Streetsblog New York City

When Scott Stringer held his first transportation conference five years ago, streets like this didn't exist in NYC. Photo of First Avenue: NYC DOT

Times have changed since Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer hosted a conference on transportation reform in 2006. Five years ago, New York City appeared to be on the verge of shaking off the traffic-first approach to street engineering that had dominated city transportation policy for decades. Whispers were in the air about a push to tame city traffic and fund the transit system by putting a price on congestion-plagued streets. Since then, plenty of innovation has come to NYC streets, while traffic congestion and transit funding remain core challenges.

Last Friday, Stringer’s office organized a sequel, providing an opportunity to take stock of the last five years and recalibrate the transportation reform agenda going forward.

As it happened, former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall made brief remarks at the outset of the event, hosted at John Jay College, in her capacity as a vice chancellor of CUNY. The moment was ripe with irony. Five years ago, then-commissioner Weinshall made a splash at the first Stringer transportation conference, calling for bus rapid transit, parking reform, safe routes to schools, and new public spaces. In the past two years, Weinshall’s dogged attempts to eradicate the Prospect Park West protected bike lane have, if nothing else, underscored why she had to leave the department before progress could be achieved on all the promises she made in 2006.

On Friday morning, the stage belonged to her successor, Janette Sadik-Khan, who highlighted DOT’s long list of achievements and innovations:

• Select Bus Service: Though the roll-out has been slower than originally anticipated and true bus rapid transit has eluded NYC DOT and the MTA, NYC now has three operating corridors of Select Bus Service, including 34th Street and First and Second Avenues in Manhattan and on Fordham Road in the Bronx, improving transit for tens of thousands of riders each day and attracting thousands more.
• Bicycling: In 2006, the city promised to add 200 new miles of bike lanes, a pledge that has since been fulfilled and surpassed. Now New York sets its sights not only on advancing the number of bike lane miles, but creating innovative street designs that lead the nation in making cycling accessible to a wide array of city residents.
• Parking: The DOT has piloted Park Smart, time-of-day variable pricing for parking spots in Park Slope and Greenwich Village and is on its way to expanding it into other parts of the city.
• Safe routes to schools: The city has a robust program to improve safety near 135 schools in all five boroughs.
• Public plazas: The big public space news of 2006 was that the city would add a ribbon of pedestrian space to the Times Square bowtie. No one could have predicted the city would add substantial public plazas at Times Square and Herald Square by reclaiming lanes from traffic.

For all the reasons to celebrate the progress on NYC streets, the conference also provided some sobering perspective on the state of the transit system.

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LaHood, flanked by NYC Transpo Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer, lauds the NACTO bike guide. Photo: Darren Flusche, League of American Bicyclists

If Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has anything to say about it, every transportation planner in the country should have a shiny new engineering guide on his or her bookshelf.

It’s been six months since the National Association of City Transportation Officials released the Urban Bikeways Design Guide in an online format. Yesterday, LaHood was among the first to hold the print edition in his very-excited hands, providing a ringing endorsement for its widespread adoption.

It would have been a bittersweet moment, coming only hours after LaHood told reporters that he would be a one-term transportation secretary – if the attendees had heard the news by then, which most of them hadn’t.

Before the most bike-friendly transportation secretary in U.S. history took the podium, another groundbreaking policymaker — Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City Transportation Commissioner — set the stage. Sadik-Khan is more than the architect of NYC’s next-gen bike infrastructure; she’s also the president of NACTO. So, she proudly raised a copy and called the guide a compendium of “everything you need to know to bring world-class bikeways to city streets.”

With American cities constantly struggling to implement cycling facilities that have long been the norm in Europe, NACTO created the guide to speed adoption of bicycling infrastructure by speaking directly to planners and engineers in their specialized technical lingo. By compiling a manual written by American city officials, for American city officials, Sadik-Khan said, the guide will give cash-strapped municipalities the certainty they need to view cycling facilities as proven traffic applications, not costly experiments. By putting all the engineering specs on paper, she added, it will help cities move beyond the rigid design standards that have limited bike infrastructure in the past.

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If you couldn’t be at Madison Square yesterday, not to worry — Robin Urban Smith brings us the video highlights from the big bike-share press conference with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC business leaders, and progressive politicos.

Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announces the selection of Alta Bike Share to operate NYC's bike-share system. Standing to the left is Working Families Party director Dan Cantor. To the right are council members Gale Brewer and Brad Lander, and Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson. Photo: Noah Kazis

Addressing a plaza full of reporters at Madison Square this afternoon, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced that the city is entering the next phase of its initiative to launch a public bike system stretching from the Upper West Side to Bedford Stuyvesant. The system will be run by Alta Bike Share and consist of about 600 stations with 10,000 bicycles, creating a network of comparable size and density to bike-share systems in cities like London and Paris.

Station density is perhaps the single greatest key to success in a modern bike-share system. The less searching you have to do for a station, and the closer you are to your destination when you dock your bike, the better. As Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak told Streetfilms earlier this year, the underlying principle is “go big or go home.” With this announcement, NYC DOT and Alta have clearly signaled that they are going big. Once bike-share launches, it will change the way New Yorkers get around the city, extending the range of the transit system and adding point-to-point convenience for short trips.

Sadik-Khan said the selection of the bike-share operator also marks the beginning of an extensive public outreach campaign, which will seek ideas from local residents, community boards, and civic leaders to determine where bike-share stations should go. “This is just the start,” she said. “We really want your help in planning the system.” Public workshops will be held throughout the fall, and the bike-share system is on track to launch in 2012, potentially by the summer.

Leaders from NYC’s business community and progressive political landscape hailed the bike-share program as a way to give New Yorkers more transportation options and attract a skilled workforce. Both Kathy Wylde, the CEO of the city’s biggest business lobbying group, the Partnership for NYC, and Dan Cantor, leader of the labor-affiliated Working Families Party, were on hand to back the initiative. Wylde called bike-share “an important contribution to the next generation of what will make New York attractive to talent,” and Cantor said it is “one of those things that we’re going to look back at in a few years and say, ‘What took so long?’”

Asked specifically why cycling and bike-share is progressive, Cantor said: “This is so obvious. This is good for human beings. It’s good for the planet. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions. It burns calories. It makes you a happy person when you ride a bike.”

Three City Council members who represent districts within the bike-share service area also endorsed the plan: Gale Brewer, Brad Lander, and Tish James. The precise borders of the service area have yet to be finalized, but its general contours will run from the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side to Bed Stuy and Greenpoint. The city is considering ways to expand service to other areas after the first phase of the system is up and running, said Sadik-Khan.

Council Member Tish James, trailed by Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, tries out a bike made by the Public Bike System Company, which will supply NYC. Photo: Ben Fried

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Sadik-Khan with Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro and cyclist-baiting Council Member James Oddo. Photo: NYC DOT via The New York Observer

Matt Chaban at the Observer has filed a balanced, thorough and, dare we say, mature profile of Janette Sadik-Khan. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely worth a read.

Eschewing the pat cars vs. bikes conceit, and with nary a mention of the commissioner’s sartorial preferences, Chaban examines NYC DOT spending and wonders why critics refuse to acknowledge that, under Sadik-Khan, the agency is busting its hump to keep roads and bridges in good shape for motorists.

Of the 775 projects funded under the current capital plan, only a handful involved pedestrian plazas, like the closure of Times Square and the rest of Broadway, or bike lanes, like the litigious route along Prospect Park West. Some of these projects are so cheap, they do not even make the budget. All told, DOT has spent $19.2 million on plazas and $15.8 million on bike lanes. That is less than 1 percent of all capital spending over the past four years.

“She has done more for drivers than anyone since Robert Moses,” one transportation professional told The Observer.

All of which means nothing, Chaban writes, to a media and political establishment wedded to the status quo. When politicos and the press go into convulsions over the slightest perceived inconvenience to the motoring minority, when a junk lawsuit literally drives the news cycle of the city’s paper of record, DOT’s success stories don’t stand a chance.

Of course no one ever flipped breathlessly to a story about a pothole-free street, or a pedestrian who made it home safely. (“So much of what DOT does is invisible,” says Sam Schwartz.) But Chaban notes that even a sure-fire spectacle like the replacement of the Willis Avenue Bridge only got play for a day or two, “compared to at least a year’s worth of reports lambasting bike lanes.” Another example: If any media outlet in the city has connected the makeover of Times Square with the subsequent rise in retail rents, please send us a link.

If the city were really ramping up cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure at the expense of motorists, at least Sadik-Khan’s detractors, misguided as they may be, would be arguing from a point of fact. But as it is DOT is making New York a more livable city on the cheap with little to no impact on drivers — if anything, the emphasis on maintenance and repair is a blessing for motorists — and is saving lives in the process. Only through willful ignorance could this story continue to go untold.

James Vacca and Janette Sadik-Khan take advantage of new pedestrian countdown timers crossing 165th Street at the Grand Concourse. Photo: Noah Kazis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayor Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan were joined in Madison Square by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for today's traffic safety announcements. Photo: Brad Aaron

New York City is plagued by speeding drivers. According to Transportation Alternatives, 39 percent of motorists drive in excess of the city’s 30 mph speed limit, regardless of the presence of pedestrians or even school children. Its ubiquity notwithstanding, speeding is far from a victimless crime. Speeding-related crashes killed 71 people in the city in 2009, and injured 3,739.

Joined by DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Mayor Bloomberg today announced a multi-pronged program to reduce deaths caused by speeding. Locally, the city is initiating its first “slow zone,” enacting a 20 mph speed limit in the Claremont section of the Bronx. In addition, DOT will be placing radar-equipped signs at locations in all five boroughs, alerting drivers to their speed.

Speaking from Madison Square at Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the mayor unveiled the measures as part of DOT’s pedestrian safety action plan, released last summer. “The slow-speed zones and increased speed boards we are announcing today will target the biggest killer on our roads — speeding — in the most dangerous locations,” said Bloomberg.

On the heels of her department’s much-publicized safe-cycling campaign, Sadik-Khan reintroduced the driver-targeted “That’s Why It’s 30″ PSAs. A person struck by a vehicle traveling at 30 mph has up to an 80 percent chance of surviving the collision, according to figures cited by the city, while the likelihood of survival drops to 30 percent when the vehicle is moving at 40 mph.

“Every crash is preventable,” said Sadik-Khan, who noted that overall crash-related injuries have dropped by 41 percent since the installation of pedestrian plazas at the site of today’s event. “That’s not an accident,” she said, “that’s an accomplishment.” During her remarks, Sadik-Khan pointed to the city’s goal of reducing traffic fatalities by 50 percent by 2030.

Absent from today’s presentation was any mention of enforcement. When asked about NYPD cooperation, Bloomberg replied that budget constraints don’t allow for “a cop on every corner.” The city would like to rely more on automated enforcement, the mayor said, but has been stymied by Albany. (After the presser, a Bloomberg aide told Streetsblog that the administration asked for the current speed camera bill, which we reported on last week.) Future “slow zones,” meanwhile, will be considered by request.

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Photo: Brad Aaron

The speed limit will be reduced from 30 miles per hour to 20 miles per hour in the Claremont neighborhood of the Bronx, Mayor Bloomberg and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced today, fulfilling a promise laid out last year in the city’s pedestrian safety action plan to pilot a 20 mph zone in one New York City neighborhood. Similar slow speed zones in London have been proven to save lives and prevent injuries.

Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan were joined by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon at a press event today announcing the UN’s Decade of Action for Road Safety, which will call attention to the 1.3 million people killed and 20 to 50 million people injured in traffic crashes each year worldwide.

We’ll have a full report on the announcement later today. According to a press release, Claremont was selected based on several factors, including crashes per square mile, number of schools and subway stops, and the location of truck routes.

Better bicycling infrastructure could be coming to a city near you thanks to an initiative of the National Association of City Transportation Officials. NACTO’s Cities for Cycling committee today released its anticipated Bikeway Design Guide, a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in bicycle infrastructure that is intended to advance state and national policy. Created for a profession that prizes design standards, the document has the potential to spur widespread adoption of bike infrastructure that makes many more people feel safe riding on the street, leading to big increases in cycling for transportation, as well as gains in pedestrian safety.

This bike box in New York gives cyclists more visibility at intersections -- a design treatment recommended by NACTO's new Bikeway Design Guide. Photo: Cities for Cycling

The guide is the result of months of study by engineers, planners and academics from fifteen major U.S. cities. It offers comprehensive design instruction on the latest in cycling infrastructure innovations from Europe and stateside, such as bike boxes, bike signals and separated cycle tracks.

“NACTO’s Urban Bikeway Design Guide gives American planners and designers the tools they need to make cycling accessible to more people,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City transportation commissioner and president of NACTO. “These guidelines represent the state of the art and should be adopted as the new standards around the country.”

Planners hope their recommendations will be incorporated into the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials’ design guidelines. Design manuals by these standard-bearing organizations thus far ignore some of the cutting-edge bike treatments that have been adopted in cities like Portland and New York, as well as European cities. As we reported earlier this week, this makes funding and planning for these potentially life-saving projects difficult and time consuming, particularly for smaller cities, NACTO officials said.

In the meantime, Cities for Cycling is encouraging local communities to adopt its recommendations. Already, the states of Washington and Texas are looking to make NACTO’s standards official, sources say.

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Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood immediately after addressing the Bike Summit. Photo: Clarence Eckerson

New York City politicians may have had their feathers ruffled by Janette Sadik-Khan, but on the national stage, New York City’s transportation commissioner is getting nothing but love from the Obama administration for her innovative leadership.

Streetsblog Capitol Hill’s Tanya Snyder reports that at the National Bike Summit last night, US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood had this to say about Sadik-Khan:

A quite extraordinary lady as all of you know. She has really put New York on the map when it comes to making New York a livable, sustainable community with lots of opportunities for walking, and biking paths, and you can live in New York and not own an automobile. So Janette, thank you for your leadership. Thank you for your leadership.

New York City is a liberal bastion and the least car-dependent city in the country. But our senior senator seems intent on halting the progress of innovative street designs here in NYC, while representatives from Maryland and Oregon carry the banner for bike infrastructure in Congress. One of our mayoral hopefuls makes wisecracks about ripping out bike lanes, while the next mayor of Chicago has pledged to install miles of bikeways, with an emphasis on physically-protected lanes, each year he’s in office.

What does it say about the political class in this town when changes to make our streets safer leave our electeds hyperventilating, while a former Republican congressman from Peoria touts their safety and environmental benefits?