Streetsblog New York City

Earlier this week, Laurence Renard was killed as she crossed First Avenue when a dump truck driver turned into her path from 90th Street, hitting her from behind. Renard was one of at least six pedestrians and cyclists who have lost their lives in traffic crashes on East Side streets since last August.

People are seriously hurt and killed with terrible frequency on the East Side of Manhattan: 148 pedestrians and cyclists died on its streets between 1995 and 2008, and more than 15,000 were injured. The area is rife with wide streets and intersections that invite speeding and reckless driving. At the same time, the East Side is home to high percentages of walk-to-work commuters, car-free households, and senior citizens. East Siders lead walkable lifestyles and make many trips by foot or bike, but their streets are extremely dangerous.

Last night, more than 100 people gathered at St. Mark’s Church on East 10th Street for the unveiling of Transportation Alternatives’ East Side Action Plan [PDF], which outlines a broad vision for making this part of Manhattan safer and more livable.

In a series of public workshops, more than 600 East Siders helped TA put together recommendations to redesign their streets and put walking, biking, and transit first. The Action Plan came out of those workshops to serve as “a tool for local East Side experts to use as citizen planners, so they can educate their communities and generate the local support needed to engage decision makers around design and policy change,” said TA’s Julia De Martini Day. Dozens of community groups from Chinatown to Harlem have signed on to the campaign.

With political attacks on pedestrian and bicycle improvements fresh in everyone’s mind, the kick-off event last night was something of a rallying cry for the coalition. New Yorkers who want safer streets have to organize and mobilize as effectively as possible, a point that former Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa brought home when he told the audience that the allocation of street space “is a political decision, not a technical decision.”

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Last night, Manhattan Community Board 2 resoundingly endorsed the city’s plans to transform Astor Place and Cooper Square from asphalt expanses into pedestrian-friendly public spaces. After including some language in its resolution to appease the concerns of certain residents, the roughly 40 community board members in attendance voted unanimously for the plan to transform street space into plazas and expanded sidewalks.

The plan includes a new 8,000 square foot pedestrian plaza at Cooper Square, a plaza replacing one block of Astor Place below the cube sculpture, widened sidewalks, 113 bike racks, 64 new trees, and thousands of square feet of new plantings and environmentally-friendly permeable surfaces.

In the days before last night’s vote, some opposition to the plan had emerged from former CB 2 members active in the NoHo community. At the meeting, Jeanne Wilcke, the president of the Downtown Independent Democrats, requested a delay to “fine tune” the plans, which has been in the works for about a decade, worrying about the traffic effects of narrower streets and the management of the new public spaces.

Another speaker, Marty Tessler, demanded that the plan’s hard-surface open space be replaced with landscaping in order to keep too many people from gathering there. “We are hopeful that we will not be subjected to the street performers and all that,” he added.

Following testimony from six people, the community board voted unanimously for an amended resolution supporting the city’s plan. None of those amendments take away from the overall support for the redesign.

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Tonight, Community Board 2 will vote its recommendation on DOT’s plans to make Astor Place more accommodating and inviting to pedestrians.

While it’s hard to imagine how, for an area between the East Village and NYU, traffic lanes could be considered more desirable than space for people, the outcome of the vote is very much in question.

This project has been in the pipeline for years, yet could be jeopardized by those opposed to change, unless supporters turn out to speak up in favor of better public space.

If you can make it, tonight’s meeting will start at 6:00 p.m. in the gym at Grace Church School, 94 Fourth Avenue.

If you can’t make it to Brooklyn for the Prospect Park West forum tomorrow, there’s a Manhattan livable streets effort that needs a show of support.

The reclamation of Astor Place, years in the making, would transfer thousands of square feet to pedestrians, and lay the foundation for a great public space to take shape between the East Village and the NYU district. It’s also reportedly under fire at the community board level. Manhattan CB 2 is voting its recommendation Thursday night, and sources say that a handful of opponents are organizing a “campaign of fear” to influence the decision, reminiscent of the one cooked up against improvements on Prince Street in 2008 (remember the mimes)?

It’s clear that opponents are more interested in obstructing a new public space than in making it as good as it can be. One straw man is the supposition that, if street space is rededicated for use by the general public, the area will be overtaken by corporate events (as opposed to being dominated by cars, which is presumably preferable). Another argument that’s been made against the new pedestrian plazas goes something like, “If the place is nicer, people will have lunch there and leave their wrappers littered around.”

Absurd as it may be, there is a chance that such piffle could carry the day. The local community boards are generally supportive of the project, but have already shown a tendency to waver on amenities like public seating. A few rational voices can help inject common sense into the discussion and stiffen the spines of those who’ll be voting.

If you’d like to help, Thursday’s meeting will be held at 6:00 p.m. in the gym at Grace Church School, 94 Fourth Avenue.

Plans to transform another asphalt tangle into a great public space are moving forward at Astor Place, and Curbed has the details. With significant street space being reclaimed for pedestrians, the plan should serve as a new gathering place in the East Village and make the neighborhood safer for walking.

Here are a few of the highlights from the presentation made by the Department of Design and Construction to Community Boards 2 and 3 last night:

• The block of Astor Place south of the cube will be completely replaced by a new plaza, integrating the island where the sculpture sits with the pedestrian environment.
• The plaza around the subway entrance at Astor Place will be expanded considerably, as will the sidewalks around that intersection.
• 8,000 new square feet of pedestrian space will be built at the southern edge of Cooper Square, roughly between E. 5th and 6th Streets.

As a capital project, the reconstruction will include more heavy-duty elements than the pedestrian reclamations built out on Broadway so far. Think concrete, granite, street trees, benches, bike racks, and a new green stormwater management system.

We’re still waiting for additional information about the plan from DDC and the local community board, like when exactly this plan, which has been in the works for several years, will become a reality. In the meantime, though, be sure to check out Curbed for the most comprehensive look at the new design so far, including 24 images. Here are two more images from last night presentation:

UPDATE: A DDC spokesperson informs us that the project will be put out to bid this summer and that construction should begin in spring 2012.

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Select Bus Service is up and running along First and Second Avenues, bringing rapid bus enhancements to the second busiest bus line in New York City. Though riders will need some time to adjust to the new system, many are already praising the faster service.

The thousands of bus riders along Manhattan’s East Side were surely in need of some relief. Though the M15 bus was one of the highest-ridership routes in the country, with 16,541,900 annual rides, it was also one of the slowest in New York City, moving at an average speed of less than six miles per hour. The lack of a decent transit option east of Lexington Avenue also contributes to intense and uncomfortable crowding on the 4, 5, and 6 subway lines.

With the SBS improvements, this critical route should run far more smoothly. Buses will spend less time stopped and more time in motion, thanks to off-board fare collection and three-door loading and unloading. During peak hours, passengers will speed through traffic in camera-enforced bus lanes. New York’s first SBS route, along Fordham Road, improved bus speeds by 20 percent and ridership by 30 percent, according to MTA chief Jay Walder.

First and Second Avenue could see similar gains. On the first weekday of service, at the outset of what figures to be an initial period of adjustment, riders were already noticing the difference.

“It’s definitely faster. You don’t have to wait in line for people to find their MetroCard,” explained Monica Sunwoo, who was headed to work in Midtown.

“It feels a little bit faster,” judged a rider named Miriam, who was traveling from 116th Street to 68th, “especially getting to enter all the doors.”

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Select Bus Service remains on track to debut on October 10, confirmed NYC DOT and the MTA at a meeting of the project’s Community Advisory Committee last night. Bus service improvements along the corridor are as crucial as ever and will be bolstered by camera enforcement, which DOT announced would be in effect starting in November. The changes that take effect in 25 days, however, won’t be the full complete streets package originally promised. Above 34th Street, bike lanes and pedestrian refuge islands were unceremoniously stripped from the plan some time this spring.

When pressed last night by Scott Falk, the secretary of Transportation Alternatives’ East Side Committee, to explain why protected bike lanes had disappeared from the street design between 34th and 125th, DOT Director of Transit Development Joe Barr had this to say:

We still remain committed to getting that plan done. That’s our goal. We’re learning a lot from this summer’s implementation. Right now, we’re just focused on making 10/10/10 a success. Once that’s passed, we’ll be in a better position to say what next year’s plan will be, what we can get done, what the community’s reaction will be. The success to date, seeing more cyclists out there, the number of complaints about the implementation has been very very low. That all points to being able to expand that treatment successfully next year.

It’s worth parsing that statement more closely. Barr came across as wanting to see the original bike lane plans carried out and was clearly choosing his words very carefully.

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The beginnings of the First Avenue protected bike lane, at St. Mark's Place. Photo: Ben Fried

It's not finished yet, but some segments of the First Avenue bike lane are quite rideable. I used about eight blocks of it this weekend.

This Saturday, I was able to bike from my apartment in Prospect Heights to the East Village, and back again, without really leaving a marked bicycle path. The only exceptions were the side streets at each end of the trip, and those felt a million times safer than crossing high-speed traffic sewers like Atlantic Avenue and Houston Street.

A lot of the bike infrastructure on that trip -- including the Allen Street lane, the Sands Street bikeway, and the brand new Vanderbilt Avenue bike lane -- didn't exist a year and a half ago. The protected lanes on First and Second are creating some extremely useful connections to these recent improvements. You can ride for long stretches and feel like you're using the genuine article: a safe, connected bike network.

Living where I do, I'm lucky enough to be able to take advantage. New Yorkers who live in East Harlem and on the Upper East Side deserve an ironclad guarantee that they'll get access to this network of safer streets as soon as possible.

Yesterday brought another disappointing development in the city's plan to re-design First and Second Avenues. While upgraded bike routes are still guaranteed below 34th Street -- a far cry from what was presented to the public -- even that portion will not be a continuous protected route.

A new map of the project [PDF], which DOT presented at last night's Community Board 11 meeting, shows that between 14th and 23rd Streets, Second Avenue is only slated to receive a normal curbside lane. For nine blocks, cyclists will have to navigate a zone where a single illegally-parked car can thrust them into fast-moving traffic.

We have a request in with DOT and the mayor's office about why these blocks aren't getting a protected lane. 

Earlier this week, when we asked the press shops for DOT and the mayor's office about the overall scaling back of the East Side plans, we only received a response from DOT. A spokesperson said that the hold-up is caused by time constraints on construction work, and the need to accommodate construction of the Second Avenue subway.

Here's their full statement:

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The re-design of First and Second Avenues has been a complex project to judge since the initial plans were unveiled earlier this year. From the beginning, it's been the most ambitious re-envisioning of a major corridor we've seen in New York City to date: 250 blocks of faster bus service and safer traveling for cyclists and pedestrians. But it has not met the high expectations of New Yorkers who held out hope for a truly high-performance busway and a continuous, protected bicycle corridor.

Today, at Mayor Bloomberg's official announcement of the project, the ambiguities intensified. Construction is moving forward, but large segments of the protected bike path will not be built this year. For the time being, at least, the protected bikeway will extend only between Houston and 34th Street.

While Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan attributed the delay to the time constraints of building such a large project, stressing DOT's intention to finish the job, there is lingering uncertainty about the full 250-block re-design. The city's plans call for more bike and pedestrian improvements to be built during next year's construction season but no longer specify the addition of protected lanes to segments of First and Second north of 34th Street.

As presented to several Manhattan community boards, the project was supposed to include protected bike lanes on Second between 100th and 125th, and on First between 34th and 49th and between 57th and 125th, with a buffered lane in the gap. (Here's an earlier map of the project.)

Following today's announcement, it's unclear whether the mayor is committed to delivering all the bike and pedestrian improvements in the original plan. Above 34th Street, the changes on tap for this year call only for widening the existing bike lane on upper First Avenue by one foot and adding a painted buffer. The project web site does not identify segments that will receive protected bikeways in the future, going only so far as to say that the 2011 and 2012 construction seasons will bring "additional pedestrian and bike improvements throughout the corridor."

For now, advocates for safer streets will need to keep up the pressure to ensure that Midtown, the Upper East Side, and East Harlem receive the bike and pedestrian safety features originally promised. Today they stressed the groundbreaking nature of the re-design and the importance of completing the bikeway.

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