Streetsblog New York City

A new crop of bus routes is moving into the pipeline for implementation as Select Bus Service. The MTA and NYC DOT are in the initial stages of bringing SBS to the Bronx’s Webster Avenue, where the most unreliable bus in the borough runs, and to Brooklyn’s Utica Avenue, the second-busiest bus route in the city.

The innovations of SBS — pre-paid boarding, dedicated bus lanes, priority at traffic signals — have sped buses and attracted new riders on Fordham Road, First and Second Avenues, and 34th Street. And they can work on bus lines all over the city. So as the first round of SBS implementation comes to a close (lines on Nostrand Avenue and Hylan Boulevard are scheduled for completion in the next year or two), the development of new routes is a welcome signal that the MTA and NYC DOT are committed to bringing bus improvements to more New Yorkers.

The city’s first Select Bus Service line launched on Fordham Road in the Bronx in 2008, and it’s been a smashing success. Bus speeds increased by 20 percent and ridership by 30 percent. So expanding SBS to more routes in the borough is a no-brainer. The choice of the Bx41 for the upgrade was first reported in the Daily News yesterday.

“There was a lot of support in the Bronx for doing a route along Webster Avenue,” an MTA spokesperson told Streetsblog. “This would be a full-fledged SBS route with all the features offered by the Bx12 and the M15.”

Running down Webster, the Bx41 has relatively high ridership — 7.6 million annual riders — but was ranked the most unreliable bus in the borough this year by the Straphangers Campaign. Perhaps in part because of all that bus bunching, ridership on the route has been in free fall. The Bx41 saw one million fewer trips in 2010 than in 2009, according to the MTA.

There’s no roll-out date for the Bx41 yet, according to the MTA, and any eventual route will need to go through a public review process.

Read more…

A 57-year-old Bronx man was struck and killed by a school bus driver on Tuesday.

According to reports, at around 6:00 a.m. Milo Montivilla was crossing with the light at Broadway and Mosholu Avenue in North Riverdale when the bus driver, turning right, ran him over. The Daily News interviewed a witness at the scene:

“He was walking to catch his bus and the [school] bus just hit him and dragged him down the street,” said the witness, who declined to give her name.

“He was under it for a good 10 minutes. I couldn’t believe it.”

The witness said the bus operator did not appear to have seen the pedestrian and continued driving.

“Everybody was screaming, ‘You hit someone! You hit someone!’ Everyone bum-rushed the street,” she said.

“That’s when he stopped and got out. Everyone was on their phones calling the cops.”

The driver was too distressed to talk at the scene but could be overheard telling a supervisor on the phone: “I didn’t see him. It was too dark.”

The driver’s identity was not released. He was not charged.

“I didn’t seem him/her” are the magic words for the motorist who pulverizes another person, even if the victim is breaking no laws, is directly in front of the vehicle when hit, and is dragged down the street until passersby intervene. The driver’s speed, the possibility that he was distracted in some way — these factors seemingly become irrelevant to police and prosecutors when presented with the invisible pedestrian or cyclist defense, despite state laws enacted to protect vulnerable street users from everyday driver negligence.

The crash that killed Milo Montivilla occurred in the 50th Precinct. The commanding officer there is Captain Kevin J. Burke. To voice your concerns about neighborhood traffic safety directly to Captain Burke or other precinct higher-ups, drop in on the next community council meeting. The 50th Precinct council meets the second Thursday of every month at the station house, located at 3450 Kingsbridge Avenue, at 7:30 p.m. Be sure to call ahead (718-543-5978) to confirm meeting times and dates.

The city’s first “neighborhood slow zone” officially opened this morning, bringing a 20 mph speed limit and new traffic calming treatments to the residential Claremont neighborhood in the Bronx. Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, joined by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca and local District Manager John Dudley, announced that the 20 mph zones would soon be coming to neighborhoods across the city. Starting today, residents and community boards can apply for their own slow zone.

The new Claremont zone covers the roughly 35 city blocks bounded by 167th Street, 174th Street, Southern Boulevard and West Farms Road/Boone Avenue. At each entrance to the zone, street signs flank the road announcing the 20 mph limit and that it is a residential area. Inside the zone, stencils and street signs continue to trumpet the lower speed limit. Nine new speed humps have been added to five already in place, which Sadik-Khan said makes the zone largely self-enforcing. In London, slow-speed zones incorporating traffic-calming treatments are preventing dozens of deaths and serious injuries each year.

“To some people, this neighborhood is nothing more than a shortcut,” said Sadik-Khan. That attitude, she noted, has had deadly results. In the last five years, 46 people were killed or seriously injured in traffic crashes in the larger community district between 2006 and 2010. The slower speeds would restore the streets to the community, she said. “Our streets are for New Yorkers. They’re where we live, where we play, where we shop.”

“The slow zone is now one where pedestrians will feel safe,” said Diaz, who said he’d been hearing complaints about safety in the area since he served in the state Assembly. Diaz touted the fact that the program would be expanding to other neighborhoods. “This is not going to stop at Claremont,” he said.

Vacca, too, celebrated the safety improvements. “They will save lives,” he declared. In addition to the speed bumps slowing down cars, he urged motorists to respect the speed limit voluntarily. “Look at your speedometers and see how fast you’re already going, and then slow down,” he said.

The form to get your own neighborhood slow zone is already live on DOT’s website, where the agency lays out the characteristics that will lead to successful applications. DOT is looking for zones that include schools, daycare centers, senior centers, and mostly residential uses, taking up an area roughly five blocks by five blocks and set off by clear boundaries, such as parks or major roads. The city wants to keep the slow zones separate from commercial areas, bus and truck routes and hospitals and fire stations.

Applications must come from community boards, business improvement districts, civic associations or elected officials, and are due by February 3. The first round of slow zones will be selected in March, according to DOT, and installed over the course of next year.

More photos of the slow zone below:

Read more…

The Department of City Planning continues to display an openness to the possibility of tearing down the Sheridan Expressway. A slideshow prepared for a September public meeting, recently posted online, shows how the agency is applying a comprehensive approach to the question of what to do with the lightly-used, Robert Moses-era highway along the Bronx River.

Funded with a federal TIGER grant, the DCP study will examine much more than the effect of a highway removal on traffic. Especially encouraging: The department wants to use a “triple bottom line” approach, measuring the impact of any decision on the economy, society, and environment. “For example, a road geometry change could reduce vehicle capacity but also reduce air pollution, maintenance costs, and injuries to pedestrians,” the agency explains in its slideshow.

That kind of perspective is a world apart from the New York State Department of Transportation’s approach. The state DOT’s most recent analysis of a Sheridan removal studied only traffic impacts, and based its evaluation on the unrealistic assumption that nothing would replace a decommissioned Sheridan.

DCP, in contrast, is studying three scenarios: one with the Sheridan kept in place, another with the expressway turned into a boulevard (think West Street or San Francisco’s Embarcadero), and a third with no road at all. In every case, major improvements to the Bruckner Expressway would be installed, including a new exit that would significantly improve truck access to the Hunts Point food market. Some of the opportunities DCP identified for the area, such as fostering development along the East Tremont Avenue corridor, could take place regardless of what happens to the Sheridan. Others, like the redevelopment of a small industrial zone sandwiched between the Sheridan and the Bronx River, DCP identified as contingent on changes to the expressway.

Read more…

City Council Transportation Chair James Vacca showed his safety supporter side at a press conference in the Bronx this morning. Standing with DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan at the corner of the Grand Concourse and 165th Street to announce the installation of countdown pedestrian signals, Vacca had strong words for speeding motorists and endorsements for both automated speeding enforcement and slow speed zones.

“The accidents are too many and the speed is unacceptable,” said Vacca of the Grand Concourse. That avenue had 411 pedestrian injuries between 2005 and 2009 and nine pedestrian fatalities, according to Sadik-Khan. Vacca heartily endorsed the installation of countdown timers along the Grand Concourse, saying he hoped to see them throughout the city.

The countdown signals have also already been installed along Queens Boulevard, Hillside Avenue and Kissena Boulevard in Queens and West Street in Manhattan, among other streets. They will eventually be come to 1,500 intersections citywide.

Off the Concourse, Vacca called for two measures in particular to keep speeds down. He repeated his endorsement of 20 mile per hour speed limits, saying they could work in many neighborhoods, given “local input” in the process. Vacca had hoped that the city’s first 20 mile per hour speed zone would be located in his district, though DOT selected the Claremont section of the Bronx for the first site.

Vacca also urged Albany to pass legislation allowing the city to install automated cameras to enforce the speed limit. “Many motorists have to look themselves in the mirror,” he said. A pedestrian hit at 30 miles per hour, the New York City speed limit, has an 80 percent chance of surviving the crash; a pedestrian hit at 40 miles per hour has only a 30 percent chance of survival. Speeding, said Vacca, is “something we can’t have any tolerance for.”

Vacca’s commitment to promoting street safety through enforcement stands in tension with his positions on redesigning the streets themselves for the same purpose. The transportation committee chair seems more willing to let speeding continue if reining it in would require taking away a parking space, building a bike lane or creating a pedestrian plaza.

The Bronx is booming. Over the last decade, no borough added more new residents or posted faster wage growth.

The Bronx’s incredible resurgence even attracted national attention last week from USA Today, which turned to City Council Member James Vacca to explain the wave of residential development in the borough. Vacca used the opportunity to basically argue for halting growth in much of the outer boroughs, advocating for restrictions on density and higher parking requirements.

As both a council member and a community board district manager, Vacca has responded to rising demand for housing by fighting for zoning changes that would lock in a more car-centric cityscape. Neighborhoods like Throgs Neck were granted the city’s special suburban-style classification (the technical term is “Lower Density Growth Management Area“), meaning even more parking and even larger yards are now required for new development.

Regrettably, there’s nothing unusual about New York’s representatives closing the door to development in their neighborhoods by pushing for a major downzoning, even near transit. Swathes of the city have seen development restricted, nearly always to cheers from residents and elected officials.

On a City Council full of believers in subsidized parking, Vacca has managed to distinguish himself with a laser-like focus on providing more and cheaper parking, even right next to the subway. In explaining why development had to be limited, the transportation chair told USA Today, “Many of these row houses that went up came without parking or adequate parking.”

Nowhere has Vacca’s commitment to high parking requirements been more evident than in a rezoning adopted last March for the Westchester Square and Pelham Bay neighborhoods of the Bronx, which he strongly supported.

In 2006, the Department of City Planning had rezoned most of the area as low-density districts with high parking requirements. Along the last six stops of the 6 train, however, urban-style growth would still be allowed. In fact, City Planning explicitly reduced parking requirements on shopping streets close to transit. The East Bronx would be allowed to stay semi-suburban, but not near the subway.

Last year’s change effectively undid that policy, hiking parking requirements in the same areas where they had been left low.

Read more…

The Department of City Planning’s commitment to rezoning the city along more transit-oriented lines is a critical component of its sustainability agenda. Allowing more people to live and work next to transit means more people will ride transit and fewer will drive.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, upzonings have indeed been concentrated near transit. But what the administration gives with one hand, it takes with the other. Over the last decade, the Department of City Planning has also downzoned large swaths of transit-accessible land, preventing further development in these locations. Indeed, under one representative five-year period of Bloomberg and Burden’s city planning, three-quarters of the lots rezoned for greater density were located within a half-mile of rail transit, but so were two-thirds of the lots where development was further restricted, according to research by NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The pattern still holds. In fact, some of DCP’s most recent rezonings are restricting development on blocks literally around the corner from a subway stop.

Take the Williamsbridge/Baychester rezoning in the Bronx, which the City Planning Commission certified last month. There, an elevated train, the 2, runs up White Plains Avenue. Along White Plains itself, DCP proposes to either maintain the existing rules or allow slightly more growth. But turn the corner off the main street even a fraction of a block, and the department is seeking to sharply curtail the opportunity for growth.

At the 219th Street station, for example, the allowable floor area ratio (or FAR), a measure of density, would drop from 2.43 to 1.25 as soon as you move east off of White Plains. Parking minimums would rise, requiring 85 parking spots for every 100 homes (up from a 70 percent ratio). To the immediate northwest of the station, the proposed zoning would be even stricter, with a FAR of 1.1 and a parking space required for each new residential unit.

The story is the same one stop further north at 225th Street. Walk one short block south of the station, turn left and the allowable FAR drops to 0.9, again with a parking space required for each unit.

Two sides of the Baychester Avenue stop on the 5 line are slated for the same extremely restrictive zoning, but in that case there won’t even be any upzoning along a main street to compensate for it.

Those neighborhoods are in the northeast Bronx, near the end of the subway system. Even so, transit is heavily used in the area; in that City Council district, less than half of residents drive to work.

Moreover, DCP is tightening its zoning precisely because developers want to build in these areas. Explaining the need for the new restrictions, the department writes on its website that “the residential neighborhoods in the rezoning area have been experiencing development pressure” and that the new rules are needed to “preserve the scale and context of these areas.”

Read more…

Last month DOT announced plans for the city’s first 20 mph zone, located in the Claremont section of the Bronx. The agency’s presentation to the local community board is now online [PDF], so you can see how DOT plans to implement the slow zone strategy in what could be the first of several neighborhoods. The approach is low-cost but should be effective: Every entrance to the area will be marked with a highly visible “gateway” announcing the reduced speed limit, and the neighborhood will be blanketed with regularly-spaced speed humps.

A number of factors led DOT to select this quarter square mile of Claremont for the city’s first slow zone. There are five schools in the area, and the streets are relatively dangerous — the number of injuries per mile is higher than almost three-quarters of NYC’s streets. The DOT presentation also notes that Claremont has clearly defined boundaries, with an elevated train on the west and the Sheridan Expressway on the east, making it easier to set the zone apart from the other city streets.

When drivers enter that zone, it will be immediately clear that they are meant to slow down. At each entry point, large signs announcing the 20 mph zone and surface markings narrowing the right-of-way will replace one parking space on each side of the street. Compare the rendering above to a typical school zone treatment, where the signs don’t figure so prominently within the motorist’s field of vision:

Read more…

Last week’s tragic bus crash in the Bronx, which left 15 dead, has captured the attention of New York’s media and political elite. Since the crash took place nine days ago, the New York Times has published no fewer than seven articles updating its readers on every detail and development.

Much of the attention has centered around whether Ophadell Williams, the bus’s driver, should have been licensed to operate the bus in the first place. Governor Andrew Cuomo took a break from high-stakes budget negotiations to order an investigation of Williams’ driving and criminal records and Senator Chuck Schumer has called for the state DMV to audit every driver’s license held by a tour bus driver. Said Schumer in a WNYC report, “Looking after a crash, or a spot check while the driver is behind the wheel, that’s good, but what would be better is preventing these people who shouldn’t be driving, from getting behind the wheel in the first place.”

Schumer’s focus on prevention must be cold comfort to the family of Peter and Lillian Sabados. The elderly couple were killed in a hit-and-run crash while walking to Thanksgiving Mass in 2009. Their killer, Allmir Lekperic, had amassed at least 29 license suspensions in the three years beforehand. Any attempt to prevent Lekperic from getting behind the wheel in the first place was clearly ineffective.

You’d never know it from watching the news this week, but there are far more Allmir Lekperics in the world than deadly bus drivers. Each year, around 375 people are killed in bus crashes nationwide, according to a 2009 report by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration [PDF]. The bulk of those deaths come from crashes involving school buses and transit buses; charter and tour buses were involved in only 396 out of 2,629 fatalities between 1999 and 2005, around 57 a year.

Compare that to the number of people killed in crashes with improperly licensed drivers. One in five fatal traffic crashes nationwide involves at least one driver without a valid license, according to research by the AAA Foundation [PDF]. Those crashes killed an average of 8,801 people each year.

Crashes involving unlicensed drivers, therefore, killed more than 154 times as many people as all crashes involving charter buses.

Read more…

Parking minimums continue to stymie the creation of affordable housing in New York City, according to an architect who frequently designs those projects. When a rezoning suddenly put parking minimums in effect for an affordable housing project in the Bronx, Richard Ferrara of DeLaCour & Ferrara Architects was forced to cut apartments out of the building.

The HUD-sponsored project, located on Bathgate Avenue between 183rd and 184th Streets, was originally slated to be an 18-unit building. Under the zoning that used to govern the site, the parking minimums were low enough that fewer than five spaces were required, said Ferrara. With such a small number of required spaces, the project was eligible for a waiver, meaning it didn’t need to build any parking at all.

In October, however, the area was classified as a “neighborhood preservation area” by the Department of City Planning in its Third Avenue/Tremont Avenue rezoning. The new zoning, known as R6A, carries slightly higher parking requirements for affordable projects [PDF]. “When we went down to an R6A,” said Ferrara, “it put us in a position where we couldn’t get the parking waived.” In effect, the rezoning added parking requirements where there hadn’t been any before.

Including the now-required parking in the project came at the cost of affordable housing. “We had to reduce the number of apartments. We wound up losing two apartments,” said Ferrara.

In general, said Ferrara, parking minimums add to the cost of projects. “There’s a cost implication,” he said. “In some places you have to go into the cellar, it becomes more expensive.”

Even though he reported that it’s “not uncommon” to subdivide a project into smaller buildings in order to receive a waiver for each half, Ferrara said even that “is a cost item.” If you subdivided a taller project to avoid parking requirements, you’d have to spend twice the money and space on elevators, he offered as an example.

Two affordable units are not, on their own, the difference between an affordable housing market and an unaffordable one. But if it’s routine for parking requirements to cut 11 percent of the units out of other affordable projects, the impact would be substantial indeed. That’s not a price worth paying for the dubious goal of making it easier and cheaper to drive in New York City.