Yankee Stadium parking in its natural state. Photo: Daily News

In today’s Daily News, Juan Gonzalez reports that Bronx Parking Development Company LLC is expected to default this year on the $200+ million in triple-tax-exempt bonds issued by the New York City Industrial Development Agency, the financing arm of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Since the threat of default has loomed for some time now, let’s look at the more recent developments cited by Gonzalez.

The promise of jobs to be created by the garages was never that grand to begin with — 12 full-time and 70 part-time positions, with an average wage of $11 an hour. But Bronx Parking LLC is so desperate for cash, writes Gonzalez, that “the company plans to slash the salaries of a handful of full-time garage employees and to reduce the number of game-day parking attendants from 76 to 57.”

“The people who continue to pay the price for this thing are the kids who lost their park space, and now the handful of people who got jobs and are going to lose them,” says Bettina Damiani, project director of Good Jobs New York, an NGO that has tracked the stadium project from its inception.

On top of that, a proposal to lure a hotel to complement or replace the garages has apparently cratered after four developers who expressed interest in the deal wanted “major city subsidies.” Gonzalez reports that Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., who inherited the stadium parking disaster from his predecessor Adolfo Carrion, “has been pressing City Hall to come up with an emergency plan to restructure the bonds, tear down some of the garages, and replace them with low-income housing.”

How bad is it for Bronx Parking LLC? According to Gonzalez its garages are 38 percent full on Yankee game days. When the stadium is idle, they have a total of 70 regular customers for 9,000 spaces.

On the other hand, from a neighborhood perspective about the only thing worse than a bunch of empty garages would be a bunch of full garages, a silver lining brought about by malfeasance on the part of the IDA, which approved the parking deal before conducting an economic feasibility study. Also, aides to Mayor Bloomberg tell Gonzalez that neither the city nor the IDA is responsible for backing the bonds.

The garages, however, were exempted from rent and taxes unless they turned a profit, so taxpayers probably shouldn’t expect a return on their investment. More than anything, Damiani sees those empty buildings as an ugly monument to the misplaced priorities of the Bloomberg administration, whose legacy of environmental stewardship and progressive transportation policies will be undercut by acres of new parking across the city.

“This community didn’t need thousands of parking spots,” says Damiani. “I have run out of adjectives to describe how bad this is.”

From today’s speech:

We’ll also make our city smarter and safer by deploying Traffic Enforcement Agents to safety hot spots at key intersections, doubling the number of 20 mile-per-hour zones for schools, and continuing adding more miles of protected bike lanes.

Now, I realize the debate over bike lanes has sometimes been hot and heavy. But the reality is more and more New Yorkers are biking, and the more bike lanes we put in, the fewer deaths and serious injuries we have on our streets.

This year, we’ll take steps to enforce the law requiring every delivery rider to have proper safety equipment and clothing that identifies the name of the business. At the same time, we’ll launch the largest bike share program of any city in the country. Those bikes will create another option for getting around town faster and easier, and so will new Select Bus Service in Brooklyn, which we’ll launch in partnership with MTA Chairman Joe Lhota.

Watch it live here.

Update: Bloomberg also talked a little about parks and waterfront development. Read more after the jump.

All across the city, we’ll continue reclaiming and revitalizing our waterfront. We’ll open Rockaway Park in Queens. We’ll complete the reconstruction of McCarren Pool in Williamsburg, and the first phase of Calvert Vaux Park in Bensonhurst and we’ll transform Pier 5 of Brooklyn Bridge Park into soccer fields and open space.

Here in the South Bronx, we’ll begin construction of Soundview Park. And out in the harbor, we’ll continue transforming the island that time passed by, with 30 new acres of parkland that will make Governors Island one of the great waterfront destinations in the world.

And across the city, we’ll join with AT&T to bring Wi-Fi service to a dozen city parks — so even if you’re enjoying a beautiful day, you can still work or study or play ‘Words with Friends.’

Reclaiming the waterfront and wiring our parks are just two of the ways we’re re-orienting our city around the needs of people today, not the needs of people 30 years ago.

Speaking at yesterday’s Transportation Alternatives rally at 1 Police Plaza, Erika Lefevre pointed to inconsistencies between initial accounts of the hit-and-run collision that killed her son Mathieu and the version offered by the crash report, which her family obtained only after weeks of NYPD stonewalling.

The case of Mathieu Lefevre is only the latest in which relatives and friends of traffic crime victims are kept in the dark by a police department with a long record of withholding information regarding cyclist and pedestrian deaths. It does, however, afford a detailed look at NYPD incompetence and obfuscation. For example:

• An NYPD officer told Gothamist that the department “had concluded that Lefevre had run a red light at the intersection.” The glaring flaw in that conclusion is that if both Lefevre and driver Leonardo Degianni were traveling in the same direction, and Lefevre ran a light, presumably Degianni could not have struck Lefevre unless he did the same. Regardless, there is no mention in the crash report of either party running a light.
• The prevailing narrative of the crash, which originated with NYPD, is that Lefevre was riding to the right of Degianni’s commercial truck when Degianni turned into him. The diagram on the crash report seems to depict a rear-end collision, and the officer’s notes say Degianni made the turn after the collision.
• NYPD told the Lefevre family that the truck that hit Mathieu was identified through visible damage, but the vehicle damage codes section of the crash report was marked through, with no details documented.
• On October 24, an NYPD spokesperson told Gothamist: “The driver did not know that he hit the cyclist.” The police report, amended on October 30 with Degianni’s identity (which police would not provide to Gothamist or the Lefevre family), includes no explanation of why Degianni left the scene, or what circumstances led him to run over a person on a bicycle without knowing it.
• NYPD told Erika Lefevre that charges had been dropped against the driver, suggesting that charges were filed at some point. This contradicts a statement, also reported by Gothamist on October 24, that no charges were filed, as well as remarks from a department spokesperson who told Metro: “There’s no criminality. That’s why they call it an accident.”

Inexplicably, even as NYPD refused information to the Lefevres, the department was talking to the media. On October 26, a week after her son was killed, Erika Lefevre told reporters, “All we know is what we have read in the papers.” On Wednesday, Lefevre spoke directly to NYPD.

“Today, I am asking NYPD to stop leaking misinformation to the press about crash victims,” she said. “That only hurts victims and their families and makes NYPD appear unprofessional and biased.” Lefevre said that to this point NYPD has not complied with freedom of information requests and has not permitted her family to see video of the crash and other evidence police say they have.

"All we know is what we have read in the papers," said Erika Lefevre about the hit-and-run collision that killed her son Mathieu. Photo copyright Dmitry Gudkov

The family of Mathieu Lefevre, the 30-year-old artist killed by a hit-and-run driver while riding his bike in East Williamsburg last week, was joined by dozens of supporters outside 1 Police Plaza today to demand that NYPD rein in deadly driving and end its policy of silence when it comes to fatal traffic crashes.

Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, began the rally by reading from a list of cyclists, pedestrians and drivers killed this year at the hands of motorists who faced no charges of any kind. While drivers continue “killing with impunity on a daily basis,” said White, NYPD has “consistently failed” to take action to stop the violence.

In 2010, White said, 269 people died in New York City traffic. Traffic crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for the city’s children, and from 2000 to 2009 more New Yorkers were killed by cars than guns. Addressing his remarks to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, White said: “You are failing to enforce a basic standard of due care.”

The devastation wrought by the city’s traffic fatality epidemic is made worse by NYPD’s practice of withholding crash information, even from family members of victims. Lefevre’s parents traveled from western Canada immediately upon hearing of their son’s death. Since then, said his mother Erika, they have learned little about the crash.

“All we know is what we have read in the papers,” said Lefevre. Last Friday, the Lefevres waited all day at NYPD headquarters, but were told nothing. No one was available to speak with them over weekend, said Lefevre, and since Monday they have been passed from desk to desk. NYPD revealed to the family that the truck that hit Mathieu, identifiable from visible damage, was found two blocks from the crash site, and that the driver was located through the company that owns the truck. The Lefevres were not given the name of the company or the driver. As for the crash itself, the only details they have been made privy to are time and location. Lefevre said the family was told today that “charges were dropped” against the driver, though she isn’t sure charges were filed in the first place.

Lefevre said that, according to police, the driver of the truck that killed Mathieu was “likely unaware” of the collision.

Intensifying the agony of the families of crash victims is as deeply ingrained in NYPD culture as the department’s laissez-faire approach to traffic enforcement. White said the buck stops at the top.

“Ultimately, what needs to happen is we need leadership,” said White, calling on Kelly and, especially, Bloomberg to tap the city government talent pool to reduce traffic deaths and injuries.

In the case of Mathieu Lefevre, White believes the driver should at minimum be charged under the state’s vulnerable user laws, which have yet to be applied with any regularity by NYPD since they were adopted a year ago.

In the meantime, the Lefevres continue to wait for answers. Erika Lefevre said the last time she talked to her son, who rode his bike regularly during the one and a half years he lived in Brooklyn, was when he called her on October 10, her birthday.

“Mathieu’s life was cut short before he had a chance to develop into what he would become,” Lefevre said. “It is very important that we know the circumstances of our son’s death.”

The theory is that the city is gathering traffic data this summer as a baseline for a car-free park trial next year. That would jibe with recent remarks from Mayor Bloomberg and references to park data collection reported in the Times earlier this month.

Over the spring, supporters of a car-free trial lined up endorsements from every community board surrounding the park, and had hoped to free the park for recreational use from the July 4 weekend until Labor Day. The mayor was unmoved to implement a trial this year, but recently hinted that something might move forward once the city collected sufficient data.

“We are doing studies,” Bloomberg said on July 12. “Until we really can understand the traffic patterns and what effect it will have, we’re just not going to go and rush to do it.”

A request to DOT for confirmation that the city is indeed counting cars in the park was not immediately answered.

The proposal has gained near-universal support at the community board level, with hundreds of board members voting in favor and only a handful of votes against, and is simpatico with the wishes of Central Park Conservancy head Douglas Blonsky. But it will need a push to overcome resistance from Mayor Bloomberg.

Coughlin says the next step will be a public campaign by Council Member Gale Brewer and others. (Streetsblog has messages in with Brewer’s office for details.) The Manhattan Borough Board must also cast an official vote on the resolution, Coughlin says, “Which will give us another opportunity to raise the issue, but we hope we won’t need it by then.”

Not only would the trial give users much needed room and the freedom to enjoy the city’s premier green space without having to dodge cars and suck exhaust this summer, the effect would spill over into surrounding neighborhoods, which could expect a major drop in cut-through traffic. Given the benefits and such a diverse base of approval, it’s hard to imagine what constituency the mayor would be playing to by refusing to close the Loop Drive for two months.

Michael Bloomberg at the C40 summit in São Paulo, where he spoke strongly of the environmental need for transportation reform. Photo: nyc.gov.

When it comes to sustainable transportation, Michael Bloomberg is saving his strongest words for an international audience. While the mayor’s rhetoric on transportation now tends to focus on safety, when transportation is on his agenda at all, at a meeting of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group in São Paulo Bloomberg brought back some of his 2007-vintage language.

Said the mayor in his speech:

“The intense burning of fossil fuels in the world’s cities – where 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are produced – not only contributes to climate change, it also clogs the streets, pollutes the air, and shortens the lives of their millions of residents. How we as mayors respond to these challenges will strongly determine the fate of the entire world, now and for decades to come.”

Bloomberg, the current chair of the C40 project, was there to announce the release of two studies and a new partnership between the coalition of big-city mayors and the World Bank.

The first study created a shared greenhouse gas reporting system for the C40 cities, allowing high-quality comparisons for the first time. The 42 C40 cities that participated were responsible for 1.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions, it found, roughly equivalent to the emissions of Japan.

Numbers like that fed into what at times seemed to be a bit of urban policy triumphalism on the part of the mayors. “Because of our shared experiences in leading the world’s great cities, and because, more than anyone else, we grasp the urgency of the challenges we now face, no one can do more to produce good outcomes for the world than we, the mayors of great cities, can,” said Bloomberg.

While it’s true that many cities have shown real leadership on climate change and reduced their greenhouse gas emissions, in the United States, states have probably implemented the most effective new climate policies and no real solution to climate change seems imaginable absent national and international action.

That doesn’t mean that action at the city level isn’t critically necessary, and the second report lays out how much has already been done. In the 58 C40 cities, 4,734 climate change actions are in effect and another 1,465 are in the process of being implemented.

The report notes that transportation is one of the three areas where cities have the most direct ability to prevent climate change, along with energy use by buildings and waste management. Twenty-two of the C40 mayors have invested in new bike infrastructure, for a total of 9,370 km of new lanes, and ten have built bus rapid transit systems. Another nine are working to introduce electric or hybrid taxi fleets.

To ensure that progress on those fronts not only continues but speeds up, the World Bank announced a new partnership with the C40 cities. Though it normally works through national governments, the World Bank will create a new system for C40 cities to access its technical assistance and climate finance initiatives directly.

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.

The details of the revised plan haven’t been posted online yet, but in a press release the mayor’s office gave top billing to an initiative they’re calling the “Clean Heat Campaign,” which seeks to phase out use of the dirtiest heating oils.

The city is also touting a social networking tool called “Change by Us” meant to gather ideas and feedback from local residents on planning and sustainability initiatives. According to the press release, the platform works by asking a question “that residents can respond to by text message or through the Change by Us web and mobile sites.” Questions will be put out frequently, the city says, but it’s not clear yet how the responses will be integrated into the real-world planning process.

The full plan will include revisions to PlaNYC’s transportation and public space planks, which have helped guide the addition of new pedestrian spaces, bike lanes, and rapid bus routes for the last four years.

The signature transportation initiative in the original PlaNYC, congestion pricing, fell victim to the windshield perspective of Albany lawmakers in the spring of 2008. No one expects a congestion pricing revival today, but advocates will be watching closely to see if the administration takes full advantage of traffic reduction strategies entirely within its control. Most notably, reining in the proliferation of off-street parking that has accompanied new development in the city would address one of the big missing pieces in the original PlaNYC.

Streetsblog’s Noah Kazis is at the event in Harlem and will be filing a report later today. We’ll provide more details from the updated plan as they become available.

The tweets come from Wolfson’s personal account, but given his position inside the mayor’s political circle, the bursts of text seem to hint that the administration’s support for Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan runs deeper than you would surmise if your only information came from, say, Michael Grynbaum stories.

This morning, with New York Magazine’s epic he-said/she-said on NYC bike policy making the rounds, Wolfson sent out a memo with more of an official imprimatur. Using “Office of the Mayor” letterhead [PDF] that should catch the attention of the city’s press and political class, he outlined the following case: Bike lanes are popular, supported by the public process, and a proven method to make streets safer.

He also includes a piece of data I haven’t come across before, which nicely encapsulates how illogical it is to claim that expanding the city’s bike infrastructure threatens pedestrian safety:

• From 2001 through 2005, four pedestrians were killed in bike-pedestrian accidents. From 2006 through 2010, while cycling in the city doubled, three pedestrians were killed in bike-pedestrian accidents.

Shouldn’t this sort of information have made its way into Matt Shaer’s NY Mag piece, instead of bike lane crank Jack Brown comparing bike policy to terrorist attacks?

Here’s the full Wolfson memo:

MEMORANDUM

To: Interested Parties
From:  Howard Wolfson
Subject: Bike Lanes
Date: March 21, 2011

In light of this week’s New York magazine article about bike lanes I thought you might find the below useful.

• The majority of New Yorkers support bike lanes. According to the most recent Quinnipiac poll, 54 percent of New York City voters say more bike lanes are good “because it’s greener and healthier for people to ride their bicycles,” while 39 percent say bike lanes are bad “because it leaves less room for cars which increases traffic.”
• Major bike lane installations have been approved by the local Community Board, including the bike lanes on Prospect Park West and Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn and on Columbus Avenue and Grand Street in Manhattan. In many cases, the project were specifically requested by the community board, including the four projects mentioned above.
• Over the last four years, bike lane projects were presented to Community Boards at 94 public meetings. There have been over 40 individual committee and full community board votes and/or resolutions supporting bike projects.
• Projects are constantly being changed post-installation, after the community provides input and data about the conditions on the street. For example:
  • The bike lane on Columbus Avenue was amended after installation to increase parking at the community’s request.
  • Bike lanes on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and on Father Capodanno Blvd. in Staten Island were completely removed after listening to community input and making other network enhancements.
• 255 miles of bike lanes have been added in the last four years. The City has 6,000 miles of streets.
• Bike lanes improve safety. Though cycling in the city has more than doubled in the last four years, the number of fatal cycling crashes and serious injuries has declined due to the safer bike network.
• When protected bike lanes are installed, injury crashes for all road users (drivers, pedestrians, cyclists), typically drop by 40 percent and by more than 50 percent in some locations.
• From 2001 through 2005, four pedestrians were killed in bike-pedestrian accidents. From 2006 through 2010, while cycling in the city doubled, three pedestrians were killed in bike-pedestrian accidents.
• 66 percent of the bike lanes installed have had no effects on parking or on the number of moving lanes.

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.

Mayor Bloomberg presenting his annual budget, which includes an increase in parking meter rates. Photo: nyc.gov/Edward Reed

Mayor Bloomberg unveiled his budget plan yesterday, including hundreds of measures to close a deficit of billions of dollars [PDF]. While the most controversial element may be Bloomberg’s plan to lay off thousands of teachers, included among the smaller-scale deficit-closing measures is one that is sure to set up a fight over transportation policy. The budget again includes a 25 cent increase in the hourly rate for on-street parking in most of the city, a proposal which the City Council negotiated out of this year’s budget in January.

In Manhattan above 86th Street and in the other four boroughs, meter rates would rise from 75 cents an hour to one dollar, raising $13.8 million in 2012. In Manhattan below 86th Street, meter rates are already scheduled to go up from $2.50 per hour to $3.00, a change which will raise $10.4 million annually.

New York’s on-street parking — even the small fraction of it that’s metered — is priced far below the demand. Over the past 18 years, the meter rate hasn’t increased at all when adjusted for inflation. The enormous mismatch between the amount of on-street parking and the demand creating by the current bargain-basement prices is a major contributor to drivers’ inability to ever find a space on the street, to rampant double-parking, and to the city’s traffic congestion, as drivers circle the blocks hoping to get an open, discounted space.

The Bloomberg administration has already tried once to enact the 25-cent meter hikes. However, led by transportation committee chair Jimmy Vacca, the City Council struck a deal last month to delay implementation of the increased meter rates in the boroughs and Upper Manhattan. They are expected to oppose the same rate hike now, setting up parking rates as one likely front in the coming budget battle between the mayor and the Council.

$13.8 million is only a fraction of the overall budget deficit, but it’s also real money. According to the Independent Budget Office [PDF], $10 million buys 158 new teachers, 956 Head Start slots, or 10 days of residential garbage disposal. If Christine Quinn and the City Council choose to fight over the parking hike, they’re not only prioritizing a discount for drivers over congestion relief, but over everything else that money could buy.

Testifying in Albany on Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal today, Bloomberg said he won’t get involved in a renewed push for congestion pricing, WNYC’s Azi Paybarah reports:

“I’m not going to come back and fight that battle,” said Bloomberg, citing the political risk City Council members took in supporting it, only to see it die in Albany without a vote.

Later, when asked if congestion pricing as a “dead” issue, Bloomberg told reporters it’s up to state lawmakers to come up with a way to fund the state’s mass transit’s needs, saying, he is “not going to stand up and campaign for it.”

Bloomberg’s answer comes shortly after a vaguely-sourced report in the Daily News indicated that some form of congestion pricing is back on the table. The story was apparently enough provocation to get a small group of Queens and Brooklyn pols to preemptively declare this weekend that they still oppose congestion pricing.

The roster of opponents will be very familiar to readers who recall the 2007-08 congestion pricing saga (Tony Avella, David Weprin, the Queens Civic Congress, Marty Markowitz). Their core strategy hasn’t changed either. They still contend, contrary to the data on the city’s commute habits, that funding transit by ending the free ride for the select group of New Yorkers who car commute into Manhattan isn’t fair to the middle class. Never mind that the city’s demographics are trending towards even greater reliance on transit in the boroughs these pols represent.

It does appear, however, that they will need to find a more appropriate venue than the steps outside City Hall to hold their press events.

Mayor Bloomberg just signed two bills making domestic violence and hate crime data public. Why won't he support the same for traffic crimes? Photo: Spencer T. Tucker via nyc.gov

Bloomberg administration officials have now twice appeared in front of the City Council to oppose legislation requiring that the city post up-to-date information about traffic crashes and summonses online. In April, the NYPD testified that such a reporting requirement would be a burden on the department and that the public couldn’t interpret that kind of information. And last week the DOT argued that it wasn’t the right agency to release such information.

But the Bloomberg administration isn’t always opposed to tracking and reporting police data. On Monday, the mayor signed into law two bills that will release information about hate crimes and domestic violence. Intros 373 and 393 require the Mayor’s Office of Operations to centralize this data on the city’s My Neighborhood Statistics website. “The two bills before me today increase transparency,” said Bloomberg at the bill signing.

“To not have this information available to the public would mean keeping our residents in the dark,” Council Speaker Christine Quinn said of the legislation, according to a DNAinfo report. “Any additional data to help understand and fight both hate crimes and domestic violence will be beneficial to individual neighborhoods and the City as a whole.”

With Bloomberg and Quinn squarely on board, both bills flew through the legislative process. They were introduced to the Council on October 13; hearings, votes, and the bill signing took less than a month.

While the specifics differ, the principle behind those bills is the same idea underpinning Intro 370, Council Member Jessica Lappin’s bill to release TrafficStat data about the location and cause of traffic crashes and data on traffic enforcement summonses. New Yorkers not only deserve to know about crime in their city, but they should be able to use that information to advocate for change. So why is the administration trying to keep traffic crime information hidden even as it celebrates the release of information about hate crime and domestic violence?

Perhaps the problem is that when it comes to traffic enforcement, the city isn’t eager to see sunlight shine on its record.

Take, for example, the recent Daily News exposé of traffic enforcement quotas in Brooklyn’s 77th Precinct. Documents portray a directive to issue summonses for six offenses: cell phone use, failure to wear seatbelts, double parking, stopping in a bus stop, tinted windows, and operating trucks off of designated routes. In contrast, the DOT’s recent pedestrian safety report found that the top three contributing factors in serious crashes involving pedestrians were driver inattention, failure to yield, and speeding. There’s not a lot of overlap between those two lists.

That means that in at least one precinct, the NYPD is not deploying its traffic resources to target offenses that cause the most harm on city streets.

Releasing data on traffic crashes and summonses would greatly increase the transparency of efforts to reduce deadly driving and make it easier to hold NYPD accountable for its performance. But it seems to be the one type of information about neighborhood safety that the Bloomberg administration wants to hide from public view.

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.

Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs. Photo: City Hall News

The Age-Friendly New York City agenda includes 59 initiatives meant to make it easier to age in the city, including building traffic calming public spaces and redesigning the city's most dangerous intersections. Bloomberg's remarks didn't specifically mention the pedestrian safety aspects of the plan, but he did reaffirm his commitment to follow through on the entire Age-Friendly program. "When we take on a project," he said, "we actually do it." 

Quinn focused more closely on street redesigns. "Through complete streets, we're making New York a place that's safe in every way for seniors," she told the audience. In April, Quinn stood with AARP in front of the Ninth Avenue protected bike lane to participate in a safety audit. Discussing that experience last night, Quinn said that the redesigns of Eighth and Ninth had helped fix "two very problematic corners" at 23rd Street.

Perhaps most striking, it seems that livable streets advocates have a potential ally in Deputy Mayor Gibbs, who oversees the Age-Friendly New York City program. Discussing NYCDOT's Safe Routes for Seniors program, Gibbs had particular praise for neckdowns at dangerous intersections. "It creates an intentional bottleneck that not only makes the distance shorter, but slows down the traffic as it approaches the intersection," she said, "so you have a double benefit."

To keep seniors safe, one area that would especially benefit from Gibbs' influence is Manhattan's East Side.

The wide avenues there remain particularly dangerous for older pedestrians: AARP called attention to the problem in January, and Yorkville is targeted for a Safe Routes for Seniors treatment. While the original plans for re-designing First and Second Avenues included pedestrian refuge islands, which are of particular benefit to older New Yorkers, along most of the corridor south of 125th Street, as of this month the administration will only fully commit to pedestrian safety improvements south of 34th Street. 

When asked whether she'd support restoring refuge islands to the full extent of the original plan, Gibbs said she just didn't know that level of detail about the First and Second Avenue redesign, which isn't under her direct supervision. The original plan earned the support of community boards and elected officials representing the length of Manhattan, and more importantly, would save seniors' lives in East Harlem, the Upper East Side, and Midtown. It's an essential, and shovel-ready, way to make good on the promises of Age-Friendly New York City. 

Flushing Commons puts growth next to a major transit hub, but it's stashing a lot of parking there as well. Image: Rockefeller Group Development Corporation.

First, let's see what City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden had to say. Burden understands that Flushing is rapidly turning into a downtown all its own, calling the area "one of the city’s most dynamic regional centers," and that it deserves development suited for a downtown, not a suburb.

More important, Burden highlighted the critical importance of building a walkable, dense project in a neighborhood with the busiest subway station outside Manhattan, 21 different bus routes and a Long Island Railroad station, and the third-busiest pedestrian intersection in all of New York. Explaining her support for the project, Burden said Flushing Commons "exemplifies sustainable, transit-oriented development that capitalizes on Flushing's exceptional subway, bus and commuter rail access."

All of that is true, and Burden's stated support for transit-oriented rezoning has generally translated to real-world results: Under Burden, the Department of City Planning's many rezonings have, on average, pushed growth towards transit. 

But Flushing Commons will also include around 1,600 parking spaces, all priced below market rates. That means residents, shoppers, and workers at the mixed-use project will be driving into downtown Flushing, not taking transit. That doesn't exemplify sustainability; it enshrines a car-centric lifestyle in steel and cement. 

Keep in mind that the total amount of parking is far greater than the developer wants to build or than the Department of City Planning itself requires. It was mandated by EDC and essentially pulled out of a hat.

So what does the city, ostensibly dedicated to reducing automobile use, have to say about stuffing so many more cars into horribly congested downtown Flushing? According to the developer, Michael Meyer, parking never came up at the planning commission meeting.

Mayor Bloomberg, however, raised the issue in a press release praising the commission's vote. The commission's action, he said, "moves us one step closer to reinvigorating downtown Flushing with new housing and retail options, hotel or office space, and much-needed additional parking for the area's residents and visitors." For the mayor, it seems, making it easier to drive into a booming, dense, transit-rich downtown isn't a violation of the principles of PlaNYC, but a neighborhood perk. 

This project, which replaces a vitality-sapping 1,100-spot surface parking lot, is very close to being, as Burden argues, a transit-oriented home run, putting hundreds of thousands of square feet of new development in one of Queens' most walkable and transit-accessible sites. But instead, it's going to give more space to storing private vehicles than to retail and office space combined.

Unfortunately, things aren't likely to get any better when the project goes to City Council. Both local council members, Peter Koo and Dan Halloran, support adding even more parking to Flushing Commons. 

Commuter vans, like this one in Sunset Park, could become a more common sight on New York's streets. Image: The Brooklyn Ink.

To clarify what's in the works, livery vans are going to be a completely new service, not an expansion of the existing commuter van program. Currently-licensed commuter vans operate within specific geographic areas, but lack defined routes, according to a spokesperson for the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Livery vans, in contrast, would travel between fixed pick-up and drop-off spots, though drivers would be able to take any route they choose between them. Drivers would also be allowed to drop off passengers at locations of their choice, he said, not just at fixed stops. 

The fares are likely to be $2, with longer rides costing up to $4, according to media reports, and there won't be free transfers to MTA subways and buses. "The issue here is not whether it’s more expensive or less expensive; it’s whether the service exists or not," said Bloomberg at Tuesday's press conference.

Transit advocates expressed guarded praise for the plan, noting that a detailed proposal was still forthcoming. "Providing new options like this is part of providing for a car-free lifestyle," said Transportation Alternatives' Noah Budnick. The Straphangers Campaign's Gene Russianoff also believed that livery vans could help improve mobility for New Yorkers, if implemented appropriately. 

In order to make the livery van pilot successful, it's being accompanied by a major enforcement push. The TLC will target unlicensed vans, unlicensed drivers, and licensed vehicles working outside the the bounds of authorized activities, said the agency spokesperson. The idea is that illegal vans, not subject to safety and insurance requirements, would undercut the more tightly regulated livery service. 

But from there, the picture becomes less clear. One big unknown is exactly where these livery vans will run. The stops will be set in the next few weeks, according to the TLC, and the mayor promised to put the routes in areas affected by MTA bus cuts. But just how the stops connect with buses and trains will determine how much livery cab service will complement transit, and how much it will substitute for it.

The relationship between transit and livery cabs grows even more muddled. We asked the TLC what would happen to these routes if the MTA ever restores bus service to these areas and were told "this program is not tied to any actions the MTA has taken or will take in the future." Decisions to discontinue or expand the service, said the TLC spokesperson, would be made based on livery industry capacity and public appetite for the service. That suggests a very different relationship with service cuts than the mayor suggested.

The presence of Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith at Tuesday's announcement adds an extra resonance to the question of whether livery vans would replace, rather than augment, MTA service. As mayor of Indianapolis, Goldsmith's major transit initiative was a plan to privatize city buses.

Another key question: Though it's billed as a one-year pilot, according to the TLC, the metrics for success are still under development. In other words, we don't yet know what the program's goals are, or what it's ultimate purpose is.

Finding innovative new ways to bring car-free mobility to transit-poor neighborhoods, particularly in a time of austerity, is a good thing, and in the short-term that's all this plan is about. But where it is headed in the long run, how it fits into a larger transportation vision, remains completely and problematically opaque.