Transportation Alternatives held its 3rd Annual Greenway Summit on Tuesday, where keynote speaker Jon Orcutt, Director of Policy for NYC DOT, outlined the city's plans for expanding cycling infrastructure over the coming year. Here are the highlights, via the Tri-State Transportation Campaign's Mobilizing the Region:

• Adding bike lanes and pedestrian islands to Vernon Blvd. in Long Island City this summer.

• Installing new bike lanes on Kent Ave in Williamsburg along the East River.

• Improving the crossways over the FDR from the East River Greenway by keeping them cleaner and introducing traffic calming measures at the intersections.

• Extending the 9th Avenue protected bike lane in Manhattan to 33rd St. (The lane currently ends at 23rd St.)

• As part of a push to build 15 miles of protected bike lanes by 2010, installing a protected lane on 8th Ave. between Canal St. and 23rd St. in Manhattan.

• Begin design on the Navy Yard portion of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway.

• Adding a bike lane connecting Van Cortlandt Park and the Broadway Bridge in spring 2009.

• Constructing bike access to the Shore Parkway Greenway at 157th Ave near JFK Airport.

As DOT forges ahead with substantive bike-ped improvements, Orcutt pointed out that the department doesn't operate in a vacuum. 

"In thanking the advocacy community for its support," MTR reports, "Orcutt added that interagency cooperation was key to the continued advancement of cycling infrastructure in New York."

Editor's note: Items concerning the Navy Yard and Broadway Bridge have been corrected. 

Photo: bicyclesonly / Flickr 

State Senator Thomas Duane (right), Deputy Borough President of Manhattan Rose Pierre-Louis, and 12 representatives of CB2 joined Transportation Alternatives executive director Paul Steely White and Department of Transportation Senior Policy Advisor Jon Orcutt at NYU's Casa Italiana.

Given her opposition to congestion pricing despite her district's low rates of car ownership and often crushing traffic congestion, we were hoping to hear what Deborah Glick had to say on transportation and livable streets issues. Instead, we got a bit of insight into how Senator Duane views DOT's innovative new Ninth Avenue bike lane project.

During his opening remarks Duane took "just the tiniest swipe at DOT" for beginning construction on the city's first-ever, on-street, physically-separated bike lane without consulting his office. Even though the project was vetted and approved unanimously by Community Board 4's transportation committee and requires no state funds or approval, the Senator complained that he woke up one morning earlier this month to find the bike lane built and "holding up traffic."

"I know it was an attempt to fix things," he said, "but it wasn't good for it to come as a surprise." Duane hopes that the City will be more conscientious about taking input from "all sides" when it comes to a congestion pricing bill.

--April Greene

With weeping family members and the ghostly, smiling images of three boys watching over them, city officials and elected representatives joined 100 community members on a Brooklyn street corner Tuesday evening to pledge "Not one more death."

State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, Assembly member Joan Millman and representatives from the Department of Transportation, NYPD and the Brooklyn District Attorney's joined members of Transportation Alternatives and the Groundswell Community Mural Project for the emotional unveiling of the three-story tall painting at the northwest corner of Butler Street and Third Avenue in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

Created by a group of local teens in a summer-long collaboration with professional artists Christopher Cardinale and Nicole Schulman, the mural depicts fifth-graders Victor Flores and Juan Estrada and 4-year-old James Rice holding traffic signs designed to remind drivers motoring along dangerous Third Avenue that pedestrians, cyclists and drivers share New York City streets. The silhouette of a fourth figure, a girl, holds a stop sign that reads, "Not one more death."

Flores and Estrada were killed at Third Ave. and 9th St. in 2004. Four-year-old James Rice was run over by the driver of a Hummer just a block away from the site of the mural earlier this year. 

A homemade neck-down forces drivers to slow down as they turn on to Butler St. from 3rd Ave.

Accompanying the mural, Transportation Alternatives members engineered their own makeshift traffic-calming measures at two of the intersections along Third Avenue. Homemade neckdowns gave pedestrians a shorter crossing distance and forced motorists to slow down and drive more carefully as they turned off of Third Avenue on to Butler Street. Members of Visual Resistance, the group that produces New York City's ghost bike memorials, reproduced the mural images as street signs and will be posting them throughout Brooklyn.

Livable Streets activists conceived of the guerilla traffic-calming project after learning that DOT had failed to even begin implementing pedestrian safety measures on Third Avenue despite a 2004 pledge by former Commissioner Iris Weinshall that $4 million in capital improvements would be completed by the summer of 2006.

DOT Deputy Policy Advisor Jon Orcutt

DOT sent a high-level emissary to let the community know that their message had been received. Senior Policy Advisor Jon Orcutt said DOT "commends and endorses" the message of the mural project. He used the opportunity to announce that the first phase of construction projects emerging from the ten-year-old Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project had begun and "is a top priority for DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan."

DOT is working with the City's Department of Design and Construction to install neckdowns, sidewalk extensions and bus bulbs at 95 street corners throughout Downtown Brooklyn at a cost of about $5 million. The long-sought pedestrian safety measures "represent a concentrated, area-wide effort that is unprecedented in scope and approach for city government traffic calming efforts," Orcutt said.

A bike ride through Downtown Brooklyn the very next day showed that, indeed, guerilla traffic-calmers aren't the only ones tagging up the street with future sidewalk extensions and neckdowns...

Assemblymembers have proposed several spurious "alternatives" to congestion pricing, none of which have proven effective in reducing congestion and none of which would provide revenues for increasing transit capacity.

Assemblymember Richard Brodsky has argued for a car rationing scheme which would restrict car access to parts of Manhattan by license plate. As reported in MTR #558, a similar scheme in Mexico City increased used-car purchases, gasoline consumption, and driving, and decreased transit use.

Further investigation reveals, unsurprisingly, that Mexico City's policy has done nothing to improve air quality. A University of Michigan study found no evidence that the policy reduced emissions of five different pollutants-in fact, the policy increased emissions on weekdays....

...The only effective way to enforce a rationing scheme would be through the installation of license-plate cameras, which Brodsky is on the record as opposing.

When Governor Jon Corzine announced an executive order in February requiring New Jersey to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020, environmentalists applauded. However, while the NJDEP is busy creating a plan to execute the order, the NJ Turnpike Authority is fast pursuing an agenda thatwould undermine the plan's goals.

Newark's push to encourage growth goes beyond the addition of new housing: the city and state are also embarking on an aggressive complimentary plan to improve its run-down and unsafe streets. TSTC, along with the Regional Plan Association and others, has long said that improving pedestrian safety and streetscapes can help attract development and assist in revitalization efforts.

Bring it on, Simons.

Crain's New York reports that the earth is shaking below Dept. of Transportation headquarters at 40 Worth Street:

Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's new transportation commissioner, politely says she's building on the foundation left by her predecessors. In fact, she is shaking it. A month into her job, she's advancing ideas that the department has long rejected, from residential permit parking to banning cars from Central Park to the mayor's revolutionary congestion pricing plan.

Ms. Sadik-Khan knows she can't merely reform the Department of Transportation's policies. She has to change its very mind-set, because staffers have long seen their mission as moving as much traffic as they can, as fast as they can.

Overcoming such entrenched thinking is an immense task, as Ms. Sadik-Khan, 47, knows from experience. As a DOT staffer in 1991, she answered Mayor David Dinkins' call to reduce congestion by writing a plan for East River bridge tolls. The idea was predictably unpopular and died quickly. Ms. Sadik-Khan's abandoned report sits on a shelf in her unglamorous 10th-floor office at 40 Worth St., a reminder of what happens when policy meets politics.

After leaving city government, she worked as a senior vice president at engineering giant Parsons Brinckerhoff and before that as a transportation official in the Clinton administration.

This time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vowed to fight for congestion pricing regardless of the political cost, which is why Ms. Sadik-Khan is in the hot seat. "When I talked with the mayor about the possibility of joining the agency, I did talk to him about wanting to do congestion pricing, moving forward with bus rapid transit, taking a greener approach, looking at complete streets, a revitalized bike network," she says. "I very much see working toward a greater, greener New York as the new mission."

She speaks of redesigning the city's streets for pedestrians, bicyclists and buses. That's what Jon Orcutt from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Andy Wiley-Schwartz from the Project for Public Spaces and traffic consultant Bruce Schaller have advocated for years. The department had never listened, but Ms. Sadik-Khan not only heard them, she hired them.

At 40 Worth St., you can almost feel the foundation rumbling.

Following in the footsteps of Bruce Schaller and Jon Orcutt, Project for Public Spaces vice president and transportation program director Andy Wiley-Schwartz is heading over to 40 Worth Street where he will be reporting to Deputy Commissioner Schaller at DOT's new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. There they will be working to implement the transportation and public space objectives set out in Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC.

Wiley-Schwartz starts at DOT on Monday. While there has been no official announcement of his hiring or his title, word has it Wiley-Schwartz will be working on new public space initiatives, which seems like a natural fit, given his experience at PPS. With DOT's recent focus on reclaiming under-utilized bits and pieces of street space as public plazas and with tremendous grassroots energy in places like Hell's Kitchen, SoHo, Gansevoort, Grand Army Plaza, Williamsburg and even the occasional, random on-street parking spot -- it seems like "public space initiatives" could be a pretty exciting job description at DOT right now.

Wiley-Schwartz has been a contributor here at Streetsblog. At PPS he specialized in working with Departments of Transportation and community groups all across the U.S. on downtown street enhancement, traffic calming and bicycle and pedestrian projects. He is a national lead in the Context Sensitive Solutions movement, an articulate advocate and just a really pleasant guy to work with. Here is an excerpt from his PPS bio:

He specializes in helping communities rebuild their neighborhoods and cities by leveraging transportation funding into the development of public spaces, including streets and other transportation facilities, in part by focusing on strategic partnerships and programming.

Andy's current projects include PPS's New Jersey Smart Choices program: an outreach, education and training program to help municipalities plan and make sustainable land use decisions in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Transportation. He is also working with the Times Square Alliance in New York City, the City of Elmira, NY to revitalize the area under and around a railroad viaduct downtown, and advising the City of Indianapolis on their plan to build a "Cultural Trail" through their central business district.

And, no, this is not an April Fool's prank. It's June, people.

Following the appointment of Bruce Schaller as Deputy Commissioner for Planning and Sustainability, Jon Orcutt is DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan's second high profile hire since taking over the agency. Stay tuned for one or two more big appointments.

Kate Slevin will be taking over as Tri-State Transportation Campaign's acting executive director. Here is the press release from TSTC:

After 13 years with the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Jon Orcutt is joining the staff of the New York City Dept. of Transportation to serve as senior policy advisor to new city transportation commissioner Janette Sadik- Khan.

The Tri-State Campaign's board of directors has appointed Kate Slevin as acting executive director.

Jon's new position is a testament to how far transportation reform themes have advanced in New York City and the metropolitan region. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC sustainability program for 2030 embraces congestion pricing for Manhattan south of 86th Street and a host of improvements to mass transit and the city's bicycling and walking environments. Congestion pricing to manage demand for metropolitan roadway travel was a founding principle of the Tri-State Campaign.

Jon has extensive experience as a transportation reform advocate in the New York region. He was executive director of Transportation Alternatives from 1989 to 1994, the Tri-State Campaign's associate director from 1994 to 2003 and executive director until June 8th, 2007. Last fall he served on the transportation advisory committee to Governor Spitzer's transition team.

"I've always had the highest regard for Commissioner Sadik-Khan's abilities, vision and drive and am excited to contribute to the transportation aspects of PlaNYC under her leadership," said Jon. "Meanwhile, I'm confident the Campaign will not miss a beat in Kate's capable hands."

Jon thanked the Campaign's present and past staff members for their tenacity and invaluable contributions to the organization's success, and the organization's directors and funders for the incredible education and innumerable opportunities that working at the Campaign provided him.

"Viewed from the perspective of 1994, today's public policy discussion of metropolitan transportation is almost unrecognizable. The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has played a strong role in changing the terms of discussion and the contents of many elements of policy. I think it's worth a case study in public advocacy success, and it's been a real privilege to have been involved," Jon said.

Co-chairs

• Elliot Sander, director of NYU Rudin Center for Transportation, VP at MTA contractor DMJM Harris and former city Dept. of Transporation commisioner. (Rumored to an MTA chairman candidate)
• Mary Ann Crotty, former transportation advisor for Mario Cuomo.

Members

• Janette Sadik-Kahn, VP at Parsons Brinckerhoff (Big MTA contractor leading the Partnership for NYC's congestion pricing study)
• Gene Russianoff, Straphangers Campaign (the MTA's best critic)
• Jon Orcutt, president of the Tri State Transportation Campaign (another tough MTA critic and big thinker on regional transport issues)
• Ernest Tollerson, VP at Partnership for NYC (Working on the Partnership's congestion pricing study)
• Mitch Palley, MTA board member from Suffolk (often the lone dissenting voice with votig power on the board and big supporter of the third rail project for the LIRR)
• Susan Kupferman, president MTA Bridges and Tunnels (Rumored candidate for MTA executive director)
• Robert Yaro, president of Regional Plan Association

Other Members

• James Conigliaro, Machinists
• Sam Williams, UAW 9A
• Garry Labarbera, president Teamsters Local 282
• Jack Aherne, International Union of Operating Engineers
• Chris Ward, managing director of the General Contractors Association (Ports, shipping and environment expert)
• Sonia Toledo, managing director Merrill Lynch
• Jamie Mercado, partner at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett
• Edward Malloy, president of Buildings and Construction Trades Council
• Eva Lerner Lamb, presidents of Palisades Consulting
• Doreen Frasca, president of Frasca & Associates
• John Egan, president of Renaissance Corp.
• Binta Brown, Associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore
• Samara Barend, director of STV Inc. (Engineering firm that did the Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel study)

Though the symposium conspicuously avoided controversial developments like Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards, Jon Orcutt, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign offered a caution in the Q&A period. "There's a lot of bad car development going on," he said, citing big box stores on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx or in Red Hook. Even projects near transportation hubs, he added, citing Atlantic Yards, show "it's possible to do design that isn't the best transit-oriented development."

Jon Orcutt, Executive Director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign was on New York 1's "In Transit" this weekend discussing the results of a survey showing that most New Yorkers are unhappy with Mayor Bloomberg's job on transportation. Click here to see the video.

NY1: We showed the DOT your poll and they said, 'We're doing things to alleviate traffic, like Thru-Streets and Bus Rapid Transit.'

Orcutt: Thru-Streets is a molecule in a drop in a bucket. It's not addressing traffic congestion. It's not addressing any part of the city other than a very limited piece of Midtown. Bus Rapid Transit is stuck as a study. There is no Bus Rapid Transit in New York City and at the pace they are moving, which is about the pace of the M34 bus, we aren't going to see any Bus Rapid Transit during Mayor Bloomberg's term of office.

The mayor needs to really light a fire under the DOT to get much more ambitious initiatives underway. The mayor needs to a stronger attitude regarding New York City Transit even though he doesn't directly control it. The Mayor has a pretty big microphone in this town and he should use it.

The so-called "greatest city in the world" doesn't even have decently-paved streets, let alone cutting edge transportation features like bus rapid transit, neighborhood traffic calming plans or bicycle-friendly avenues. It may be time to consider planning and transportation policy as Board of Education-type problems, where a top-to-bottom overhaul of city agencies is needed.

-- Jon Orcutt, executive director, Tri-State Transportation Campaign.

An important new survey says that New Yorkers believe that traffic congestion is a major problem plaguing New York City and that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is dong an inadequate job in addressing it.

According to the Tri-State Transportation Campaign's telephone survey of 800 New Yorkers:

59% of New Yorkers say the mayor is doing only a "fair" to "poor" job of reducing traffic jams and delays on city streets, highways and bridges. On only one other issue, increasing the stock of affordable housing, does the Mayor receive a higher net negative rating (60%). Mayor Bloomberg receives the highest net positive marks for keeping parks clean and safe (63%) and reducing crime (57%).

These findings come from a random telephone survey of 800 New York City residents in the five boroughs conducted May 19 through June 4, 2006, by Michaels Opinion Research. "The daily grind of gridlock and its impact rarely makes headlines, but the survey results show that New Yorkers have strong opinions about the problem and expect more action from Mayor Bloomberg to solve it," said Maureen Michaels, president of Michaels Opinion Research.

Discontent with the Mayor's performance on traffic congestion cuts across most segments of the city's population, but residents of Staten Island appear especially angry about traffic jams and delays 82% give an overall negative rating to the mayor, despite his announcement of a new transportation plan for the borough this spring.

• While 62% of motor vehicle owners give the Mayor a negative rating on reducing traffic jams and delays throughout the city, non-vehicle owners are not satisfied with his performance either (56% negative), nor are those who drive to work (70% negative).
• Dissatisfaction with the Mayor's performance on traffic issues also cuts across age and income groups, though a solid third of middle and upper income residents give intensely negative ratings (33%-36% rate the job he is doing on traffic issues as "poor").
• And among the working population, 59% of those who work below 60th Street in Manhattan and 67% of those working outside Manhattan say the Mayor has done, at best, a fair-to-poor job reducing traffic on city streets, highways and bridges.

"Let's face it, the Bloomberg administration has accomplished next to nothing on traffic problems since taking office. A few potentially promising initiatives, like speeding buses through traffic and enforcing truck routes, seem stuck as endless studies," said Kate Slevin, associate director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, sponsor of the survey project.

Download the full report, here.

Video still by Clarence Eckerson