’s plaza program hit a milestone today, when officials cut the ribbon on a block of Willoughby Street reclaimed from car traffic between Pearl and Adams Streets in Downtown Brooklyn. What used to be, essentially, a private parking lot for government placard holders, is now the first plaza program project to make the transition from temporary materials to permanent construction.

The 14,000 square-foot plaza, set in motion in 2006 with a street reclamation by Iris Weinshall’s DOT, was folded into DOT’s Plaza Program after Janette Sadik-Khan took charge of the agency. It then entered the capital project pipeline for the Department of Design and Construction, which raised the plaza to the same grade as the sidewalk and worked with DEP to replace water mains.

The project cost $2 million, paid for by federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality funds. Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez was on hand for today’s ribbon-cutting, along with Sadik-Khan, DDC Commissioner David Burney, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership President Tucker Reed, Jeff Kay of Muss Development, and Borough President Marty Markowitz.

“It’s a pleasure when the commissioner and I can be on the same side of a project,” Markowitz said, before launching into a gregarious bit inviting the single people of Brooklyn to make the plaza their new meeting spot.

The overall theme this morning was not match-making, but retail sales. Sadik-Khan cited research showing that plazas help improve retail sales, adding that DOT expects to release a complete study of those effects this summer.

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Choked by traffic, Downtown Brooklyn and its surrounding neighborhoods need a comprehensive agenda for transportation — and the current ad hoc approach from the city and state isn’t cutting it in the fast-growing area, says a coalition of community groups, elected officials, and advocates.

The report calls for the expansion of popular programs like 20 mph zones while asking the city to take bolder steps to redesign major streets.

Last week the coalition unveiled the “BK Gateway Transportation Vision” [PDF], covering a broad range of steps to curb traffic, improve surface transit, and make streets safer for walking and biking. The organizations that produced the report and rolled it out include the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, the Park Slope Civic Council, the Boerum Hill Association, and the office of Council Member Letitia James.

The heart of the plan calls for congestion pricing and residential parking permits, as well as an expansion of the PARK Smart program beyond Park Slope and 20 mph neighborhood slow zones beyond the one in Boerum Hill. Congestion pricing — by far the most transformative single proposal in the plan — and RPP — recently rejected by DOT for neighborhoods near the Barclays Center — need Albany’s say-so to advance, while NYC DOT could move forward with more PARK Smart areas and slow zones independently.

Other key coalition requests within the city’s control are street redesigns. The plan calls for protected bike lanes and Select Bus Service on Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues — two critical transportation corridors with terrible safety records — as well as extending the bus-only lanes on Fulton and Livingston Streets.

The plan also calls for a “pedestrian safety rapid response team” around the Barclays Center to handle overflow crowds. This and other arena issues are likely to be addressed as part of DOT’s study examining traffic and parking after the Barclays Center opened this fall.

Parking placards, which are used, abused, and counterfeited all over Downtown Brooklyn, are not mentioned in the report. When Streetsblog asked James if she supports placard reform, she said, “There should be areas where placards are not allowed at all. That includes my placard.”

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Parking reform for Downtown Brooklyn — which would take the mild but worthwhile step of cutting the district’s mandatory parking minimums in half – went before a City Council subcommittee on Monday. The fate of the proposal now comes down to council members Tish James and Steve Levin, who represent the area. The two representatives are talking tough and trying to get DCP to do more — but what they want has little to do with parking policy.

Tish James and Steve Levin want to use parking reform to address unrelated aspects of Downtown Brooklyn's 2004 rezoning. Photos: City Council

James and Levin want guarantees that repurposed parking garages or future development will include more income-restricted units, a new elementary school, or other community facilities that they say are lacking since more families moved to the neighborhood following a 2004 rezoning. The council members are basically using parking reform as leverage to extract unrelated amenities from the city.

“Council Member James and I would like to see these issues addressed sooner rather than later,” Levin said at Monday’s Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises hearing, “and see this as a particular opportunity to have that conversation.”

On the affordable housing front, one step that would also make an impact would be to eliminate parking mandates entirely. But neither James nor Levin are asking for the elimination of parking minimums. This despite the fact that James herself acknowledges that parking mandates increase the cost of housing.

The Navy Green development, in her district, received a waiver from the city’s existing parking rules, allowing it to keep costs down for tenants and increase the number of affordable units. DCP wants to eliminate all parking requirements for income-restricted developments like Navy Green, a proposal James supports.

At the same time, James is skeptical that market-rate housing consumers would benefit from the same type of reform. ”I’m not naïve enough to think that savings will be passed along to buyers or renters,” she told Streetsblog. ”Most developers are not in the business of benevolence.”

But the evidence does not suggest that developers will just pocket the savings from not having to build parking, said Simon McDonnell, a research affiliate at New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. ”If the market is operating, a reduction in developers’ input costs clearly gives them more leeway to offer lower prices,” he said, which could put market-rate units within the range of people who can’t afford luxury housing but don’t qualify for income restricted housing.

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The New York City Department of City Planning announced yesterday that the City Planning Commission has approved a measure to reduce Downtown Brooklyn’s onerous parking minimums. But the commission, chaired by Amanda Burden, appears to have wasted an opportunity to improve on the timid reforms.

The City Planning Commission moved ahead with reducing -- but not eliminating -- the Downtown Brooklyn parking minimums that force developers to build entire floors of unwanted parking, like at 29 Flatbush.

The good news is that new developments in Downtown Brooklyn, one of the most transit-rich places in America, will no longer have to include four parking spaces for every 10 residential units, and the mandate for affordable housing to include parking will be eliminated. That should make it easier to supply much-needed housing and lessen the government-mandated incentive to own and drive a car.

The bad news is that the new rules still require two parking spaces for every 10 units of market-rate housing. Instead of letting builders supply parking based on demand or capping the supply of parking to curb traffic, DCP and the planning commission insist on guessing how many people will own cars and compelling developers to build that amount of parking. In DCP’s words, the amendment is an attempt to “match residential requirements to residents’ use.” But as one downtown Brooklyn developer told DCP officials at a June hearing, a 20 percent mandate still compels the construction of more parking than some developers believe residents will use.

At public hearings this summer, Borough President Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn Community Board 2, and a parade of developers all asked for the lower parking minimums to apply retroactively, so that residential parking spots which currently sit empty can be repurposed as retail space, offices, or other uses. The zoning amendment that the planning department linked to in its Twitter announcement yesterday [PDF] does not apply the changes to existing buildings, however. Streetsblog has a request in with DCP to see if the planning commission decided to update the proposal and let developers repurpose their empty parking spaces after all before voting on the amendment.

UPDATE: DCP confirms that the amendment was revised to apply the lower parking minimums retroactively — a welcome improvement. A second revision would let developers site the mandated off-street parking up to half a mile from a new project, up from a quarter mile in the original amendment. This enhances a provision that allows developers to put the mandatory parking in public parking garages.

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Many residents and elected leaders from the neighborhoods near the Barclays Center in Prospect Heights are letting out a sigh of relief after steeling for gridlock this weekend. Sellout crowds for the arena’s first events — three Jay-Z concerts — did not completely overwhelm nearby neighborhoods with traffic, but the strain on local streets was still clear.

Traffic generated by the first events at the Barclays Center was not as heavy as expected, but there are still problems. Photo: Mark Bonifacio/Daily News

“It wasn’t as bad as we expected,” Danae Oratowski, chair of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council, told Streetsblog.

Council Member Letitia James said her office was “pleasantly surprised that we did not receive as many complaints as I had anticipated.”

Despite the relative smoothness of the arena’s opening, there were rough spots. Early indications show that the share of event-goers taking transit may not be as high as predicted during the arena’s planning, while free curbside parking on local streets seems to be irresistible to many drivers looking to avoid paying at parking garages and lots. Sidewalk space fell short of what was needed to handle the number of pedestrians, especially when the concerts let out, which led police to close Atlantic Avenue to vehicles in order to accommodate crowds leaving the arena.

After the concerts ended on Friday and Saturday, NYPD barriers proved to be ineffective crowd control, as sidewalks filled up near the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street and along Atlantic Avenue. Presently, there is no crosswalk for people leaving the arena’s mid-block Atlantic Avenue exit. “The sidewalks are too small to accommodate the crowd,” said James.

Traffic management around the arena was supplemented by additional NYPD personnel for opening weekend. “One of the reasons it worked so well is that there were vast numbers of police officers on the streets,” Oratowski said. “I don’t know if that’s really a sustainable plan for the future.”

Not that the traffic management provided by police necessarily improved matters either. NYPD officers waved many drivers through red lights, leading to conflicts with crossing pedestrians and cyclists who had a green light. Safety apparently wasn’t the top priority. 78th Precinct Captain Michael Ameri told the Patch, ”I’m in a good mood because traffic is moving well.”

A large portion of concertgoers got to the event by subway. Turnstile exits at the recently rechristened “Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center” station increased 6,754 in the four hours before the show compared to other Fridays in September, according to MTA data analyzed by WNYC. If all of those additional riders were going to the Barclays Center, they would make up approximately one in three concert attendees at the sold-out 19,000-seat arena.

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Borough President Marty Markowitz wants to reduce parking minimums in Downtown Brooklyn, and he thinks developers should be able to convert existing parking spots to other uses.

The area of downtown Brooklyn rezoned in 2004 will be affected by DCP's proposed parking rule changes.

This spring the Department of City Planning unveiled a plan to cut Downtown Brooklyn’s onerous parking requirements in half, and Markowitz’s recommendations [PDF] are the latest step on the way to enacting some type of reform. In some respects, his preferred parking reforms go farther than DCP’s original proposal and a resolution passed by Community Board 2 this summer. The borough president wants to retroactively apply the reduced parking minimums to downtown Brooklyn properties developed since 2001, condition the relaxed parking requirements for new development on the inclusion of affordable housing units, and increase the requirements for bicycle parking.

While this bodes well for Downtown Brooklyn parking reform, it also indicates that DCP didn’t aim very high with its original proposal. With local Council Member Steve Levin being an early proponent of reform, perhaps the complete elimination of Downtown Brooklyn parking requirements would have stood a chance.

Markowitz’s bike parking recommendation is attracting the most attention this week, but his most significant request may be to retroactively apply the new parking rules to any development built since 2001, which would allow parking spaces that currently sit empty to be converted to more productive uses. Markowitz’s position goes farther than Community Board 2, whose land use committee voted 9-2 in June to support retroactive application only for projects that included an affordable housing component, after a vote to apply the rules to all existing development failed.

Markowitz does not go so far as to support removing parking minimums entirely. “We should not make future plans based on initial trends of the past decade,” he states in the letter. Arguing that the area may attract residents in the future who “will view access to automobiles in a different light,” Markowitz says that one of the country’s most transit-rich neighborhoods needs parking mandates in cases when “public transportation is inadequate for the intended journey.”

And in fact he’d like to attach some conditions to relaxed parking minimums in new development. Echoing CB 2, Markowitz wants the zoning code to create further incentive for developers to utilize the inclusionary housing program, by triggering the reduced parking requirements for market-rate units only if at least 20 percent of a project’s units are affordable. It should be noted that lowering parking minimums is, on its own merits, a way to reduce the cost of housing.

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Parking reform in Downtown Brooklyn doesn’t go far enough, said developers at a public hearing last night, and the land use committee of Brooklyn Community Board 2 agreed. They want reduced parking requirements to apply not only to new buildings, as proposed by the Department of City Planning, but also to existing buildings and developments under construction. This would allow developers to convert empty floors of parking into retail, housing, or office space.

Construction is currently underway on 29 Flatbush Avenue, which was required to include multiple floors of parking that the developer did not want to build.

The DCP proposal is a step forward for Downtown Brooklyn but could go much farther: It would cut the current parking minimums in half, and eliminate them for affordable housing. Though parking politics in New York City is often hotly contested, not a single member of the public appeared at last night’s hearing to testify against the changes or to push for the continued oversupply of parking spaces.

Instead, representatives of Brooklyn’s real estate industry came to describe how the requirements, which currently mandate the construction of four parking spaces for every 10 market-rate residences, are raising rents for everyone in the area. “We have parking in the basement, the ground level, the second floor and the third floor, at great expense,” said Drew Spitler, whose company is building a 327-unit apartment building at 29 Flatbush Avenue. “We went to great pain to build the parking, because of the current requirements.”

Rather than request the outright elimination of parking mandates, the developers asked to make the reduction in Downtown Brooklyn parking requirements retroactive, allowing them to repurpose existing parking. “You could use the third or fourth level of parking for new industries that are coming into Downtown Brooklyn, retail, housing, you name it,” said Tom Conoscenti, the executive director of planning and administration for the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership. “Activate these spaces.”

Indirectly, making parking reform retroactive could also allow future developments to be built without parking, despite the continued existence of parking minimums. Existing buildings could rent out no-longer-required spaces to satisfy the parking requirements for new projects going up nearby, confirmed Purnima Kapur, director of DCP’s Brooklyn office.

The call for retroactively reducing parking requirements was echoed by representatives from Two Trees Management Company, Forest City Ratner, 388 Bridge and The Hub. Between all of their Downtown Brooklyn projects, hundreds of parking spaces could be repurposed.

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Thirteen subway lines pass through the Downtown Brooklyn area, shaded in peach. If DCP won't eliminate parking minimums here, what are the prospects for reform elsewhere? Image: DCP

The proposed reduction of parking minimums in Downtown Brooklyn, though seriously insufficient, is good news for housing affordability and environmental sustainability in New York City. But it’s terrible news for those hoping to see broader reforms of New York City’s parking requirements. If the Department of City Planning felt so politically constrained that it could only halve parking requirements for market-rate units in Downtown Brooklyn, it’s hard to see any meaningful change happening in the rest of the city — unless residents and activists get serious about advocating for real parking reform.

As Streetsblog reported yesterday, the Department of City Planning considered eliminating parking requirements entirely in Downtown Brooklyn, but opted against it for a single reason: undefined “community input.” By DCP’s own admission, under the new proposal many large Downtown Brooklyn developments would still be required to build more parking than they want or need. Parking minimums would be eliminated entirely for affordable housing.

That disappointing outcome took place among what will surely be the most favorable conditions for parking reform in the city. Thirteen subway lines stop in Downtown Brooklyn, more than even exist in any other American city. The powerful local business community has been pushing for a reduction or elimination of the minimums for years, and the local City Council member, Steve Levin, had expressed support for such a move. Significantly fewer Downtown Brooklyn residents own cars than in the surrounding community district, much less the borough or city as a whole.

If given all those advantages DCP was only willing to cut parking minimums in half, what could they possibly propose for neighborhoods like Harlem, Williamsburg, or Long Island City, much less the broad swath of neighborhoods being studied in the department’s “inner ring” parking study?

There’s still a chance to show the Department of City Planning that it can think bigger, though, in Downtown Brooklyn and elsewhere. Community Board 2, Borough President Marty Markowitz and the City Council all must weigh in on the proposal, and public hearings will be held by the community board, council, and City Planning Commission. These venues offer an opportunity to show that the preponderance of “community input” is pushing for the elimination of parking minimums, not their retention.

More fundamentally, though, City Planning Director Amanda Burden and her bosses, Deputy Mayor Robert Steel and Mayor Bloomberg, need to show a little spine in the face of motorist demands for more parking. This administration, not one generally known for its timidity, is falling far behind its peers on parking policy. Across the country, cities are eliminating or reducing parking minimums citywide.

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