Streetsblog New York City

Nassau County’s unwillingness to pay for its own buses is ending in disaster for Long Island Bus riders. The MTA has announced that it plans to cut 25 of the 48 LI Bus lines and axe weekend service on two more.

“It’s absolutely devastating,” said the Tri-State Transportation Campaign’s Ryan Lynch. He noted that as eight percent of Nassau County households don’t have access to an automobile, many of LI Bus’s 106,000 daily riders will be left without any way to get around. “They’re going to be stranded,” he said. “They’re going to lose their jobs. They’re going to have to drop out of school.”

According to Lynch, the routes selected for elimination generally have the lowest-ridership in the system. Some communities, such as Bethpage, Elmont, and Lindenhurst, will be left entirely without bus service.

These extremely deep cuts come because the MTA decided it could no longer continue to offer Nassau County a special deal on its bus system while the recession and Albany raids were battering its own budget.

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New York State still lacks a complete streets law, despite the bill's overwhelming passage through the State Senate and the support of the Assembly's Transportation Committee. After a series of amendments in June, the Assembly bill now matches the stronger Senate version, but is stuck in the Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Upper Manhattan rep Herman "Denny" Farrell. 

In the face of state inaction, Long Island's local governments are taking street safety into their own hands, passing their own complete streets policies. However, there's only so much that towns can do; some of their most dangerous streets are outside their jurisdiction. A comprehensive approach to street safety requires action from the Assembly. 

The Town of Babylon, which encompasses several smaller communities and is home to more than 200,000 people, passed Long Island's first complete streets policy earlier this month. The legislation acknowledges the town's auto-dependency and Long Island's history as a region that pioneered sprawl, while promising to move beyond that legacy. "This Policy will fundamentally change the relationship between driver and pedestrian by creating streets that regard these users equally, with equal right to access and use," reads the preface to the bill.

Any roadwork under the town's jurisdiction -- whether planning, repair, or new construction -- must now be designed and executed to accommodate pedestrians of all abilities, cyclists, and public transportation. While not every street will have sidewalks or bike lanes, Babylon is committed to building "an interwoven array" of streets -- networks for walking, bicycling, and transit so people can reach destinations safely and quickly without having to drive.

To ensure that the new policy has staying power, Babylon will develop a new Sustainable Complete Streets Master Plan within 18 months and evaluate its streets based on a new array of metrics, including the increase in walking and biking and the reduction in car speeds in pedestrian areas.

Babylon isn't the only Long Island town working to complete its streets. Both Islip and Brookhaven, which cover big geographic areas and have the populations of medium-sized cities (around 300,000 and 450,000 people, respectively), will be voting on complete streets policies in August. 

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Last January, Alexander Aponte struck and killed nine-year-old Ibrihim Ahmed in Ozone Park while driving with a suspended license. He was charged with a misdemeanor -- driving without a license -- that carried a maximum penalty of $500 and/or 30 days in prison. The Queens DA's office said prosecutors couldn't levy more serious charges unless Albany rewrote the laws.

As Streetsblog reported last fall, Assembly Member Robert Sweeney, a Democrat from Suffolk County, is trying to do just that, with a bill to give prosecutors the power to go after drivers with suspended licenses who cause serious injuries. Now he's gaining support from his colleagues in Albany. Just last week, Sen. Liz Krueger signed on as a cosponsor of the Senate counterpart after hearing from her constituents. The bill now has 10 sponsors in the Assembly and two in the Senate, with support from both sides of the aisle.

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance also gave the legislation his endorsement during his campaign. A spokesperson for his office confirmed that he still supports it. Elected officials are becoming aware of this hole in our criminal code and the urgent need to fix it.

Currently in New York State, unlicensed drivers can reasonably expect to avoid criminal charges for causing injury or death unless they leave the scene or are determined to be intoxicated. Sweeney's bill, A02612, would classify vehicular assault and manslaughter as felonies in cases where a driver's license has been suspended or revoked. "If you get behind the wheel of a vehicle and you know it's illegal to do that," Sweeney told Streetsblog, "and you get into an accident where someone is seriously hurt, that's entirely preventable."

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It happened again last Friday. Keston Brown was at the wheel of a Gristedes van on E. 37th Street when he jumped the curb and ran over two women. Miraculously, one of them, Tassia Katsiambanis, survived. But her co-worker Ysemny Ramos, a young mother planning that night's celebration of her wedding anniversary and the upcoming birth of another child, died at the scene. Brown was found to be intoxicated and was charged with DWI, manslaughter and assault.

About an hour earlier on the Upper West Side, a yellow cab driver jumped the curb at Amsterdam and W. 106th Street, careening onto the sidewalk and into a pizzeria. Seven people were injured, one critically. Despite this, and though witnesses said he was racing another car to the intersection before the crash, the cabbie walked away scot-free.

How can this be? How can New York drivers destroy, kill and maim with impunity -- almost always when sober, and even if, in some cases, they aren't?

In part two of our interview with veteran vehicular crimes prosecutor Maureen McCormick (read part one here), the former Brooklyn ADA, now with Nassau County, offers more insight into the state of traffic justice in New York State, and describes how she and others in the prosecutorial community are working to strengthen laws that deal with negligent drivers.

Brad Aaron: There were a couple of recent high-profile cases in which Manhattan pedestrians were killed by hit-and-run drunk drivers. One case ended with a guilty plea resulting in a two year prison sentence, while in the other, also following a plea, the driver received a sentence of just 15 days. Nassau County, meanwhile, is successfully prosecuting killer drunk drivers for murder, with commensurate sentencing. In your experience, what could explain such discrepancies?

Maureen McCormick: [Nassau] District Attorney Kathleen Rice has made traffic justice one of her top priorities. She campaigned on holding DWI defendants accountable for their actions and she has created policies and pursued prosecutions that demonstrate her continued commitment to this issue. In the first year she took office she held 66 percent of Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) offenders to the top count of their charges while the New York State average was 44 percent. She increased jail sentences from 10 percent to 16 percent and she has maintained an overall conviction rate of 94 percent.

The DWI/murder case against Martin Heidgen was recently the subject of a "60 Minutes" report. Heidgen drove more than three miles the wrong way on the Meadowbrook Parkway with a blood alcohol concentration of .28 before slamming head on into a wedding limousine, killing the driver, 59-year-old Stanley Rabinowitz, and decapitating 7-year-old flower girl Katie Flynn. Heidgen was convicted of depraved indifference murder in 2006 and sentenced to 18 years to life.

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While many of her colleagues are hoping to avoid taking a stand on congestion pricing by urging Speaker Sheldon Silver to kill the plan without a vote, Nassau County Assembly Democrat Michelle Schimel has come out strongly in favor with an editorial in the Great Neck Record:

For more than 300,000 Long Island residents, the daily commute to New York City is often a difficult one --- either because their mass transit experience is unpleasant and slow or because they sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic from their home to their office. Unfortunately, it's only going to get worse. Our region can expect more and more drivers on our streets, and riders in our buses and trains. But, as of now, we don't and won't have the funds to make real improvements to handle the overflow.

[Congestion pricing] would reduce traffic by 8 percent in Long Island and across the region while earning $500 million a year that would go directly to mass transit projects such as modernization of the Long Island Rail Road and East Side Access --- projects that could cut commuters' trips by as much as 44 minutes a day, according to the Regional Plan Association. The reduced congestion will also help drivers who aren't commuting daily to Manhattan, freeing up roadways to save everyone time.

More important than the cost to a small percentage of commuters is the cost of maintaining the status quo and not implementing a congestion pricing plan. Millions more people will clog our roads over the next few decades without viable alternative mass transportation options, making daily commutes far more unbearable.

MTA Deputy Director of Media Relations, Jeremy Soffin, sends this along:

As you know, the first tunnel boring machine for the East Side Access project has been chewing its way under Manhattan for almost a month, and we just wanted to provide a short update. The machine has now tunneled approximately 1,350 feet. While the machine generally averages 50 feet per day, we had a record performance yesterday of 114 feet. The machine is now operating underneath 60th Street near Lexington Avenue. In total, the machine will bore approximately 7,200 feet total to 38th street. A second TBM has been assembled in the "launch box" at 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue and will begin tunneling a parallel tube shortly.

East Side Access will bring LIRR trains into Grand Central Terminal for the first time.

You can find more information on the construction here.

Photo: robert the bear/Flickr

The first hearings conducted by the New York City Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission were held yesterday, with one in White Plains and another at Hofstra University.

Newsday reports on the latter:

Congestion pricing is a "sensible solution" to traffic tie-ups that cost the region $13 billion and 52,000 jobs a year, said Josh Klainberg, deputy director of the New York League of Conservation Voters. "The technology exists today that will allow us to create a congestion pricing system that is fair, flexible and responsive to regional planning needs," Klainberg said.

Corey Bearak of Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free referred to Bloomberg's proposal as a congestion tax and said excessive traffic is caused partly by failure to enforce traffic laws.

But Weisenfeld and others said Bloomberg's proposal would be a hardship for people traveling into Manhattan. Robert Friedrich, president of the co-op board in Glen Oaks Village in Queens, said there is little public transportation in his neighborhood.

"There are no subways there, and there are sporadic buses," he said. "This is an imposition of a lot of money on working-class people."

Business owners said the proposal would hurt companies that must make multiple trips to Manhattan each day.

"Our industry is going to be majorly impacted," said Ron Billing, president of Ron's Rapid Delivery in Hicksville.

And here's the Journal News from White Plains:

"I represent a county with many commuters who are not rich," said Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee, D-Suffern. "I am proud to say that Rockland is home to more New York City firefighters than any other county besides Richmond. Not to mention teachers, court clerks, hospital workers - in short, the people who keep the city running. These workers cannot afford a tax on going to work."

Also in opposition was former New York City Council member Walter McCaffrey; John Corlett, director of government affairs for AAA in New York; and Westchester County Commissioner of Transportation Lawrence Salley.

Salley stressed that the counties outside of Manhattan would have to pick up the transportation slack of riders who could no longer afford to drive into the city.

"(The numbers of diverted travelers) would inundate the existing access systems for Metro-North stations and overwhelm the bus service provided by the Westchester Bee-Line to Manhattan and to the Bronx subways," Salley said. "Without access to additional operating assistance, from the congestion pricing revenue stream or from some other source, much of the cost of carrying diverted commuters in Westchester will fall again on the most regressive of taxes, the local property tax."

Those opposed to the fees said the commission should look at other ways to alleviate congestion, such as getting people out of their cars and onto public transportation, enforcing the traffic and parking laws already in place and changing existing traffic patterns.

There will be another hearing tonight, in Manhattan:

Hunter College - Kaye Theater
Thursday, October 25, 2007
6:00 PM
East 68th Street Between Park & Lexington Avenue

Long Island is safe. So safe that police recruits are flocking to the island's two counties, according to an article in last Tuesday's New York Times:

High pay coupled with low crime rates make a coveted Long Island job "like winning the lottery in law enforcement," said Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of law and police studies at John Jay College. Nassau [County] has the lowest crime rate in the nation of any place with more than one million people, and Suffolk is not far behind.

Long Island is dangerous. So dangerous that "After a deadly day on Long Island roads," Newsday reported last Wednesday:

Sen. Charles Schumer is calling for a safety audit of roadways in Nassau and Suffolk, which have more fatal accidents than any other county in the state.

A decade ago, Northwest Environment Watch (now the Sightline Institute) published a memorable report showing that violent deaths were less common in Seattle than in the surrounding suburbs. The author of this myth-buster, Alan Durning, took the novel but logical step of combining traffic fatalities with homicides and found fewer violent deaths (per million people) in the central city. It wasn't that city drivers were saner. Rather, city dwellers spent less time driving than suburbanites, giving them fewer opportunities to kill themselves or other Seattle residents on the roads, which more than offset the city's higher homicide rate.

A similar calculation for New York City and Long Island, using 2005 data, likewise upends the conventional wisdom. Per million people, Long Island had 51 fewer homicides (16 vs. 67), but 50 more traffic fatalities (89 vs. 39), than New York City. In terms of total violent deaths, the difference between the Big Apple and Long Island - 105 deaths per million people in the City, 104 on the Island - is statistical noise.

What this means for our police, I'm not exactly sure. But perhaps it can lay to rest, once and for all, the myth that violent deaths stop at the city line. Indeed, if recent trends continue, the risk-averse may start pulling up stakes from Lindenhurst and hunting for a house in Lefferts Gardens.

Combined homicides + traffic fatalities per million, 2005
Richmond (S.I.)	74
New York (Manhattan)	86
Nassau	87
Queens	94
Suffolk	120
Kings (Brooklyn)	123
Bronx	127

Download the spreadsheet Komanoff created to derive this data.  

Photo: klauskinski/Flickr