Streetsblog New York City

Downtown Brooklyn’s mandatory parking minimums would be cut in half for new development and eliminated outright for affordable housing under a plan from the Department of City Planning. The change is significant — the first rollback of the costly and car-ownership inducing requirements under the Bloomberg administration — but doesn’t go far enough. Even by DCP’s own roundabout admission, the reduced parking minimums will still create an unnecessarily large supply of parking.

Currently, zoning for the city’s third-largest business district requires a 40 percent parking ratio for market-rate housing units (i.e. four parking spots for every 10 apartments) and 25 percent for affordable housing. The DCP plan would drop the market-rate ratio to 20 percent and eliminate the requirement for affordable housing. There are currently no parking minimums in the area for commercial buildings and no parking minimums on any development along a designated stretch of Atlantic Avenue.

“Our goal is to rationalize parking requirements for Downtown Brooklyn, recognizing that it has some of the best transit infrastructure and one of lowest rates of auto ownership in New York City,” said DCP Director Amanda Burden. “Our new Downtown Brooklyn Off-Street Parking rules will better allocate parking where it is needed while removing the financial burden of having to provide parking for affordable housing.”

The reforms are badly needed in Downtown Brooklyn, which DCP senior planner Lish Whitson noted boasts “some of the best transit infrastructure in the country.” Residential developments simply don’t use the amount of parking they are being required to build. Existing garages in the area are only half full on the weekend and 40 percent filled during the evenings, according to data provided by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.

“There’s an oversupply right now,” Burden said.

In his presentation to the planning commission, Whitson singled out one building to illustrate how the new rules would work. The Avalon Fort Greene has 631 rental units and was required by law to provide 252 new parking spaces along with them. During the evenings, DCP found, only 88 of those spaces are filled. Each parking space in the area costs $50,000 to build, Whitson said. When the spaces sit empty, or when garages have to drop their prices to attract customers, he noted, “those costs are passed on to the residents of the buildings, most of whom don’t own cars.”

But at 20 percent, the proposed parking minimums are still too high for the area. At the Avalon, Whitson admitted that the new minimums would have required 126 spaces to be built, a number that is still 50 percent higher than what the building currently rents out.

Why, then, mandate such a high number? More than one planning commissioner wondered the same thing.

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Downtown Brooklyn’s Willoughby Street plaza, located just off Adams Street, was the forerunner of New York City’s current efforts to reclaim roadways as pedestrian spaces. Built in 2006, before Janette Sadik-Khan took over the city Department of Transportation, the city used now-familiar ingredients — concrete planters and folding chairs — to close the block to auto traffic and open up space for people to walk and sit.

Six years later, the plaza is a construction site, as the city transforms it from an overnight experiment to a permanent part of Downtown Brooklyn. New street trees and planting beds will supersede the movable planters and uniform sidewalk-style paving will replace the asphalt of the former roadbed.

The neighbors can’t wait.

“The new pedestrian plaza that they’re putting in is going to be fantastic,” said Jeff Kay, COO of Muss Development. “We’re really excited about it.”

Muss Development bought the bottom two floors of 345 Adams Street, a superblock-sized city office building that fronts the Willoughby plaza, in 2007, with the intention of turning the space from offices into retail. Kay said the plaza has been a boon to restaurants signing new leases in the building. “It’s a great complement, the fact that people can eat there and bring stuff out of the restaurant,” he said.

A new Panera Bread is set to open shortly on the ground floor of 345 Adams, according to Brownstoner. A Muss media release says Candy shop Sugar and Plumm and restaurant American BBQ and Beer Company are scheduled to open this fall. A Shake Shack just opened on the other side of the plaza.

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Walk out on any New York City street and you’re likely to find rampant disregard for traffic laws. Pinpointing exactly who’s speeding requires special equipment, but for many offenses, you can track the level of lawlessness with the naked eye.

A team of Transportation Alternatives volunteers did just that over the course of October on the block of Jay Street between Willoughby and Johnson Streets, a major approach to the Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Brooklyn. Over the course of eight weekday rush hours, the volunteers tracked three easy-to-catch violations: Bike lane blocking, bus stop blocking, and illegal U-turns.

On that one block, 49 drivers parked in the bike lane every hour, 18 parked in the bus stop, and another eighteen made an illegal U-ey. You can do your own count in the video above.

Brooklyn cyclists, transit riders, pedestrians and motorists hoping for a safe and easy commute shouldn’t look to the NYPD to clean up Jay Street, either. In an average hour, three of the drivers parked in the bike lane, five parked in a bus stop, and two of the U-turners were cops, according to T.A.

In other words, police officers made as many illegal U-turns on this block in a single hour as the number of summonses NYPD issued for illegal U-turns on the same stretch in the entire month of September, according to T.A.

“The police aren’t paying attention (and are breaking the law), so drivers think they can get away with anything,” said T.A. Executive Director Paul Steely White in a statement. “With so little enforcement against the many drivers who blatantly ignore the rules of the road, everyone on this street is in harm’s way. Police Commissioner Kelly needs to get his department in order and make traffic safety a priority.”

A reader sends this shot of the freshly paved surface of Adams Street, heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge just south of Johnson Street. The parking regulations have switched sides, so it looks like the old curbside bike lane on the right side of the street — a notorious double-parking zone — will be shifting over, either all the way to the left curb or between the parking lane and the moving lane. We have a request in with DOT to find out what the plan is.

A left-curb placement might make this bike lane somewhat less susceptible to chronic blockage by illegal parkers, nicely captured by Brownstoner today on a stretch of Adams closer to Tillary Street and the bridge entrance:

DOT is in the process of fleshing out a substantial redesign of the Tillary and Adams approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge, currently scheduled for construction sometime next year. An early concept for the project included a center median, two-way protected bike lane on one block of Adams south of Tillary. Word is that Council Member Steve Levin’s traffic task force wants to see the protected path extend all the way south to Atlantic, but funding remains less than certain.

As the New York Post continues its increasingly tedious assault on pedestrians and crosstown transit riders, its writers always seem to suggest that giving priority to buses in an important retail area is both radical and self-evidently bad for business. If they bothered to look just one borough away, they’d see that nothing could be further from the truth. The eight bus- and pedestrian-only blocks of downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall make up the most successful retail strip in the city outside of Manhattan.

It was a similar bus- and pedestrian-only plaza that the DOT scrapped for a single block of 34th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues — partially, it seems, at the behest of Macy’s and local real estate interests. So it’s revealing to compare the current clamor over the 34th Street plaza, the 34th Street transitway, and now, in the Post at least, any transit improvements whatsoever, to the creation of the Fulton Mall.

The Fulton Street Mall has its roots in the planning vogues and racial turmoil of 1960s New York. “The idea of a transit mall was what every downtown revivalist was talking about in the 1960s,” explained Meredith TenHoor, the co-author of Street Value: Shopping, Planning and Politics at Fulton Mall. Prompted by department store owners worried about retaining their white customer base, she said, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership proposed a series of improvements to make the area “feel more like an indoor shopping mall instead of a dirty downtown street.”

Over time, however, the design morphed — in some ways unintentionally — from one intended to compete with Long Island shopping malls into one that embraced its Downtown Brooklyn location. According to a 1977 article in the New York Times, for example, plans for a Plexiglas arcade covering the street were scrapped by the time construction started.

More important was the inclusion of buses in the plan, a consequence of the budget realities of the fiscal crisis years. “The city had no money at the time,” said TenHoor, “so they were able to use federal transportation grants to make the pedestrian mall” by adding a transit corridor. It helped that as the city’s planners studied the area, “they found it had all these incredible links to transit and most of the shoppers were coming through transit.”

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If you’ve ever wished you could dodge more cars and inhale more exhaust on your way to the park, Downtown Brooklyn’s next green space is for you. It will be built on top of a garage with nearly 700 underground parking spots.

Last Thursday, the city’s Economic Development Corporation released a request for proposals to build Willoughby Square Park, a new public space set to open on Willoughby between Duffield and Gold. Instead of using city funds to build the park, EDC is building 694 parking spaces underground and getting the garage’s developer to pay for the park construction.

City officials have repeatedly referred to the new public space as Brooklyn’s Bryant Park. Like Bryant Park, it will be privately run and surrounded by towers. But here’s one major difference: Bryant Park sits on top of the stacks of the New York Public Library, not an enormous garage. Two decades ago, the city was thinking creatively about how to combine an ambitious park restoration with the storage of 3.2 million books and 500,000 reels of microfilm. These days, the city seems intent on combining its development and public space plans with the storage of congestion-causing, streetlife-suffocating private vehicles, even in incredibly transit-rich downtown Brooklyn.

The merger of park and parking garage is no surprise in an EDC-sponsored project. The agency has recently been in the headlines for building so much parking at Yankee Stadium that the developer may default on its bonds, and EDC president Seth Pinsky once told Streetsblog that providing too little parking at a project would be “the worst thing we could do.” You can also point the finger at the Department of City Planning, which put forward the idea for a park over a garage in its 2004 rezoning.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Department of City Planning is currently studying the merits of parking minimums in some of New York's transit-rich neighborhoods, like Harlem and western Brooklyn and Queens. And local interests in at least one neighborhood, Downtown Brooklyn, are starting to mobilize around the issue. While the coalition has yet to go public, sources say there have been preliminary discussions about reducing, or even eliminating, parking minimums in the area, which would be a big victory for sustainable transportation.

Right now, parking minimums in Downtown Brooklyn force new developments to include huge garages, effectively subsidizing driving in one of New York City's most transit-rich neighborhoods. For example, the zoning for the Downtown Brooklyn special district [PDF] requires some residential buildings to provide off-street parking spaces for at least 50 percent of all units. In other cases, the ratio is 40 percent. In practice, this means that a big development like the Toren building, which has branded itself as one of Brooklyn's greenest buildings, had to dedicate its second and third floors to parking.

"There is a movement afoot to eliminate or decrease the parking minimums," said Hope Reichbach, the communications director for Council Member Stephen Levin, who represents the area. Noting that this push is in the earliest stages, though, she wouldn't say who was participating in discussions.

Whatever proposal emerges to reduce parking requirements in Downtown Brooklyn is likely to have Levin's support, said Reichbach. "There's a lot of public transportation to Downtown Brooklyn and the council member definitely wants to encourage alternative modes of transportation," she explained.

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Sometime around 2019, the state DOT will begin reconstructing the segment of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway that runs through downtown Brooklyn. There are years and years of review before a shovel goes in the ground, but when construction starts, local streets already jammed with trucks and car commuters heading for free East River bridges will see even more spillover traffic. And the project itself, which will run from Hamilton Avenue to Sands Street, will have important consequences for bus transit, access to the waterfront and Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the quality of life in nearby neighborhoods.

At a meeting last night of the "stakeholder advisory council" for the project, the DOT and its consultants met with representatives of local civic groups and elected officials to discuss preliminaries. To give you a sense of just how early on the process is, the purpose of the meeting was to refine criteria the DOT will use to evaluate its options, and it won't even be the last meeting about criteria.

What was interesting to see was how transportation engineers approach the problem of reconstructing a highway jammed through some of the most densely settled urban neighborhoods in the nation -- a reminder of automobile infrastructure's voracious appetite for space.

In engineer-speak, the BQE is "non-standard." As James Brown, a consultant with the firm HDR, put it, the engineers are "interested in standard features. Ten feet is not the standard width of a lane; interstates have 12-foot lanes." From the engineers' perspective, the ramps and acceleration lanes are too short, he said, and the shoulders too narrow. So, in addition to keeping the BQE from disintegrating, the project may widen and lengthen certain parts of the roadway. Much of the discussion last night centered around how to prioritize neighborhood quality of life and the public realm while addressing the genuinely hazardous roadway conditions in need of attention.

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Brooklyn's new Long Island Rail Road terminal opened earlier this month to generally positive reviews for its airy interior. Outside the station? That's an entirely different matter.

The Brooklyn Paper called the "sarcophagus-sized slabs of stone" on the sidewalk -- which nearly come up to one's neck -- "a grotesque eyesore." City Council Member Letitia James agreed, telling Gothamist, "This is a facility that is supposed to celebrate openness, yet they put hideous barricades in front of it."

The barriers weren't in the original renderings for the site, which architect John di Domenico hoped would become a "civic presence." They were added after the fact for security, according to the Brooklyn Paper.

We're still trying to figure out just who decided to go for total overkill here. Requests are in with di Domenico + Partners, the NYPD, the MTA, and the Department of Design and Construction. While we haven't pinpointed exactly where the order came from, the fortress mentality on display exceeds even the NYPD counterterrorism division's own guidelines.

We did get to sift through the NYPD's 2009 report, Engineering Security: Protective Design For High Risk Buildings. As a major transit hub, the Atlantic Terminal falls under the NYPD counterterrorism division's "High Tier" category, for which they prescribe additional security measures. Those measures include "perimeter security," which the NYPD justifies like so: "The best way to minimize the impact of an attack is to keep the threat away from a building."

The NYPD also puts forward some basic guidelines about just how much protection they think is necessary. That's where the real surprise is. Here's what the city's counterterrorism experts recommend:

With respect to bollards, the NYPD recommends four feet of clear spacing, bollard sleeve to bollard sleeve. In general, New York City recommends that bollards measure between 30 and 36 inches in height.

And here's how the Atlantic Terminal sarcophagi measure up, based on an informal analysis conducted by Streetsblog today. The barriers loom a full foot higher than NYPD's own recommendations:

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A quick note about tonight's meeting on motorist-cyclist relations put on by Brooklyn Community Board 2. "Sharing the Road, Sharing the Responsibility" -- a panel discussion with NYCDOT, NYPD, Transportation Alternatives, and AAA -- is an important one for cyclists to attend.

This community district includes the approaches to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. If you ride those bridges, you'll want to turn out for what promises to be a substantive discussion of street safety. We hear that the panel will field written questions from audience members. Here's where to go to speak up:

6:00 pm
St. Francis College - Founders Hall
180 Remsen St. (bet. Court & Clinton Sts.)
(2/3/4/5/M/R to Borough Hall)