We've posted many times on NYPD bus lane abuse, so it's nice to have this reader-submitted shot. This scofflaw driver was tagged Monday evening on E. 57th Street between Madison and Fifth -- just in time for bus passengers to witness a rare act of traffic law enforcement.

With new MTA chief Jay Walder citing bus lane blockage as a top priority, hopefully we'll be seeing a lot more of this. Who knows, maybe there's even an order of concrete on the first 100 days' agenda.

Newly digitized AAA mag: crazy for cars, mad about pedestrian streets.

The “test project,” now four months old, has been criticized by some as both tacky and ill-suited to the location. While we tend to agree, we are more concerned with serious safety issues created by mixing cross-town traffic and pedestrians, particularly where many of them are vacationing tourists. We also have yet to see the environmental and congestion benefits to justify the experiment’s costs.

The pedestrian plaza concept was the brainchild of city transportation officials intrigued with the idea of importing the pedestrian zones common in Europe to New York City. But so far, the project appears to be an unnatural fit for the heart of America’s biggest city. After all, Times Square is not Rome, Paris or Barcelona, where piazzas and squares lined with cafes and restaurants evolved naturally in the urban landscape.

Yep, all of a sudden pedestrians are mixing with crosstown traffic. Remember back when that never happened? Me neither.

Have fun picking this apart, Streetsbloggers. I'll just go out on a limb here and wager that the editorialists at AAA, headquartered out in Nassau, don't represent the views of real New Yorkers and probably never walked around with all those "vacationing tourists" squeezed into traffic by the sidewalk crunch at the old Times Square.

After the jump, a nice rejoinder from genuine city dwellers, courtesy of City Room, about the pleasures of having places to socialize in public.

On busy evening in Times Square, at the pedestrian mall on Broadway, E. J. Bonilla and Melissa Oyola found an empty table and two chairs, content among the seas of calm and waves of chaos surrounding them.

This is date night.

“Ever since they hooked this place up, it’s like a lifesaver,” Mr. Bonilla, 21, said. “If you’re with somebody, you’re with them because you like each other. You shouldn’t necessarily need something else to help you guys along.”

Photo: Daily News

Scarlett was also convicted of assault, presumably for injuring a third pedestrian, Abayomi Henderson, who seconds earlier had walked around the couple as they strolled down the sidewalk.

While it's not unheard of for a sober city driver to be charged for killing someone -- in cases of drag racing, for instance-- it is, as Streetsblog readers know, extremely rare, and even more so for prosecutors to secure a murder conviction.

"I can't recall any prior instance in which a killer driver who wasn't intoxicated was convicted of murder," says Charles Komanoff, long-time pedestrian safety advocate and author of Killed By Automobile, "and that includes many of the roughly 200 fatal instances since 1990 when the driver mounted the sidewalk."

Komanoff cites several such cases in which drivers whose negligence resulted in death were given a slap on the wrist, or were subject to no legal sanctions at all. Stella Maychick, mistaking the gas pedal for the brake, killed six people and injured two dozen in Washington Square Park in April 1992: no charges filed. Isaac Chehebar, joy-riding at twice the speed limit on Ocean Parkway, killed sisters Inna and Svetlana Shetman and maimed their mother Rima Shetman in April 2001: plea-bargained by Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes to four months. And most recently, delivery driver Chao Fu, leaving his van with the engine running and the gear in reverse, killed toddlers Diego Martinez and Hayley Ng in Chinatown last January: no charges filed.

The decision to prosecute Scarlett for manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide was announced almost immediately. "Apparently, he stopped taking his medication," an NYPD spokeswoman said the day after the crash. "It was a conscious decision, so he's being charged." Why Auvryn Scarlett and not Chao Fu? Local coverage of the trial was scant, but a BBC report offers some insight:

Summing up the prosecution case at New York Supreme Court, assistant district attorney Chris Ryan said Scarlett had shown a complete disregard for the safety of others.

Driving six days a week for the refuse haulage company, he knew he could have a seizure at any time "on some of the busiest streets on earth".

He said: "It is like playing a game of Russian roulette, only instead of pointing the gun at yourself, you point it at other people. And if someone dies -- that is murder."

The Scarlett prosecution seems to hinge on the "conscious decision" not to take his seizure medication, making it a reverse DUI case of sorts. It could also be that the incident was captured on video, which prosecutors showed to the jury, or even that the victims were living a New York fairytale -- lovebirds on a Valentine's Day stroll -- the instant they were brutally killed. Whatever factors were at play in determining whether to bring charges (Streetsblog has a message in with District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office), Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Paul Steely White questions how the Scarlett case could differ so greatly from that of other pedestrian fatalities.

"Don't people make a conscious decision to speed or a conscious decision to turn without yielding?" says White. "Are we saying that people are somehow unconscious when they're breaking the law? The bottom line is that people are responsible for their own behavior, especially when they're driving a multi-ton vehicle. Scarlett's actions were no more deliberate than the majority of negligent motorists who routinely get off scot-free."

Komanoff agrees: "It would be a positive sign if [Scarlett's prosecution] signaled the end of the Manhattan DA's habitual coddling of killer drivers. But if it's back to business as usual after this case, then one is left wondering why one driver's failure to take medication is treated more harshly than the failure of other drivers to refrain from gross, fatal negligence."

One hopes that under future DA Cy Vance, holding killer drivers accountable will indeed become the norm. Unfortunately, with pedestrian deaths on the rise, safe streets advocates will probably have their first indication not long after Vance takes office in January.

Auvryn Scarlett will be sentenced for the murders of Jacqueline Timmins and Andrew Hardie on October 15.

Although there is undoubtedly an amazing streets renaissance going on in NYC, there still remain places in dire need of improvement. Every workday, heavily-used areas like the blocks surrounding Penn Station are overwhelmed with pedestrians making their way home via buses, subways, the Long Island Railroad and Amtrak. The sidewalks are so clogged by this "crush of humanity" that people are forced to walk in the streets. If you've never seen it, or if you're claustrophobic, get ready.

Open Planning Project Executive Director Mark Gorton recently went out to sample the atmosphere on a typical weekday evening and posits that we can do much better in how we choose to allocate street space. His words sum it up nicely:

The reason it's so crowded here is not because there's not enough space. It's because we give all of our space to the least spatially-efficient form of transportation available. 

Of course he is referring to the automobile -- especially the single-occupant vehicle. Oddly enough, I did a PSA over three years ago which aired during our New York City Streets Renaissance campaign launch. I filmed most of it in the same location. It still looks much the same, perhaps worse.

Hey, here's some of that pulse-pounding New York City energy that a few people wish we still had in the middle of Times Square.

Instead of propelling a vehicle through midtown streets, the energy embedded in this taxi's tankful of gasoline has been converted into giant fireballs, molten metal, and a black cloud of vaporized God-knows-what. City Room reports that, thankfully, there were no injuries, and in fact, no one really batted an eye. ("This was routine," said the FDNY spokesman.) I guess we're just more accustomed to the sight of exploding taxis than people sitting outside on chairs, talking to each other. Gawker has another pic of the taxi after further combustion.

Captions?

Update: Here's some video, also via Gawker. I'm declaring the winner of the caption contest to be "curly" -- nice TerraPass reference.

Photos: Mike Noble

Also: How is a bike chained to a sign post a threat to pedestrian safety or a "security concern"? We have a message in with DOT to see if the city is indeed involved.

Update: A DOT spokesperson says the agency is not aware of action by the city to regulate bike parking at Rockefeller Center.

We've got two dispatches from the opening day of real-time bus arrival displays on 34th Street. First, the good photo: A reader sent the above shot of the display inside the shelter at Third Avenue. That's a nice crisp presentation. Are the times accurate? None of the dailies ran blaring headlines about haywire displays today, so you've got to assume the tracking system performed decently.

A report in AMNY did say that the displays sometimes announced arrivals before any bus pulled up to the shelter. We have a theory about one factor behind the glitches: Maybe the bus riders who encountered overly optimistic countdown times were stationed at the eastbound stop on Park Avenue. Before buses could reach that shelter during the evening rush, they had to contend with a convoy of 12 police cruisers hogging the bus lane on the south side of 34th between Fifth and Sixth:

The 34th Street bus lane, yesterday at approximately 5:45 p.m.

Not only are these parked squad cars slowing buses down by forcing them into the other traffic lane, I'm guessing they're also throwing the whole predictive bus tracking algorithm for a big loop.

The alert reader who sent the photo, recalling the last time bus-blocking police cruisers were sighted, noted that the squad cars came from several different precincts in a contiguous area of Brooklyn (the 61, 62, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, and 78, to be specific). The NYPD has yet to respond to Streetsblog's request for an explanation.

The mayor, who appeared personally at yesterday's bus tracking presser, seems to be banking pretty heavily on a visible transit improvement to score points with voters this election season. Maybe this time someone at Bloomberg 2009 will ask the NYPD to stop using a heavily trafficked exclusive bus lane as their exclusive parking lot.

DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announces the 34th Street pilot this morning. On the left are MTA Bus president Joseph Smith, Mayor Bloomberg, and acting MTA chief Helena Williams.

Displays counting down the minutes until the next bus arrives have been installed at eight shelters serving the M34 and M16 routes on 34th Street. All eight are live and functional, according to a DOT spokesperson, so if you're taking a late lunch in Midtown, you can walk on over and check them out. You'll find them at the eastbound bus stops at Tenth, Ninth, Eighth and Park, and the westbound stops at First, Second, Third, and Lexington.

The displays are part of a pilot program provided at no cost by a Long Island company called Clever Devices. A report by Michael Grynbaum in the Times' City Room blog notes that Clever Devices installed a similar pilot for Chicago three years ago, a program called Bus Tracker that has since expanded to cover more all of the city's bus network. The Manhattan pilot uses GPS satellite tracking to determine the position of buses. Wait times based on those positions are then transmitted to LED displays mounted at the bus shelters.

Two prior contracts for real-time bus tracking have been scrapped by the MTA, most recently this January, because the systems could not deliver accurate information to riders. Long after cities like London, Paris and Bogota implemented similar technology, New York bus riders still have to guess whether the next bus will arrive when the posted schedule says it will. If this 34th Street pilot pans out, it will mean less exasperation for straphangers, and, perhaps, a little more credibility for the MTA.

We'll post some pics of the new displays soon. If you snap a picture of one, you can email it to tips@streetsblog.org or tag it "streetsblog" on Flickr.

When New York City opened up new pedestrian zones in the heart of Midtown this summer, naysayers predicted a traffic nightmare. Nearly two months later, we're still waiting for the much-feared Carmaggedon.

In this video, Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton takes us on a tour of Broadway's car-free squares and boulevard-style blocks, where conditions have improved dramatically for pedestrians, cyclists, and, yes, delivery truck drivers. As Mark says, the counterintuitive truth is that taking away space for cars can improve traffic while making the city safer and more enjoyable for everyone on foot. There are sound theories that help explain why this happens -- concepts like traffic shrinkage and Braess's paradox which are getting more and more attention thanks to projects like this one. While traffic statistics are still being collected by NYCDOT, there's already a convincing argument that Midtown streets are functioning better than before: To understand it, just take a walk down Broadway.

Thanks to Chris O'Leary at On Transport for posting the best documentation we've seen so far of NYPD's utter disregard for the 34th Street bus lane. He took this picture yesterday during the middle of the evening rush, around 6 p.m., a time when there's absolutely no excuse:

The shoulder lane is dedicated to buses only between 7am and 7pm on weekdays. But the eight empty police cars parked in the lane between 5th and 6th avenues would suggest otherwise.

As a result, buses had to load and unload in the one eastbound travel lane, causing gridlock and leaving cars in the crosswalk of a major pedestrian crossing.

Who will enforce the law when the enforcers won’t even obey the law?

We've seen traffic enforcement SUVs clog this bus lane before, but these are regular precinct vehicles, without a doubt. "At first I figured they were responding to an emergency," O'Leary said, "but there was no police presence on the street or sidewalk, they were ALL unoccupied, and the lights and engines were off."

The community affairs desk at Midtown South denied that officers from that precinct ever park in this bus lane. Perhaps officers from another precinct decided to make a pit stop and, just for good measure, mess with all the straphangers counting on Select Bus Service to get around town.

This was the scene at Herald Square yesterday afternoon. It's full of people doing what the Times' Susan Dominus finds so un-New York: sitting down. Some of these loafers are actually putting their feet up, right in the heart of our fast-paced, cutthroat city. It's like they've never even seen The Sweet Smell of Success.

Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson sent this photo and some others he snapped while shooting footage of the new Broadway. Before we get to those, a few Independence Day weekend notes.

• First, a reminder to tell John Liu that you support the Bicycle Access Bill. This is a big one.
• Second, the Macy's fireworks are switching rivers this year, so instead of the ultimate car-free event on the FDR, we'll have a car-free Route 9A and bike-free Hudson River Greenway. Starting at 4:30 on July 4th, the bikeway will be closed from 14th Street to 68th Street. It's expected to re-open in the wee hours of July 5th, after the cleaning wraps up.

Enjoy the weekend everyone. We'll see you back here on Monday. On to the pictures from Clarence...

Clarence, who is something of a giant chess aficionado, says he's never seen such a large crowd for a match.

You can now see some of the new street surfacing at Times Square.

A future performance area?

This is what the reverse side of a meter receipt looks like now.

This image of Fifth Avenue unearthed by the Times' Jennifer 8. Lee (nice headline!) is a fascinating relic from the dawn of the motoring age. The new geometry pictured here nicked 15 feet of sidewalk from pedestrians to make room for two traffic lanes. In one fell swoop, the balance of space shifted dramatically: Two 30-foot sidewalks and a 40-foot roadway became 22½-foot sidewalks and a 55-foot roadway. The insets show the sort of "imperfections" slated for elimination on the auto-friendly Fifth Avenue: terraces, stoops, gardens -- the type of amenities that make streets more than simply thoroughfares to pass through.

Which got me wondering: A hundred years from now, how will we interpret images like this?

Photo: jblough/Flickr

Not that it didn't deserve the attention, but last month's car-free Times Square debut overshadowed other major Broadway safety improvements like these to the north -- including pedestrian islands and separated bike lanes -- which are now well on their way to being implemented. These pics were taken last weekend just south of Columbus Circle between 57th and 55th Streets.

Photos: Brad Aaron

We've been meaning to post this vid from culture mag ANIMAL New York (h/t Gothamist), which neatly undercuts the argument that the newly pedestrianized Broadway is "only for tourists." Sure, the tourists are grateful not to be jostling for space right next to traffic anymore, but so are lots of people from the five boroughs. It is, after all, where 158,000 people go to work every day. Take that, Andrea Peyser.

I've lived in New York City for just about twenty years now but yesterday was my first trip to Times Square.

Sure, I've been to Times Square before. Plenty of times. But until yesterday Times Square had never ever been a destination for me. Rather, it had always been a place to avoid or, if unavoidable, a place to get in and out of as fast as possible on my way to somewhere else.

The New York City Department of Transportation's "Green Light for Midtown" plan brought me and a lot of other people to Times Square yesterday. And it kept us there. By simply removing motor vehicles from Broadway around Times and Herald Squares and inviting pedestrians in with seating, street performers, good people-watching -- and a naked cowboy -- New York City has created two great new public spaces for tourists, office workers and, yes, even jaded residents.

Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson squares off with the Naked Cowboy. Icon Parking Systems, the Cowboy's sponsor, may be one of the few businesses unhappy with the new Times Square. The Cowboy is pleased.

The space is still raw and unfinished and it'll be interesting to see how it works during the weekday, but my two young sons and I had a blast yesterday along with thousands of others. Times Square is suddenly a place worth visiting and staying a while (especially if you're a parent desperate for an easy, low-cost weekend adventure for your kids).

The Naparstek boys experience Times Square for the first time. ("Can we get a big TV on the front of our house too?")

A large part of the design’s success stems from the altered relationship between the pedestrian and the structures that frame the square. Walking down the cramped, narrow sidewalks, a visitor could never get a feel for the vastness of the place. Now, standing in the middle of Broadway, you have the sense of being in a big public room, the towering billboards and digital screens pressing in on all sides.

This adds to the intimacy of the plaza itself, which, however undefined, can now function as a genuine social space: people can mill around, ogle one another and gaze up at the city around them without the fear of being caught under the wheels of a cab.

A more personal Times Square: Sunning in the middle of Broadway.

No doubt some aspects of the new Times Square will be found to be successful and others not working all that well. Still, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and her team already deserve a ton of credit for their willingness to experiment and innovate. During the Iris Weinshall era at DOT, the idea of removing motor vehicles from Broadway was considered a huge long-shot, a Hail Mary pass, a kind of Livable Streets Holy Grail. It was difficult to imagine a version of the New York City Dept. of Transportation that would do it. These guys and their colleagues went ahead and did it...

NYC DOT's Seth Solomonow, Janette Sadik-Khan, Andy Wiley-Schwartz, Ryan Russo and Sean Quinn at Times Square on Monday morning.

Open Planning Project executive director Mark Gorton catches some rays.

The changes underway in New York City right now are pretty breathtaking and livable streets advocates deserve some credit too. Yesterday I couldn't help but think back to a January 2005 dinner at Mark Gorton's Upper West Side apartment. Former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa was the guest of honor. Transportation Alternatives' new executive director Paul Steely White set up the event and Jody Gorton cooked up a delicious meal for Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins and about fifteen advocates and civic leaders.

The topic of discussion that evening was Broadway and it's potential to be a truly great, pedestrian-only public space. Peñalosa believed it was possible and he was inspirational in laying out the vision. Project for Public Space president Fred Kent had been thinking about the idea for 30 years and he provided the historic perspective. ITDP director Walter Hook had seen pedestrian streets work all over the world and he talked about international best practices. Tompkins had to live with the daily consequences of whatever happened at Times Square and he reminded everyone of the political realities. At the time it seemed a little far-fetched, this notion that Times Square might someday be a mostly car-free space. But here we are five years later and it's happening along with lots of other good stuff.

It was from meetings like this one that the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign was born and ideas like physically separated bike lanes, car-free streets and a less automobile-dependent city were popularized and made politically possible in New York and beyond. If you've been a part of New York City's livable streets movement, today's a day to pat yourself on the back. As Danish urban designer Jan Gehl says: "How nice it is to wake up every morning and know that your city is a little better than it was the day before."

Photos: Aaron Naparstek, Brad Aaron and Nick Whitaker.

Here's the view from 45th Street looking south at about 1 pm today, about 30 minutes after the city Dept. of Transportation closed Broadway to motor vehicle traffic in Midtown. It's obviously way too soon to judge how this experiment is working but today, at least, car-free Broadway appears to be a huge hit. 

If you have any photos of your own, we'd love to see them. E-mail them to tips at streetsblog dot org or tag them "streetsblog" in Flickr.

The full transformation will take a few months to set up, but come Memorial Day, pedestrians will finally have some breathing room at Times Square.

With all those cars headed out of town, DOT is going to re-route traffic at Times Square around Broadway and onto Seventh Avenue. Come Memorial Day morning, New York City will have brand new public spaces carved out of the street, smack in the middle of Midtown. If you're staying in the city for the long weekend, it's time to party.

The Times Square Alliance will be out bright and early Monday setting up beach chairs. Virgil's Barbecue will be firing up the grill. At some point, a giant movie screen will get unfurled for a noon showing of "On the Town" (it's the last day of Fleet Week, folks). I suspect that I won't be the only New Yorker heading over to Times Square for the first time in ages.

So, this year we're not holding anything back: Happy Memorial Day weekend! We'll see you back here on Tuesday.

Vehicles will be redirected from Broadway to Seventh Avenue, as the orange sticker says, "Starting Sun May 24"

"Green Light for Midtown will make the street work like it should," said Commissioner Sadik-Khan. "For the first time ever, standard grid intersections will be reconnected in this notoriously gridlocked part of the City, creating major traffic flow improvements on 6th and 7th Avenues."

While much has been made of the plan's expected "major traffic flow improvements," most New Yorkers will enjoy the project for its three-plus acres of car-free space.

Construction is expected to take three months, though a series of public events will be held in the interim.

We'll have more later.

Streetsblog San Francisco's Bryan Goebel, blogging from New York this week, came upon the scene of a driver-cyclist collision in Midtown Manhattan at around 1:30 this afternoon.

"The bicyclist -- according to one witness -- was traveling northbound on Eighth Avenue past 43rd in the left lane and a delivery van pulled out from the curb and hit him," said Bryan.

Police and EMTs were on the scene for about half an hour.

Warning: the top pic after the jump may be considered graphic by some. Also, the shot of the van and the bike was taken after the bike was moved.

Photo: AntyDiluvian/Flickr

From 1998 to 2007, some 700 pedestrians were injured and five were killed in Midtown Manhattan along Broadway, making it one of the more hazardous stretches in the city.

Mr. Bloomberg’s reordering of Broadway might not work for everyone. Taxi drivers are alarmed that it will cut down on fares, and theater owners are, as always, nervous. But with pedestrians in danger and growing complaints that Broadway has become too "crowded," the mayor is right to provide more elbow room for people who give Broadway the life it needs.

Good to know that not every editorial board considers public health and happiness to be "frivolous" boom-time luxuries.