Times critic Michael Kimmelman and NYC Planning Director Amanda Burden on a walking tour of the South Bronx last year. Image: NYT

The fight to eliminate parking minimums in New York City just went mainstream.

As part of a wide-ranging exploration of parking lots and public space set to run in Sunday’s paper, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman signed on to the growing list of people urging New York City’s Department of City Planning to scrap the costly and outdated requirements that force new developments in most of the city to include parking. The whole article is well worth a read, but here’s Kimmelman’s NYC-specific recommendation:

For big cities like New York it is high time to abandon outmoded zoning codes from the auto-boom days requiring specific ratios of parking spaces per housing unit, or per square foot of retail space. These rules about minimum parking spaces have driven up the costs of apartments for developers and residents, damaged the environment, diverted money that could have gone to mass transit and created a government-mandated cityscape that’s largely unused. We keep adding to the glut of parking lots. Crain’s recently reported on the largely empty garages at new buildings like Avalon Fort Greene, a 42-story luxury tower near downtown Brooklyn, and 80 DeKalb Avenue, up the block, both well occupied, both of which built hundreds of parking spaces to woo tenants. Garages near Yankee Stadium, built over the objections of Bronx neighbors appalled at losing parkland for yet more parking lots, turn out never to be more than 60 percent full, even on game days. The city has lost public space, the developers have lost a fortune.

Kimmelman hits the nail on the head, noting that the parking requirements are an environmental disaster in America’s most car-free city, an obstacle to the construction of badly-needed housing, and often incompatible with good urban design. In calling for the outright elimination of parking minimums, Kimmelman goes far beyond the reforms being hinted at by DCP. Right now, DCP is only considering a reduction in parking minimums and only in a few neighborhoods near the Manhattan core. No actual proposal to cut the “inner ring” parking requirements has been released, though DCP has proposed eliminating parking minimums for affordable housing in the Manhattan core.

Kimmelman’s endorsement should carry weight at DCP, however. DCP director Amanda Burden prides herself on her commitment to urban design and she took Kimmelman on a tour of the South Bronx for his inaugural article as architecture critic. If anyone can persuade Burden to act boldly, it might be him.

At 295 Avenue P, in Bensonhurst, surface parking takes up the entire ground floor. Photo: Joseph Kodransky

Here they are: the first set of reader-submitted “pedestrian burdens,” courtesy of Michael Kodransky, co-author of ITDP’s recent report on European parking policy innovations.

In this photo series, Streetsblog is cataloging the parking lots and garages that erode New York’s pedestrian realm, whether through blank walls, repeated curb cuts or unsightly structures. City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden is committed to making New York City a paragon of good urban design, but all too frequently new development makes the city more hostile to pedestrians. Burden’s planning department bears responsibility. The agency continues to defend parking minimums across most of the city, and the resulting proliferation of space for car storage is fundamentally incompatible with the walkable urbanism that Burden wants to foster.

Not all of the pedestrian-unfriendly buildings showcased in this series are the direct result of parking minimums, but they show the kind of urban design that parking minimums cause, and they illustrate how the planning department is failing to stand up for a quality walking environment.

Bensonhurst’s 295 Avenue P, shown above, is the result of a developer who needed no help from the city to build a terrible pedestrian environment. To walk into the building, you have to pass through the surface lot that wraps it on two sides. The building faces West 3rd Street with a low, blank brick wall meant only to enclose the surface lot. With 24 ground-floor parking spaces for its 20 residential units, including all that parking was the developer’s prerogative. But even an enlightened builder wouldn’t have come up with something much better. The city required ten parking spaces, and the most cost-effective option is to put them on the ground floor.

In Long Island City, the massive parking garages for the Queens West development flank both sides of 47th Road. Photo: Michael Kodransky

In Long Island City, the Queens West development serves up an even bigger architectural disaster, thanks to multi-story parking decks. Queens West is a state project not subject to city zoning, but it was built to specifications that apply in many parts of the city, with parking spaces for 60 percent of units. That parking was concentrated into a few parcels, leading to the vista shown here, at 47th Road and 5th Street. Nothing frames the Empire State Building like six stories of structured parking.

On the other side of 5th Street, where city retains control over land use, parking maximums replaced parking minimums in the mid-1990s. The two garages shown in this picture, which have room for a combined 1419 spaces, would be illegal. Development in Long Island City is booming, as the New York Times recently reported. At Hunters Point South, a nearby mega-development planned by the city, the Bloomberg administration put in place a 40 percent parking maximum, stricter than what is in place in the rest of Long Island City.

City agencies are producing a better urban environment in this part of Queens than state agencies, but in much of New York the city is still encouraging Queens West-style, parking-saturated development. The planning commissioner should be asking, which is the better model for development: Hunters Point South and the rest of Long Island City, or Queens West?

Four buildings along Vinegar Hill's Evans Street, four parking garages. Photo: Michael Kodransky

These low-rise buildings in Vinegar Hill illustrate what a 50 percent parking requirement looks like in a rowhouse context. Each of these four buildings along Evans Street, clearly constructed together, houses two residential units and a one-car garage. The curb cuts take away almost as much on-street parking as the off-street spaces provide. These garages probably weren’t required by law — the development was small enough to receive a waiver — but for whatever reason, the developer built the required level of parking anyway. Regardless, the ground floor of one side of this pleasant residential street was given over to car storage.

Garages, curb cuts, and blank walls eating away at the sidewalks in your neighborhood? Email your photos to tips@streetsblog.org and make sure to include the address of the buildings.

At 1 Morningside Drive, parking minimums forced the construction of a 148-space garage. The developers put the parking on the ground floor, creating a blank wall facing a busy pedestrian street. Photo: Noah Kazis

Get your cameras ready, Streetsbloggers. It’s time to show Department of City Planning Director Amanda Burden what city-mandated parking garages are doing to the streets in your neighborhood.

In most of New York, it’s illegal to build anything of a certain size without a certain amount of parking, thanks to 1960s-era mandates in the city zoning code. Despite ample research showing that parking minimums encourage car ownership and cause traffic, DCP claims otherwise and clings to the position that these mandates are necessary.

Traffic isn’t the only cost of parking minimums, and under Burden DCP has at least acknowledged two other important ways they harm the city. Parking minimums increase the cost of housing, as the commissioner has stated, and parking on the ground floor erodes the pedestrian environment.

In some areas, DCP is beginning to rewrite the city’s archaic zoning regulations to try and prevent parking from taking the place of ground-floor retail, lobbies, stoops, and other uses that connect buildings to the sidewalk. On Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, where a 2003 rezoning led to a wave of development with ground floors dominated by ventilation ducts and even surface parking, DCP reversed course. In June, the department put out new rules forbidding curb cuts across the sidewalk, barring parking along the ground floor street frontage and encouraging retail uses. A draft rewrite of the parking regulations for much of Manhattan would eliminate a key incentive to build ground floor parking. In these select locations, Amanda Burden is making good on her widely-touted commitment to quality urban design.

Most of the city isn’t so lucky, however. In Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, parking is required in new developments. In practice, because developers often find it impractical to build underground parking, that often means the city is reserving ground floors for parking. Instead of new development fostering an engaging public realm, pedestrians encounter blank walls and curb cuts. The good news is that DCP is in the process of revising parking regulations for the “inner ring” of neighborhoods around the Manhattan core, which presents an excellent opportunity to stop forcing these dead spaces on neighborhoods everywhere.

Writing about parking regulations can get dry, so Streetsblog is going to start making the case visually. We need your help for our new photo series: “Pedestrian Burdens.”

Send us pictures of buildings in your neighborhood where parking harms pedestrian space, whether it’s a ground-floor garage, an egregious curb cut, or an ugly surface lot. Bonus points for buildings covered by parking minimums (larger buildings in Upper Manhattan or the other four boroughs) and built during the Bloomberg administration. Email your photos to tips@streetsblog.org and make sure to include the address of the buildings. We’ll feature the best on Streetsblog, building a visual case for Amanda Burden and DCP to act decisively on this critical urban design issue.

We’re starting with three of our own. The photo at the top of the post is from 1 Morningside Drive. That blank wall contains a garage with 148 parking spots, right at ground level.

On that site, on the north side of 110th Street, developer AvalonBay was required to provide a space for 50 percent of the building’s 295 units. It didn’t build a single parking spot beyond what was required by law. Had the same building gone up literally across the street, it would have been subject to parking maximums, not minimums. That solid brick wall of parking might have been more housing, retail, or open space. No wonder AvalonBay Senior VP Fred Harris has publicly called for parking minimums to be reformed.

Another blank wall created by a city-mandated parking garage, this time at 111th Street and St. Nicholas. Photo: Noah Kazis

A few blocks east on 110th sits 111 Central Park North, the most expensive building in Harlem. The front door, facing the park, boasts an elegant setback and sculpture. The luxury building presents the rest of the neighborhood, however, with a featureless wall, one-story tall. That’s its 34-car garage.

Again, the developers didn’t build a single space more than they were required to by the district’s 40 percent parking requirement. The building sits on top of the 2/3 train, three stops from Times Square.

Even without parking minimums, ground-floor garages get built on pedestrian-oriented streets. Photo: Ben Fried

City requirements aren’t the only reason parking interrupts the public realm, of course. At 655 Washington Avenue, the architect placed two single-car garages at ground level. The ten-unit building earned a waiver from the area’s parking minimums, so these were spaces the developer wanted. In fact, they’d have been eligible to build them even under Manhattan’s strictest parking maximums. Even so, the garages interrupt what is elsewhere a mixed-use street with ground-floor retail.

The research on parking coming out of Amanda Burden's planning department has serious flaws. Will sloppy studies undercut promising reforms brewing inside DCP? Image: Wikipedia

Streetsblog reported yesterday that DCP is preparing significant revisions to parking policies in the Manhattan core. Limits on parking in Manhattan are a decades-old cornerstone of the city’s traffic management policies, but developers know how to game the rules and take advantage of loopholes, leading to the construction of large new garages in some of the most walkable neighborhoods in the country. Parking experts praised DCP’s reform package for tightening the rules and laying out an updated approach to parking policy appropriate for a dense urban setting.

Those plans are still just a draft, however, and DCP’s final proposal could look much different. The powerful real estate industry is mobilizing against not only the proposed reforms, but existing parking limits as well. Meanwhile, factions within DCP seem intent on undermining the draft parking reforms, while the top of the department appears rudderless on the issue. Lately the City Planning Commission has issued a handful of pronouncements about the relevance of parking policy to a good pedestrian environment, but Planning Chair Amanda Burden has yet to make a sustained public stand on matters of off-street parking.

Any adjustment to the city’s parking rules must go through the City Council, where the influence of the real estate industry will be felt. And the industry’s lobbying arm, the Real Estate Board of New York, wants to undo parking limits already in effect in Manhattan.

Currently, developers of new housing can’t attach parking to more than 20 percent of residences below 60th Street or 35 percent of residences below West 110th and East 96th Streets. “We would like to see those maximums raised to accommodate the auto ownership in those neighborhoods,” said Mike Slattery, senior vice president for REBNY. A more detailed set of real estate industry recommendations drafted by the law firm Kramer Levin [PDF] opposes most, but not all, of the draft parking reforms currently circulating inside DCP.

Interestingly, REBNY’s rationale for opposing parking maximums echoes DCP’s own studies. Borrowing a line from DCP’s 2009 residential parking study, Slattery argued that car ownership is independent of parking supply and instead determined mainly by household income. The implication is that parking maximums only lead to parking shortages, not to reduced car ownership and driving.

The argument is faulty (more on that below), yet DCP itself continues to perpetuate it. Despite the department’s forward-thinking draft proposal to reform parking policies in the Manhattan core, not everyone seems to be on board. The department’s transportation division houses a faction determined to provide the city with a steady supply of new parking spaces, even in the heart of Manhattan. The division is at work on a new study of public parking in the Manhattan core, and a draft recently obtained by Streetsblog [PDF] mainly serves to justify the need for more parking.

The presentation on the parking study [PDF] states: “Vehicle registrations in all of Manhattan increased 39 percent between 1982 and 2009, despite the 1982 policy to reduce parking.” Like Slattery, DCP’s transportation division is arguing that parking maximums do not, in fact, reduce car ownership. It’s the mirror image of previous claims from DCP that parking minimums do not induce car ownership. The argument is also riddled with flaws.

Parking construction is mandated uptown, so it’s completely improper for DCP to lump vehicle registrations inside the Manhattan core together with registrations outside the core. “This is, near as I can tell, an example of the sloppy nature of these studies. They’re fast and loose with their definitions to support the points they want to get to,” said Dave King, a planning professor at Columbia University. “There’s still hundreds of thousands of people north of Central Park who are all subject to parking minimums.”

Rachel Weinberger, a University of Pennsylvania planning professor, noted that the actual change in car ownership in the Manhattan core is consistent with the assertion that the parking maximums have worked.

Similar errors abound in DCP’s study, and all point in the same direction. Finding that car ownership in Manhattan is linked to income and parenthood, DCP concluded that “demographic changes among Manhattan residents have led to an increase in the number of private vehicles in the Core.” Again, the intent is apparently to dispel the idea that parking regulations affect car ownership rates. But correlation is not causation. It could be that the creation of more parking caused more high-income families to move to Manhattan.

It could also be a coincidence, as when DCP found a strong correlation between finance-sector employment and the number of vehicles entering the Manhattan core. The department interpreted that to mean that structural economic shifts rather than parking policy affect travel behavior. However, environmental planner Dan Gutman crunched the numbers himself and found that interpretation wanting. Even though finance employment has risen, he said, “hub-bound morning peak (7-10 am) volumes have remained essentially flat since 1978.” Since most high-paying finance jobs have daytime hours, it doesn’t appear to be the case that new financiers are crowding the streets.

A graph compiled by environmental planner Dan Gutman shows how a DCP study cherrypicked data to undermine the city's parking maximums. The red line, showing the amount of parking, appears to diverge from the blue line, the daily motor vehicle trips into the Manhattan core, evidence DCP used to argue the maximums were a failure. But the parking trend fits closely with the green line, showing total vehicle accumulation in the area, a more appropriate measure.

Instead, Gutman found that total vehicle accumulation in the central business district, the sum of all cars parked and driving in the area, declined in line with decreases in the parking supply. “This seems to imply that the increase in 24-hour hub-bound entries was largely related to through traffic or possibly other traffic during evening hours, and that reduced parking may have had the intended effect of reducing vehicle accumulation,” said Gutman. “Thus the 1982 parking policy may have been a striking success rather than a failure.”

Perhaps the most fundamental problem with DCP’s study is that it tallies up the benefits of parking without accounting for its costs. The authors are sure to note that “there will always be a need for people with medical conditions to drive.” Drivers entering Manhattan for entertainment or shopping trips, the report states, “should not be discouraged from parking in the Manhattan Core. They are a user group which generates revenue for the city and since they are likely to travel during off-peak hours and carpool, they do not create additional peak-period traffic congestion.”

No doubt shoppers bring revenue to the city, but so would the additional retail space that could be built in place of a parking garage. DCP’s report neglects to mention that. Likewise building more housing instead of parking would reduce rents for everyone. DCP officials, from director Amanda Burden to sustainability director Howard Slatkin, have publicly articulated some of the costs of parking in the past, but none of those costs were tallied in this study.

The pro-parking tenor of DCP’s Manhattan core study is difficult to square with the draft parking reforms proposed by the department. Inside DCP, it seems, support for more progressive parking policies does not run deep.

Any parking reforms will have a difficult path forward, given the internal divisions at DCP, the opposition from the real estate industry, and the political difficulty of moving progressive parking policies through the City Council. Unless Amanda Burden shows leadership on the issue, a promising initiative to plan for a more sustainable city might not have much of a future.

Innovative street designs including the Ninth Avenue bike lane helped NYC claim the EPA's award for overall excellence in smart growth. Photo: Kyle Gradinger/Bike Coalition of Greater Philadelphia

NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden were down in D.C. yesterday to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual “Overall Excellence in Smart Growth” award. The EPA highlighted four PlaNYC-related initiatives for recognition: NYC DOT’s Street Design Manual, the city’s Active Design Guidelines, City Planning’s Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, and the zoning amendment that passed in 2009 requiring new apartments and offices to include bike parking.

At a time when some local elected officials are raring to tear out pedestrian safety improvements and erase bike lanes, New York’s new street designs are receiving honors as nationally significant innovations. In the award announcement, the EPA singled out the city’s construction of more than 20 miles of protected bike lanes as an example of “implementing world-class street designs that support multi-modal transportation and help achieve environmental and other community goals.”

The EPA has given out smart growth awards in several categories since 2002. Stay tuned for more on yesterday’s winners from Tanya Snyder at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

Photo: Heath Brandon via Flickr.

Big news from today’s Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance conference: a new city-subsidized ferry service will begin crossing the East River in May. City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden announced that the new service will run for at least two years, departing at least every fifteen minutes during rush hour.

Making the ferry service possible, said Burden, were the series of rezonings that have spurred growth along the transit-poor waterfront, creating a pool of potential customers. Accordingly, the service will begin by serving Hunters Point South, Greenpoint, North Williamsburg, South Williamsburg, Fulton Ferry, and both Downtown and Midtown Manhattan.

We’ll bring you more information about the ferry plans as it becomes available.

City Planning will decide whether to let this 44th Street parking garage buck the Clean Air Act and store 90 more cars than currently allowed by law. Image: Google Street View.

With two days until the City Planning Commission votes on the parking-heavy Riverside Center mega-project, the commissioners had a chance yesterday to ask any final questions about the project before the vote. As it happened, they didn’t bring up parking at that section of the meeting, but parking was a hot topic elsewhere on the commission’s agenda, including a pair of requests for special permits to build more parking below 60th Street.

First up, though, was an example of more enlightened planning: Courtlandt Crescent, slated to be the next development in the South Bronx’s much-heralded Melrose Commons revitalization project. This 217-apartment project, which will also house a 10,000 square foot child-care center, will include 29 spaces for cars, according to Department of City Planning staffer Vineeta Mathur. Courtlandt Crescent will also have parking for 110 bicycles.

When planning commission member Angela Battaglia wondered why there was so little car parking included, chair Amanda Burden responded, “It’s expensive. As you know, it would affect the affordability.” Battaglia then agreed that the affordability levels were indeed admirable.

Next was a request for a special permit to build a 42-space garage on the ground floor of a downtown office building. The building, located at the corner of Water and Broad Streets, is going to be the new home of the New York Daily News, and the News is requesting the garage so that its reporters and photographers can quickly get in a car and drive off to cover a story, according to DCP’s Grace Han. The garage would convert an existing loading bay and an under-used mailroom.

The desire to use ground floor space for a parking garage stands in sharp contrast to the Downtown Alliance’s new vision for Water Street, which calls for remaking the entire length of the corridor to put pedestrians first and revitalize street life. That vision has started to take shape with a DOT pedestrian plaza at Water and Whitehall Streets [PDF].

The final item was another special permit for a parking garage, this time a public garage on West 44th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. The garage currently is allowed to hold 260 cars but often stores more and has been cited for doing so by the Department of Buildings, according to DCP’s Erike Sellke. The garage, which exits onto 43rd Street across the street from an elementary school, is applying for permission to hold up to 350 cars.

Both Manhattan lots require a special permit because no new off-street parking is allowed in Manhattan south of 60th Street without one, in order for the city to comply with the federal Clean Air Act. But special permits are nearly always granted, weakening the effectiveness of the regulation. Things got so bad that a lawsuit recently forced the city to crack down on special permits and put a hard cap on the number of off-street spaces in the Hudson Yards area on Manhattan’s Far West Side. As part of the settlement, the City Planning Commission stated in city law that limiting the amount of off-street parking is an important component of “creating an area with a transit-and pedestrian-oriented neighborhood character.”

The West 44th Street lot is just one block away from the Hudson Yards area. Will the same logic apply?

The drawings released by Extell Development don't draw attention to the blank walls and curb cuts that would disrupt the sidewalk at Riverside Center.

A hearing on the Riverside Center mega-development yesterday revealed a popular hunger for a more walkable West Side and perhaps some interest from the City Planning Commission in the same. Extell Development is looking to build a housing and retail complex, including 1,800 parking spaces, on this waterfront site equivalent in size to two Manhattan blocks. Public testimony called for a slew of urban design improvements to their plan, including reducing the amount of off-street parking, integrating the site with the surrounding streetscape, and working towards burying the elevated Miller Highway.

As chair Amanda Burden and the other commissioners now deliberate over the approvals the project needs, they have the power to determine whether this block on Manhattan’s West Side will be dominated by the automobile or develop into a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, in line with the goals of PlaNYC.

Efforts to better integrate Riverside Center with the surrounding neighborhood and streetscape got the most play yesterday. In Extell’s plans for the project, retail faces the inside of the development and passersby would see largely blank walls rising from the sidewalk, with the streets sloping down to the waterfront and the buildings stationed on an elevated platform. That wall would be interrupted by a slew of curb cuts to enter Extell’s proposed 1,800-space parking garage and auto showroom and service center.

“The development turns its back on the street,” said Brian Cook, the land use director for Borough President Scott Stringer. “It systematically ignores the rich context of the area,” explained Community Board 7 chair Mel Wymore.

The City Planning Commission appeared receptive to this critique. “Does one see an auto showroom as something that enlivens the edge of the project?” Burden asked Extell president Gary Barnett after he testified. “What is going to energize the sidewalk and the street life at the front of this project?”

Other commissioners pressed the developers and architects about the effect of driveways, retail, stairways, and platforms on the pedestrian environment. The developer, in turn, outlined a few minor steps to address the issue, such as changing a staircase to 59th Street into a slope.

But one underlying cause of the streetlife-deadening platform is the excessive amount of parking that Extell is seeking to build, according to Ethel Sheffer, a CB 7 member and former president of the New York American Planning Association chapter. The platform “is there in large part because it satisfies an extensive request of 1,800 parking spaces on two levels,” she said.

The second level of Extell's proposed 1,800 space garage covers the entire four-block site. Image: Extell Development

Those 1,800 spaces, which require special permits from the commission, would create a development dominated by the automobile, perhaps to a degree unmatched by any project in the Clean Air Act zone below 60th Street. The community board and borough president each recommended against allowing 1,800 spaces at Riverside Center.

Parking received some attention from the commission at the very start of yesterday’s hearing. Commissioner Richard Eaddy cited the community board’s request for a smaller lot and asked Barnett why he didn’t agree with the board.

“We’re actually cutting out parking from the area,” said Barnett, arriving at that claim by adding the surface parking currently on the site to the number of spaces he thinks his tenants will demand. “We’re going to be down 800 or 1,000 spaces,” said Barnett.

CB 7 member Ken Coughlin laid out just how inflated Extell’s demands are. If the commission simply used the same calculations in effect at the nearby Hudson Yards project, he said, only 768 spaces would be built. “Should we be creating additional incentives to drive in an already congested and polluted urban environment?” he asked.

The commission has written that one of its goals for Hudson Yards was to “limit the amount of off-street parking… consistent with the objective of creating an area with a transit- and pedestrian-oriented neighborhood character.” Riverside Center could be the first large-scale development near Hudson Yards where the commission proves it is truly committed to that goal.

The elevated Miller Highway running in front of Riverside South. Photo: Riverside South Planning Corp.

Other testimony focused on ensuring that the project furthers efforts to bury the elevated Miller Highway between 59th and 72nd Streets. According to architect Daniel Gutman, who helped design the original plan for the Riverside South complex, the 1991 agreement required that the developer build the northbound tube for a tunnel while the state would build the southbound tube. Some of that construction has already taken place. Actually burying the road, however, would require additional funding that isn’t available yet — the highway was renovated only 15 years ago.

Even so, many urged the commission to do what it takes to move the plan forward, whether by extracting more funds from Extell or simply not obstructing the current slow progress toward a tunnel. “The space is still marred and made dangerous and oppressed by the highway,” said former Municipal Art Society president Kent Barwick.

“The vision that drove that compromise was the relocation of the overhead road,” said Barbara Fife, a former Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning under David Dinkins. She urged that the Commission require the developer to complete part of the southbound tunnel in order to gain approval.

Burden showed some attention to the potential of a buried Miller Highway, at one point asking Extell’s landscape architect how her plans would change if the highway were moved underground.

In addition to requests for design and planning improvements, testifiers made strong demands yesterday for Extell to build a new school and provide more affordable housing. To the extent that negotiations pit competing priorities against each other, the commission will need to fight that much harder to make Riverside Center a walkable place and not let sustainability fall by the wayside.

Flushing Commons puts growth next to a major transit hub, but it's stashing a lot of parking there as well. Image: Rockefeller Group Development Corporation.

First, let's see what City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden had to say. Burden understands that Flushing is rapidly turning into a downtown all its own, calling the area "one of the city’s most dynamic regional centers," and that it deserves development suited for a downtown, not a suburb.

More important, Burden highlighted the critical importance of building a walkable, dense project in a neighborhood with the busiest subway station outside Manhattan, 21 different bus routes and a Long Island Railroad station, and the third-busiest pedestrian intersection in all of New York. Explaining her support for the project, Burden said Flushing Commons "exemplifies sustainable, transit-oriented development that capitalizes on Flushing's exceptional subway, bus and commuter rail access."

All of that is true, and Burden's stated support for transit-oriented rezoning has generally translated to real-world results: Under Burden, the Department of City Planning's many rezonings have, on average, pushed growth towards transit. 

But Flushing Commons will also include around 1,600 parking spaces, all priced below market rates. That means residents, shoppers, and workers at the mixed-use project will be driving into downtown Flushing, not taking transit. That doesn't exemplify sustainability; it enshrines a car-centric lifestyle in steel and cement. 

Keep in mind that the total amount of parking is far greater than the developer wants to build or than the Department of City Planning itself requires. It was mandated by EDC and essentially pulled out of a hat.

So what does the city, ostensibly dedicated to reducing automobile use, have to say about stuffing so many more cars into horribly congested downtown Flushing? According to the developer, Michael Meyer, parking never came up at the planning commission meeting.

Mayor Bloomberg, however, raised the issue in a press release praising the commission's vote. The commission's action, he said, "moves us one step closer to reinvigorating downtown Flushing with new housing and retail options, hotel or office space, and much-needed additional parking for the area's residents and visitors." For the mayor, it seems, making it easier to drive into a booming, dense, transit-rich downtown isn't a violation of the principles of PlaNYC, but a neighborhood perk. 

This project, which replaces a vitality-sapping 1,100-spot surface parking lot, is very close to being, as Burden argues, a transit-oriented home run, putting hundreds of thousands of square feet of new development in one of Queens' most walkable and transit-accessible sites. But instead, it's going to give more space to storing private vehicles than to retail and office space combined.

Unfortunately, things aren't likely to get any better when the project goes to City Council. Both local council members, Peter Koo and Dan Halloran, support adding even more parking to Flushing Commons. 

On the west side of Manhattan, Extell Development is proposing to build two levels of below-ground parking, each covering most of the two-block footprint of the Riverside Center site. Image: Extell Development [PDF]

The City Planning Commission certified Extell Development's parking-filled Riverside Center proposal yesterday afternoon, setting in motion the city's land use review process. Certification is more about completing paperwork than rendering judgment, but the discussion of the proposal did offer a few clues about which aspects of the three-million square foot project are front and center in the minds of planning commissioners.

Although commissioners raised questions about the pedestrian environment, no one asked specifically about Extell's requests for special permits to build 1,800 underground parking spaces and the five curb cuts that will provide access to them.

Still, approval of Extell's current proposal appears far from predetermined. "As you might imagine, we have some problems with that proposal, and we will discuss it extensively during the public review process," City Planning Commission Chair Amanda Burden announced at one point, interrupting the presentation of the project.

The provision of affordable housing looks to be the most contentious issue. Although Extell is seeking a raft of revisions to an earlier development pact, the developer wants to build the same amount of affordable housing offered when that agreement was reached 17 years ago. Burden made clear that she believes times have changed since 1993, and that Extell will have to include more robust affordable housing provisions to pass muster.

Commissioner Anna Levin came the closest to raising the issue of excessive parking, when she asked about the car dealership and service center included in Extell's proposal. She called for "a larger discussion about policy" in an area that she said "has historically been Auto Row, but let's face it, isn't anymore." She implied that the commission ought to take a hard look at the centrality of the automobile along Manhattan's far west side, noting that a certification hearing wasn't the time to do so.

After yesterday's hearing, the Riverside Center proposal now moves into the public review process. Manhattan Community Board 7 gets a look at the project next; it has 60 days to hold a public hearing and issue its recommendations. After that, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has 30 days to make his recommendations. The City Planning Commission gets another look at Riverside Center at that point, issuing official approvals, disapprovals, or modifications to the plan. That step, the first with binding power, is currently scheduled for September 15.

The City Council gets the final say, with the ability to approve, reject, or modify whatever reaches it. The council is likely to show significant deference to local Council Member Gale Brewer, who has indicated that she believes the Extell proposal includes too much parking.

Will City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden foster walkable development and livable streets in her third term? Image: Wikipedia.

The rezonings are not stopping. The department recently announced plans to rezone two underutilized commercial corridors in the Bronx for mixed-use development. Planners also continue to facilitate mega-projects in conjunction with the NYC Economic Development Corporation, like the redevelopment of Willets Point in Flushing.

So in the next four years, will New York's planners adopt more sustainable practices or continue the status quo? The department's clear awareness of the need for transit-oriented, sustainable growth gives hope for improvement. But the experts Streetsblog spoke to all agreed that change is needed.

One frequent criticism of the department is that city planners employ a piecemeal approach, without using all the tools at their disposal. "There's a joke about the Department of City Planning," said Joan Byron of the the Pratt Center for Community Development, "that they're really the Department of City Zoning."

The sentiment that "rezonings are not enough" was shared by many. Planning "shouldn't be a sporadic, ad-hoc thing, but a comprehensive approach," said Ron Shiffman, a co-founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development and a former planning commissioner. "I thought that's what PlaNYC 2030 would help us do."

Shiffman urged the incorporation of transit planning earlier in the development process. "They should be putting in transit lines that are guaranteed prior to the development," he said. "There should be a rider and seat evaluation before any redevelopment or any very high-density rezoning."

"The fact is that we're not trying to leverage our transit system to create more pedestrian or transit-oriented environments."

Jonathan Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, generally agreed. "For several of the rezonings," he said, "there should have been more transportation planning." 

City agencies are not strangers to the idea of getting developers to help finance expanded transit service. Just this month, EDC president Seth Pinsky signaled his agency's interest in "value capture" -- channeling some of the value of real estate development into the addition of transit capacity. Interestingly, Shiffman identified Hudson Yards and the 7 Line extension as one of the only places where this has occurred, although he doesn't endorse the entire project.

Another repeatedly voiced suggestion is that the planning department needs to do more to address flaws embedded in the entire zoning code, rather than focus mainly on individual rezonings. "There will still be opportunities to continue these targeted rezonings," said L. Nicolas Ronderos of the Regional Plan Association, "but moving forward I'd like to see more technical revisions to the underlying code."

On that score, revising the 50-year-old off-street parking requirements in the zoning code would present a huge opportunity for sustainability and livable streets.

The Domino Sugar redevelopment in North Brooklyn, now undergoing public review, would construct 1,694 new parking spots. Image: thenewdomino.com.

Eighteen months ago, a broad coalition of environmental, transportation and planning advocates called on the planning department to implement a package of parking reforms [PDF]. While the department has begun to study some of the questions raised by these groups, no concrete reforms have been enacted.

The parking reform recommendations, which accompanied the release of the report Suburbanizing the City, urge the city to eliminate parking minimums, institute parking maximums near transit, stop subsidizing the construction of parking, and separate the price of parking from the price of housing (which can make housing more affordable while discouraging the purchase and construction of parking).

The key, said report co-author Rachel Weinberger, is to connect the planning department's transit-oriented zoning to a transit-oriented parking policy. "Even while our parking minimums are generally quite low," she said, "the fact is that we're not trying to leverage our transit system to create more pedestrian or transit-oriented environments around transit stations."

Off-street parking reform must overcome the territorial instinct of car owners who fear increased competition for on-street space. It's not an easy political lift. And reforming the mega-project approach to redevelopment will require a tougher stance with private sector builders, guided by a firmer vision for the future of the city.

Both tactics are necessary to deliver on the sustainability goals of PlaNYC. To do it, Mayor Bloomberg will have to show the same backbone he's displayed in his public health initiatives. "If you're the kind of tough love mayor that has the guts to ban smoking and transfats," argued Joan Byron, "you should be able to look the developers in the eye and tell them that it's a new world. If you won't develop a good urban environment, others will."

The Argyle, a new arrival on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue, is close to transit but cedes the ground floor to parking rather than retail or even a stoop. Parking requirements throughout New York compromise walkable development. Image: Brownstoner.

This is the second installment in a three-part series on the reshaping of New York City and its consequences for sustainability and livable streets. Read the first part here.

Yesterday we looked at the Department of City Planning's eight-year record on rezoning and its general success at creating opportunities for development near transit. Density, however, is only one piece of the planning process. Amanda Burden's planning department has laid the foundation for transit-oriented growth, but so far failed to create conditions where walkable development can flourish.

"Everyone's trying to remake themselves into New York while New York is trying to make itself a more suburban environment."

The department's parking policy is one major impediment. By requiring most new residential developments to include a minimum number of parking spaces per unit, the department is artificially inflating the supply of parking, inducing more traffic and subsidizing car ownership.

New research from Simon McDonnell, Josiah Madar and Vicki Been at NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy [PDF] shows how these policies actually concentrate parking in transit-rich areas.

Required parking per thousand square feet of land. Parking minimums actually consume the most space along transit lines.

The research reveals that although buildings near rail stations have lower parking minimums than those in more car-dependent areas, on average residential development within half a mile of rail is still required to have 46 parking spaces for every 100 housing units. Perversely, because you can build more densely near transit, parking minimums per square foot of land are actually higher where transit options are most robust. So even as the planning department tries to concentrate growth near transit lines, it is simultaneously filling that valuable real estate with unnecessary parking.

The impact of inserting so much new parking into the built environment is enormous.

New York City's parking minimums will add a billion more vehicle miles traveled per year by 2030, according to Transportation Alternatives' 2008 report, Suburbanizing the City. Parking minimums can also force new development to disengage from the street, creating unpleasant sidewalks and dead spaces for pedestrians, as seen on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue.

"Everyone's trying to remake themselves into New York while New York is trying to make itself a more suburban environment," said Rachel Weinberger, the lead author of the TA report and a professor of urban planning at UPenn. Weinberger argues that the combination of increased density and parking minimums means that the planning department is "pushing the urban form into a more Corbusian, towers-in-the-park shape." A form that has been discredited for the better part of 50 years.

Shortsighted parking policy has been complemented by outsized redevelopment projects widely seen as antithetical to sustainable planning. "The big way that Bloomberg projects have been anything but transit-oriented is not the rezonings, but those rezonings that have been combined with major redevelopment initiatives," said Joan Byron, the Director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center for Community Development. "These are the megaprojects: Yankee Stadium, Willets Point, or Coney Island, to name a few examples."

In these cases, Byron says, the planning department -- especially when working closely with the NYC Economic Development Corporation -- ignores good planning and instead "seeks to maximize the return on investment for a hypothetical developer." The upshot is that these megaprojects routinely sacrifice walkable streets in order to embrace the automobile, as Ron Shiffman, a co-founder of the Pratt Center and former planning commissioner, described for Streetsblog last November.

In some places, the planning department's transit-oriented rezonings and its auto-centric redevelopments sit cheek-by-jowl. The 1,248 parking space East River Plaza, for example, hulks next to the FDR Drive in East Harlem, while just a few blocks closer to the Lexington Avenue subway, huge swaths of the neighborhood were upzoned to take advantage of the area's transit resources.

The Department of City Planning's vision for Hudson Yards.

While the Bloomberg administration invests billions of city dollars in making Hudson Yards a "dynamic, transit-oriented urban center," it has also actively fought to make it a car-friendly location. These goals are fundamentally incompatible. "You can't make a place auto-accessible," said Weinberger, "without eroding the pedestrian and therefore the transit environment."

Bloomberg and Burden have undertaken a transformative rezoning of the city, mostly along transit-oriented lines. At the same time, their policies are not filling those transit-rich areas with development that actually fosters walking and transit use. Planners instead insist on the unnecessary construction of parking spaces and allow developers to import suburban standards into New York City's urban fabric. It's as if the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. In the third post of this series, we'll look at how the Bloomberg administration can use the next four years to better align its development policies.

This is the first installment in a three-part series on the reshaping of New York City and its consequences for sustainability and livable streets.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Department of Transportation has built hundreds of miles of bike lanes and given acres of Times Square to pedestrians. Together with the MTA, the city is moving to construct a new rapid bus network for New York. But when it comes to livability and green transportation, perhaps the biggest legacy of the Bloomberg years will be something less tangible: Zoning.

Since taking office in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden have rezoned one-fifth of New York City, approved countless special permits for developers, and assisted with financing for favored projects. Those decisions -- the scope of which haven't been seen since the total overhaul of NYC's zoning code in 1961 -- will shape the future of the city for generations. "The simple act of rezoning these areas," said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, "has already or will spur significant change in the landscape, the skyline, and the character of these neighborhoods."

PlaNYC forecasts that one million new residents will call New York City home by 2030. Zoning determines where growth happens and where those new New Yorkers will live. It can focus development in dense, transit-rich parts of the city or in more auto-dependent neighborhoods. And that in turn can spell the difference between a New York that increasingly favors transit, walking, and bicycling to get around, and a New York with more congestion, pollution, and dangerous streets.

Grading purely on location, the Bloomberg/Burden rezonings are, by and large, a bright spot in the administration's record, though not without significant flaws and missed opportunities.

The general thrust of the changes has been to funnel growth into relatively transit-rich locations. Simon McDonnell, a research fellow at NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, has conducted a detailed analysis of recent rezonings that examines proximity to transit. His research determined that, between 2003 and 2007, about three quarters of the lots rezoned for denser development were within a half-mile walk of rail transit stations. However, two thirds of downzoned lots -- where density has been restricted -- were also close to stations.

McDonnell's research suggests that even while the Bloomberg Administration has zoned for growth to be centered around transit, it has also closed off the possibility of more intensive transit-oriented development. The overall effect is positive, but it could be even better. "It's fair to say," McDonnell concluded, "that a majority of the net new residential capacity that came online during this time period was near rail transit."

The Department of City Planning has rezoned 20 percent of the city under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden. Click for an interactive version of this map on the planning department site.

The Department of City Planning cites prominent upzonings in transit rich areas like Downtown Brooklyn and the Bronx's Lower Concourse as examples of its transit-oriented strategy. At the same time, in particularly car-dependent areas like the Bayside neighborhood of northeastern Queens, the planning department has ensured that major development will not occur.

Joan Byron, director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center for Community Development, noted that "the political pressure to do these downzonings has often come from self-protective, predominantly homeowner communities," but that she still believes such downzonings promote sustainability.

The combination of zoning for density near transit and downzoning in car-dependent areas is a significant innovation, said L. Nicolas Ronderos, Director of Urban Development Programs at the Regional Plan Association. In praising what he called a "double approach," Ronderos argued that the planning department "sees transit-oriented development not just through the lens of rail but also of automobiles. It's transit-oriented development not only as increasing density around transit, but decreasing density where there is none."

While most upzonings have planned for growth close to transit, there are important exceptions. Bowles pointed to the 2005 rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint as an example of particularly backwards transportation planning. "There was a plan to create thousands of units of new housing on the waterfront," he said, "many of which would come in a Greenpoint neighborhood that had pretty deficient access to transit networks."

The typical rezoning is tough to classify as an attempt to increase or decrease density across an entire neighborhood. Rather, the general strategy at the planning department has been to increase density and introduce a mix of uses along avenues and in areas next to transit, while preserving the existing character of side streets and more distant areas, often through downzoning.

The rezoning in Jamaica channels growth along bigger streets and near transit. Image: NYC Dept. of City Planning.

Department spokesperson Rachaele Raynoff pointed to the major rezoning in Jamaica as illustrative of this approach. "Around the AirTrain, we zoned for growth," she said. "It's a tremendous opportunity with the confluence of subway lines and the LIRR. And yet many of the low-density residential blocks further away from transit were protected."

All told, the rezonings of the last eight years have laid the ground for New York to build on its unique strengths as a transit-rich city. It's a major accomplishment, but Bloomberg and Burden have more work ahead of them to fully deliver on the promise of a city that grows sustainably. As the next post in this series will show, zoning for growth near transit won't necessarily translate into transit-oriented development or a walkable city.

According to the Smart Growth Manual, "It is the planner's role not to incentivize driving, but to create a transit and pedestrian experience that makes not driving a pleasure."

Presenting at the invitation of Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, Speck gave New York's top land-use policy makers advice on how to make the city more walkable and livable. He was quick to note that New York is already among the greenest cities in America, simply by virtue of its density and low rate of driving. Even so, his presentation outlined how the city often fails to capitalize on its transit infrastructure. Perhaps most importantly, Speck repeatedly identified ways in which the city sabotages the sustainability of its transportation system through its parking policy.

While commissioners responded enthusiastically to Speck's vision, one exchange revealed the strong influence of demands for plentiful, cheap parking on their decisions.

Commissioner Betty Chen asked Speck to respond to the two arguments about parking she hears most frequently. The first is that parking spaces are necessary to lure higher-income residents to a neighborhood; the second is that, as she put it:

Certain people will own cars and drive no matter what, no matter what public transportation is available. Maybe it's because they live in a part of town that's not close to public transportation, or they want to bring their family for shopping or a Broadway show, or it doesn't make sense for work... So you should provide parking for those people because otherwise they'll be circling the block and leading to congestion on the streets.

While Chen -- and Burden, who asked a more general variation on the same question -- showed interest in moving away from automobile-centric development, the question certainly reveals the obstacles standing in the way of more walkable, sustainable patterns of development in New York. (For more on the damage to New York caused by parking minimums, Transportation Alternatives' 2008 report, "Suburbanizing the City," is essential reading.)

Upon learning that many parts of the city still had parking minimums for new construction, Speck responded that there is almost never any reason to force developers to build more parking than they want to. While providing the caveat that minimums are a "neighborhood-by-neighborhood decision," Speck illustrated the perils of parking minimums with the hundreds of empty spaces -- parking spots that were required by law -- in Washington DC's otherwise successful DC USA development. Unfortunately, the Planning Commission has buttressed New York's parking minimums as recently as last November. 

Speck also criticized New York's under-use of transit stations as development centers. He displayed a satellite photograph of the St. George Terminal of the Staten Island Ferry, showing a massive surface parking lot adjacent to a transit hub which serves 65,000 passengers daily:

Image: Google Maps

On a site with such direct access to Lower Manhattan, laying asphalt instead of building a high-density development is a terrible misallocation of a very scarce resource.

Christine Berthet, the co-founder of the Clinton/Hell's Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition who has squared off with the planning commission over parking policy before, attended Speck's presentation. While she was optimistic about the general tone of the discussion, she was disappointed in what came next: The commission certified a special permit for a developer to build about 50 percent more parking than the law would otherwise allow. As Berthet put it, "Commissioner Chen was really looking for answers on parking and the strong answer she got was that you just need to say no to the developers. That's not an answer the Planning Commission is ready for."

When Michael Bloomberg was first elected eight years ago, I and many others thought such a wealthy mayor might assert his independence from developers who choose to serve their own self-interest at the expense of the city's long term needs. Six years later, the release of PlaNYC 2030 finally gave hope to that desire. The mayor put forth a vision that, despite some shortcomings, promised a framework for sustainable, equitable growth. For all the city's progress toward advancing those goals, however, it has taken several steps backward by continuing to build real estate projects that erode the walkable city. Mayor Bloomberg’s re-election provides an opportunity to correct these oversights and refine his administration’s legacy on building an equitable and environmentally sustainable city.

A rendering of the proposed Hudson Yards development on the far West Side. Only a hard-fought court battle against Mayor Bloomberg, the Department of City Planning, and other public agencies prevented this project from adding up to 20,000 parking spaces in Manhattan.

Unfortunately, creativity, innovation and commitment to the principles of sustainability stop with these few agencies. Other public servants charged with planning for the future of the city have abdicated that responsibility. The Department of City Planning, despite some exemplary work on open space design and enhancing opportunities for world-class architecture, has ignored planning for the New York City of 2030. Instead, it has focused on rezoning the city as if we still lived in the 1960s, using the language and planning concepts of that discredited era rather than preparing to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

Together with private developers, the city's Economic Development Corporation and other quasi-government entities, the planning department has embraced outmoded redevelopment plans for Willets Point in Queens, Hudson Yards on the far West Side, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, and Columbia University's expansion into Manhattanville without any substantive regard to the principles and goals of PlaNYC.

These large-scale development plans fundamentally ignore the issue of sustainability. And they cast the form of the city in concrete for a century or more.

In these developments, the street is nothing more than square footage added to permit greater building heights and densities. Streets in these developments divide rather than integrate neighborhoods. Traffic lights are recalibrated, for instance, to facilitate the flow of traffic and hinder pedestrian movement by reducing crossing times. Perversely, these measures are dubbed “mitigation” in the environmental review process. Without them, the development would not be allowed to proceed. This is because the developments include more space for car parking than needed -- far above the norm in New York City -- creating more traffic and necessitating such "mitigations."

This runs against the principles of good urbanism and drains the life out of the city. The street is the common denominator of every neighborhood in New York. Streets, more than buildings, make up the city’s patrimony -- its "genius loci." When I grew up in New York in the 1950s, streets were our parks, our gardens, and our athletic fields. They facilitated activity, exercise, and civic discussion. They were places that fostered social interaction and social cohesion. They met needs that transcend any particular era. As we move deeper into the 21st century, we need to reintroduce these functions into our neighborhood fabric.

What does this mean in practice? At the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn, for example, development that enhances streetlife and improves the public realm -- development consistent with the principles of PlaNYC -- would not close streets, as developer Forest City Ratner intends to do. Instead, as proposed in the UNITY Plan, the street grid of Fort Greene would extend through the Yards, weaving into the Prospect Heights grid to the south.

The UNITY Plan for the Atlantic Yards site.

To build a sustainable city, we need to think and plan on a small scale, not just the mega-project scale. We need to engage more New Yorkers in the process of building neighborhoods, not just the politically connected or wealthy. The place where everything comes together, where we all meet and interact, and where sustainable planning must begin, is the street. The mayor has the intellect and the openness to understand this. He now has four years to reinforce what his administration has done well so far. Four years to change direction from past mistakes. Four years to focus on what has been ignored until now.

After evaluating downtown streets, city staff reported their findings on public life. Photo: Shin-pei Tsay.

Calling the assembled city staff "the pied pipers of the new way of doing business," Sadik-Khan touted the city's transition to more human-centered street metrics. "The tools that we've used in the past have done a really good job of helping us measure cars and traffic," she said, "but as we're looking to improve the condition of our streets for other users of the system -- for pedestrians, for cyclists, for people whether they're walking around, riding around, chatting, strolling, having lunch -- we need a much more comprehensive approach."

After a powerpoint from team Gehl, everyone got a feel for what Sadik-Khan was referring to. Fanning out from City Planning's Reade Street headquarters, 11 groups headed to different sites downtown, timers in hand, to see how well New York's streets and public spaces serve the people who use them. The evaluation combines hard stats like pedestrian and cyclist counts with open-ended questions that touch on the quality of the public environment and how well it supports social activity. The same technique underlies much of the data presented in World Class Streets.

DOT Assistant Commissioner Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who heads up the Public Plaza Program, said that the day's events presage permanent changes. "We are going to be working on different ways of building some of these methodologies into our standard operating procedure," he said, "so that we are more versed in studying street life." DOT will both perform the evaluations on its own, he added, and insert the work into consultant contracts.

Many of the city's urban planning advocacy groups were on hand, including the Regional Plan Association, Project for Public Spaces, and the Municipal Art Society. The multi-agency get-together drew their praise. "I think it's great that DOT, DCP, and EDC are collaborating on this initiative to create more sustainable streets in New York City," wrote MAS's Elizabeth Werbe in an email message. "This inter-agency cooperation bodes well for the city, considering the expertise of Gehl Architects in providing innovative tools to measure the conditions that allow for the development of pedestrian and bicycle friendly environments, in addition to the analysis and methodology needed to translate these findings into recommendations that will improve the public realm."

Another thing that bodes well, says Gehl, is simply the act of observing places close-up -- "to get people out there to see with their own eyes what's going on... by the end of the day, you know a lot about the city beyond the figures that you got."

"Our proposed citywide bicycle parking requirements will make it possible to secure one's bike at home and at work, thereby making it easier to commute to work, to school and run errands by bike," said Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden in a written statement. "This is one key piece of a larger package of city efforts to support bicycle ridership."

Before becoming law, the amendment must pass through the public review process, which gives veto power to the City Council. DCP estimates that the new zoning could be enacted within six months.

Another pending piece of legislation, the Bikes in Buildings Bill, would mandate access for bikes in existing commercial buildings and enjoys majority support in the Council. The bill is reportedly opposed by the Real Estate Board of New York, but according to a story in the Daily News yesterday, co-sponsor David Yassky appears confident that it will clear committee and pass:

Councilman David Yassky (D-Williamsburg) said legislation that would allow bikes to be stored in private office buildings would buoy ridership, which city officials hope will reach 18,000 by 2015.

The legislation, which could be voted on by the end of the year, would allow bike access in thousands of commercial buildings across the city, ensuring that all riders would have space to store their bikes during the workday.

"When we [pass the legislation], I predict the number of bike commuters will rise even further, making our city greener, healthier and less congested," Yassky said.

REBNY President Steve Spinola wrote to his members in September asking them to voluntarily comply with a DOT program to expand bike access and parking in office buildings, indicating that he would continue to oppose mandates like the new zoning amendment.

Here are the details from DCP on those requirements.

The new zoning would require that bicycle parking spaces be enclosed, secure, and accessible to designated users, such as residents, employees, or in the case of public parking garages, the general public. To ensure the new requirements do not encumber new developments, required bicycle parking would not count against the permitted floor area. The new zoning provides that:

• Residential buildings with more than 10 units must provide secure bike parking for 50% of the units, or one space for every two units.  
• Commercial office buildings must provide one space for every 7,500 square feet.
• Retail and most other commercial uses, as well as most community facility uses, would be required to provide one space for every 10,000 square feet of floor area.  Smaller buildings, where three or fewer bicycle spaces are required, can waive the requirement.
• Universities and hospitals will be required to provide secure bike parking but special provisions would allow these institutions to locate spaces more flexibly in a campus setting.
• For industrial and semi-industrial uses, religious institutions, and certain other facilities with varied employment densities or unusual space demands, bicycle parking would not be required but would not count against permitted floor area.
• Public parking garages would be required to provide one (1) bicycle parking space for every ten (10) automobile parking spaces.
• Requirements would apply to new buildings, enlargements of 50% or more, and conversions to residential use.
• Fifteen (15) square feet would be required per bicycle parking space. The amount of parking space required per bicycle can be reduced to as little as 6 square feet per bicycle with the submission and approval of a more efficient layout.
• In order to address a wide range of building configurations, bicycle parking may be provided in a variety of locations, including on the ground floor of a building, in a cellar or in a parking garage.

The Chairperson of City Planning Commission may authorize a reduction or waiver of bicycle parking spaces when subsurface or below-ground infrastructure conditions make bicycle parking infeasible.

If anyone knows more about any of these folks, or if you spot any outdated info, please share.

The IDA board:

• Robert C. Leiber, Chairman. President of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Former real estate executive. Mayoral appointee.
  
• Derek Park, Vice Chairman. Senior Executive Vice-President, Cohane Rafferty Securities. Mayoral appointee.
  
• Amanda Burden, ex officio. City Planning Director, City Planning Commission Chair.
  
• Michael Cardozo, ex officio. New York City's Corporation Counsel.
• Albert V. De Leon. General Counsel, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken.
• Dan Doctoroff, ex officio. Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding.
• Joseph I. Douek. Chairman and CEO, Willoughby's Konica Imaging Center, friend of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, and subject of this 2006 critique on Room EIght.
• Kevin Doyle. Executive Vice President, Local 32BJ, "the largest property services union in the country." Doyle was profiled by the Observer when he joined the IDA board. Appointed by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.
• Bernard Haber. Member of Queens Community Board 11. Queens Borough President appointee.
  
• Rafael Salaberrios. President, Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation. Chairman, Bronx Tourism Council. Bronx Borough President appointee.
  
• Robert D. Santos. Vice President for Campus Planning and Facilities Management, City College of New York. Former executive with construction firm Lehrer McGovern Bovis, Inc. Former Assistant Commissioner, NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Former Deputy Commissioner for Operations, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. Mayoral appointee.
  
• William C. Thompson, ex officio. New York City Comptroller.

Alternates:

• Barry Dinerstein. Deputy Director for Housing, Economic Development and Infrastructure Planning, NYC Planning Department.
• John Graham. City Comptroller appointee.
• Angela Sun. Doctoroff appointee.
• Leonard Wasserman. Chief, Economic Development Division, New York City Law Department (Corporation Counsel). 

At a sparsely attended public hearing in Lower Manhattan, Margaret Collins of Save Our Parks told the New York City Industrial Development Agency (IDA) that a "barely contained rage" is simmering over the traffic the new stadium is expected to bring to the area. Surveys show that lack of recreational space and pollution are the top concerns in South Bronx neighborhoods, Collins said -- problems that were exacerbated when the Yankees seized public park land for its stadium complex, and which could yet worsen once its proposed 9,000 parking spaces are put to use.

Though the new facility will have 5,000 fewer seats, and will be served by a new Metro-North station, current plans call for it to have 2,500 more parking spots than the existing stadium. Three new parking garages (of four originally planned) will be financed through $225 million in triple tax exempt bonds, if the IDA approves such action, at a public cost of some $8,000 per space. A vote could come as early as next Tuesday, September 11. The IDA board votes in closed session.

Noting the low turnout for the hearing, Collins -- herself testifying with sleeping infant in tow -- pointed out that most affected residents can not make it downtown for a meeting in the middle of a workday. She warned that lack of public attendance should not be confused with lack of public engagement. 

"The community is not sleeping on this question," Collins said.

Speaking after an unusual plea for access was presented to the IDA on behalf of Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Jr., Collins bristled that politicians had signed on to the stadium project without knowing what they were agreeing to. Carrion, a vocal stadium proponent, has been denied what his office termed "vital information" regarding its financing, even though he, like all borough presidents, has an appointee who serves on the IDA board.

The IDA is the financing arm of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The IDA board is made up of 15 members and alternates, including City Planning Director Amanda Burden and Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff.

While she was outnumbered by IDA board members and staff, Collins was not alone in testifying against the project. Joyce Hogi, who has lived in the vicinity of Yankee Stadium for 30 years, objected to the "snarling traffic" that "consumes" the area, and said the new garages would amount to "induced demand" for otherwise unneeded parking, "providing an incentive to drive into an already overburdened neighborhood." Of the new Metro-North station, Hogi asked, "We spend millions on public transportation and now we plan to spend millions to encourage them not to take it?"

Hogi suggested public moneys would be better spent on upgrades to the Melrose Metro-North and 161st Street subway stations, which would benefit surrounding neighborhoods year-round.

Bettina Damiani, director of Good Jobs New York, said that the parking subsidy, if approved, would bring the public commitment to the new stadium to a total of approximately $795 million.

Photo: Michael Dietsch/Flickr

Janette Sadik-Khan: Four days.

Streetsblog: Left in the legislative session?

JSK: Yeah, well, maybe four days left, maybe more days. August in Albany. What can be better?

SB: (Laughing) So, let's start with something other than congestion pricing. How was your trip to Copenhagen to meet with Jan Gehl? Had you ever been before?

JSK: Never been.

SB: What did you think?

JSK: I thought it was spectacular. The experience of riding a bicycle in a city in which the car is not the priority was really inspiring. One piece that was a bit of a surprise was how well behaved people were in Copenhagen. I didn't see a single person break a single traffic law while I was there which is certainly a little different than the experience that we have here.

SB: I noticed the same thing when I was there last fall but every Copenhagener I asked insisted they were just as rude and unruly as New Yorkers.

JSK: Gehl went through the historic trajectory of how they've reclaimed public space bit by bit, one street at a time. Today, they've reached a tipping point where 36 percent of the people commuting to work are on bike and they're looking to get that mode share up to 40 percent.

The other thing that amazed me is that there are all of these bikes parked all over the place and it appears that none of them are locked. They all have these small black handcuffs on the rear wheel. You turn the key and this steel rod comes through and locks it up. How long do you think that would last on the streets of New York City? Ten minutes?

So, there are definite cultural elements that make Copenhagen Copenhagen and need to be adapted to work in New York. But the design of the streets and their approach to the streets are really interesting and I'm hoping to bring Gehl over at the end of next month to help us work on a pedestrian and public space strategy much like what he did for London.

SB: Would you have him work in a specific location or citywide?

JSK: We need to be able to show what can be done in all five boroughs with a variety of different techniques. But not everything needs to be a massive capital project. I'm looking to see what we can do on a shorter term basis to have some immediate impact in reclaiming streets and coming up with different designs for roadways and sidewalks.

SB: Are you looking at reclaiming on-street parking space for other uses?

JSK: That is something we're looking at. In fact, we're talking about removing a lane of parking on Broadway next to City Hall. Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia has been really great about looking for ways to reclaim street space. He's been helping me identify where these different places can be. The other question is once we reclaim it what do we do with it? You have to do it in a way that leaves a meaningful public space.

SB: So, let's talk about congestion pricing. There are a lot of negative signals coming out of Albany and Sheldon Silver. What's the status?

JSK: We're very hopeful. It's a heavy lift, certainly. The Mayor's working very hard and all of us are working very hard to see the legislation and authorization come through by Thursday, which is when the session ends. The Senate has been terrific. Bruno's been really good. The Assembly is open and we continue to do briefings. The governor has been very supportive, so that's a big help. We'll see what happens when the chips fall on Thursday.

SB: If congestion pricing doesn't pass do you have a Plan B? Are there traffic reduction measures that the city can implement if this plan falls through?

JSK: Everyone is shooting for Thursday but the promise of a special legislative session later this summer is still out there. So, Plan B is the special session. We are not giving up hope at all. We are fully committed. We need to get this legislation passed. It needs to pass now. It would be ridiculous to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. That's our plan and when the plan passes we're looking to institute a series of immediate short term improvements before the switch is flipped on congestion pricing, including increased express bus service, ferry service and a variety of other initiatives. So, our emphasis is on making sure this congestion pricing program passes. On the transportation side, we don't think there's anything more important for the future of New York than getting this plan through.

SB: Is it a given at this point that no new "SMART" authority will be created and the MTA will administer the congestion pricing program?

JSK: That is still in negotiation. On the governance side I think that they are looking at a model that includes both the city and the state much along the lines of the Capital Program Review Board which handles the MTA's money. There are four votes on the CPRB: the City, the State, the Assembly and the Senate. Four people in a room. It takes a unanimous vote of the CPRB to pass the MTA's capital program. So, I think people are moving towards that kind of a governance model. But the negotiations continue.

SB: The City's proposed Bus Rapid Transit system will be dependent on camera-based enforcement of the bus lanes. Is the legislature going to give us the cameras? Is that sort of issue even on the radar in Albany right now?

JSK: It's definitely on the radar. It's part of our plan. We're hoping it is also addressed in the next four days. Keep those phone calls going to your legislators.

SB: The Hudson Yards rezoning on the west side of Manhattan requires developers to include over 20,000 new parking spaces. We recently did a story about this on the blog that generated a lot of response. People don't understand how these parking requirements fit with the Mayor's long-term sustainability and traffic reduction goals of PlaNYC.

JSK: In Copenhagen I was joined by City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden. We spent a lot of time talking about the success of cities like Portland and Chicago that have revised their zoning codes with lower parking ratios and how that has led, in a lot of instances, to a renaissance for pedestrian space and transit without any apparent downside.

SB: Towards the end of his private consulting career, your new Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller put forward a study suggesting that pedestrianizing Prince Street in SoHo, say, on weekends, might be doable and even desirable. Can we expect to see you move on this type of project?

JSK: We're looking at all sorts of treatments to improve the streets of New York. Bruce being here is going to help us. A lot of people have interesting ideas. It will be exciting to have Jan Gehl here because he will help us identify some of the places where we can do urban acupuncture and specific interventions, much as he's done in other cities.

As important as it is to do these interventions, it is also important to ensure that we have policies and programs in place that will set the direction for the agency for years to come.