Streetsblog New York City

Streetsblog has been calling around to transportation advocates and experts, gathering reactions to yesterday’s release of the first major update to PlaNYC 2030 since the citywide sustainability initiative was launched four years ago. Here’s our first installment, with Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely — we’ll be posting more reactions later this afternoon.

White told us he was encouraged to see the addition of a public health section in PlaNYC 2.0, and that the new plan will benefit from being less wonky than the original:

The continuation and expansion of Summer Streets and play streets bodes very well for public support. I think if there was a flaw in the first PlaNYC, it was too CO2- and policy-oriented. What this clearly does better than 1.0 is make the sustainability agenda more relevant and tactile for New Yorkers. I think the play streets in particular really jump out.

The inclusion of bike-share was also an encouraging sign that Bloomberg is serious about launching a public bike system, he said, but the mayor will need to do some serious follow-up:

They’re reiterating their commitment to roll out bike-share in 2012 and committing to keeping the yearly membership cheaper than a monthly Metrocard. As long as the state legislature doesn’t double the cost of a Metrocard, that’s a good thing.

The mayor needs to prove that he still cares. Will he attend summer streets and play street events? Will he back up bike-share when the going gets tough? Will he extend bike and ped improvements to East Harlem and other neighborhoods clamoring for their fair share of safety?

What’s lacking in the updated plan? White said the revision fails to reform the anti-urban tendency of the Economic Development Corporation and the Department of City Planning to push for excessive off-street parking:

There are parking garages sitting half empty that the city forced developers to build. Each of those parking structures represent millions of dollars that developers could have been required to upgrade local transit stations, or improve the streetscape. It’s not enough to study off-street parking policy. The city must overhaul its broken off-street parking policy before a tidal wave of new car ownership eclipses the plan’s other gains.

"Fixing the Great Mistake" is a new Streetfilms series that examines what went wrong in the early part of the 20th century, when our cities began catering to the automobile, and how those decisions continue to affect our lives today.

In this episode, Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White shows how planning for cars drastically altered Park Avenue. Watch and see what Park Avenue used to look like, how we ceded it to the automobile, and what we need to do to reclaim the street as a space where people take precedence over traffic.

The second installment in Streetsblog's series on the potential direction for transportation policy during Michael Bloomberg's third term comes from Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives. Don't miss the first entry, by Tri-State Transportation Campaign executive director Kate Slevin.

Mayor Bloomberg has already shown how much his administration can accomplish in just a few years. Since Janette Sadik-Khan's appointment to head the DOT in 2007, the city has striped hundreds of miles of bike lanes, reclaimed acres of street space for pedestrians and improved bus travel for tens of thousands of New Yorkers. "More of the same" is no longer a dirty phrase when it comes to local transportation policy. During the next four years, the mayor needs to accelerate this progress, and introduce a few key innovations to maximize the value New Yorkers get from their new streets.

Whether you're a straphanger, a cyclist, or a driver, every trip begins and ends with a walk. Pedestrians have had it good in recent years: Public plazas are sprouting by the dozen, hundreds of intersections have safer sidewalks and crossings, and the city's blueprint for sustainability, PlaNYC, promises that many more improvements are coming soon. How should New York keep this momentum going?

Well, the release of DOT's Street Design Manual back in July was an especially auspicious development. This groundbreaking playbook contains templates that can transform streets in neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. The manual is an engineering document, but it also makes sense as an outreach tool. Community groups concerned about street safety could use the manual as a menu, requesting traffic calming solutions for their neighborhood from DOT. Liberal use of these new designs, applied through a smart community-based process, could pay huge dividends all over the city.

For a fraction of the cost of subway line construction, buses could move millions, if the mayor throws his weight behind BRT.

Our city's new public spaces and calmed streets won't live up to their potential, though, unless New Yorkers know their roadways are safe places to walk and bike. Under Commissioner Ray Kelly, the NYPD has reduced levels of violent crime to record lows. Law enforcement should tackle traffic crime with equal diligence. Zero tolerance for speeding and dangerous driving, more comprehensive reporting and analysis of traffic crashes, and a relentless advertising campaign -- similar to the one the Mayor used to take on smoking -- would tame the Wild West atmosphere on our streets. If Bloomberg and Kelly successfully drive down traffic crime, hundreds of lives could be saved, thousands of injuries prevented, and countless New Yorkers would get out and enjoy their city more.

One sensible way for the NYPD to roll out this approach to traffic enforcement would be to start in areas frequented by children and seniors. Seniors make up 12 percent of New York's population, yet account for 39 percent of pedestrian fatalities. And according to the Department of Health, auto traffic is the leading cause of injury-related death in children ages 1-14. DOT's Safe Routes to School and Safe Routes for Seniors programs have spawned imitators around the country, but our city is no longer the national leader. Other cities are now far ahead of New York when it comes to implementing these street safety programs. Combined with police enforcement, short-term and inexpensive improvements such as leading pedestrian intervals, reductions in signalized crossing speeds, and a citywide slower speed limit in school zones would prioritize pedestrians, save the lives of children and seniors, and get New York City back in the forefront of planning streets for safety.

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Here are some early pics from this morning's Bike to Work festivities, courtesy of Transportation Alternatives. Don't forget to tag your own shots for our Flickr pool, and stay tuned for Streetfilms coverage. 

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Move on over, Bar Refaeli and make room on the newsstand for Paul Steely White and Janette Sadik-Khan. City Hall, a free monthly newspaper, has named the pair of leading transportation policy wonks to its "30 Most Beautiful People in New York Politics" list.

While Sadik-Khan was a shoo-in, we hear that Steely White just barely edged out Queens Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio for that final slot. Congratulations to both and let's chalk up another good reason to commute by bike and by foot: It makes you beautiful.

Feel free to add your own additions to the "Most Beautiful" list in the comments section...

On Monday afternoon the City Council's transportation committee will take up the Bikes in Buildings Bill, which addresses a major obstacle to bike commuting. The legislation would give people who work in commercial buildings the right to bring their bikes inside the workplace, if they have the consent of their employer. Transportation Alternatives director Paul White calls it "one of the easiest ways to enable much greener travel in New York City." The bill's prospects look promising: Bloomberg reports that it enjoys the active support of the mayor, and most of the City Council is expected to sign on.

The public can testify at Monday's hearing, scheduled to begin at 1:00 p.m. in the main council chamber at City Hall.

Opposition stems from the Real Estate Board of New York, which is expected to testify against the bill. "I'm sorry but bringing a bike into a narrow or crowded lobby is not necessarily a safe thing," REBNY President Steve Spinola told Streetsblog soon after the hearing was first scheduled. "If somebody brings a bike in and hits somebody, whether it's a woman -- a pregnant woman -- or a man, or whatever, and hurts them, well number one, not only will possibly that bicyclist be sued, but I can guarantee you that they're going to be suing the building owner, arguing that they left an unsafe situation."

Empirical evidence of the supposed hazards posed by bicycles is in short supply. "REBNY has been raising the liability issue for months now," said White. "The fact is they haven't marshaled a single example of a building that has sustained damage or incurred liability or otherwise experienced problems with allowing bicycles inside." T.A. has been compiling a dossier of buildings that let bikes inside, and White says they've found that "it's completely doable, completely easy, and actually is a valuable amenity to tenants."

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Front row l-r: Tish James, Paul Steely White, John Liu, David Yassky. Photo: Mike Infranco.

With the fallout from Wall Street taking a toll on city coffers, Mayor Bloomberg has a lot of tough calls to make. The "Bikes in Buildings" bill [PDF] is not one of them. It's a lay-up -- a simple rule change that promises big gains for bike commuting. The bill, also known as Intro 38, would require commercial landlords to allow tenants to bring bikes inside buildings. No storage requirements attached.

On the steps of City Hall this morning, City Council members David Yassky, Tish James, and John Liu joined Transportation Alternatives' Paul Steely White and a band of advocates to urge passage of the bill. In total, 30 members of the City Council have already signed on to the measure, a majority of the chamber.

A similar pledge to promote bike storage in commercial buildings is enshrined in the transportation plank of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC. As the speakers were quick to point out, "Bikes in Buildings" is an even easier lift.

"It's simply to mandate that you have to allow access to bicycles, and then you let the landlords figure out, case by case, what's the most efficient way to do it," said Yassky. The way things stand now, he noted, even if businesses encourage employees to bring bikes to work, most building managers won't let it happen. "You can bring a dolly or a stroller, but not a bike."

Reversing this widespread policy would address one of the major obstacles to bike commuting, especially among people who already ride: the lack of a secure place to keep bikes at work. Rigorous projections of the bill's effect are not available, but, drawing from his decades of experience analyzing bike traffic, former TA president Charles Komanoff gave a rough estimate that "universal bike commuter access to buildings would cause at least a 25 percent increase and perhaps as much as a 50 percent increase in bike commuting."

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On Monday we looked at how the proliferation of off-street parking is pushing New York toward higher rates of car ownership and substantially more traffic, based on the projections in Transportation Alternatives' new report, Suburbanizing the City. To avert a scenario where the city becomes less transit-oriented and more beholden to car owners, a coalition of planning and environmental groups is calling for the reform of off-street parking policies. In a letter to Mayor Bloomberg, they urge the city to:

1. Fully assess the amount of existing and planned off-street parking.
2. Consider measures to significantly reduce required parking.
3. Revise environmental laws so that parking impacts are fully accounted for.
4. Freeze special permits and stop directly subsidizing new parking.

The full slate of recommendations starts on the third page of this PDF. With more than a billion miles per year in extra car traffic on the way if current practices remain unchanged, advocates say the city must first acknowledge the impact of off-street parking. "What is almost as scary as all this new traffic is the fact that the city is not even aware of the problem," said T.A.'s Paul Steely White. "The Department of City Planning does not know how much parking exists, nor how the parking supply affects traffic congestion."

Decisions such as whether to allow developers to exceed parking limits in Manhattan are currently based on small-bore factors, like traffic counts on nearby streets. The cumulative impact of all the off-street parking that's being added through these exemptions remains unknown. That hasn't stopped the Planning Commission from approving a slew of them, the effects of which will be felt for decades. "The city takes a very local view of parking," said report author Rachel Weinberger. "They have to take a citywide view of what additional car ownership means."

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Yesterday, several planning and environmental organizations joined Transportation Alternatives on the steps of City Hall to tout the release of "Suburbanizing the City" [PDF], the new report that critiques New York City's off-street parking policies. The coalition is similar -- but not identical -- to the array of groups that pushed for congestion pricing earlier this year. Their testimony highlighted the range of benefits that off-street parking reform would deliver, from mitigating tailpipe emissions to reducing housing costs.

Planning advocates recommended doing away with parking requirements and "unbundling" the cost of parking from the price of housing. "There's no reason for parking to be paid for by people who don't own cars," said Tri-State Transportation Campaign director Kate Slevin, adding that the construction of parking should be "a choice rather than a necessity."

Minimum parking requirements are especially ill-suited to affordable housing developments, said Elena Conte of the Pratt Center for Community Development (pictured at the mic). "[A parking minimum] really makes no sense at all for communities where less than 20 percent of households own cars, because it drives up the cost of housing and takes up valuable space that otherwise could be used to create additional units or public space."

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Adjacent blocks in Park Slope, one built before parking requirements took effect, and one built after.

If New York City maintains current parking policies, the traffic generated by the addition of new off-street spaces will likely exceed a billion miles per year by 2030, according to a report released yesterday by Transportation Alternatives. That distance is roughly equal to eight months' worth of all driving in Manhattan below 86th Street. By comparison, congestion pricing is projected to cut traffic by less than half that amount.

The report, "Suburbanizing the City" [PDF],  is the first to address the effects of off-street parking requirements on traffic. The report's authors, who include University of Planning Professor Rachel Weinberger, and Streetsblog contributor John Kaehny, conclude that developers are essentially required to build higher levels of car ownership into the very fabric of the city -- between 40 and 50 percent above current levels. In many cases the inclusion of parking is mandated by the city's zoning requirements. This is a recipe for induced demand: The more parking is provided with new residences, the more people will drive.

"As the pace of residential development is speeding up to provide for a growing population, this increase in the parking supply will unleash a torrent of unnecessary car ownership, unnecessary driving, and unnecessary traffic and pollution," said T.A.'s Paul Steely White. "All of this traffic trouble will largely erase the transportation improvements and carbon savings from PlaNYC."

One of the barriers to addressing the problem is a lack of information. The report notes that the Department of City Planning neither tracks the cumulative amount of parking in the city, nor measures the impact of parking on traffic and pollution. The proliferation of accessory parking in Hell's Kitchen and the possible addition of a 2,300-car Costco garage on the Upper West Side are symptoms of the city's ad-hoc approach to parking management. All told, says report author Rachel Weinberger, the biggest impact on traffic might come from the construction of smaller, one- to three-family residences required to include off-street parking.

A broad coalition of planning and environmental groups co-issued the report. Streetsblog will have more on yesterday's joint press conference (also see articles in AM New York, Metro, the Post, and the Sun) and recommendations for addressing the parking glut. Key findings from the report follow the jump.

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