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.

Stringer focused on the high price of MTA capital construction – what former MTA Charman Jay Walder dubbed “the MTA premium” on construction costs compared to other world cities. New York suffers from a much higher cost per mile for expanding its subway network – nearly quadruple the cost of subway expansion in London and more than five times as expensive as in Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.

The borough president pointed to costly work rules and excessive regulation as causes. He also mentioned that not knowing the location of underground utility lines has slowed the Second Avenue Subway and driven up costs.

Stringer proposed an “underground census” that would help capital construction stay on time and under budget by using all our available technology to map the city’s entire subsurface infrastructure network. He claimed such a tool would have saved $80 million on the Second Avenue Subway project. Unfortunately, given the project’s multi-billion dollar pricetag, even $80 million amounts to a drop in the bucket.

Former Port Authority chief Chris Ward – always known as a frank pragmatist – could truly speak his mind, having left his post earlier this fall. He focused on the continued irrationality of New York’s road pricing and the failure to properly fund infrastructure, saying that the region is not going to get anywhere without tolling the East River bridges and developing a more general tolling structure that reflects when and how people use crossings. Crossing the Tappen Zee Bridge during the times of day when traffic moves freely should cost less than driving across the Brooklyn Bridge into the most congested part of the region. According to Ward, we need to assess user fees to reinvest in our infrastructure.

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign agreed. “Someday we’ll have to move to a system of congestion pricing or bridge tolls. It’s politically very hard but it makes extremely rational sense as a source of funding,” he said, while adding that right now is a very difficult time to be talking about taxes or new revenues.

Albany’s failure to enact congestion pricing or bridge tolls has put transit advocates in a very hard place. Without those revenue streams, the MTA will have to borrow vast sums to pay for its current capital program — a lose-lose proposition. While on the one hand increased borrowing means that the pressure on the fare is only going to go up in the future, on the other hand rejecting borrowing means cutbacks in the capital program that would send the system back to the days of frequent train breakdowns and crumbling stations, said Russianoff.

After several rounds of fare hikes and service cuts in the past five years, there is a consensus that transit funding is the primary transportation issue New York City needs to face. What will it take to celebrate progress on that challenge when the next borough president’s transportation conference rolls around in 2016?

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.

Beyond the ease of reference, the guide breaks new ground by detailing bicycle infrastructure that has yet to be officially embraced by the old guard of transportation engineering institutions. The current versions of the AASHTO Guide to Bikeway Facilities or the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) directly reference only five of the 21 treatments outlined in the NACTO guide, according to the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals. Looking for design guidance on bike boxes? Best practices for protected bike lanes? Thanks to NACTO, now there’s a reference guide for that.

What will that sleek techno-manual mean for the average cyclist? A blossoming of bike infrastructure that will help mainstream bicycling, make streets safer for all users, and finally bring American transportation into the 21st century, said Sadik-Khan. “This is a design guide for streets that work today and in 2050; streets that aren’t designed for 1950,” she said.

Secretary LaHood seconded that emotion. The first words out of his mouth were a direct recommendation that every community use the design guide as a means to promote more and safer cycling. “This is an extraordinary piece of work that’s long overdue,” the secretary said.

True to his reputation, LaHood touted the importance of “providing cycling opportunities that are safe, convenient and available.” The new guide, he said, should serve as a resource in that effort.

“This is a big deal,” he said of the proliferation of urban bicycling. “And this guide is a big deal.”

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

One of the defining aspects of the contract is that the system must operate without public subsidy. Alta is assuming all the financial risk of running the system, which is projected to cost about $50 million per year to operate. They expect to turn a profit, a portion of which will be shared with the city. Some revenue will come from memberships, which will be priced at less than $100 for an annual pass and give users access to an unlimited number of trips under 30 minutes, after which additional fees kick in. Daily, weekly and monthly passes will also be available (specific prices have not yet been set, but you can read about the general structure of how membership will work).

Another major source of revenue will be corporate sponsorship, and Alta is now seeking a single sponsor whose brand will go everywhere the bike-share system goes — 600 kiosks and 10,000 bikes.

Judging by the Q&A after the presser, NYC’s bike-share plans will face an uphill battle in the media. A good chunk of NYC’s press corps seems to think the bike-share story is about what might happen once people who don’t normally ride in New York are using public bikes. Will they wear helmets? Will they follow the rules of the road? (Experience in other cities suggests that bike-share users are safer on the streets than cyclists riding their own bikes.) As for providing a new transit option and overcoming the barriers to bike riding posed by theft and walk-up apartments without much storage space — don’t count on a wave of coverage about that.

We’re at the very beginning of the process to bring a world-class public bike system to NYC. This fall will come dozens of public workshops to discuss where hundreds of stations should go. The NIMBYs are already staking out their position, and the press corps is as hungry for conflict as ever. If you want bike-share in NYC to be as good as it should be, get ready to make your case.

Noah Kazis contributed reporting to this post.

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.

Today’s announcements came as the United Nations launched its “Decade of Action for Road Safety” campaign to reduce traffic fatalities in 120 countries. By 2020, said Secretary General Ban, the UN hopes to save five million lives worldwide. On a global scale, he said, road fatalities are the leading cause of death of people age 15 to 29, and kill 1.3 million every year. Ban also praised Bloomberg for recently donating $125 million to improve worldwide road safety.

If the questions lobbed at the mayor from the city press corps are any indication, expect less media emphasis on traffic deaths and speed enforcement and a lot of attention on those radar signs, which will feature “digital displays of skeletons” to goad drivers into slowing down. Skeleton queries outnumbered questions about reducing fatalities by a sizable margin. Said an obviously impatient Bloomberg: “If you save one life, it’s one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever heard.”

A couple more tidbits: During the Q&A session, Bloomberg expressed unequivocal support for the city’s bike lane program, and took a jab at preemptive criticism of the upcoming bike-share launch. And addressing Sadik-Khan, the mayor was unambiguous in his appraisal of her job performance.

“The bottom line is you’ve done exactly what we’ve asked,” Bloomberg said. “You are saving lots of lives.”

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.

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.

“NACTO’s Cities for Cycling Urban Bikeway Design Guide is perfect for any city looking to start a bike program at the highest level,” said Boston Transportation Commissioner Tom Tinlin.

The Bikeway Design Guide offers four different treatments for bike signals, three physically-protected cycle track designs, four types of striped bike lanes and a variety of intersection treatments and signage recommendations. Guidelines are divided into three categories: required, recommended and optional.

Design guidance on one-way cycle tracks, for example, would require a symbol and arrow marking as well as “preferential lane” status, as defined by the guide. Colored pavement for the track is considered optional.

The guide was developed with input from transportation officials from Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

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?

We’ve queried Weiner’s office to find out, but the Times piece, more than anything, should serve as a rallying point for those who support the work of NYCDOT. Whether or not Sadik-Khan has hurt feelings or ruffled feathers, her efforts continue to make city streets safer and more accessible for the majority of New Yorkers. Period.

With the axing of the 34th Street pedestrian plaza, you can bet the haters — the “real New Yorkers” for whom pedestrians and bus riders are obstacles on the other side of the windshield — smell blood in the water. Today’s sneering editorial from the Post calling for Sadik-Khan’s job is likely but a hint of what’s to come.

Several Streetsblog readers have posted their letters to Weiner and the Times. After the jump, read what John Petro of the Drum Major Institute wrote to the congressman. At this pivotal moment, consider adding your voice of reason to what is sure to be an ongoing war of words over the very future of the city.

The Honorable Representative Weiner,

I live in an area in New York City a bit west to your House district, but I wanted to write to express my concern about your comments related to bicycle lanes as they were quoted by the New York Times on Friday afternoon. I know that you have stood up and spoken out in favor of pedestrian and bicycle improvements before, so it is quite possible that your quote was taken out of context. All the same I would like to take the opportunity to discuss exactly why recent improvements to the city s streets are so important.

I am a policy analyst for urban affairs at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive-leaning think tank based in New York City. My comments today reflect my personal opinion, not those of the Drum Major Institute, but I would like to refer to my position with this organization because I am currently researching a comprehensive paper about street safety in New York City.

Through my research, I have found that about 270 New Yorkers are killed by traffic incidents, on average, every year. For every traffic fatality, there are thousands of life-altering injuries, including the loss of a limb, chronic pain, and immobility. I have found that among our peer cities in Europe, New York City s fatality rate is extremely high. I also want to point out that the threat that street safety poses to the city s general public is on the same level as gun violence. In fact, more people are killed by traffic in New York City than are murdered by guns.

Therefore, street safety is a very serious issue. If there were about 270 fatalities at Kennedy or LaGuardia every year, I’m quite certain that we would feel compelled do something about the situation. And yet, the same number of people is being killed on the city s streets every year.

This is even more alarming given that many our peer cities in Europe have fatality rates half of New York City’s. For example, Paris halved the number of traffic fatalities in the city in the short span of six years. The interventions that reduce fatalities are well known. They aim to limit automobile speeds to between 20 and 30 miles per hour when pedestrians are present. These interventions, such as the wide-spread introduction of protected bicycle lanes, have been associated with reduced fatality rates in the cities that have implemented them, as studies in medical journals such as Injury Prevention have shown.

As a progressive, and one that has been closely watching your admirable statements on the House floor, I hope that you will take these facts into mind when developing your position on bicycle lanes in built-up urban areas. This is simply a matter of life and death, an ethical issue that should be treated with the utmost seriousness. Personally, I do not feel that 270 deaths and thousands of life altering injuries on the city s streets every year are acceptable. Given the fact that they can be avoided, as the experience of European cities shows, I cannot accept that level of violence.

If you have any questions about how I ve arrived at these conclusions I would be happy to share the academic studies and reports by organizations such as the World Health Organization which have concluded: interventions such as the implementation of bicycle lanes have the potential to save hundreds of lives every year in New York City. Thank you.

John Petro

It’s not so much a profile of transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan as a 2,500-word description of her place in New York’s political firmament. The question that drives the piece forward is this: “What is it about Sadik-Khan that gets under the skin of state legislators, City Council members, and other political figures?”

A more revealing piece might have asked: “What is it about a program to make New York a better city for transit, biking and walking that gets under the skin of the city’s political class?”

New York is now seen as a national innovator in progressive transportation policy, emulated by cities all over the country. I would like to know more about why so many elected officials in this supposed bastion of progressivism are so worked up over this development, which has not really affected all that many streets. What is it about some thermoplastic stripes on a street that gives Lew Fidler such agita?

The quote that’s already sending the most ripples has nothing to do with Sadik-Khan herself, and everything to do with the program that’s advanced under her leadership at DOT. It comes from Congress member, congestion pricing foe, and once and future mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, at a Gracie Mansion dinner last year:

“When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing?” Mr. Weiner said to Mr. Bloomberg, as tablemates listened. “I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your [expletive] bike lanes.”

The strange thing about Weiner’s wisecrack is that he’s on the record supporting the expansion of NYC’s bike network.

In 2007, while he was opposing congestion pricing, he was supporting steps (including bike-share) to increase cycling in New York to 10 percent modeshare.

In 2008, while he was toying with a run for mayor, Weiner told the riders assembled at the first Tour de Queens:

We still have to make this city a much more bike-friendly town. For every ten dollars we spend for transportation in this city, nine dollars and 30 cents goes to moving cars around, and the other 70 cents is to help pedestrians and bike riders. We need to change that.

The shout-out to better streets for walking and biking even made it in to Weiner’s proto-platform, before he decided not to make a run at City Hall:

Finally, as evidenced by my work as a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to secure millions of dollars for pedestrian and bicycle transportation options, we need to make our existing infrastructure safe and friendly for alternative modes of moving from Point A to Point B. Integrated neighborhoods — where individuals live, work and play in close proximity to one another, as Jane Jacobs once exalted — demand that we enable those who want to commute without polluting to do so safely and easily.

Interesting that the guy said something totally different at a dinner for New York’s congressional delegation. I think it says more about the audience at Gracie Mansion that night than it does about the person overseeing the changes to NYC’s streets.

While the mayor didn’t make a rousing defense of the 34th Street plan, he did mention the success of rapid bus improvements on First and Second Avenue. Overall, I think it’s pretty good news if you want to see improvements for transit, biking, and walking move forward in New York City.

You can listen to the show here. Here’s a partial transcript:

Gambling: And we actually have a whole bunch of Tweets which we’ll see if we can get to as many as possible in just a little bit here. Oh, 34th Street. You and your Transportation Commish decided no more pedestrian –

Mayor: You know she can’t catch a break.

Gambling: I’m surprised she doesn’t get run over at this point.

Mayor: This woman has made some real innovations here in this city that will last and will be a very big deal.

Gambling: But this one’s not going to happen.

Mayor: Well everybody said, “You should talk to the community.” She came up with a plan, she spent a few years talking to the communities. They didn’t like it.

Gambling: From Herald Square to Fifth was going to be pedestrian, correct?

Mayor: Whatever. And so she’s changing it. Says, “I’ll come up with another plan.” That’s what she’s supposed to do. And one editorial vilified her today, the other one gave her a lot of credit for listening and trying something. More modest bus lanes, they work someplace. You know, my charge to her is don’t let anybody beat you down. Do the right thing, listen to people, try to explain, try to get buy-ins and that sort of thing, but keep coming up with new ideas even if your ideas — if you can’t implement them, if the people don’t want them or whatever, don’t go back into a car or a bicycle or whatever and be afraid of trying new things.

Gambling: Iris Weinshall, they laughed at her with the cross-town through streets, and those worked out pretty well.

Mayor: Yeah absolutely. I mean, you know, and Iris was very innovative and did a lot of good things, and Janette is doing it, and I hope whoever is the Transportation Secretary in my successor’s administration also does new things. You can’t sit there and do what you’ve been doing forever. It just — I know everybody says, ‘Oh no if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.’ You have to lead, you have to anticipate, and some of the things that Janette has done have worked out phenomenally well.

We have to address the fact that the buses are so slow, that they are not a good alternative to cars, because then you’re in this ever declining cycle of what’s it — non-virtuous cycle I think is what they would call it. And First Avenue, Second Avenue bus lanes I’m told are working out. These buses where you get on and off and it’s the honor system and you buy a ticket in the middle of the block, speed things up. Cameras on the buses, that speeds things up. You know, there’s somebody who doesn’t like everything so, you know, if we listened to them, Central Park would never have been built and nothing would have gotten done.

Normally, one angry editorial in the city’s News Corp. tabloid wouldn’t be cause for concern. But this one came complete with a companion news piece, in which City Council members, including Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca, piled on. And it’s also the latest and loudest salvo in what can only be described as a multi-pronged assault waged by local media and politicians on the city’s bicycle program.

John del Signore at Gothamist ran a good piece exposing the Post’s shoddy case against Sadik-Khan, calling the paper’s focus on one city official a “disingenuous” attempt to “score cheap political points.”

I’d like to focus on one particular rhetorical tactic favored by the Post’s editorial staff: the name-calling.

The Post refers to Sadik-Khan as “Deputy Mayor for Bicycles” and, a few paragraphs later, “Bicycle Lady.” As astute observers will know, if the writers had been paying attention the past three years, they would have come up with a more accurate nickname, like “Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Bus Lady.” Or, to really cover the full extent of what’s been going on, “Safer, More Efficient Transportation Lady.”

We’re living in a golden age for improvements to bus corridors, expansions of public space, engineering that prioritizes pedestrian safety, and yes, more efficient streets for motorists. The recent progress of the city’s bicycle program has been stupendous too, opening the door for many more New Yorkers to feel safe riding on city streets. But with so much else going on in NYC DOT’s transportation modernization effort, it’s telling that the Post singled out bike policy for derision.

No matter how much evidence piles up that more people are riding and fewer pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists are getting hurt, in some people’s view, bike infrastructure will never be legitimate. The message comes through loud and clear in the editorial pages of the Post. You can sense it when national Republicans threaten federal bike-ped funding before taking aim at any other transportation programs. It seeps into public hearings in NYC, like when the Democratic chair of the City Council Transportation Committee says that bike policy is “all about trade-offs” with motorists, not about protecting New Yorkers who ride or extending access to an affordable mode of transportation.

If you want to see NYC keep making strides toward becoming a bike-friendly city, it’s gut-check time. Community boards need to hear from residents that safe streets for cycling matter (Brooklyn CB 6 folks can get going on that this Thursday). Council members need to hear from their constituents that bicycling and bike policy matter. At your local precinct community council, cops need to hear that smart, targeted traffic enforcement matters.

And the Bloomberg administration needs to hear from New Yorkers who want to see the progress of the past few years continue. Here’s a good place to get that message out loud and clear.

Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca, far left, puts a question to DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, seated at the far table in the center. Photo: Ben Fried

The line to testify at today’s Transportation Committee hearing on New York City bike policy was snaking outside into the biting cold well before the 10:00 a.m. start time. More than 70 people signed up to speak, filling up two hearing rooms at 250 Broadway.

The first few hours of the hearing, however, belonged to committee members, who peppered Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan with questions about an exhaustive array of bike-related topics: how DOT decides to install bike lanes, how they measure the success of bike lanes, how much bike lanes cost, how the city intends to discourage rule-breakers on bikes, and yes, whether cyclist registration should be required.

“Nobody disagrees that using more bicycles is a good thing, but in a city where traffic is horrendous and finding a parking space is difficult, bike policy is all about tradeoffs,” committee chair Vacca said in his introduction. “Too many people are starting to get the impression that bike policy is about getting them to give up their cars.”

All of Streetsblog’s editors and reporters are gathering for our annual strategy session this afternoon, so unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the full hearing. But here are a few quick hits that will hopefully give a sense of where certain Council members stand on bike policy:

• Vacca had the mic longer than other committee members and had the longest exchanges with Sadik-Khan. One question about the cost of building bike lanes yielded an answer that will be of particular interest to Streetsblog readers. All of the current DOT’s bike projects combined have cost a total of $8.8 million, including analysis, design, outreach, and construction, Sadik-Khan said. When you factor in the 80 percent federal match, the city has spent less than $2 million from its own coffers on the major expansions to the bike network we’ve seen the last few years.
• Queens representative Peter Koo, who represents Flushing, said, “In my experience, I hardly see any people using the bike lanes. Meanwhile, the motorists have no place to park, and business people have no place for deliveries.” Statistics laying out the substantial bicycle volumes on certain streets — in the range of 10 to 20 percent of peak hour traffic on several corridors, Sadik-Khan said — did not sway him. “Some parts of the city, downtown areas, don’t need bike lanes,” he said. “They should go in suburban areas.”
• Southern Brooklyn’s Lew Fidler said residents in his neighborhoods will not commute by bike and questioned the utility of long-term planning when it comes to bike infrastructure. He professed not to understand the DOT priority on building bike lanes that would yield a more connected, cohesive network of safe cycling routes. He also asked DOT to come back and install a bike lane along recreational routes by the water in his district.
• Tish James asked DOT to expand the bike network in Brooklyn beyond the downtown core and neighboring communities, into central and southern Brooklyn. “The objections of my colleagues notwithstanding, I can think of no better way of addressing the sedentary lifestyle than expanding the bicycle network.” She also asked for more physically protected lanes in Brooklyn.
• The first and, I believe, only council member to bring up the idea of mandatory registration for cyclists was David Greenfield, a freshman who represents parts of Borough Park, Midwood, and Bensonhurst.
• East Side representative and occasional cyclist Daniel Garodnick asked how pedestrians’ perception of safety on streets with new bike lanes can be addressed. “Even before bike lanes, the number of complaints about riders who do improper things is high,” he said. He welcomed DOT’s new “Don’t be a jerk” education campaign, but he’d like to see more from the police. “I hope DOT will encourage NYPD to do proper enforcement of the rules, so that as we expand the bike network, people will use it properly,” he said.
• Another East Side rep, Jessica Lappin, took a harder line on cyclist enforcement. “What people are doing is breaking the law and putting lives at risk,” she said. “I’ve heard countless stories of people who’ve been hit, killed, the list goes on and on.”

There were several camera crews in the cramped hearing room. Can’t wait to see how the coverage shakes out from this one.

If you want to report from the latter parts of the hearing or you have testimony that you’d like to share, drop us a line in the comments or send us an email at tips@streetsblog.org. You can also get lots of good snippets of testimony from the Twitter feed of Streetsblog reader BicyclesOnly.

With the hearing room full, lots of people were still waiting outside 250 Broadway when the Transportation Committee got started this morning.

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.

This weekend, Select Bus Service debuted on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, bringing a package of improvements to speed trips on one of New York’s most-used bus routes. Buses on the M15 route were traveling at a snail-like clip of less than 6 mph before the introduction of SBS.

Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City Transit’s Director of Bus Planning Ted Orosz, and MTA Bus Company President Joe Smith spoke to Streetfilms about how SBS will make traveling on the east side of Manhattan faster and easier for transit riders. The major changes include dedicated bus lanes enforced by cameras, priority for buses at traffic lights, and off-board fare collection.

Select Bus Service in the Bronx has produced a 20 percent improvement in travel times and enticed thousands more New Yorkers to ride the bus. Officials project that once people get used to the new system on First and Second Avenues, transit riders on the east side will see similar gains. Have a look and see how it works.

Between Chris Christie’s decision to wind down construction on the ARC tunnel and the fare-hiking aftereffects of Albany’s political malevolence/incompetence, it was a rough week for sustainable transportation in the New York City region. Governors and legislatures may call a lot of the shots when it comes to transportation policy, but thankfully not all of them. Case in point: All the great changes in New York documented by the fine team at Embarq in this stunning video, the first in a series called “Cities in Focus” which will also showcase innovations from Curitiba, Istanbul, Mumbai, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Watch this installment and see Michael Bloomberg, Janette Sadik-Khan, and Streetsblog originator Aaron Naparstek all appear within a few seconds of each other. And check out City Fix blogger Jonna McKone’s report on the video premiere earlier this week. (NYC DOT Senior Policy Adviser Jon Orcutt dropped a few intriguing bits of info about how the city is developing bike-share plans.)

We’ll see more results of NYC innovation this Sunday, when Select Bus Service and the re-designed First and Second Avenues officially debut.

NYCDOT will build out at least 20 miles of "intensive" safety improvements each year to reduce pedestrian injuries and fatalities on the city's most dangerous streets. Graphic courtesy of NYCDOT's Pedestrian Safety Study & Action Plan

“We’ve made historic gains in reducing traffic fatalities, and this year we are seeing pedestrians fatalities decline again,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “But we still see too many families devastated by traffic accidents. The report and actions detailed today, including the installation of pedestrian countdown signals across the city, will make our streets even safer, especially for the pedestrians who, year in and year out, account for the majority of New York’s traffic fatalities.”

The report, which you can download here, analyzes crashes that caused 7,000 serious pedestrian injuries and deaths in New York City. Among the findings: Driver inattention is the most common cause of crashes that seriously injure or kill pedestrians; failure to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk is responsible for 27 percent of such crashes; speeding is a factor in more than 20 percent of such crashes, but most New Yorkers don't know the citywide speed limit is 30 mph.

DOT has outlined a range of actions to meet the agency's goal of cutting pedestrian fatalities to half the 2007 level by 2030, a target set in its strategic plan, known as Sustainable Streets, in 2008. Each year, the agency will re-engineer 60 miles of streets to improve safety. Along these corridors, at least 20 miles of streets will receive "intensive" safety improvements, such as sidewalk widenings or pedestrian refuges, that alter the geometry of the street. DOT will also launch the city's first 20 mph zone in a yet-to-be-selected neighborhood in 2011, part of a pilot program intended to "slow traffic on an area-wide, rather than individual street, basis." The citywide roll-out of 1,500 pedestrian countdown signals, which Bloomberg referred to, comes after a DOT pilot showed that they reduce injuries and that pedestrians prefer them to regular signals.

The investment in designing safer streets will be paired with several traffic enforcement and education measures. We'll have a more detailed re-cap, with highlights from the press conference, later today.

NYCDOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is in Los Angeles this weekend for the StreetSummit, a gathering of Southern California bike and pedestrian advocates. In a lead-in to the conference, Sadik-Khan spoke at her alma mater, Occidental College, and Clarence Eckerson and Streetsblog LA's Damien Newton were there.

Speaking to a packed house of advocates, planners, and students, Sadik-Khan described how New York's streets are becoming safer and more sustainable. Damien reports that the changes happening here are raising expectations on the other side of the country:

The real message of the evening was that Angelenos, especially our government leaders and transportation bureaucrats, shouldn't be scared of trying something new. After all, the transportation planning for Los Angeles up to now clearly hasn't worked...

As Sadik-Khan talked about how easy it is to make some of these changes, some in the room got a little queasy. It's easy to paint bus-only lanes? Sorry, that takes decades of studies and environmental reviews. NYCDOT has a goal of fifty miles of new bike lanes ever year? Well, here in L.A. we can bring a Sharrows pilot program on a couple of streets to fruition a mere three years after the city starts studying it.

For more on Sadik-Khan's appearance in Los Angeles, check out Damien's write-up at Streetsblog LA.