Streetsblog New York City

In the video, an early morning car commuter, presumably someone working on the nearby Barclays Center arena project, apparently decides that the last parking space on this block of Pacific Street (between Sixth Avenue and Carlton Avenue) is too small to accommodate his SUV, so he makes his own free parking by uprooting a No Standing sign. Oder says the vandalism and flouting of parking regs is symptomatic of the un-monitored violations around the Atlantic Yards construction zone, including trucks double-parking and idling.

This isn’t the first time that Atlantic Yards workers have torn out this particular No Standing sign, thereby adding about four or five illegal on-street spaces, according to Atlantic Yards Watch. In fact, the maker of this video predicted that the sign “would be destroyed within one day of installation again,” and he was right.

And you thought placards were the ultimate in free parking entitlement.

This is the generous new sidewalk extension at the five-way intersection of Washington Avenue, Park Place, and Grand Avenue in Brooklyn. Here you can see bell bollards protecting the added pedestrian space between Washington, on the left, and Grand on the right.

I live around the corner, and I can’t say enough about how much this addition has improved the walking experience. Before DOT put this in as part of a broader safety project, the area between Grand and Washington felt like a grey zone were pedestrians weren’t supposed to tread. Walking on the east side of Washington usually entailed weaving between a combination of parked police vehicles and metal barricades:

Image: Google Street View

The cops who operate out of the building at the corner of Grand and Park have staked claim to the sidewalks here, and they seem to consider any pedestrian space within a 200-foot radius of their workplace to be fair game for parking. Here are their vehicles hogging the sidewalk on Park:

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Could the state legislature get in on the costly, congestion-inducing parking minimum game? And could they do it at the site of Brooklyn’s biggest transit hub? Under a proposal by Assembly Member James Brennan, that’s exactly what would happen.

Assembly Member James Brennan wants the state government to force more parking into Atlantic Yards. Image: NYS Assembly.

Brennan is working on legislation that would force Forest City Ratner to build more off-street parking at the Atlantic Yards site, as was first reported in the Park Slope Patch. Currently, an 1,100 parking space surface lot is slated for the site.

Tonice Sgrignoli, a legislative aide for Brennan, said the legislation is still being researched and no details are available at this point. According to Sgrignoli, ESDC eliminated a requirement to build underground off-street parking that had been in an earlier agreement with Forest City Ratner and this legislation would likely undo that change.

When Streetsblog asked why Brennan thought that Atlantic Yards should have more parking in the first place, Sgrignoli replied that “Anyone who’s ever tried to drive a car and park it in that area will understand why it’s important to provide parking.”

Hopefully, Brennan himself has a more sophisticated understanding of parking policy. As former Boerum Hill Association president Jo Ann Simon said, no conceivable amount of off-street parking is going to free up on-street spaces so long as they are cheaper than going to a garage and available to anybody. “If people drive there, they will always try and find something free on the street,” she said. What happens on-street — many in the area, including Simon, have long pushed for residential parking permits — Simon said, “is entirely irrelevant to whether there should be more off-street parking to serve the arena.”

Simon’s argument is borne out by the reality at Yankee Stadium. There, despite a whopping 9,000 off-street spaces, area residents still complain that on-street parking is impossible on game day, according to a Crain’s report.

Moreover, building extra parking will simply mean that more people are able to drive to the area instead. “Brennan’s proposal to compel more off-street parking in one of New York City’s most transit-accessible locations betrays a terrible lack of understanding regarding transportation and mobility,” said University of Pennsylvania parking expert Rachel Weinberger. “His idea will invite more traffic through his district, more traffic in adjoining districts, and by requiring all of that parking, other development is preempted.”

Agreed Simon, “You induce drivers if there is parking there.”

Steven Higashide of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which has analyzed the plans for Atlantic Yards and is a member of the Brooklyn Speaks coalition, said that underground parking had been a part of the Atlantic Yards plans, but was removed when the amount of development planned was scaled back.

“The only way Atlantic Yards can become part of a vibrant urban fabric is if the city and developer work to reduce driving to the site,” said Higashide. “Providing hundreds or thousands of extra parking spaces won’t do that.”

Prospect Heights resident Steve O’Neill has been biking for most of the 15 years he’s lived in New York City. Steve commutes daily to Columbus Circle, and last year he added a new leg to his trip. Every day he drops his son Beckett off at school in Park Slope, and the new Prospect Park West bike lane helps him do that safely.

As a subway trip it took 30 minutes — including a transfer and going up and down nearly 200 steps. On the bike, they get to school in just 10 minutes. How does Beckett feel about the bike ride to school? “The last time I didn’t ride it was winter and it was really snowy and he was begging to go on the bike instead of the subway,” Steve said.

The view south on Washington Avenue at Prospect Place. Photos: Ben Fried

It looks like DOT is exercising its option to stripe a bike lane on Washington Avenue, imposing some order on street markings from Eastern Parkway to Atlantic Avenue. Previously it wasn’t really clear whether this part of Washington was one traffic lane or two traffic lanes in each direction, leading to a lot of double-parking, dodging, weaving and speeding. Now it’s official: Washington Avenue is one lane in each direction with left-turn bays and a marked bike route (some of which is sharrows). I could be wrong, but this bike lane might be NYC’s first new route in 2011, which is shaping up to be a slower year for bike network expansion compared to the previous three years.

The bike route was described as “optional” in DOT’s presentation on the project, which Brooklyn Community Board 8 approved in April. The safety improvements on Washington include new pedestrian infrastructure for the five-point intersections at Atlantic Avenue and at Park Place. Local residents, led by architect Jeff Sherman, had gathered hundreds of signatures asking for pedestrian improvements at Atlantic.

The expanded sidewalks at the intersection of Washington, Park, and Grand Avenue will, one hopes, permanently discourage police from depositing their vehicles in the pedestrian right of way. (Full disclosure: I cross this intersection just about every day.) Crews have been carving up the asphalt there for the past two days, holding the sidewalk parkers at bay for the time being, at least at the corner marked off with construction barrels.

New and expanded pedestrian islands and sidewalks on the north side of GAP will create safer and more direct connections to walk to the central plaza area. (This image comes from DOT's 2010 presentation on GAP and may not include minor changes to this part of the plan.)

Construction on a slate of pedestrian and bike improvements for Grand Army Plaza is scheduled to move forward this summer, NYC DOT announced this Saturday. The redesign includes a major expansion of the pedestrian islands at the north side of GAP and the addition of a two-way, protected bicycle connection linking Union Street to Eastern Parkway on the southern side. It does not include the two-way, protected bike lane on Plaza Street shown in DOT’s 2010 presentation on this same project, which Community Boards 6 and 8 both approved last year.

DOT made its revised presentation Saturday at the Grand Army Plaza Coalition‘s annual meeting. It was an anniversary of sorts for GAPCO, a partnership between the area’s major cultural institutions and neighborhood residents, which formed in 2006 to make Grand Army Plaza a welcoming public space instead of a traffic vortex. Since then GAPCO has put together several public workshops and site visits, producing a conceptual blueprint for city agencies to work from [PDF].

Image: Google Maps

The big difference between last year’s DOT plan and this year’s is that the two-way, protected bike lane on Plaza Street has been set aside until an unspecified date in the future. Plaza Street encircles most of GAP, and a two-way path would create a safe hub for cyclists to take the most convenient routes to and through the space. But after last year’s CB votes, some Plaza Street residents contacted the city saying the parking-protected bikeway would cause traffic back-ups, even though Plaza Street receives little traffic and is already just one lane wide.

So call it the NBBL effect: Despite the multi-year community-based planning process that informed last year’s presentation, and despite the community board votes in favor of it, DOT seems unwilling, for now, to stir the pot so close to the litigious and well-connected NIMBYs of Prospect Park West, who happen to have  U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer on their side.

The improvements scheduled for this summer are still significant, and they represent a major milestone in the campaign to make GAP more accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. Starting in June and wrapping up in August, the city plans to build out these improvements, which Streetsblog reported on last April:

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Damage to the SUV's windshield shows the force with which the driver hit a cyclist last night. Photo: Wayne Bailey

An SUV driver hit and injured a delivery cyclist at the intersection of Dean Street and 6th Avenue in Brooklyn at around 10 p.m. last night. Photos sent to us by reader Wayne Bailey, who came across the scene shortly after the collision, seem to show that the cyclist was on his way to deliver food when he was hit and thrown over the hood of the car with enough force to shatter the windshield.

The NYPD press office did not have any information on the crash, but according to the Park Slope Patch, police have assigned culpability to the cyclist, who did not suffer major injuries. The driver stayed at the scene, according to Bailey, and the cyclist was taken by ambulance to the emergency room. Bailey said the driver claimed the cyclist “came out of nowhere” and also blamed temporary blue walls around the Atlantic Yards construction site for blocking his vision. We do not have the cyclist’s version of events.

The injured cyclist's bicycle after the collision. Photo: Wayne Bailey.

Plans to create a "temporary" 1,100 space surface parking lot, shown here in the lower left, are at issue in the latest fight over Atlantic Yards. Image: Jonathan Barkey and the Municipal Art Society.

The latest round of the knock-down drag-out fight over the Atlantic Yards project is underway, and it’s all about parking. At issue is a potential 1,100-space surface parking lot that would be located between Pacific and Dean Streets, just west of Vanderbilt Avenue. That lot has been portrayed as temporary, “interim” parking by the Empire State Development Corporation and project developer Forest City Ratner, but could sit there generating traffic for up to 25 years. Last week several groups filed a motion to halt construction until the environmental impacts of the project are studied more fully.

The basic question is whether the environmental review for Atlantic Yards needs reworking in light of the fact that development could take up to 25 years, rather than the ten-year construction schedule originally put forward by ESDC and Ratner. (Be sure to check out the invaluable Norman Oder for all the details.) If construction is really going to take an extra fifteen years, the argument goes, the true impacts on things like traffic, noise, and air quality weren’t ever disclosed, in violation of environmental law. That argument got a boost in the courts a few weeks ago, and the legal battle now hinges on whether or not to halt construction.

For the BrooklynSpeaks coalition, the 1,100 space “interim” parking lot is at the heart of the issue. As Oder reports, their lawyer suggested that construction on the Barclays Center basketball arena might be allowed to continue “but all other work, including any attempt to convert Block 1129 to a parking lot, should be absolutely enjoined unless and until there is full compliance with SEQRA.”

“They were supposed to put the parking underground,” BrooklynSpeaks member Jo Anne Simon explained. A quarter-century of surface parking wasn’t part of the deal.

Though Simon said that BrooklynSpeaks has tried not to debate suitable uses for the Atlantic Yards site, she did suggest that surface parking wasn’t an acceptable option. “Something that’s an amenity for the community,” she suggested, “maybe some interim open space.” Simon also added that some additional demolition would still be required to pave over the block, “and that we’d like to see not happen.”

At last night's presentation to a joint meeting of three Brooklyn community boards, DOT assistant commissioner Ryan Russo unveiled what he called "a pretty dramatic and bold, exciting plan" for Grand Army Plaza. The proposal lived up to the billing. Lots of asphalt will be reclaimed for walking and biking. Getting to the central plaza will be a much-improved experience, as will biking to the greenmarket, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the park, thanks to an entirely two-way system of bike lanes. Russo said DOT hopes to begin implementation in August.

It's a complex project that really needs graphics to help you visualize it, but I don't have the plans just yet. Here's my bullet point description and a Google satellite view until DOT posts the full presentation online, which should happen later today.

• Image: Google Maps
  On the north end of the plaza, northbound traffic on Flatbush and southbound traffic on Vanderbilt will cross at a greatly simplified X-shaped intersection. The pedestrian spaces that define the boundaries of the "X" will be much more generous and well-defined than the mish-mash of poorly-connected islands and striping that people navigate now. Walking to the central public space will be safer and simpler, especially if you're approaching from Park Slope.
• The Plaza Street bike lane will be converted from a buffered, one-way counterclockwise path to a two-way, parking protected path, giving cyclists a safe and legal way to take the shortest routes around the plaza.
• The area between the arch and the central plaza will be set off with DOT's epoxy-and-gravel surface treatment, seen on Broadway and other pedestrian reclamation projects. Physical barriers will be added to keep cars from illegally cutting across.
  
• On the south side of the plaza, pedestrian islands will be expanded and five crosswalks will be added, making it easier to walk between Union Street, Plaza Street, and the greenmarket area. The greenmarket area will also be set off with epoxy-and-gravel and have physical barriers from traffic.
• There are several two-way bike connections planned for the south side, the general effect of which will be this: Anyone coming or going from Prospect Park West, the Prospect Park loop, or either end of Plaza Street will be able to bike safely and legally to any of those streets. Eventually a two-way path on Eastern Parkway, part of a separate capital project, will feed into this system. The plan also appears to include a small "bike roundabout" where PPW meets a two-way connection leading into the park loop (h/t @mikepstein for pointing that out).
  

This time-lapse film by Tracy Collins at Not Another F*cking Blog is a telling indictment of poor pedestrian conditions at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. And depending on how Bruce Ratner's new sports arena is built out -- the groundbreaking is set for this week -- things could get much worse.

As exemplified by the crosswalk hogs in the video, this is a terrible environment for pedestrians right now. If and when the arena arrives, two things will happen: thousands of pedestrians will arrive via transit to get to games -- the more the better, but they'll need more space; and more people will be driving here, especially if there's a huge surface parking lot.

Note that Forest City Ratner has not answered questions about all the "interim" surface parking it intends to construct. Scroll down this post for a thorough list of related unresolved issues from the Dean Street Block Association, care of Norman Oder.