Streetsblog New York City

The signing of an agreement to close the East River Greenway gap between 38th Street and 60th Street is big news for people who want to enjoy the waterfront on Manhattan’s open space-starved East Side. There’s finally a realistic plan in place to build a continuous route to walk, run, or bike along the water. When finished, it could form the backbone of the bike network on the East Side.

But the deal signed this week is an early step in a complicated and lengthy process; construction will take place in three stages and won’t wrap up for at least a decade. We checked in with City Council Member Dan Garodnick, a strong supporter of the greenway project, to hear how the process will move forward from here.

Building the full esplanade will cost roughly $200 million. To fund the project, the city turned to a land deal with the United Nations. The City will turn over a piece of the under-used Robert Moses Playground to the United Nations for $70 million and pay for the rest with the proceeds from the sale of One and Two UN Plaza, buildings in which the city owns a stake.

The first $70 million can’t pay for the entire greenway, Garodnick explained, meaning work will have to be done in phases. The playground deal will fund an extension of the greenway from 60th Street south to 53rd, where caissons left over from an FDR Drive detour are already in place. That first segment will connect to an existing pedestrian bridge over the highway at 51st Street.

Once the UN buildings have been sold — which Garodnick said could take some time, depending on the market, since the agreement requires them to go for a high enough price to pay for the construction work — work could take place on the southern portion of the greenway.

At the same time, work will already be underway on turning the Con Ed pier between 38th Street and 41st Street into a greenway and parkland. Construction on the Con Ed pier should begin soon, according to a press release from the mayor’s office. But work on the first new segment of the greenway likely won’t start until 2016. At the southern end, work won’t begin until roughly 2020.

Moreover, the agreement signed Wednesday is a memorandum of understanding putting the city, state and United Nations on the path to a completed deal; there’s still a lot of legal work to be done in addition to design and construction. While this deal clears the way for a continuous off-street cycling route along the East Side, it will be a long while before that connectivity materializes.

At a City Council Transportation Committee hearing today, the New York Police Department announced its opposition to legislation that would curb parking placard abuse by requiring barcodes on official placards. NYPD claimed that it has placard abuse under control and that only Police Commissioner Ray Kelly should have the power to determine what tools are used to defend against it. Testimony from NYPD and DOT also revealed that there are currently 118,000 official placards in circulation, tens of thousands more than previously realized.

Putting barcodes on placards would allow traffic enforcement agents to easily and accurately know whether the laminated plastic sitting on a car’s dashboard legitimately grants extra parking privileges. That wouldn’t solve every kind of placard abuse, but it would empower agents to ticket the truly bogus placards.

Council Member Dan Garodnick, the bill’s sponsor, cited yesterday’s experiment by Transportation Alternatives, in which a placard from the “New York State Numismatic Agency,” marked with the official seal of Bulgaria, escaped ticketing during seven hours of illegal parking in Lower Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn and Times Square, proving that placard enforcement was effectively non-existent. “It’s clearly time for the city to take a bolder step,” said Garodnick.

Council members from across the city understood that allowing placard holders to hoard curb space and escape parking regulations is hurting their neighborhoods. “It seems like New York City has become the Wild West of parking permits,” said Brooklyn’s David Greenfield. Said Queens rep Jimmy Van Bramer, “Others, particularly those who work for a city agency, are held to a different standard.”

The only person who didn’t see the need for action on placard abuse was Susan Petito, the assistant commissioner for intergovernmental affairs at NYPD. While Petito gave lip service to the council’s concern, she ultimately claimed that the NYPD had the problem under control.

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City Council Member Dan Garodnick has introduced a bill that could cut down on the abuse of fraudulent parking placards. The bill would require that city-issued placards be equipped with bar codes that traffic enforcement agents can scan to verify. If enacted, it should cut down on one form of placard abuse: the use of bogus laminated pieces of paper to park illegally with impunity.

The Bloomberg administration substantially cut the number of city placards in 2008, after a concerted advocacy campaign to wrestle the proliferation of officially sanctioned parking perks — and all the traffic they cause — under control.

The potential for abuse is still high, though, since traffic enforcement agents are reluctant to ticket any vehicle that bears the stamp of official privilege. As Streetsblog has reported, there’s a whole cottage industry devoted to the manufacture of fake parking placards. Synagogue- and church-goers have shown no compunction about putting placard-esque items on their dashboards to get away with parking illegally.

Garodnick’s bar code proposal would help traffic enforcement agents tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake. “The idea is that this would make it easy for them to scan a placard, to remove the element of doubt when a TEA may be uncertain of whether this is a legitimate placard,” said Dan Pasquini, Garodnick’s communications director.

Other forms of placard abuse will be tougher to stamp out. The bar codes wouldn’t help agents muster the will to ticket vehicles with official placards parked in front of bus stops and fire hydrants, which are illegal spots no matter what’s on the dash.

The bill has been introduced in the transportation committee, where Garodnick’s office hopes to get a hearing soon.

Earlier this week, Laurence Renard was killed as she crossed First Avenue when a dump truck driver turned into her path from 90th Street, hitting her from behind. Renard was one of at least six pedestrians and cyclists who have lost their lives in traffic crashes on East Side streets since last August.

People are seriously hurt and killed with terrible frequency on the East Side of Manhattan: 148 pedestrians and cyclists died on its streets between 1995 and 2008, and more than 15,000 were injured. The area is rife with wide streets and intersections that invite speeding and reckless driving. At the same time, the East Side is home to high percentages of walk-to-work commuters, car-free households, and senior citizens. East Siders lead walkable lifestyles and make many trips by foot or bike, but their streets are extremely dangerous.

Last night, more than 100 people gathered at St. Mark’s Church on East 10th Street for the unveiling of Transportation Alternatives’ East Side Action Plan [PDF], which outlines a broad vision for making this part of Manhattan safer and more livable.

In a series of public workshops, more than 600 East Siders helped TA put together recommendations to redesign their streets and put walking, biking, and transit first. The Action Plan came out of those workshops to serve as “a tool for local East Side experts to use as citizen planners, so they can educate their communities and generate the local support needed to engage decision makers around design and policy change,” said TA’s Julia De Martini Day. Dozens of community groups from Chinatown to Harlem have signed on to the campaign.

With political attacks on pedestrian and bicycle improvements fresh in everyone’s mind, the kick-off event last night was something of a rallying cry for the coalition. New Yorkers who want safer streets have to organize and mobilize as effectively as possible, a point that former Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa brought home when he told the audience that the allocation of street space “is a political decision, not a technical decision.”

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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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The City Council Transportation Committee held a hearing yesterday on four bills that would release new information about traffic crashes and how the Department of Transportation decides whether to install traffic calming measures and traffic control devices like stop lights and stop signs. All together, the bills would cover a wide spectrum of information, but committee chair Jimmy Vacca said the goal of each is “empowering citizens who want to fight for traffic calming measures in their own community.” The measures drew opposition from DOT representatives, however, who seemed to bristle at the prospect of Council-imposed mandates even while pledging support for the intent of the bills.

The first two bills, Jessica Lappin’s Intro 370 and Rosie Mendez’s Intro 374, would both open up data about traffic crashes to the public. Intro 370, an amended version of Lappin’s “Saving Lives Through Better Information Bill,” would require DOT to publish on its website weekly information about all traffic crashes and traffic fatalities in the city, searchable by intersection. Intro 370 would also mandate the creation of an interagency traffic safety plan, developed and implemented jointly by all the relevant city departments.

Lappin’s original bill would have placed the responsibility for publishing crash data on the NYPD. The police came out against that bill and effectively killed it earlier this year, even though a former NYPD traffic chief said the agency could have easily complied. During today’s hearing, Lappin said that she amended the bill “based on feedback we’ve received from the Administration.”

Intro 374 would fill a big hole in the city’s crash data, requiring DOT to gather information on all bike crashes that get reported to the city. Currently, no data are reported about collisions between cyclists and pedestrians or other cyclists.

These bills each got a lot of support from the committee and those testifying. “Think about it,” said Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Paul Steely White, explaining the need for Intro 370. “Right now, community groups and elected officials like yourselves are often forced to make decisions that directly affect life and death, based on information from 2008, at best.” White also said he believed it would be more appropriate for the NYPD to be in charge of releasing crash information, as that department already collects and compiles it.

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Above 34th Street, the East Side of Manhattan is unforgiving for cyclists, without any real provision to ride safely and quickly. The one dedicated path for bicycling, the East River Greenway, is barely usable for practical trips — the gap between 38th Street and 63rd Street being the most prominent of several flaws. On a ride organized by Transportation Alternatives this Sunday, Michael Auerbach of neighborhood group Upper Green Side led a group of about 20 cyclists, including City Council Member Dan Garodnick, on a tour of the greenway path to take in its pinch points, shoddy surfaces, and other shortcomings. Here’s a short photo tour of the trip from 6th Street to 63rd Street, with an assist from TA’s Kim Martineau.

The city has begun exploring a plan that would plug the greenway gap using funds secured through a land swap with the United Nations. If, after looking at these pictures, you’re wondering about what you can do to support a better greenway, it may helpful to keep in mind Garodnick’s parting message from the Sunday tour: “Communicate to your elected officials.”

The pathway narrows and cyclists must dismount in front of the Crow’s Nest, sandwiched between the FDR Drive and the East River, before riding through the restaurant’s parking lot.

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"You can't control what you can't measure," the saying goes. So to get a better grip on street safety on Manhattan's East Side, Transportation Alternatives started by collecting better data about local traffic collisions and injuries. Last night, a group of Upper East Siders used that information to begin imagining what a safer neighborhood might look like.

The safety data and the workshop are part of a new campaign organized by TA called the East Side Streets Coalition, which aims to dramatically improve safety from East Harlem to Chinatown. The goal is to reduce traffic collisions that injure and kill pedestrians and cyclists by 50 percent over the next ten years.

"Other areas of Manhattan have seen significant street improvements in the last few years," said TA campaign coordinator Julia Day. "A lot of the East Side's major corridors haven't benefited from these improvements." As a result, she said, the East Side has some of the most dangerous streets in the city. The densely-populated Community Board 8 district on the Upper East Side, for example, suffers from the third most crashes of any community district in the city.

The campaign started by mapping out precisely where pedestrians and cyclists are most at risk of getting hurt by cars. Using advanced mapping techniques and new data from the state Department of Transportation, TA has identified and visualized the intersections where the most crashes occur along the entire East Side. These intersections will be the principal targets of the campaign. (The campaign will explicitly refrain from focusing on First and Second Avenues, which are already slated to receive major pedestrian and cyclist safety features.)

The coalition is beginning outreach to develop a vision for a redesigned East Side. The first workshop, for Upper East Side residents, was held last night, with about thirty participants meeting in the cafeteria of the Wagner Middle School to share their concerns about local streets and develop solutions.

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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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From the first (and only) town-hall meeting of the Manhattan Borough President’s Planning for Pedestrians Council in 1987, to Manhattan Community Board 8’s “Bicycle Forum” this week, I’ve sat through innumerable gatherings on cyclist-pedestrian conflicts.

Each session has been suffused with elephant-in-the-room syndrome. Somehow, the agenda never includes motor vehicles, even though cars, cabs and trucks do 99.5 percent of the traffic maiming and also commandeer street space and mindshare to the point where clashes between bikes and peds become inevitable.

The CB 8 forum on Tuesday evening did have hopeful elements, however. Local residents wanting more bike and pedestrian infrastructure and fewer cars outnumbered those who wanted cyclists put in their place. None of the five elected officials in attendance played the anti-bike card; all seemed receptive to the livable streets agenda. And one or two attendees who professed to be terrified by bicycles even took pains to support bike lanes.

Some highlights:

• Deputy Borough President Rosemonde Pierre-Louis “commend[ing] City DOT and Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan for their visionary work to make New York City more walkable and bikeable.” (City Council Member Jessica Lappin had a more guarded version of the same message.)
• Council Member Daniel Garodnick deflecting criticism from a pro-congestion pricing audience member by insisting he had been a “strong, outspoken supporter” of Mayor Bloomberg’s toll plan and, by implication, could be counted on to champion traffic pricing in the future.
  
• A diverse collection of Upper East Siders — a 50-something male attorney who has cycled to work for decades, a young woman who recently took up bike-commuting, a female African-American community board member, and a husky pedestrian who pronounced himself too un-coordinated to ride a bike — passionately and eloquently speaking up for cycling and cycle facilities. Here are some of their remarks:

“Cycling makes me healthy.”
“After biking to work, I feel good all day.”
“Cycling is saving my life.”
“Broadway is really great, Second Avenue is awful.”
“Summer Streets was fabulous.”
“There’s been nothing to teach people how to use these new streets.”
“A message should be sent by the community board to the District Attorney and the NYPD that there needs to be a re-evaluation of our priorities to protect cyclists and pedestrians.”

Okay, it wasn’t all a lovefest. There were these complaints from several women of a certain age, CB 8 members all:

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