Streetsblog New York City

Children growing up in Manhattan’s low-income communities are at significantly higher risk of being seriously injured or killed in traffic than their neighbors in wealthier districts, a new study from Transportation Alternatives finds [PDF]. Intersections near public housing appear to be particularly dangerous for children trying to cross the street.

In East Harlem and on the Lower East Side, the number of children younger than 18 who are killed or seriously injured while walking or riding their bikes is significantly higher than on the Upper East Side or in Gramercy and East Midtown, even though there are more total crashes with pedestrians in those wealthier neighborhoods.

The most dangerous intersection for kids on the East Side is Lexington and 125th, where 34 children were injured and one killed between 1995 and 2009.

The disparity can’t be explained by differences in population. In fact, the Upper East Side has the greatest share of residents under the age of 18 of the four areas studied. Rather, children are more at risk of getting hit by a car than adults in the low-income neighborhoods, while they are at lower risk in the high-income areas.

Transportation Alternatives hasn’t pinned down a cause, but they theorize that the design of public housing projects could be the culprit. Nine of the ten most dangerous East Side intersections for children were near public housing. The creation of large superblocks at many public housing developments could be encouraging children to cross mid-block, for example.

Twelve-year-old Dashane Santana, a resident of the East Village’s Jacob Riis Houses, was hit and killed last Friday while crossing Delancey at Clinton Street, across from NYCHA’s Seward Park Extension at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Leaders from East Harlem and the Lower East Side have decried the unsafe conditions their children face. “My district contains the greatest concentration of public housing in the city and is located in an area of Manhattan where traffic can be quite heavy. That means the children of my district are at risk,” said City Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito. “We need immediate action to address dangerous driving habits and must improve traffic patterns in high risk areas. Bike lanes in East Harlem are certainly one part of the solution, but more can be done.”

“This map shows us an injustice, pure and simple,” said Damaris Reyes, the executive director of the neighborhood organization Good Old Lower East Side. “Our kids living in public housing on the Lower East Side, including my own children, deserve safe streets just as much as any other child in the city. The NYPD needs to get its priorities straight and crack down on dangerous driving.”

The Department of City Planning continues to send confusing signals about parking policy. Is the department looking to strengthen parking policies that limit traffic, or does it want to water down the rules already in place?

While DCP is developing a solid package of reforms for parking regulations in the Manhattan core right now, it is simultaneously preparing to open the door to the evisceration of parking maximums. DCP wants to sever the connection between existing parking maximums and the federal Clean Air Act, which is the ultimate guarantee that the parking rules will remain in place and be upheld.

Right now, parking maximums in Manhattan are backed up by the force of the Clean Air Act. Parking controls are not only part of the city’s zoning code, but also part of New York’s State Implementation Plan (SIP), which documents how the state complies with federal air quality standards.

Linking parking maximums to the SIP gives them teeth. Recently, when the city wanted to scrap parking maximums on the West Side as part of plans for the Hudson Yards development, neighborhood activists were able to take the city to court under the Clean Air Act. The city was forced to settle and enact a hard cap on the amount of parking at Hudson Yards, an important first for New York City.

Had parking maximums not been part of the SIP, eliminating them at Hudson Yards would have been a routine zoning change. In fact, while attempting to push through its parking plans for the West Side, the city tried to remove parking controls from the SIP in 2007. The state Department of Environmental Conservation did not go along with the city’s plans, however.

In a meeting earlier this year with parking reform advocates, DCP staff announced that they are again going to ask for parking caps to be removed from the SIP. Sandy Hornick, a long-time DCP official now serving as a consultant for strategic planning to the department, said that the department would make that request once the proposed Manhattan parking reforms are enacted, reported Christine Berthet, the co-chair of Community Board 4′s transportation committee, who attended that meeting.

Berthet said she believes that DCP’s actions don’t add up. “If all the efforts they are doing intend to reduce parking and reduce traffic, then why do they need to touch the State Implementation Plan?” she asked. She hypothesized that DCP might be seeking to inoculate itself from lawsuits the next time the agency tries to weaken Manhattan’s parking maximums.

A generation ago, every new building in New York City had to include parking. Even in downtown and midtown Manhattan, the law required developers to build parking spaces for 40 percent of all new residences. The most walkable, transit-accessible districts in the country had mandates to set aside space for car storage.

The passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970 changed that. A series of lawsuits brought under the new law forced the city to reckon with the fact that parking mandates were making New York’s traffic and air pollution problems worse. The city changed course. In 1982, parking maximums replaced parking minimums in Manhattan below West 110th Street and East 96th Street. Nearly 30 years later, the limits on parking in the Manhattan core — parking is capped at 20 percent of new residential units below 60th Street, and 35 percent on the Upper West Side and Upper East Side — still constitute perhaps the most important use of parking policy to limit traffic in any American city.

Their effect is diminished, however, because the rules are riddled with loopholes. Special permits allow developers to skirt parking maximums, and parking minimums still impede the construction of affordable housing. Now, the Department of City Planning is undertaking a major rewrite of the Manhattan core parking regulations that could address these and other shortcomings. A summary of the proposed changes [PDF] prepared by the law firm Kramer Levin at the end of August for clients in the real estate industry and two documents outlining DCP’s research obtained by Streetsblog [PDF 1, 2] reveal the department’s thinking. (DCP would not comment for this story other than to say it has not yet produced a final proposal.)

According to parking policy experts, DCP’s Manhattan core proposal, as it appears in these documents, would be a significant improvement over the status quo, tightening the restrictions on parking and eliminating major loopholes and incentives that lead to parking construction. Parking maximums are also in place in parts of Long Island City, but it is unclear whether the reforms will extend into Queens; none of the documents Streetsblog obtained mention Long Island City.

The enactment of these reforms is far from certain. The real estate industry is lobbying against the changes and pushing for existing parking maximums to be loosened. At the same time, a faction within DCP believes that current limits on parking have failed to reduce driving and that building more parking is necessary to attract high-income residents and families with children. The future of parking reform in the Manhattan core is still very much in question.

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This weekend, Select Bus Service debuted on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, bringing a package of improvements to speed trips on one of New York’s most-used bus routes. Buses on the M15 route were traveling at a snail-like clip of less than 6 mph before the introduction of SBS.

Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City Transit’s Director of Bus Planning Ted Orosz, and MTA Bus Company President Joe Smith spoke to Streetfilms about how SBS will make traveling on the east side of Manhattan faster and easier for transit riders. The major changes include dedicated bus lanes enforced by cameras, priority for buses at traffic lights, and off-board fare collection.

Select Bus Service in the Bronx has produced a 20 percent improvement in travel times and enticed thousands more New Yorkers to ride the bus. Officials project that once people get used to the new system on First and Second Avenues, transit riders on the east side will see similar gains. Have a look and see how it works.

Robert Bowen, 45, was bicycling south on Second Avenue near 59th Street last night when he was struck by a truck driver who didn't stop at the scene. He sustained severe trauma to the body, according to police, and was taken to Cornell Hospital in critical condition. NY1 reports:

Sources say 45-year-old Robert Bowens was riding in the bus lane and was hit by a flatbed truck while switching out of the lane, which was blocked by a Verizon truck working on a manhole.

The truck fled the scene.

A Verizon crew that was working in the area came to the man's aid.

NYPD's public information office said the investigation is still ongoing and that no one has been identified or arrested yet.

The crash happened near the Queensboro Bridge just after 11 p.m. In DOT's original corridor plan for re-designing First and Second Avenues, street segments near the crash location were slated to receive shared lane markings on the opposite side of the street from where Bowen was struck. Those street changes are on hold, along with other safety improvements north of 34th Street that face an uncertain future.

Church and Vesey is one of the most crowded and busy intersections in the city. With about 15,000 people walking across Church during peak weekday hours, the foot traffic is heavier there than anywhere in Times Square. A recent decision by the Port Authority could jeopardize those pedestrians starting this Friday.

In a vote two weeks ago, the board opted to skimp on safety by hiring security firm Allied Barton to manage pedestrian movement at Church and Vesey. Security personnel with no formal training in pedestrian management will be replacing workers certified by the American Traffic Safety Services Association who've successfully kept people safe as construction near the World Trade Center site increases the potential for conflicts.

"With traffic down there only slated to increase with more intense construction, pedestrians will be put at unacceptable risk without certified ped managers there to stop traffic and shepherd folks," said Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White.

Currently, pedestrian managers with Sam Schwartz Engineering handle the intersection, using yellow chains to stop people from crossing against the light. While this isn't the type of traffic control that we tend to get excited about here at Streetsblog, the fact is that the pedestrian managers have a proven safety record. Since they started in 2008, 60 million people have crossed without incident, according to Schwartz.

Certified pedestrian managers receive training in how to handle different signal phases, coordinate movements of traffic and pedestrians, and deal with pedestrian behavior, Schwartz said. When the Battery Park City Authority was looking to staff intersections with crossing guards earlier this year, Schwartz said, they chose his firm because it offered the lowest qualified bid, with crossing guards all professionally certified. The Port Authority simply went with the lowest bidder, Allied Barton.

The Port Authority has not returned requests for comment on this story.

After a lot of great advocacy from the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance and a down-to-the-wire vote at Community Board 7 this spring, DOT crews are laying down the first on-street protected bikeway above 34th 59th Street, on Columbus Avenue between 96th and 77th. Streetsblog contributor Ken Coughlin sent in these pictures of the painting and striping in progress last Friday.

More New Yorkers are riding bikes than ever, but a new report from the Department of City Planning further complicates the effort to precisely determine how much cycling has taken off. The report, which looks only at cycling in Manhattan bike lanes from 2001 to 2008, shows a significantly slower rate of growth than estimates based on other measurements.

To develop its report, DCP tracked the number of cyclists using ten on-street bike lanes and seven points along the greenway system over the course of a fall day. From 2001 to 2008, use of the on-street lanes increased by 30 percent. Along the greenways, the number of cyclists grew by 26 percent from 2002 to 2008. The report was completed in June 2009 but didn't appear online until this summer.

The observed growth in use of Manhattan bike routes is far below other estimates of cycling citywide. Commuter cycling increased 150 percent between 2001 and 2008, according to measurements by NYCDOT [PDF]. The U.S. Census, too, recorded a faster increase based on interviews through its American Community Survey. "Although the American Community Survey has been criticized for underestimating the growth in cycling in New York City," said Rutgers professor John Pucher, "its growth rate is twice as high as the rate estimated by DCP."

Of course, each of these data sets captures different information. DCP looked at older bike lanes along the length of Manhattan, many of which are not up to present-day standards. DOT's count captures cyclist volumes from April to October and is largely based on the number of cyclists crossing the East River bridges, which connect neighborhoods with some of the largest concentrations of cyclists and with well-developed bike infrastructure. ACS data covers the entire city, but only counts those who use the bike as their primary mode of commuting, erasing those who bike part-time, or for local errands.

A DCP spokesperson said that although different methodologies yield different results, the important thing is that cycling is up in New York City. Moreover, she noted, the report adds yet more evidence that installing bike facilities increases ridership, a fact which she said will inform the department's bike planning efforts.

Transportation Alternatives' Noah Budnick said the disparities between estimates of cycling growth highlight the fact that "data has never really been collected on cycling, and people are still trying to figure out how to do it." He also emphasized that the absolute number of cyclists on the greenways was significantly higher than on parallel on-street lanes. "Cyclists really love protected space," he said.

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Last night Manhattan Community Board 4 voted unanimously in favor of an 11-block extension for the Eighth Avenue bike lane, which would bring the protected bikeway up to 34th Street. In an interesting flourish, the board asked that the extension include separate left-turn phases for bikes and cars.

The request for separate turn signals calls attention to design differences that have become increasingly pronounced among the city's protected bike lanes. NYC's first protected bikeway, on Ninth Avenue, came with pedestrian refuges at every intersection and separate left-turn signals for bikes and cars. The design has worked so well that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and transportation committee chair James Vacca used Ninth Avenue as the backdrop for a press event in support of complete streets policies earlier this year.

The new bike lanes on First and Second Avenues, as well as the lane coming to Columbus Avenue later this year, don't include separate turn phases or concrete pedestrian refuges at many intersections. The lack of these features may water down the safety benefits of the new lanes.

On a recent tour of the separated bikeways in the East Village, CB4 transportation committee co-chair Christine Berthet says she saw drivers routinely take left turns without using the designated "mixing zones" -- the areas where motorists are supposed to merge with bike traffic before turning. "Cars are turning from the second lane at full speed," she said. "The [bike] lane is not designated by something physical."

As with any new design, motorists may need some time to adjust their behavior, but Berthet and other street safety advocates think it's poor strategy to settle for less than the full bike-ped package. "Fundamentally, I think we do not want to encourage DOT to proceed with bike lanes that are just paint, especially at the turning corner, where it's dangerous for everyone," she said.

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East Harlem residents are outraged by the city's backtracking on plans to bring protected bike lanes to their neighborhood. 

At a public meeting about the re-design of First and Second Avenues held by Community Board 11 last night, neighborhood residents demanded that safe cycling conditions extend uptown, but DOT representatives were unable to guarantee future improvements. Up until this week, DOT had publicly indicated its intention to construct protected bike lanes on the corridor in East Harlem, in conjunction with the rollout of Select Bus Service. But three days ago, Mayor Bloomberg announced a re-design for the avenues that specifically called for protected bike lanes only between Houston and 34th Streets -- a stretch that will itself be compromised on nine blocks of Second Avenue (more on that later).

From the beginning, East Harlem residents expressed anger about the Bloomberg administration's neglect of their neighborhood. James Garcia, a local bike commuter, testified first and denounced the lack of protected lanes north of 34th Street. "I pay my taxes like everyone else, and we deserve the same treatment north of 96th Street," he said. "We deserve the same development that Lower Manhattan gets." 

DOT bike coordinator Josh Benson first explained the scaled-back plans by telling the group that there's only so much construction that can be completed in a year, and that completing the full corridor this summer would be impossible. 

But that answer didn't satisfy those in attendance. "Why don't we start in East Harlem?" asked one community board member. 

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