Streetsblog New York City

If you’re like most New York commuters, you took a train or bus to get to work today. And like most New Yorkers, you are invisible to the City Council and speaker Christine Quinn.

On Tuesday, Quinn issued a letter, co-signed by transportation committee chair James Vacca, bragging about the accomplishments of a council obsessed with the perceived needs of city drivers. You know the bills: the muni-meter grace period, the elimination of the alternate side violation sticker, the loosening of parking fine deadlines. While she makes mention of the law that requires NYPD to post traffic crash data online, Quinn also touts the council’s success in adding red tape to the installation of bike lanes, a proven safety measure.

The council’s transportation achievements add up to three bills written to address the pet peeves of certain car owners, three bills that allow council members to grandstand for codifying existing DOT protocols, and one genuinely useful bill to help make streets safer.

More broadly, Quinn’s “Transportation Report” contains not one word about public transportation. Framing the council’s transportation agenda as a win for “nearly every New York City driver,” Quinn ignores the 55 percent of commuters who rely on transit. Quinn and the City Council are kowtowing to the city’s motoring elite the same way Republicans in the House of Representatives are writing legislation to please oil companies.

You can find the full text of Quinn’s missive after the jump. Have at it.

January 31, 2012

Dear New Yorker,

A special thank you to everyone who responded to our first NYC Council Transportation Report! We were thrilled with the positive response, and the feedback we received was very helpful and informative.

There’ve been a number of important transportation-related developments since then, many of which you’ll find detailed in our newest report below.

As we explained in our first issue, our goal with these reports is to stay better connected and engaged with you and other New Yorkers about the important and challenging transportation issues affecting our city and communities, so please keep the comments and feedback coming!

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On Monday we published the revised schedule for this week’s City Council hearing in James Vacca’s transportation committee. Out with oversight of the MTA budget and its consequences for straphangers, in with bills to make parking more convenient. Maybe we were being a little unfair with that post, because the person who ultimately sets the agenda for the City Council isn’t Vacca, but Speaker Christine Quinn.

A year ago Quinn made it clear that her top transportation priority wouldn’t be improving conditions for straphangers or making streets safer for walking and biking. Nope. In a city where 54 percent of households don’t own cars, Quinn focused on reducing the perceived inconvenience of storing cars on public streets.

Now the speaker is getting her moment in the spotlight from this agenda, with the passage of three bills yesterday. One would ban the Sanitation Department from placing stickers on cars that violate alternate-side parking rules. The Sanitation Department opposes the legislation, but the bill has enough votes on the council to override a mayoral veto. Another would let motorists escape a ticket if they show the parking enforcement officer a muni-meter receipt timestamped within five minutes of the violation, and the third would give illegal parkers more time before late fees kick in on their violations.

The 54 percent who don’t own cars get nothing out of this package, except maybe dirtier streets.

The real irony is that car owners don’t get much out of these bills either. The fact is that parking will remain a headache as long as New York gives away most of its scarce curbside space for free, or at bargain rates.

The City Council could learn a few things from San Francisco, where car owners are incurring fewer parking tickets thanks to a program that aligns parking prices with demand. Rather than bend over backward to address a few pet peeves, Quinn and Vacca would do more to lessen parking dysfunction by encouraging the city to move quickly with its own program to put the right price on curbside space. Instead, any time the city tries to adjust meter rates, the council is the loudest opponent.

After the jump, read the email blast that Quinn’s office sent out yesterday claiming victory against “unfair” and “unnecessarily punitive” parking enforcement.

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Yesterday the City Council passed Lew Fidler’s Intro 412 — the bill mandating community board notification about the installation of bike lanes — setting the stage for some showboating from Fidler, Speaker Christine Quinn and Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca.

“Our legislation will ensure the Department of Transportation works with community boards and fully considers feedback from neighborhood residents on where, and how, bicycle lanes are installed,” Quinn said in a statement.

This is kind of like bragging about legislation that ensures the Department of Sanitation will pick up the trash. The city already brings bike lane proposals to community boards. The past few years have produced a long record of community board votes in favor of safer streets, as well as a few that went in favor of the status quo. With or without this bill, the bike lanes are going in where the community boards sign off on them.

Defending the need for the legislation, Vacca told NY1, “I don’t think it’s anti-bike to make sure that local neighborhoods have input as to where bike lanes go.”

Can’t argue there. Having a public process for bike lane installation is not anti-bike. What’s anti-bike is to imply that the recent expansion of bike lanes has somehow lacked sufficient public input, which is the message that comes across from the coverage of this bill.

It’s also strange that the City Council thinks it’s necessary to mandate notification for all bike lanes, but not for all changes to motor vehicle lanes. If the city wants to carve out some left-turn bays from a pedestrian median, for instance, there’s no law requiring a public hearing.

So yeah, it’s anti-bike to grandstand about the imaginary problem of community input on bike lanes when the council could be focusing on real transportation problems like the MTA debt bomb, obscenely wasteful subsidies for stadium parking, or NYPD’s refusal to disclose information on traffic crashes.

In any case, Quinn, Vacca, and Fidler missed their chance to boast about the real innovation in this bill. It requires the city to inform community boards before any bike lane is removed:

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In her State of the City address this afternoon, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn laid out her priorities for the year ahead. Her speech focused on four issue areas: balancing the city budget, creating jobs, preserving affordable housing and parking.

Quinn’s parking platform isn’t aimed at making parking cheaper or more plentiful — though she’s taken action on that front recently — so much as eliminating some of the inconveniences car owners face when they park on public streets. To that end, she’s drawing on ideas like Brad Lander’s call to reduce the number of alternate side parking days on the city’s cleanest streets.

While the Council seems poised to advance important bills opening up data on traffic safety, Quinn’s transportation platform for the year only provides benefits to a privileged minority of New Yorkers. In a high-profile moment as she gears up for a 2013 mayoral run, Quinn offered nothing to the 54 percent of households which don’t own a car.

The parking related section of Quinn’s prepared remarks is excerpted below:

We’ve taken on everything from potholes to bedbugs, noise complaints to stalled construction sites. This year we’ll focus on an issue that plagues New Yorkers in many neighborhoods – parking.

Look, we still want to get more folks out of their cars and onto public transit. But for families in many neighborhoods, that’s simply not an option. So under the leadership of Transportation Committee Chair Jimmy Vacca, we’ll pass a package of legislation to make their lives a little easier.

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At a public hearing held by the Fire Department this morning, every person who testified spoke against charging a fee for FDNY response to traffic crashes, calling it inappropriate to make drivers pay for what they said ought to be a basic government function.

The charges are part of the Bloomberg administration’s attempt to close a budget deficit. The Fire Department proposes to recover the cost of responding to a traffic crash by charging the motorists involved between $365 and $490, depending on the severity of the crash. They estimate the fees would raise $1 million a year.

The charges can also be seen as an attempt to make motorists bear some of the enormous cost of traffic crashes. According to the city Department of Transportation, traffic crashes cost $4.29 billion a year.

No one at this morning’s hearing saw it that way. Opposition focused on whether it was right to switch from using general taxation to fund fire services to a user fee model:

• The charge would “radically alter the relationship between the city’s taxpayers and the services they receive,” said City Council Member Dan Garodnick in a statement read by an aide. Continuing down this path, he argued, would create “two forms of government – one for those who can pay and one for those who cannot.”
• “Imposing crash taxes on individuals unfortunate enough to have accidents adds insult to injury,” said AAA New York’s John Corlett. “Public safety services are a core government function and therefore should be properly budgeted for.”
• The flat charges would place “a disproportionate financial burden on poor and minority citizens,” said William McDonald of the NAACP’s Jamaica Branch, speaking for the branch’s president.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn also wrote in to the Fire Department in opposition to the fee. “The Fire Department doesn’t charge for its response to structural fires, and the Police Department doesn’t charge for patrolling a block. Charging for responding to the scene of an accident is a slippery slope,” she wrote. She also worried that drivers might choose not to call 911 if faced with an additional fee, leaving people on the road who shouldn’t be, like injured or drunk drivers.

Though the Fire Department has the authority to institute this charge unilaterally, legislation has been introduced in both the City Council and state legislature to take away that power.

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Bloomberg administration officials have now twice appeared in front of the City Council to oppose legislation requiring that the city post up-to-date information about traffic crashes and summonses online. In April, the NYPD testified that such a reporting requirement would be a burden on the department and that the public couldn’t interpret that kind of information. And last week the DOT argued that it wasn’t the right agency to release such information.

But the Bloomberg administration isn’t always opposed to tracking and reporting police data. On Monday, the mayor signed into law two bills that will release information about hate crimes and domestic violence. Intros 373 and 393 require the Mayor’s Office of Operations to centralize this data on the city’s My Neighborhood Statistics website. “The two bills before me today increase transparency,” said Bloomberg at the bill signing.

“To not have this information available to the public would mean keeping our residents in the dark,” Council Speaker Christine Quinn said of the legislation, according to a DNAinfo report. “Any additional data to help understand and fight both hate crimes and domestic violence will be beneficial to individual neighborhoods and the City as a whole.”

With Bloomberg and Quinn squarely on board, both bills flew through the legislative process. They were introduced to the Council on October 13; hearings, votes, and the bill signing took less than a month.

While the specifics differ, the principle behind those bills is the same idea underpinning Intro 370, Council Member Jessica Lappin’s bill to release TrafficStat data about the location and cause of traffic crashes and data on traffic enforcement summonses. New Yorkers not only deserve to know about crime in their city, but they should be able to use that information to advocate for change. So why is the administration trying to keep traffic crime information hidden even as it celebrates the release of information about hate crime and domestic violence?

Perhaps the problem is that when it comes to traffic enforcement, the city isn’t eager to see sunlight shine on its record.

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Officials held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the suburban-style East River Plaza shopping complex today. The fleet of cars that the city's leading politicians and developers arrived in barely registered in the mall's giant parking lot.

It's safe to say that East River Plaza will go down as an urban planning disaster for the ages, but as politicians praised the project, they gave no indication that they've absorbed lessons from its big mistake. The mall's eight levels of parking, a full 1,428 spaces, take up the better part of a city block. Those spots have mostly been sitting empty, hogging space and sucking the life out of the pedestrian environment -- a testament to the city's lax urban planning oversight and the fantastically faulty assumptions of the developer, who now admits that more people than expected are walking or taking transit to East River Plaza rather than driving.

So it was particularly jarring to hear praise for all that parking from City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. She thanked the city for rezoning the area "to make it not only a place where commercial development could occur, but also a place where we could have parking, so people could come here and take those 488 rolls of toilet paper home with them, out of Costco, as I myself like to do."

Never mind that parking takes the place of what could be more retail and more jobs, or that 82.3 percent of East Harlem households don't own a car [PDF]. This empty lot is failing even as a place to store private cars. 

A ribbon cutting may not be the occasion to expect reflections on lessons learned, but today's event was a great opportunity to explore East River Plaza and document a colossal mistake that should never be repeated. Photos after the jump.

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While receiving an honor from AARP last night, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn reiterated their support for the Age-Friendly New York City plan to make the city work better for senior citizens. Because New York's elderly pedestrians are at the greatest risk from motor vehicles, the Age-Friendly New York program includes a number of pedestrian safety components. Though Bloomberg and Quinn reiterated their support for these programs last night, perhaps the most enthusiasm for redesigning streets to better serve older New Yorkers came from Linda Gibbs, deputy mayor for health and human services.

The Age-Friendly New York City agenda includes 59 initiatives meant to make it easier to age in the city, including building traffic calming public spaces and redesigning the city's most dangerous intersections. Bloomberg's remarks didn't specifically mention the pedestrian safety aspects of the plan, but he did reaffirm his commitment to follow through on the entire Age-Friendly program. "When we take on a project," he said, "we actually do it." 

Quinn focused more closely on street redesigns. "Through complete streets, we're making New York a place that's safe in every way for seniors," she told the audience. In April, Quinn stood with AARP in front of the Ninth Avenue protected bike lane to participate in a safety audit. Discussing that experience last night, Quinn said that the redesigns of Eighth and Ninth had helped fix "two very problematic corners" at 23rd Street.

Perhaps most striking, it seems that livable streets advocates have a potential ally in Deputy Mayor Gibbs, who oversees the Age-Friendly New York City program. Discussing NYCDOT's Safe Routes for Seniors program, Gibbs had particular praise for neckdowns at dangerous intersections. "It creates an intentional bottleneck that not only makes the distance shorter, but slows down the traffic as it approaches the intersection," she said, "so you have a double benefit."

To keep seniors safe, one area that would especially benefit from Gibbs' influence is Manhattan's East Side.

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Electeds and other officials gathered with representatives from AARP today to pledge support for street improvements and to call on Albany to pass complete streets legislation.

Kicking off a day of street surveys across the state, the group met at the corner of Ninth Avenue and 23rd Street, an intersection that had been particularly hazardous for the older residents of the nearby Penn South co-op.

One Penn South resident recounted her memories of living above the intersection before a redesign of the corridor brought refuge islands along Ninth to protect both pedestrians and cyclists. "Every time I heard a siren on Ninth Avenue," she said, "I ran out to see if it was one of our seniors."

Council Speaker Christine Quinn praised "the success we've had at 23rd and Ninth," and promised that the city would "replicate" it. "I'm looking forward to more safely strolling across intersections across the city," Quinn said. Quinn also noted the development of Age-Friendly NYC, a set of 59 initiatives to help New York City become more hospitable to a growing senior population. Traffic calming and street redesigns were an important piece of that document.

AARP's top pedestrian safety priority is complete streets legislation working its way through the state legislature. That bill, which has the support of the chairs of the transportation and aging committees in both the Assembly and Senate, would ensure that all streets statewide are designed with the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, people with disabilities, and transit riders in mind.

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Now that Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, John Liu, and the City Council have been sworn in, attention turns to speaker Christine Quinn's choices to head legislative committees. For New Yorkers who care about street safety and sustainable transportation, the big question is who will run the City Council transportation committee.

Committee chairs can set the agenda in more ways than one, acting as gatekeepers for pending bills and commanding bully pulpits that focus public attention on city agencies. The power of the transportation chair was quite apparent last year, when John Liu held up a committee vote on the Bicycle Access Bill, casting its future in doubt.

The bill's ultimate passage was a big step forward for the council on sustainable transportation. But the city's legislative agenda can still get clogged up with counterproductive items like the parking "grace period" which the council passed in December. Will the next transpo chair spend time and energy trying to score cheap points with car owners, or will New Yorkers get a leader who puts safety and livability at the top of the agenda?

"Historically, the transportation committee has been overly sensitive to New York's minority of motorists," Transportation Alternatives director Paul White told Streetsblog. "We really need someone who understands New York's supermajority of transit riders, walkers, and, increasingly, cyclists."

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