All-door boarding is one of the features speeding up buses on the East Side and, as of yesterday, 34th Street. Photo: Noah Kazis

On the East Side, travel times improved 18 percent thanks to the SBS upgrades that went into effect a year ago, according to the city. Much of that speed increase comes from off-board fare payment: With passengers boarding at any door and no longer dipping their Metrocards, the amount of time buses sit idling is down 36. The enhancements also include dedicated bus lanes enforced with automated cameras.

Quicker trips are attracting new riders. Along First and Second Avenue, total ridership is up nine percent, especially impressive since overall Manhattan bus ridership has been declining.

Those numbers are up slightly from April, when preliminary data showed a 15 percent improvement in travel times and an eight percent boost in ridership.

Similar jumps in speed and ridership are expected for Midtown bus riders. Since bus lanes were installed along 34th Street in 2008, ridership has increased by five percent, according to MTA Department of Buses Senior Vice President Darryl Irick. Improved boarding, he predicted, would boost ridership along the routes by another five to ten percent.

While NYC still lacks full Bus Rapid Transit, these improvements are making a real difference for tens of thousands of riders every day and attracting thousands more.

“Select Bus Service is proving to be a success wherever we install it,” Bloomberg said in a press release. “Travel times go down, ridership increases and safety improves with Select Bus Service. We expect to see the same positive results here on 34th Street and we will continue to look for more opportunities to expand this great service. We all know that when mass transit works well, more people use the service, which helps to free up our streets – a boost for our economy and our environment.”

Select Bus Service fare machines sit in front of Macy's Christmas decorations, ready to be turned on this Sunday. Photo: Noah Kazis

It’s no physically separated transitway, but bus riders can still get excited about the launch of Select Bus Service along 34th Street this Sunday.

Additional SBS features should significantly speed trips along.34th Street, which already has dedicated lanes for the heavy crosstown bus traffic. By taking care of fare payment before riders board and allowing them to enter and exit using all doors, SBS should cut the time buses sit at the curb and keep people in motion, especially at super-crowded stops like Penn Station. Also going into effect this weekend is an expanded camera enforcement program to ensure that the bus lanes stay clear of traffic.

Additional bus improvements are scheduled to be installed in 2012, including transit signal priority to give buses more green time. Bus bulbs installed next year will improve pedestrian safety, add some room to 34th Street’s packed sidewalks, and keep bus drivers from needing to pull over to the curb.

Plans for a more robust transit and pedestrian redesign, which would have physically separated buses from traffic and built a pedestrian plaza across between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was scuttled due to opposition from major property owners along the street.

Construction on the final segment won't start until roughly 2020, but when complete, the midtown gap in the East River Greenway will be filled. Image: East Side Open Space via Flickr.

The signing of an agreement to close the East River Greenway gap between 38th Street and 60th Street is big news for people who want to enjoy the waterfront on Manhattan’s open space-starved East Side. There’s finally a realistic plan in place to build a continuous route to walk, run, or bike along the water. When finished, it could form the backbone of the bike network on the East Side.

But the deal signed this week is an early step in a complicated and lengthy process; construction will take place in three stages and won’t wrap up for at least a decade. We checked in with City Council Member Dan Garodnick, a strong supporter of the greenway project, to hear how the process will move forward from here.

Building the full esplanade will cost roughly $200 million. To fund the project, the city turned to a land deal with the United Nations. The City will turn over a piece of the under-used Robert Moses Playground to the United Nations for $70 million and pay for the rest with the proceeds from the sale of One and Two UN Plaza, buildings in which the city owns a stake.

The first $70 million can’t pay for the entire greenway, Garodnick explained, meaning work will have to be done in phases. The playground deal will fund an extension of the greenway from 60th Street south to 53rd, where caissons left over from an FDR Drive detour are already in place. That first segment will connect to an existing pedestrian bridge over the highway at 51st Street.

Once the UN buildings have been sold — which Garodnick said could take some time, depending on the market, since the agreement requires them to go for a high enough price to pay for the construction work — work could take place on the southern portion of the greenway.

At the same time, work will already be underway on turning the Con Ed pier between 38th Street and 41st Street into a greenway and parkland. Construction on the Con Ed pier should begin soon, according to a press release from the mayor’s office. But work on the first new segment of the greenway likely won’t start until 2016. At the southern end, work won’t begin until roughly 2020.

Moreover, the agreement signed Wednesday is a memorandum of understanding putting the city, state and United Nations on the path to a completed deal; there’s still a lot of legal work to be done in addition to design and construction. While this deal clears the way for a continuous off-street cycling route along the East Side, it will be a long while before that connectivity materializes.

Bike traffic on the Eighth Avenue protected bike lane. Photo: BicyclesOnly/Flickr

By a vote of 26 to 10 Wednesday night, Manhattan Community Board 4 endorsed DOT plans to extend the protected bike lanes on Eighth and Ninth Avenue from 34th Street to 59th Street. The bike lanes will improve safety for all users on some of Midtown’s most chaotic streets, which pass by Penn Station, the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and the Lincoln Tunnel entrance.

Though there were objections from a couple of businesses when the CB 4 transportation committee discussed the project last month, last night only one person testified about the lanes.”I’m just someone who got injured and started biking to heal the injury,” said Detta Ahl. “I found it was a good way to get around the city. I want to get around the city safely.”

Ahl also pointed out that the redesigned streets will improve safety for pedestrians and motorists as well as cyclists; further south on Eighth Avenue, a similar redesign reduced traffic injuries for all street users by 35 percent.

On the community board, opponents of the bike lane focused on what they saw as bad behavior by cyclists. Calls for additional education and enforcement of traffic laws earned loud applause.

Construction will take place in two phases next year. The lanes will be extended to 42nd Street in the spring and to 59th Street in the fall.

As Noah reported in September, the lanes will offer a much safer route for commuters, delineating protected space on wide avenues sorely in need of taming, particularly near Penn Station, the Port Authority, and the Lincoln Tunnel (though two blocks of Eighth in front of the Port Authority will not be protected). According to DOT, eight pedestrians and one motorist were killed in traffic crashes on this stretch of Eighth Avenue since 2005, while six pedestrians were killed on Ninth. Similar safety improvements on a stretch of Eighth Avenue further downtown precipitated a 35 percent drop in injuries for all street users.

The lanes got the go-ahead from the CB 4 transportation committee last month, but true to form the anti-bike minority got the headlines. As always, the more friendly voices heard on this vital measure for safer cycling and walking, the better.

Wednesday’s meeting will be held at Roosevelt Hospital, 1000 Tenth Ave., at 6:30 p.m. The full agenda is here.

Bike traffic on the Eighth Avenue protected bike lane. Photo: BicyclesOnly/Flickr

The redesign will make cycling a more attractive option to access the city’s biggest employment center and the theater district, and it will bring badly needed safety changes to the wide and chaotic west side avenues where they pass by Penn Station, the Port Authority, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Since 2005, eight pedestrians and one motorist were killed in traffic crashes on this stretch of Eighth Avenue, according to DOT; six pedestrians were killed on Ninth. Similar safety improvements caused traffic injuries for all street users to drop by 35 percent on a stretch of Eighth Avenue further downtown.

On each avenue, the space for the protected bike lane and pedestrian refuge islands will come from narrowing the existing travel lanes by two feet each, not removing a travel lane, DOT officials said. With the addition of left-turn space in the form of mixing zones — where bike traffic and turning cars overlap — and signalized turn bays at major intersections, traffic capacity will in fact increase on Eighth and Ninth Avenues. “If anything, speed should actually improve,” said DOT Borough Commissioner Margaret Forgione.

Construction would occur in two phases. The lanes would be built south of 42nd Street in the spring of next year with the northern sections completed that fall. The full board of CB 4 will meet to vote on the proposal next month.

Unlike the bike lanes on the east side, DOT’s plans do not call for the lanes to run without protection for any significant distance. Between 40th and 41st Streets on Eighth Avenue, however, the protected lane will become a buffered lane running to the right of the Port Authority cab stand. The plastic bollards currently in place there will remain to the right of the bike lane, however, providing some protection at that location. On the following block, cyclists would share the second lane from the left with motor vehicles turning left.

The need for this design stems from the double left-turn lanes onto 42nd Street, said DOT bike and pedestrian direct Josh Benson. “If the bike lane was between those two left lanes and the curb,” he said, “it would be very difficult to go straight on your bike.”

Many cyclists and community board members urged DOT to find some solution that protected cyclists as they passed through those two dangerous blocks. Jay Marcus, the committee co-chair, told DOT that perhaps they should totally reimagine the corner of Eighth and 42nd, “similar to what you did in Times Square.” In the committee’s resolution, they asked that DOT try to improve the design of those two blocks.

The committee also requested that DOT widen the sidewalks on Eighth Avenue in order to ensure that the bike lanes don’t get filled with pedestrians overflowing off the curb. “You’ll have all those commuters walking to the Port Authority,” worried Lourdes Calderon. Benson said that it was possible that something could be worked out for the areas above 42nd Street, where DOT would have some extra time to develop a plan.

Reactions to the plan from the public were generally positive, but a significant number of west side residents worried that law-breaking cyclists were endangering pedestrians. Many of them cited news reports about the Hunter study of bike-on-pedestrian injuries to make their case. A pair of local business owners, who got some outsized attention in this DNAinfo report, also claimed that the bike lane would make parking and loading impossible at their establishments. The committee accepted DOT’s word that the agency would add adequate loading zones and work with the NYPD on increasing law enforcement, and asked for progress reports on those issues.

The Bryant Park lawn, 2010. Dan Biederman says opposition to the private management of a public park in the 1980s was more vociferous than the opposition encountered by NYC DOT's Midtown street reclamation projects today. Photo: Ed Yourdon/Flickr

Here’s the second installment of Streetsblog’s interview with Dan Biederman, head of the 34th Street Partnership and the Bryant Park Corporation. In the first part of the interview, Biederman discussed reactions to NYC DOT’s recent public space projects on Broadway, and why the reality on the ground is much better for Midtown than most press accounts have let on.

Ben Fried: Do you see any similarities between the changes happening to Midtown streets now and the restoration of Bryant Park 25 years ago?

Dan Biederman: Oh yeah. [With Bryant Park] it was outright opposition from the left, mainly saying the idea of private financing and management of public parks was undemocratic and unnecessary and the like.

I think there will be a time in the next three to five years when people will look back and say, how could we have been so opposed to that change?

So if you try to change things, you get opposition. Today it’s probably broader but less vociferous. We had a narrow group of opponents and they were vociferous. You would have thought the world would come to an end if a different approach would be tried at Bryant Park.

I sent [Janette Sadik-Khan] an email once when she was really under attack saying sometimes you just have to live through these things when you’re a change agent. And she knows that. She’s a strong person. It’s been good. I keep saying to people that this team is absolutely terrific. I’ve worked with DOT since 1980. This is the best the agency’s ever been by far.

BF: What sets them apart?

DB: Her accessibility. Making deadlines. Meeting deadlines. Looking abroad for models. Something this city doesn’t do enough of. I do it a lot. I’ve always complained New Yorkers think all the wisdom in the world is in these 13 square miles. To the point where when I did Bryant Park I had a Boston architect, a Philadelphia landscape architect, a Philadelphia adviser. The only New York people were Holly White and Hugh Hardy. But I had people from Boston and Philadelphia making the initiative and everybody said, “You don’t have to go to those cities for expertise. We have all the expertise you’ll need in New York.” It’s ridiculous.

So yeah — accessibility, meeting deadlines, models from abroad, just a mid-agency management strength. Rational answers come back. They’re really trying to improve the city, and I think in the end – I think there will be a time in the next three to five years when people will look back and say, how could we have been so opposed to that change? I don’t expect whoever the next mayor is to reverse this. I can’t imagine it.

BF: Do you think there’s something missing from how they’re trying to communicate?

DB: It seems like they don’t have that many testimonials, and they could do that, but it’s not too common to have somebody come in and endorse from other cities.

I tell you — and this is in other cities too — the first comment anybody makes to me when I start consulting on a park in another city is, “We adore Bryant Park. Were you involved in there? We think it’s great, incredible what you did. This is not Bryant Park.”

Everywhere’s provincial. They all apologize for it but then they proudly say, “We’re a provincial town. You’ve got to appeal to our ideas.”

And I say — privately I say – that’s not a very constructive position because all the tools in Bryant Park work anywhere, every one of them: movable chairs, private financing, programming in off hours, gorgeous restrooms. There is nothing that is New York-specific about that. So why would you lecture me about how this park needs different treatment. They’re not talking about “this is a 900 acre park so that’s why Bryant Park doesn’t work in it.” These are parks that are very similar. “This park is not Bryant Park.” So New York does the same thing.

BF: What do you think is behind that? Is it just nativism?

DB: The funny thing is after they do that, when we’re having dinner or something, they’ll say, “This is a very provincial town.” I’ll say, “Every town is provincial. “

You have no idea. Boston – my father was a Bostonian and I lived in Boston for two years and my son lives there now. I’m really a quarter Bostonian person. They just – if you haven’t been there for forty years living and working in the city, you’re a foreigner. It is very provincial. Philadelphia’s very provincial. Everywhere’s provincial. They all apologize for it but then they proudly say, “We’re a provincial town. You’ve got to appeal to our ideas.”

BF: I was down in Manhattan Beach covering a public meeting on a bus rapid transit project for Nostrand Avenue and what they said was, “You know the project that they did in the Bronx, Fordham Road? That’ll work in the Bronx but Brooklyn is different. It’s not going to work here.”

DB: You want to know the ultimate of that? Movable chairs. We did a block from Times Square five years before Times Square was civilized. We started movable chairs in Bryant Park in 1992. Times Square was a disaster. People – criminals – went to work in Times Square and went right through Bryant Park on their way. They’d get out of the subway and go over to Times Square to commit crimes. We lost no chairs. As Holly Whyte predicted we wouldn’t.

And I went all over the United States advising, “You need to have movable chairs and tables in your park.” And people said, “Well that may have worked in New York but it won’t ever work here.”

I said, do you realize what you’re saying? We were one block from the most dangerous block in New York and maybe America and it worked perfectly fine there, but you’re telling me in Providence or Richmond or Pittsburgh or Baltimore, you’ve got a more dangerous environment? This is crazy. New York was dangerous. This worked. We created social order there. We can do it here. That’s provincialism. But everybody’s provincial, as they say.

BF: So when you travel these days then, and you’re consulting in other cities, are other cities interested in street reclamation projects?

DB: Philadelphia definitely is. I’m up in Boston a lot. I saw something in the Globe that suggested that Menino might be moving in this direction. I think there’s a network of [bike] lanes that he was working on. Dallas. It’s such an auto city but they’re just starting to get it and one of the things that’s influential is a rail trail – Katy Trail – that’s very successful. They absolutely love it. So I think that’ll come.

Where else? Pittsburgh, not too much yet. Newark, not too much yet. Newark has these suburban drivers coming in and it has much too much street width. Broad Street. I don’t know if you know Newark but Broad Street is much too wide. We’ve said it to the mayor’s people. We work closely with them. They’re terrific. And I think that there’s a chance it’ll move in that direction. Miami, nothing that much yet in Miami. Atlanta, nothing that much yet although they’re talking about streetcars and the BeltLine.

BF: Does it feel like what’s happening here is expanding the realm of possibility in these other cities?

DB: Yep. Especially the walkable cities. That’s good.

Herald Square, summer 2010. Photo: Ed Yourdon/Flickr

Before Dan Biederman came to Bryant Park, there were no movable chairs, no free movies on summer evenings, no kiosks selling sandwiches and refreshments. No lunch time crowds and not much in the way of civic life or social activity, either. There was, basically, an open-air drug market in the New York Public Library’s backyard.

In 1980, Biederman co-founded the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, beginning a long career in public space management. He blended a business executive’s managerial expertise with an urbanist’s sense of what makes places work — the latter honed at the side of pioneering public space analyst William “Holly” Whyte. Property owners in other parts of Midtown sat up and took notice of his success at Bryant Park, and by the 1990s he was also leading the 34th Street Partnership and the Grand Central Partnership. Today he continues to oversee the Bryant Park Corporation and the 34th Street Partnership, while also bringing lessons from his New York business improvement districts to cities all over the country.

Dan Biederman

A firm believer in the importance of a quality pedestrian environment, Biederman has advanced a number of street safety and public space improvements over the years. In 2009, NYC DOT’s reclamation of Broadway for pedestrians and cyclists augmented two of the 34th Street Partnership’s big public space success stories: Herald Square and Greeley Square. When the city announced the changes would be permanent last year, Biederman stood in front of the TV cameras and said, “This is a 21st century idea.”

Streetsblog recently sat down with Biederman at his Sixth Avenue headquarters, across from Bryant Park, to talk about the transformation of Broadway, the 34th Street Transitway, and how New Yorkers adjust to change. The first installment of the edited interview is below.

He started off our discussion by noting that critics of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan have managed to command more attention than her supporters.

Ben Fried: Any theories as to why?

Dan Biederman: First, cab drivers are terrible participants in public fora. They don’t know shit because they’re on the phone all day long, yet they’re able to drive. The fact that they’re also, in their minds, better transportation analysts than people who went to school in that subject and have all kinds of citywide roles, baffles me. But the view of most business people is that you can count on cab drivers to tell you what the right answer is. I think that’s crazy. They will tell you that they’re annoyed that something isn’t going their way, but they don’t have the broader view.

We don’t pay that much attention to Steve Cuozzo. I think he’s a great real estate reporter but he doesn’t know this field.

They don’t understand because they over-emphasize the inconvenience that is experienced right after a change. They don’t understand that things work themselves out because people eventually get smart, including them. If 34th Street had been closed from Fifth to Sixth [for the transitway plaza], it defies belief that cab drivers would continue driving right into the blockage and therefore there would be horn-honking at Seventh Avenue and Sixth Avenue from now till the rest of time.

But if you could go into the mind of the average building manager in midtown Manhattan, that’s what they’re picturing: “Cab drivers are right because if you close something there will be horn-honking and trouble.” So we can’t make transportation policy that way. We have to go with the better-informed people who either are consulting or working for DOT.

BF: As president of a few Midtown BIDs, you have to both represent the property owners that you’re talking about and advocate for change to some degree. How do you end up balancing that?

DB: I usually try to calm them down by saying, “First, you need to understand this very arcane field of traffic.” People confronted with new regulations will alter their behavior, and it’s not as simple as saying if 34th Street has less traffic on it, there’ll be more traffic on 35th and 33rd and 36th and 32nd. Things are not that simple.

The second way to walk that tightrope is, very often the owners who are upset with some of Janette’s plans have specific problems, and I find the agency fairly responsive to those very specific problems. For example, the 34th Street transitway, we said a number of times to the DOT, there are three or four really specific points being raised against you. One is, Vornado has a garage that enters out into the eastbound lane of 34th Street now. What do we do about that? The Empire State Building has a concern about tourist buses. Third was Macy’s and their parade. Fourth was retail on the north side of the street between Seventh and Eighth, raised by the owner of the Pennsylvania Building, 225 West 34th. Plus we wanted 33rd Street opened westbound. [It is currently interrupted by pedestrian space at Broadway.]

If you can make those people happy, all that will be left is the general concerns, as far as our district goes, about curb access, and I think two or three of those problems have disappeared. I don’t hear the Empire State Building squawking. Macy’s is satisfied because of the elimination of the Fifth to Sixth pedestrianization, although I never was 100 percent sure why that hurt their parade plans.

So those are the five points that were left after all the shouting and hubbub. We don’t pay that much attention to Steve Cuozzo. I think he’s a great real estate reporter but he doesn’t know this field. He just loves to scream and rant about it.

BF: I think it would help to clarify exactly who the BIDs speak for. Is it entirely property owners? Is it retailers?

DB: Owners, tenants and in some cases the retailers are the owners. Macy’s owns their real estate. So owners and tenants, which includes retail and office tenants and office owners and the employees, theoretically, in those buildings. We try to speak for all. The people that pay the freight are the owners and tenants.

With the initial plans come screaming and yelling. A lot of times it’s not really accurate.

Now I try to lead on this because I feel after 30 years of doing this job, I’m pretty well qualified to steer the district’s point of view in a certain direction. When people challenge me on whether this is good for the district who are influential owners and tenants, I say, “Are you telling me you would like to go back to Broadway the way it was two years ago with lanes of traffic rushing down past Macy’s and Greeley Square? I’m convinced you don’t.” The real estate community is starting to come around.

BF: What does that look like? How skeptical were they in 2009 compared to today?

DB: A lot of this skepticism bubbles up from below. The principal in the past was normally more open to changes than somebody three levels down, who’s the building manager. Building managers are as stubborn about change in the street pattern as taxi drivers are. They sound very much like taxi drivers when they talk about this stuff. So with the initial plans come screaming and yelling. A lot of times it’s not really accurate.

For example, “Traffic will continue heading right in that direction and there will be horrible traffic jams.” Well, now we’ve had Broadway Boulevard, as we call it, in for a long time. What’s happened? Sixth Avenue is clearly moving faster. There’s no question about it at Herald Square. Traffic is moving better. At Seventh Avenue there’s debate. [Janette's] numbers show a tiny decline in speed. The screamers say that it’s much worse. I think her numbers are probably accurate. It’s a tiny bit worse.

I’m starting to hear some advanced property owners say that they think Broadway retail is more valuable than it was before.

Broadway is a pleasure because if you walk across Broadway – when you leave this meeting, you ought to go west on Broadway at 40th Street at rush hour, it’s just fantastic. In the old days you’d have to rush across. You’d think you were going to be run over from cars rushing through Times Square. They finally got through the Times Square bottleneck and they’re going to race down and make up the time.

Now we have a quieter environment, much better for retail. People walking in a New York manner in all different directions. It’s a pleasure.

I kidded Janette. I said when I go past 40th and Broadway, if I’m carrying something, I start reading. She said, you shouldn’t read and cross streets. But I said, that’s how confident I am the traffic has calmed. If a car’s coming, it’s coming at 12 miles an hour so I can take evasive action. I’m enjoying this immensely. Traffic has been calmed by this move. There are very few cars going between 40th Street and 35th Street right now.

BF: How do you measure success? Are there ways to gather information that the BID is pursuing?

DB: We haven’t been scientific about it but we’re pretty good urbanists at this point, so we know and improve the pedestrian environment when we see it. We’re really good at this. There’s no doubt the pedestrian environment is better. If you can get that at the expense of only a tiny bit of decline of one avenue and a great upgrade in the other, then you’ve got a success.

Now I am hearing from some people – they think Ninth Avenue is worse. I don’t. The parts of Ninth Avenue that they claim are worse are not in my district so I have not stood on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 39th Street and analyzed it. My traditional view is the Lincoln Tunnel decides whether Ninth Avenue is bad or not. Because anybody on Seventh going south knows, if they’re a New Yorker, that it’s not a great idea to go down Ninth. If you’re coming from the west side and you’re trying to get to Chelsea, Eleventh might be a good answer but Ninth, everybody thinks Lincoln Tunnel at almost all hours of the day.

To me, at least the stuff that affects us most – Sixth better, Seventh at least close, maybe a tiny bit worse, pedestrian environment upgraded. This is a better deal for our district. I’m starting to hear some advanced property owners say that they think Broadway retail is more valuable than it was before the change, including the owners of this building. [Blackstone owns 1065 Sixth Avenue.] They own a lot of Broadway buildings – they said this change has led to measurable increases in retail rents on Broadway.

Just like two-way traffic is better for retail, 12 mile-an-hour traffic is better for retail. It’s completely accepted by everybody who knows anything about urban planning.

Coming up in part two of the interview: Biederman discusses the caliber of NYC DOT under Janette Sadik-Khan and reveals the ultimate example of NYC provincialism.

Here’s another jaw-dropping facet of the program, as reported in the Times:

[City engineers] also plan to offer this data to software developers so that drivers and passengers can gain access to this detailed information on their iPads or iPhones.

Distracted driving is a known killer, an epidemic so widespread and pernicious that it even has Albany’s attention. You’ve got to wonder about the logic behind encouraging drivers to pilot their two-ton missiles through streets teeming with pedestrians while not looking where they’re going.

From inside DOT's traffic control center, engineers will now be able to tweak Midtown traffic lights in response to real-time conditions. They'll only be getting information about automobiles, however. Photo: Jill Colvin/DNAinfo.

The Department of Transportation is rolling out a response to Midtown traffic congestion that is as high-tech as it is intellectually outdated. Microwave sensors, video cameras, and E-ZPass readers will gather traffic information in real-time and beam the information to the DOT’s Queens command center, where engineers will instantly adjust the traffic lights as needed in an attempt to fine-tune the workings of the traffic grid.

All that technology, however, will only measure the movement of automobiles through Midtown. Moreover, new turn signals and turning lanes are being added to dozens of intersections in the affected area, between Second and Sixth Avenues and 42nd and 57th Streets. That could mean time and space taken away from other modes and given to automobiles, counter to the city’s transportation goals under PlaNYC.

According to a DOT spokesperson, there is no mechanism currently in place to measure pedestrian volumes in the “Midtown in Motion” area, despite the huge number of people on Midtown sidewalks. Neither is there any transit signal priority, a system that grants a few extra seconds of green light to buses, each of which carries far more people than a few automobiles. Both of those features could theoretically be added to the system at a later date, said the DOT spokesperson.

In the meantime, however, DOT’s highly capable engineers will be told to solve a problem based only on information about motor vehicles. If they wanted to balance the needs of drivers against pedestrians or bus riders in real time, much less prioritize the latter two, they wouldn’t have the tools. Bus riders might benefit incidentally from a bump in overall traffic speeds, but couldn’t be given the extra priority they deserve.

More permanent changes also prioritize traffic capacity over all else. At 53 intersections, turning lanes will be added to the cross-town street, replacing on-street parking, loading zones, and no standing areas. In some cases, what’s being replaced might be important for pedestrian safety, whether by protecting pedestrians on the sidewalk or maintaining visibility at intersections, or needed by local businesses. Notably, the media’s same hyped-up fears about any loss of parking for a bicycle or pedestrian project have not appeared when the space remains dedicated for the automobile.

Dedicated turn signals are also being added to 23 intersections. Light timing is zero-sum; a turn phase has to come from somewhere else. Though DOT’s spokesperson emphasized that pedestrian times would remain within accepted minimum standards, he would not say whether adding turn signals would take away time from pedestrian crossings.

While DOT assiduously requests community board support for bike or pedestrian projects to go forward, the “Midtown in Motion” proposal seemingly went through no public review at all. That’s not because these changes are uniformly uncontroversial. In February of this year, for example, Manhattan Community Board 2 unanimously passed a resolution disapproving of the addition of both turn signals and turning bays on Houston Street, believing that the changes would make conditions more hazardous for pedestrians. Officials who express the utmost concern that all transportation projects earn the support of the local community are silent.

In announcing the new traffic management system, Mayor Bloomberg brought back the transportation rhetoric of the bad old days. “Midtown is the heart of New York City’s economy, traffic is its lifeblood, and we’re about to get that blood flowing even more efficiently using communications technology,” said the mayor, according to a report in DNAinfo.

Of course, a 2006 report by the Partnership for New York City found that only a third of all people traveling to Manhattan below 60th Street came in cars, trucks, or taxis. Midtown is an unparalleled business district not because of road access or traffic management, but thanks to its unparalleled transit capacity and dense, walkable development.

Moreover, the city’s Midtown traffic strategy could very well work against itself. Transportation analyst Charles Komanoff said that by his rough estimate (neither he nor Streetsblog has access to the details of the system), if “Midtown in Motion” adds the equivalent of five percent to the area’s traffic capacity, it would only speed up traffic by an average of 0.75 percent across the Central Business District. That slight speed increase would draw around 1,000 additional drivers into the CBD, slowing things down again. In the end, Komanoff guessed that the plan might only increase CBD daytime speeds from their current average of 9.5 miles per hour to 9.54 mph.

That’s a negligible reward for drivers who clog Midtown streets, and one that comes with no apparent benefit to those who are the true life force of Manhattan’s Central Business District.

Photo: Liz Patek

We have an update from NYPD on the curb-jumping motorist who struck and injured a pedestrian in Midtown this morning. Police said the driver hit a 73-year-old woman on the sidewalk while attempting to back into a parking space on 58th Street. The victim was sent to New York Presbyterian Hospital with serious head injuries, according to NYPD; she is now in stable condition.

The driver remained at the scene, the police said, so as usual, “no criminality is suspected.”

A driver jumped a curb and struck a pedestrian, reportedly severing one of her legs, on 58th Street this morning. Photos: Liz Patek

Reader Liz Patek sends this account from a crash scene in Midtown this morning:

As I was biking through Midtown, I came across this scene on West 58th Street between Seventh and Sixth Ave. It happened before I got there, I am guessing about 9/9:30 a.m. A pedestrian, a woman, was hit by the car. She was on the sidewalk when she was hit. According to witnesses, she was sent flying through the glass door of the restaurant, and according to their accounts, she was in pretty bad shape (her leg was severed). The driver was still on the scene. There was also a camera person from CBS 2 and another reporter on the scene. According to another witness account, the woman appeared to be about 55-60 years of age.

Also, according to witnesses, they are not sure if the driver was trying to execute a three-point turn or trying to parallel park and possibly lost control/accelerated in reverse into the woman. The woman was alive when ambulances took her away. Again, this is all accounts from people who either witnessed the accident or arrived just after it happened.

Streetsblog will be following up with NYPD on the outcome of their investigation.

The East River Greenway currently ends a few blocks south of the United Nations. Under a complicated land swap that is moving closer to completion, the city would be able to eventually connect the greenway through Midtown. Photo: Amy Zimmer/DNAinfo

The State Legislature took another step forward in the long and arduous process of filling the Midtown gap in the East River Greenway two weeks ago. By passing a law that would allow a swap of land between the city and the United Nations to move forward, DNAinfo reported yesterday, Albany cleared the way for a deal to be negotiated.

Under the terms of the arrangement reported by DNAinfo’s Amy Zimmer, the city would give part of the Robert Moses Playground, located just south of the UN headquarters, to the UN, which would build a new office tower there. In return, replacement park space would be added elsewhere and a segment of the greenway could be built between the UN and the water.

The deal would also allow the city to sell two buildings it currently leases to UN-related tenants and use that money to pay for the greenway connector. Though the Parks Department says the greenway will have a functional, no-frills design, the cost is still estimated to reach $150 million.

If it comes together, the deal would lead to the creation of a north-south trunk on the East Side that would provide a continuous, safe route for biking and walking. On the West Side, the Hudson River Greenway is now the busiest bike path in the country and the cycling backbone for all of Manhattan. It currently attracts cyclists from the East Side who go out of their way for the safety of biking apart from city traffic.

The general outline of the deal has the support of the Bloomberg Administration, as well as State Senator Liz Krueger, Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh, City Council Member Daniel Garodnick, and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. The empowering bill still needs to be signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo to become law.

The Albany legislation includes a sunset provision. If the UN and the city don’t ink a memorandum of understanding by mid-October, the legislation will expire.

Assuming that a deal is worked out — the momentum seems to be building in that direction, but there are a lot of moving parts — a completed East River Greenway would still be many years away. A feasibility study requested by the city in April, for example, would take two years alone.

Photo: Valerio_B/Flickr

Yesterday the 18th Annual Taste of Times Square filled up the crossroads of the world, serving dishes to throngs of people. DNAinfo reports that the event broke with tradition a little bit, and the vendors were better off for it:

This year the festival concentrated all its booths on Broadway, instead of to placing them on West 46th Street between Broadway and Ninth Avenue as they had last year. Participants said the move helped them reach more people.

“With all the tents on Broadway it’s gotten better visibility, it’s more popular. And the weather always helps,” said Gus Montesantos, director of food and beverages for Doubletree Hotel, home of Ginger’s restaurant.

Eat your heart out, Steve Cuozzo.

Photo: Valerio_B/Flickr

Madison Square Eats, a month-long food event at Worth Square, on the western edge of the park, wrapped up last Friday. Photo: Lindsey Ganson

Last year, Manhattan Community Board 6 voted to support buffered bike lanes on a Midtown stretch of First Avenue. Last night, however, the board's transportation committee chair declared it had never made such an endorsement and eliminated the option of buffered lanes from discussion. Image: NYC DOT

NYC DOT’s proposed design for bike lanes from 34th Street to 57th Street along First and Second Avenues, which call for a protected lane on First Avenue from 34th to 49th Streets and shared lanes everywhere else, earned the endorsement of Community Board 6′s transportation committee last night. The 7-5 vote in favor of DOT’s plan — the nays thought it included too much space for cyclists, not too little — came after a misleading discussion in which the committee members seemed not to understand what they were voting on.

This marks the second time that this CB 6 committee has endorsed DOT’s plans for the corridor, though those plans have changed in the intervening year. Last May, the full community board endorsed a DOT plan similar to this year’s but with a buffered bike lane on First Avenue from 49th to 57th Streets. The community board also urged DOT to consider the buffered lanes, then called Design D, for Second Avenue. DOT, however, decided that endorsement was not enough and that it needed an additional community board vote to build bike lanes from 49th to 57th.

Over the course of the evening, it became clear that the committee was confused about just what Design D was and where they had called for it. “There are two kinds of bike lane,” committee chair Fred Arcaro declared at one point, “protected and shared” — leaving out any variety of striped bike lane, buffered or otherwise. That false dichotomy went unchallenged throughout the debate, eliminating the buffered option that both DOT and the community board had previously endorsed. The committee continued to refer to “Design D,” but under the assumption that they were talking about fully protected bike lanes.

That wasn’t the only Arcaro statement of fact that shaped the course of the evening. Arcaro also claimed that the board had never endorsed Design D — “it was to consider, not necessarily that we support, to consider Design D, to do a study.” In fact the board had endorsed buffered lanes on First and called for them to be studied on Second. Arcaro simply laughed off claims that building a bike lane wouldn’t necessarily worsen traffic, which deserved to be taken seriously given the fact that a protected lane further south on First and Second didn’t slow drivers and that a buffered lane would take away parking rather than a moving lane.

At at one point well before any vote had been taken, Arcaro unilaterally announced that “you have a community that is not exactly keen on Design D.” When community members in the audience protested, committee vice-chair Molly Hollister turned around to explain that “he’s just speaking for himself.”

This isn’t the first time that Arcaro has misused the power of his position as committee chair. Last May, some committee members accused Arcaro of defeating a resolution in support of bike lanes by miscounting the committee’s votes. At the same meeting, Arcaro declared that non-committee members had no right to see the text of community board resolutions until they have already passed the full board.

With the committee’s past support for a buffered bike lane erased from memory and the very option of a buffered lane removed from the menu of designs, the committee then discussed whether to build protected bike lanes or shared lanes. The DOT proposal was presented as a compromise and barely passed over anti-bike lane sentiment by a vote of seven to five.

The committee did amend their resolution to say it supports further study of how to eventually build protected bike lanes on both First and Second. With the deck stacked against bike lanes at CB 6, that’s about all you could expect.

A reader sends along this photo of the new pop-up café on 44th Street, just west of Third Avenue. The local community board just approved the café in March, while one local resident, convinced that Midtown is an “inappropriate location” for more public seating, was still fighting to block it last month. Now the chairs have been set out and residents and visitors in this crowded part of the city are already using it to sit and chat. This photo was taken early in the morning on a Saturday, and we hear it gets much more use on weekdays.

The protected bike lane on First Avenue will extend north to 49th Street, where it will become a shared lane for eight blocks. Cyclists hoping to reach the Second Avenue bike lane from the north will have to ride in heavy Midtown traffic to get there, with only a shared lane for protection. Photo: DNAInfo

The First and Second Avenue bike lanes on Manhattan’s East Side will only be extended from 34th Street to 57th Street this year, not up to 125th Street as advanced in a plan that won community board approvals in 2010.

While First Avenue will receive Manhattan’s first northbound parking-protected bike lane above 34th Street, the rest of the East Side extension this year will mostly consist of a new shared-lane treatment, not parking-protected lanes or even the buffered, painted lanes that were endorsed by Community Board 6 last year.

DOT presented its plans to the First and Second Avenue Community Advisory Council last night. According to CAC member A. Scott Falk, the protected bikeways and pedestrian refuges have been a big success where they’ve been installed below 34th Street. Injuries for all street users are down 8.3 percent, bike volumes are up, and traffic hasn’t been slowed at all.

But whether because the local print and TV media have declared war on bike lanes or because a new deputy mayor has reportedly given less leeway to bike projects than his predecessors did, DOT’s plans on the East Side seem to keep diminishing.

Overall, the next phase of the bike project along the two East Side avenues will be far less robust than the first phase. On First Avenue, reported Falk, the parking protected lane will be extended from 34th Street to 49th. After that, cyclists will ride in a specially-designed shared lane to 57th Street. The design of the shared lane is new to New York City, with the “sharrow” stencil placed directly in the middle and a solid white line setting it off from regular traffic lanes. On Second Avenue, the same shared lane treatment will extend the entire way from 34th to 57th. Streetsblog has a request in with DOT to confirm that this will be the full extent of East Side bike lane construction in 2011.

At last night’s meeting, said Falk, DOT claimed that it was only installing shared lanes because Community Board 6 hadn’t taken a strong stance in support of the bike lanes. But last year CB 6 had in fact voted to endorse buffered lanes on First Avenue from 49th to 57th, as proposed by DOT at the time, and then went further, requesting that buffered lanes be considered on Second, where DOT had never proposed them. So while the community board had asked to make more room for safe cycling, DOT came back this year with less.

East Side residents have already seen the ambitious plans for protected bikeways from Houston to 125th Street sliced into stages. At this rate, the East Harlem residents who have forcefully demanded safe cycling facilities won’t get them for at least a few more years. That the Midtown design was watered down against the community board’s wishes is an unexpected additional setback.

The fifteen blocks of protected lane on First are still very important. They mark the first northbound protected lane to make it past 34th Street in Manhattan, and will include 12 pedestrian islands to shorten crossing distances and calm traffic.

CB 6′s transportation committee will be meeting this Monday to discuss the revised plans for First and Second Avenue. Hopefully community board members will remind DOT of exactly what it was they asked for one year ago. It would surely be helpful if supporters of safer streets attend the meeting to restate just what is at stake.

Update: You can see DOT’s presentation, which includes plans for bus bulbs and transit signal priority to further speed up buses on First and Second Avenue as well as the bike plans, in this PDF.

Graph: Office of the mayor

A new study commissioned by the city finds that air quality in Times Square has notably improved since the 2009 installation of pedestrian plazas on Broadway.

Street-level readings taken by the New York City Community Air Survey, a city-wide air quality monitoring program created as part of PlaNYC, show that “concentrations of traffic-related pollutants were substantially lower than measurements from the year before and were less than in other midtown locations.” From a media statement announcing the findings:

The report confirms that major sources of air pollution generated in New York City are vehicle traffic and buildings burning high-sulfur heating oils. Additionally, in Times Square, concentrations of nitrogen oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), two pollutants closely associated with traffic, were among the highest in the city. After the conversion to a pedestrian plaza, NO pollution levels in Times Square went down by 63 percent, while NO2 levels went down by 41 percent.

“The new Times Square is a showcase for New York’s vitality and energy, rather than for congestion and pollution,” said NYCDOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan. “The changes here have been big wins for safety, mobility and business. Now we can see that they have delivered great environmental gains as well.”

The city says that some 250,000 pedestrians enter Times Square every day.

Data from the survey were released ahead of the next edition of PlaNYC and will be used to “inform” unspecified new air quality initiatives. The PlaNYC reboot is set for April 21.

Among the fans of the new Times Square are former President Bill Clinton, who joined Mayor Bloomberg today in announcing a merger of their climate groups, the Clinton Global Initiative and C40. Regaling reporters with tales of the Times Square of old, writes City Room:

Mr. Clinton concluded by recalling that when he was a college student, he was agile — and reckless — enough to dodge the cars zipping through Times Square.

Today, thanks to the pedestrian mall, he said, there is no need. “Now you can be my age and walk in Times Square and not get run down. That is pretty cool, too.”

Right now, cyclists riding the East River Esplanade are forced onto the wide and unsafe First Avenue for 22 blocks in Midtown. Photo: Kim Martineau

New York took a step forward today in attempts to close the 22 block gap in the East River Esplanade, which forces cyclists into traffic in the ultra-congested heart of Midtown and deprives East Side communities of valuable riverfront open space. Thanks to state and federal funding, including an earmark from Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, the New York City Economic Development Corporation put out a request for a feasibility study looking at how to build a greenway along the East River between 38th and 60th Streets.

Building that continuous route would create a long-missing trunk for north-south bike travel along the East Side of Manhattan. The continuous greenway along the West Side is the busiest bike path in the country, and riders from the East Side will go out of their way to use it instead of biking on Manhattan’s wide avenues.

The study covers a variety of topics, from a broad conceptual design to the integration of the bikeway with the street network and from structural engineering to cost estimation. While the study moves the project forward, a completed greenway on the East Side remains years away. The RFP says that the contract for the feasibility study alone would last two years.

Today’s announcement won plaudits from every elected official in the area.

• Open House East: Wednesday, March 30, 6 – 8 p.m. Norman Thomas High School, 6th floor cafeteria, 111 East 33rd Street (between Park and Lexington).
• Open House West: Thursday, March 31, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. The New Yorker Hotel, Sutton Place Room, 481 Eighth Avenue (at 34th St.).

DOT will present preliminary plans for the corridor and will take public comments at both meetings. For more info, contact Veronica Bailey-Simmons at (917) 339-0488 or at vbailey@hshassoc.com.