Streetsblog New York City

The walkback of the city’s plans for 34th Street from a physically separated transitway to a package of painted lanes and bus bulbs was unquestionably a defeat for bus riders on the extremely congested street. While features like off-board fare payment, scheduled to go into effect this summer, will provide a speed boost to buses, riders won’t be able to go crosstown as quickly as if they had lanes free from encroachment.

What does the city’s decision on 34th Street mean for the future of bus rapid transit across the rest of the city, however? We spoke with two transit advocates to find out.

It seems likely that without physical separation on 34th Street, there won’t be physical separation on any bus lanes implemented before the end of the Bloomberg Administration. (The remaining routes in the city’s first phase of BRT rollout — on the Nostrand Avenue corridor in Brooklyn and Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island — are scheduled to debut in the next two years and do not include physically separated lanes.) Preliminary plans for the 34th Street route were first presented to the public in April 2008, a full three years ago, and the planning process for the project is scheduled to continue through the end of 2011. At that rate, any physically separated bus project would be at least partially under the authority of a new mayor and new DOT.

“A number of the environmental and transportation groups are starting to recognize that the next administration after Bloomberg is going to have to answer to us on where they stand on these issues that have been wildly popular for New Yorkers,” said Kate Slevin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

Though a new physically separated busway is unlikely to be constructed in the next three years, said Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development, “Planning can happen and dialogue with stakeholders can happen that make it a lot more likely that the next phase is gets built and has those features.” Byron said she hopes that the BRT team at DOT can assemble a coalition along its next routes that can politically lock in full-featured bus improvements. “There are workers and residents and employers in the outer boroughs who would love to have this problem of a Select Bus route running by their door,” she said.

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Last night, the Museum of the City of New York hosted a panel discussion about the future of large-scale transportation projects in the region. Hosted by New York Times reporter Michael Grynbaum, the panel — the RPA’s Jeff Zupan, MTA Capital Construction’s Michael Horodniceanu, the General Contractors Association’s Denise Richardson, and the Pratt Center’s Joan Byron — engaged in a wide-ranging conversation, which covered everything from the demise of the ARC tunnel to the high cost of transit projects and the question of whether New York’s transit system is too focused on Manhattan and rail.

Here are a few of the more interesting comments from the event:

• Zupan, who was director of planning at New Jersey Transit for ten years, said that plans to replace ARC were pipe dreams. “We’re not going to see any of that money any time soon for a substitute,” he said. “To think that we’re going to find a substitute for ARC I think is really folly.”
• “It was a totally political decision,” Horodniceanu said of the ARC cancellation. Christie “didn’t conceive of it” and “won’t cut the ribbons.”
• There was agreement that federal regulation is slowing down and adding to the cost of transit projects. “I think of myself as an environmentalist except when I look at the NEPA process,” said Zupan. Byron pointed to the “tortured” process for receiving federal transit aid, which she compared to highway spending, where the feds “just write the state departments of transportation a big check.”
• The untolled interstate system has created a sense that “when I drive my car, it’s free,” said Richardson. “We have lost the concept of being willing to pay for all the things we use.”
• Noting the amount of spending on the MTA’s four Manhattan-based mega-projects (the Second Avenue Subway, the 7 extension, East Side Access and the Fulton Street Transit Center), Byron said that many New Yorkers are “paying an inordinate share of the cost of expanding infrastructure [through the farebox] and not receiving a proportionate share of the benefits.” Continued Byron, “If people are not feeling the love for the MTA and its capital program, maybe there’s a reason for that.”
• Horodniceanu explained that he was very concerned with the future of those transit projects if the state doesn’t find money for the MTA’s capital program. “If there’s no money in 2012 and 2013, we’ll slow down until the money will come back,” he said. If the state waits until the economy heats up, however, the current moment of cheap construction costs will have passed.
• Zupan argued against spending billions to include commuter rail across the Tappan Zee Bridge, saying it wouldn’t have high enough ridership. “That’s one of those Manhattan-centric projects that I think Joan and I can both get against,” he said.”
• The discussion mostly focused on transit, but when asked about bikes, Zupan said that “We have the specter of the former DOT commissioner suing the city because they’re putting a bike lane in in Brooklyn. That’s horrible.”
• The otherwise quiet audience burst into applause when Byron suggested that bringing countdown clocks to buses would be even more important than bringing them to the subway. Byron pointed out that buses were in fact popular, prompting Grynbaum to respond, “I’ll have to tell my editors about that.”

Our series on the next four years of NYC transportation policy continues with today's essay from Joan Byron, Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development's Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative. The Rudin Center for Transportation Policy recognized Byron's work at the Pratt Center with the 2009 Civic Leadership Award. Read previous entries in this series here and here.

In New York political time, four years passes fast. But hey, in Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa was limited to a single three-year term as mayor, during which he built dozens of new schools and libraries, converted a golf course to a public park, laid down 100 miles of bike paths, and of course, built the Transmilenio, the system against which Bus Rapid Transit aspirants worldwide are measured.

What can get done under Bloomberg 3.0? The answer depends on lots of things, some of which are now in short supply. Money, for instance. The next several NYC budget years will be hard on everybody, and really hard on the people and neighborhoods who were bypassed by the economic boom, and who've since been battered further by the recession depression. In this environment, will City Hall keep shoveling cash into sports stadia and shopping malls? Will it continue to count on the real estate market to throw off a few crumbs of affordable housing? Or will we seize the moment and use zoning and subsidies as tools to shape the city we want, instead of simply facilitating the worst instincts of developers?

Transportation policy under Bloomberg 3.0: Money's not the problem

The next set of BRT routes needs to fearlessly go where no bus has gone before.

The good news is that some of the most effective transportation investments we can make in the next four years are also the most affordable. Implementing a full-featured and far-reaching Bus Rapid Transit system won't require either New York City DOT or the MTA to come up with a big new pile of capital dollars. Good BRT, like good pedestrian and bike infrastructure, does cost money, but at a pay-as-you-go level, rather than demanding multi-billion dollar upfront investments that can take decades to deliver results. It costs millions, not billions, and it can be up in running in months, rather than decades.

And real BRT will be transformative. New York City today is home to 758,000 workers who travel over an hour each way to reach their jobs. Two-thirds of these folks are going to jobs where they earn less than $35,000. That's not a coincidence -- look at a map, and you'll quickly see that the places poor and working-class people can afford to live are those least well-served by the subway system.

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COMMUTE's proposals for BRT routes in the five boroughs, shown next to DOT's current plan. View an enlarged version.

As part of its "Sustainability Watch" series this week, Gotham Gazette ran a great piece on Bus Rapid Transit by Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development. Byron is one of the organizers at COMMUTE (Communities United for Transportation Equity), a coalition of community groups that has advocated for congestion pricing and BRT as means to address inequities in transit access. Now that pricing is on hold at best, Byron argues that there's even more reason to allocate funds to a cost-effective BRT network:

With both the one-time shot of federal funding and the projected $500 million per year in net revenues from congestion pricing off the table for the moment, BRT may be more important than ever. The MTA Capital Plan has, in words of Straphangers Campaign spokesman Gene Russianoff, "more hole than plan," with less than $12 billion of a five-year, $29 billion shopping list accounted for. As the rail and subway projects envisioned in that plan recede into the future, BRT makes more sense than ever. It will not prevent us from building light rail or subways in the future, but for now it makes intelligent use of the infrastructure we already have -- our streets.

After applauding the roll-out of Select Bus Service in the Bronx, Byron suggests a few ways BRT plans can be pushed further:

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Streetfilms captured highlights of Enrique Penalosa's appearance with COMMUTE.

One of the most entrenched fallacies in the congestion pricing debate has been the assertion that blue-collar New Yorkers get the short end of the stick. The claim never withstood scrutiny, but now it is facing an especially strong counterargument from Communities United for Transportation Equity (COMMUTE), a coalition of organizations from low-income communities of color underserved by transit.

COMMUTE calls for giving poor New Yorkers better access to transit by implementing extensive, inter-borough Bus Rapid Transit corridors, funded from pricing revenues and the MTA capital budget. On Monday, they hosted an appearance by former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, who described how he addressed what he calls "quality of life inequality" by improving public space for pedestrians and building the TransMilenio BRT system.

COMMUTE presented Peñalosa's story as a challenge to New York pols. "People want to see that pricing is going to benefit them directly," said Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a COMMUTE partner. "He really demolishes the argument of electeds who oppose the plan and have 20 percent car ownership and 5 percent commuting by car in their districts."

The Pratt Center's Elena Conte brought this point home when she addressed the room following Peñalosa's Q & A: 

The example of Bogotá... reveals that inequities in the mass transit system can be addressed when elected leadership has the will to place the needs of the underserved above the long-established privilege of the tiny minority who drive cars

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A map produced by the Pratt Center [pdf] shows neighborhoods with a high concentration of low-income commuters with long commutes.

With congestion pricing now before the City Council, the coalition pushing it forward shows signs of strengthening at exactly the right time. One group we'll be hearing more from is Communities United for Transportation Equity (COMM.U.T.E!), a recently-formed partnership between the Pratt Center for Community Development and community organizations in low-income neighborhoods around the city. At a press event this morning, COMM.U.T.E! representatives spoke about their strategy to lobby for congestion pricing and greater funding for BRT in the MTA capital plan. 

Their campaign will call attention to stark inequities in New York City commute times. The Pratt Center has crunched 2000 Census numbers showing that two-thirds of city residents with commutes longer than one hour earn under $35,000 per year [pdf]; and that black New Yorkers face a 30 percent longer commute, on average, than white New Yorkers [pdf]. Disparities were present, if less pronounced, across other racial groups as well. Considered alongside the transit improvements that congestion pricing will make possible, the findings again pierce the argument that pricing is a regressive tax.

The problems revealed by the report are fundamentally about "human rights and dignity, rather than dry economic measures," said Joan Byron, Director of Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center.

Time lost to long commutes is "corrosive to community life and family life," said Silvett Garcia, Senior Planner at Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in the Soundview section of the Bronx. "That is time people cannot spend with their families, cannot meet with their children's teachers, cannot go to community events." She noted that bus commuters in the Bronx have to transfer twice to make a trip across the borough, which takes an hour. The same trip only takes drivers ten minutes.

Byron applauded DOT's commitment to a BRT pilot program, but noted that the scale of a BRT system would have to exceed current plans to seriously address inequities in transit access. The only way to dramatically improve transit access in neighborhoods that are currently underserved, she said, is to implement congestion pricing and significantly boost MTA funding for BRT.

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A side-by-side comparison of PlaNYC congestion pricing and alternatives offered by pricing opponents shows that the Bloomberg proposal is the only one that would have an immediate impact on auto traffic while improving transit. Further, the report concludes that plans put forth by Congressman Anthony Weiner, Council Member Lew Fidler, and Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free would actually promote driving.

Does the Rubber Meet the Road? Investigating the Alternatives to Congestion Pricing, a 14-page study (pdf) issued by Environmental Defense and the Pratt Center for Community Development, breaks it down as follows.

Anthony Weiner's Reducing Traffic and Improving Our Environment: An Alternative to the Car Tax: Many aspects of this proposal are similar to the PlaNYC's original congestion pricing scheme. However, Congressman Weiner would limit congestion pricing to trucks only and would take a series of steps to open up more existing road space for faster-moving traffic, such as reducing alternate side street parking, and increasing traffic law enforcement, that would attract more traffic in the long run. He also suggests large-scale, long-term capital investments, such as building a Cross-Harbor Freight Tunnel, that while essential for long-term regional planning, cannot address traffic with the immediacy and revenue-generating capacity of congestion pricing.

Lew Fidler's 9 Carat Stone Plan: This plan to fund long term transportation projects, including three major tunnels requiring massive capital investment, essentially levies a regional payroll tax that would support the state's general fund and not be dedicated to transportation investment, unlike tolls. Councilman Fidler proposes hydrogen powered cars, which automakers and scientists agree are many years and breakthroughs away from being practical and commercially viable. He supplements these ideas with short term measures such as increased truck loading zones and enforcement of traffic laws that, while perhaps good to speed traffic flow and ensure better safety, are not likely to achieve significant reductions in traffic volumes. Other elements of Councilman Fidler's plan, such as moving government offices from Manhattan to the other boroughs, would simply displace current traffic to new locations, and to the extent that those locations are less centrally-located in the transit system, there would likely be a net increase in traffic overall.

Keep NYC Congestion Tax Free's Alternative Approaches to Traffic Congestion Mitigation in the Manhattan Central Business District: This plan, primarily supported by AAA, the Metropolitan Parking Association and the Queens Civic Congress, among others, combines several separate measures that collectively claim to meet and exceed the 6.3% vehicle miles traveled (VMT) reduction of the mayor's plan. In fact, many will simply make driving easier in the Central Business District, thus probably attracting more drivers over time. Furthermore, the report's additive approach for totaling VMT reduction overstates the results dramatically, double-counting many overlapping traffic reduction measures.

"Unlike congestion pricing, these alternatives would encourage driving -- not discourage it -- and as a result attract more traffic in the long term," says Michael Replogle, transportation director for Environmental Defense and the report's primary author, via media release. "They also fail to match the criteria required by the federal grant, by state law, and the reality test for effectiveness, timeliness and revenue potential."

"Alternative proposals to fund mass transit through broad income and payroll tax increases are like taking a sledgehammer to a nail because they place special burdens on low and middle income residents," says Joan Byron, Director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative of The Pratt Center. "In contrast, a congestion pricing plan benefits lower-income folks most and burdens them least since the vast majority of them rely on public transportation, and do not drive into Manhattan's zone."