In a phone interview with Streetsblog yesterday, Rachel Weinberger, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an architect of the transportation section of PlaNYC 1.0, gave us her take on the update of the city’s sustainability plan.

On setting expectations:

The first PlaNYC seemed really bold in the transportation area. Maybe it seemed much bolder than we would think if it were to come out today.

On the significance of PlaNYC 1.0:

The shift in thinking is far more important than the specific projects that were enumerated in the first go.

One of the big accomplishments of PlaNYC 1.0 was that it got City Hall thinking in a way that opened City Hall up to the idea of hiring a [transportation] commissioner like JSK.

On parking policy:

The parking stuff [in the update] is a little bit anemic. But in PlaNYC 1.0 we couldn’t even touch it, it was considered untouchable. It was our judgment that congestion pricing had more legs than taking on the parking question. That’s telling.

Since we tried to break open that barrier, there’s been maybe a gestation period for the city to start coming around to thinking, “Okay, here’s an area of public policy that we can and should address.” … Now we’re on the threshold of being able to look at it in a robust kind of way. Now let’s do it.

On paving the way for other cities:

The first one also created space in other places, like Chicago and Washington. The sustainability director of Philadelphia went all around Philadelphia waving around PlaNYC, saying, “We’re going to steal everything we can from this document.”

Other cities benefited from the hard work that we did. It might be too much to push that hard again right away.

Local activists have made Williamsburg's New Domino a little less auto-centric. Image: The New Domino

How few parking spaces should be attached to new developments to make New York a more sustainable city?

That's the big question for developments like Brooklyn's New Domino, the huge project slated for the Williamsburg waterfront where developers originally proposed 1,694 parking spaces for about 2,400 residences. Neighborhood activists recently won a 266-space reduction in the amount of parking but still face an onslaught of new automobiles.

Last week, the City Planning Commission approved the New Domino in a unanimous vote. One of the only changes the commission demanded from the project's developers was to eliminate one parking lot, reducing the number of parking spaces from 1,694 to 1,428. The 266-space reduction was not based on studies or research. It came straight from a request by Borough President Marty Markowitz.

While the reduction was a victory for livable streets, the fact that more than 1,400 parking spaces remain highlights the immense disconnect between the developer's initial proposal and goals like reducing traffic or encouraging sustainable transportation. To make the Williamsburg waterfront a real beacon of sustainable planning, it's clear that the New Domino would have to include substantially fewer than 1,428 spaces.

"It's still going to be an auto-oriented development," said David King, a professor of planning at Columbia University who specializes in parking. "1,400 is just a lot of parking spaces, however you cut it."

"In the Department of City Planning, there's a group that thinks New York City will collapse on itself if you stop attracting families with cars."

The local community board and Council Member Stephen Levin had asked for even larger reductions in parking. When Community Board 1 requested fewer parking spaces, their resolution called for "a level significantly less than the maximum allowed under zoning," or 1,541 spaces, according to land use committee chair Ward Dennis. Dennis wouldn't speak for the board as to whether 1,428 was "significantly" less than 1,541.

So how, at New Domino or in any big project down the line, would you figure out the right amount of parking? 

"That's a community decision," argued Rachel Weinberger, UPenn professor and parking policy expert. "It's a vision thing." According to Weinberger, the transportation effects of off-street parking are fairly well-documented, so setting parking levels is a matter of deciding which outcomes you want.

Attaching guaranteed parking spaces to housing is one of the fastest ways to ensure that residents drive, she said, pointing to "Guaranteed Parking, Guaranteed Driving," a report she co-authored for Transportation Alternatives in 2008, as well as more intensive research she is currently conducting. Accordingly, asking how much parking to include is another way of asking how much congestion, environmental damage and danger to pedestrians a community is willing to tolerate in return for making driving more convenient. 

Exactly how many car trips are generated by each off-street space is "an impossible to answer question," said Weinberger, because "it's such a dynamic system." But it's perfectly clear that every space eliminated leads to fewer trips by car. 

King agreed, saying that at a parking-laden site like New Domino, "people may not be likely to drive into Midtown Manhattan, but they'll keep a car and drive for all their other trips." That residential parking leads to more driving, he said, is increasingly well-established. If your only goal is to reduce the number of cars on the road, he added, "there shouldn't be any parking built whatsoever."

While the effect of building less parking on traffic is fairly clear, the effect on the real estate market is less so. That's where things get interesting. Would enough people buy or rent parking-free apartments to make them commercially viable? Or would less parking squelch growth in green, transit-rich NYC?

Both King and Weinberger argued that to really understand how to set off-street parking levels, we need market research about the demand for car-free housing in New York. "We have no idea what would happen if there was no parking" at New Domino, said King, "because no one has built anything on that scale recently." If you really couldn't sell parking-free housing, the right amount of parking for new developments would necessarily be higher than zero.

Of course, looking at neighborhoods with scarce parking just across the river, like Alphabet City, added King, "I suspect it would work out just fine" at a site like New Domino. Older Brooklyn neighborhoods have very low off-street parking levels and very high real estate prices. In Park Slope, only five percent of car owners store their cars at home.

But the institutions pushing more off-street parking on New York City, King and Weinberger argued, do so because they assume that successful development requires more parking. In the Department of City Planning, said Weinberger, "there's a group of people that think that New York City will collapse on itself if you stop attracting families with cars." If you could show that big projects like New Domino would fill up even without parking, though, they might be less interested in off-street parking.

King speculated that another group might be the best target for market research: Banks. "There's no bank that's going to finance an experiment," he said, "so if the banks won't finance them, the developers won't build them." At privately financed projects like New Domino, the bank's influence is direct, but the financial sector could also influence how much parking a public agency like the city's Economic Development Corporation decides to include in its projects, said King. 

Market research -- or better still, demonstration projects -- would help determine how the New York market would respond to large developments with parking levels in line with the city's older neighborhoods. That's an answer you need to know to figure out the "right" amount of parking in a place like New Domino. 

Surface parking stretches halfway to the horizon in the heart of downtown Wichita, Kansas. Image: Wichita Walkshop via Flickr.

If you haven't checked out the ITDP parking report we covered yesterday, it's a highly readable piece of research, walking you through parking policy's checkered past and potentially brighter future.

In addition to describing six cases of innovative parking strategies, the authors draw from a wide-ranging body of evidence about the woeful state of most current parking policy, marshaling revealing facts and figures. We culled some of the ones that leap out the most. Enjoy:

• Ninety-nine percent of U.S. car trips begin and end in a free parking space.
• The average automobile is parked 95 percent of the time.
• Although many businesses today believe they benefit from free parking, curbside parking meters were actually introduced in 1935 by an Oklahoma City department store owner. He wanted to increase parking turnover so that there would always be spaces available for his customers.
• Conventional parking policy counsels providing enough spots to handle car storage on the 30th busiest hour of the entire year, usually the weekend before Christmas. That means intentionally planning for an oversupply of parking the other 8,730 hours of the year.
• At free parking spaces, 40 to 60 percent of vehicles overstay posted time limits.
• Parking typically represents a full 10 percent of development costs. What's more, the people who actually park only pay 5 percent of the cost of non-residential parking, meaning that public subsidies and developer capital pay for the rest.
• In San Francisco, parking requirements have reduced the number of affordable housing units nonprofit developers can build by 20 percent, with each residence costing 20 percent more to build than it would have without parking.
• Seventy percent of Southern California suburban office developments built exactly the number of parking spaces required by law, suggesting that parking minimums are forcing developers to build more parking than they want to.
• How much space does parking eat up? Office space typically requires 175 to 250 square feet per person. In comparison, curbside parking requires 200 square feet per vehicle, and garages require 300 to 350 square feet per vehicle.
• Even in the Park Smart pilot areas of Greenwich Village, where peak hour meter rates have been raised, on-street parking still costs $12 per hour less than off-street parking. At that rate, cruising for 15 minutes to find an on-street space to park for one hour pays off at the equivalent of a $100,000 annual salary.
• NYC has 32 percent fewer meters per capita than Chicago.
• Only two major U.S. cities, Houston and Chicago, are adding more metered parking. In Houston's case, they are more than doubling their metered spaces in coordination with the city's light rail project.

Graphic: ITDP

"There was a 35-year parking coma during which the federal government, cities, and environmentalists forgot why parking was important," said John Kaehny, who co-authored the report with Matthew Rufo and UPenn professor Rachel Weinberger. "This study shows people are starting to wake up and understand that parking is one of the most important influences on how cities work and what form of travel people choose to use."

The early 70s parking limits beat back the cycle of more car storage, wider roadways, and greater sprawl that decimates urban areas. The underlying idea was simple: Manage the supply of parking, and you can reduce the demand for driving. Yet in America this notion has gone largely unheeded, even in cities.

Instead, the authors note, parking policy is typically divorced from transportation policy and goals like reducing congestion or encouraging walking and biking. In most of our urban areas, planners determine parking volumes using suburban standards, drawing heavily on ill-suited recommendations in "Parking Generation," a manual published by the Institute for Transportation Engineers. The product is cheap, ubiquitous parking -- much of which sits unused most of the time.

Fully 99 percent of car trips in America end in free parking, an incentive that crowds out all other modes of transportation. "Even when the price of parking is free," said Weinberger, "it’s far from free."

The resulting congestion impedes the effectiveness of transit. Traffic volumes and double-parking make bicycling less pleasant and more dangerous. Walkable environments give way to curb cuts, dead walls, and land-devouring parking facilities that spread destinations farther apart. The whole vicious cycle is heavily subsidized, with the cost of parking absorbed into the price of everything from housing to movie tickets.

"In a time of economic distress, we can’t afford to continue these policies,"  said ITDP's Michael Replogle. "Continuing to subsidize parking is very costly for all of us."

Surface parking in downtown Minneapolis. Photo: ITDP/Zachary Korb

In San Francisco and New York, programs to bring the price of curbside parking more in line with off-street parking are reducing the incentive to cruise endlessly for a cheap spot. In Portland, planners have reduced parking requirements for new development near transit lines, helping to improve walkability and increase ridership.

This parking structure in downtown Boulder is wrapped with street-level retail. Image: ITDP/City of Boulder

Other cities will be able to replicate the innovations in the report, said UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking. "Weinberger, Kaehny, and Rufo show how cities can begin to repair the damage caused by decades of bad planning for parking," he said. "The case studies of six cities that have reformed their parking policies provide clear blueprints that any city can adapt to fit the local circumstances."

The Argyle, a new arrival on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue, is close to transit but cedes the ground floor to parking rather than retail or even a stoop. Parking requirements throughout New York compromise walkable development. Image: Brownstoner.

This is the second installment in a three-part series on the reshaping of New York City and its consequences for sustainability and livable streets. Read the first part here.

Yesterday we looked at the Department of City Planning's eight-year record on rezoning and its general success at creating opportunities for development near transit. Density, however, is only one piece of the planning process. Amanda Burden's planning department has laid the foundation for transit-oriented growth, but so far failed to create conditions where walkable development can flourish.

"Everyone's trying to remake themselves into New York while New York is trying to make itself a more suburban environment."

The department's parking policy is one major impediment. By requiring most new residential developments to include a minimum number of parking spaces per unit, the department is artificially inflating the supply of parking, inducing more traffic and subsidizing car ownership.

New research from Simon McDonnell, Josiah Madar and Vicki Been at NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy [PDF] shows how these policies actually concentrate parking in transit-rich areas.

Required parking per thousand square feet of land. Parking minimums actually consume the most space along transit lines.

The research reveals that although buildings near rail stations have lower parking minimums than those in more car-dependent areas, on average residential development within half a mile of rail is still required to have 46 parking spaces for every 100 housing units. Perversely, because you can build more densely near transit, parking minimums per square foot of land are actually higher where transit options are most robust. So even as the planning department tries to concentrate growth near transit lines, it is simultaneously filling that valuable real estate with unnecessary parking.

The impact of inserting so much new parking into the built environment is enormous.

New York City's parking minimums will add a billion more vehicle miles traveled per year by 2030, according to Transportation Alternatives' 2008 report, Suburbanizing the City. Parking minimums can also force new development to disengage from the street, creating unpleasant sidewalks and dead spaces for pedestrians, as seen on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue.

"Everyone's trying to remake themselves into New York while New York is trying to make itself a more suburban environment," said Rachel Weinberger, the lead author of the TA report and a professor of urban planning at UPenn. Weinberger argues that the combination of increased density and parking minimums means that the planning department is "pushing the urban form into a more Corbusian, towers-in-the-park shape." A form that has been discredited for the better part of 50 years.

Shortsighted parking policy has been complemented by outsized redevelopment projects widely seen as antithetical to sustainable planning. "The big way that Bloomberg projects have been anything but transit-oriented is not the rezonings, but those rezonings that have been combined with major redevelopment initiatives," said Joan Byron, the Director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center for Community Development. "These are the megaprojects: Yankee Stadium, Willets Point, or Coney Island, to name a few examples."

In these cases, Byron says, the planning department -- especially when working closely with the NYC Economic Development Corporation -- ignores good planning and instead "seeks to maximize the return on investment for a hypothetical developer." The upshot is that these megaprojects routinely sacrifice walkable streets in order to embrace the automobile, as Ron Shiffman, a co-founder of the Pratt Center and former planning commissioner, described for Streetsblog last November.

In some places, the planning department's transit-oriented rezonings and its auto-centric redevelopments sit cheek-by-jowl. The 1,248 parking space East River Plaza, for example, hulks next to the FDR Drive in East Harlem, while just a few blocks closer to the Lexington Avenue subway, huge swaths of the neighborhood were upzoned to take advantage of the area's transit resources.

The Department of City Planning's vision for Hudson Yards.

While the Bloomberg administration invests billions of city dollars in making Hudson Yards a "dynamic, transit-oriented urban center," it has also actively fought to make it a car-friendly location. These goals are fundamentally incompatible. "You can't make a place auto-accessible," said Weinberger, "without eroding the pedestrian and therefore the transit environment."

Bloomberg and Burden have undertaken a transformative rezoning of the city, mostly along transit-oriented lines. At the same time, their policies are not filling those transit-rich areas with development that actually fosters walking and transit use. Planners instead insist on the unnecessary construction of parking spaces and allow developers to import suburban standards into New York City's urban fabric. It's as if the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. In the third post of this series, we'll look at how the Bloomberg administration can use the next four years to better align its development policies.

Freshly cut curb in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. Photo: Department of City Planning.

The ban on parking pads should put a halt to the proliferation of curb-cuts in certain neighborhoods. "To the extent that this text amendment is effective, that will be a boon," said Rachel Weinberger, a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Suburbanizing the City, the 2008 report that examined New York City's decidedly unsustainable off-street parking policies [PDF]. "When people are paving over their front yards, that implies they're driving across the sidewalk, which is an incredibly dangerous thing."

The new rules would also create important protections in addition to the parking pad ban. One requirement sets out to prevent the addition of off-street parking in parts of Manhattan and western Queens if the new curb-cut "adversely affects" pedestrian movement. "DCP's proposed change appears to be a real shift in that policy," said Lindsey Lusher-Shute of Transportation Alternatives. "Of course, the effectiveness of this measure will be determined by the definition of 'adverse effects,' but this is a step in the right direction."

As City Room reported last week, much of the impetus for the new rules appears to have come from community boards in neighborhoods like Dyker Heights and Bay Ridge, where paved yards have rapidly spread as homeowners race to secure their own personal space for car storage. While the zoning amendment would put a stop to that particular turf war, it also gives in to the territorial instinct by creating new parking requirements.

"Unfortunately, these regulations perpetuate the now 50-year-old practice of requiring developers to build parking when they add units to existing housing," said Lusher-Shute. "In neighborhoods with excellent access to public transportation, requiring parking is costly, unnecessary and will cause more traffic congestion over the long term."

The zoning amendment is now proceeding through the public review process, including stops at all 59 community boards, the borough presidents' offices, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council.

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."

The recommendations in the report, which were formulated by co-author's John Kaehny and Weinberger, include a mix of incentives and other measures to stem the tide of excessive off-street parking. The widespread practice of "bundling" a parking spot with the price of housing, for instance, rewards car ownership and weighs down car-free households with an unnecessary cost. Cities including San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. are moving away from this practice, and New York could do the same. Another concept is to nudge developers in less transit-oriented neighborhoods to include space for car-sharing instead of private cars.

Here's a sampling of other ideas being proposed:

• Doing away with mandatory parking minimums and instituting maximums that would vary based on a development's proximity to transit
• Prioritizing the pedestrian environment above the dictates of convenient parking by banning curb cuts on key streets for pedestrians and transit
• Establishing impact fees on new parking spaces that take into account their full costs to the public.

Streetsblog will be taking a closer look at these recommendations and more in the weeks ahead.

Photo of residential driveway in Queens: Forgotten NY

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."

Representatives of Environmental Defense and the New York League of Conservation Voters rounded out the proceedings, calling on the city and state to take stock and head off the traffic-congested future that excessive off-street parking threatens to bring about. "We're building the infrastructure to encourage more people to drive with very little understanding of the environmental impacts," said Josh Nachowitz of NYLCV.

T.A.'s Paul Steely White tied the issue to preserving New York's streets for people on foot, noting that more off-street parking means less sidewalk integrity: "Curb cuts enable cars to drive across the sidewalk and block the sidewalk; it erodes the pedestrian environment."

Major planning groups, including the American Planning Association, the Regional Plan Association, and the Municipal Art Society, have also signed on to the report and urged Mayor Bloomberg to revise the city's ad-hoc policies governing off-street parking. According to one organizer behind the effort, this marks the first time all three organizations have lined up behind the same transportation reform.

Streetsblog will have more soon on the recommendations being advanced by this coalition.

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.

• In many cases, the city's residential off-street parking requirements exceed existing off-street parking. As a result, new residences built under the zoning code will have far more parking than existing residences. This will shift neighborhoods from pedestrian-oriented to more car-oriented places and undermine their pedestrian character.
• New York City zoning regulations mandating parking at new residential developments will increase auto ownership rates and add over 1 billion annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by 2030. This is 40% to 50% more than if the City were to maintain its existing rate of car ownership. (A billion VMT is equivalent to 8 months of traffic in Manhattan south of 86th Street.) Auto use associated with required parking at new housing will add over 431,000 metric tons of CO2 per year by 2030. (By comparison, the city's new, high-mileage, “green” taxis and black car initiative will reduce CO2 emissions by 351 thousand tons a year.)
• Residents of new residential development are at least 40% to 50% more likely to own automobiles than today's New Yorkers.
• The Department of City Planning lacks crucial information for making informed decisions about the amount of off-street parking it requires in the Zoning Resolution. The agency does not know how much parking there is, how much is required, or how much driving new park- ing will produce.
• There is no evidence to suggest that reducing off-street parking requirements would lead to less development, lower growth or other negative consequences.

Following United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten's "deeply troubling" letter to Mayor Bloomberg earlier this month protesting the city's directive to reduce parking placard issues by 20 percent, this week UFT chapter leaders and delegates approved a resolution not only demanding an exemption from placard reform, but calling on the city to increase the number of placards and parking spots reserved for motoring teachers.

This in and of itself is not terribly surprising, except that in December UFT members passed another resolution condemning America's avaricious consumption of fossil fuels, dependence on foreign oil, lack of interest in alternative energy, and production of greenhouse gases.

Hmm... where have we seen this before?

Here are the two rezos in their entirety, first from December:

Resolution on Protecting the Environment -- Reducing Dependence on Fossil Fuels

Whereas, it is a well established scientific fact that greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming, resulting in great dangers to our environment; and...

Whereas, the use of fossil fuels such as oil and coal results in greenhouse gas emissions; and

Whereas, little is being done in the U.S. to reduce the use of fossil fuels and develop alternative energy sources; therefore be it

Resolved, that as an important first step to reduce the use of fossil fuels and lessen dependence on foreign oil we urge the adoption of a meaningful increase in fuel efficiency standards to 35 miles per gallon or higher for vehicles; and be if [sic] further

Resolved, that other steps be taken to reduce the use of fossil fuels and lessen dependence on foreign oil including the requirement that utilities generate at least 15% of their electricity from renewable energy sources; and be it further

Resolved, that the nation reward the development of alternative energy sources such as bio fuels and solar power, which would help free the U.S. from imported oil which amounts to 60% of the oil consumed in our country.

And here is this week's resolution:

Resolution Opposing Any Reduction in Parking Permit [sic]

WHEREAS, many New York City public schools are difficult to reach by public transportation, many teachers travel between schools, and most schools do not provide off street parking for staff so that educators need to rely on street parking; and

WHEREAS, educators receive parking permits from the Department of Education that enable them to park on a portion of their school block during school hours only; and

WHEREAS, these permits, unlike Department of Transportation Permits, do not allow holders to ignore meter or no parking zone or alternate side regulations; and

WHEREAS, on numerous occasions the UFT has raised the need for more parking for teachers and has been told by the city and DOE that this is an economic bargaining issue; and

WHEREAS, the City has recently announced a plan to reduce the number of parking permits for all city employees by 20 percent; and

WHEREAS, available parking is clearly an incentive to attract teachers to high-needs schools, and rescinding permits at a time when we're making strides to attract the best and brightest to teaching in the city makes no sense; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that the UFT urge Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein to exempt UFT members from any reduction in parking permits; and

RESOLVED, that we call on the Mayor and Chancellor to join with the UFT to look for ways to increase the number of both parking permits and parking spaces for educators.

This quarter's Journal has stories on the benefits of regular "programmed" fare increases, Seoul, South Korea's successful bus rapid transit system and the future of transportation in the northeast corridor. That last one is somewhat awesomely titled, "From Megalopolis to Megamodal" and includes some interesting charts comparing the CO₂ intensity of different passenger and freight transportation modes, and U.S. petroleum use by sector. (Wasn't "Megamodal" the name of a big heavy metal band in the '80s?)

Also, U. Penn professor Rachel Weinberger, one of the authors of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC, interviews MTA Chief Elliot "Lee" Sander, who worked as the Director of the Rudin Center before his appointment to the MTA. Sander discusses the challenges facing the MTA and lays out his seven-part "strategic focus" for the agency. On December 12, The Rudin Center is hosting a breakfast with Lee Sander. If you would like to attend, RSVP online by December 7.

Below are some excerpts from the interview, which you can download in its entirety here:

RW: Looking forward then, what do you hope to accomplish in the next four years?

ES: I would like the MTA to be the best in class of large, older public transportation agencies in the world. I have identified seven areas of strategic focus that we will be working on aggressively to help get us there.

First, I want to dramatically improve workforce development at the MTA. That includes our formal relationship with organized labor, how we interact with our workforce, and how we deal with issues such as succession planning and executive development.

Second is institutional reform. There's a need for significant institutional reform at the MTA. We have seven different agencies that have essentially been run as independent organizations. This is incredibly inefficient. In a 21st Century world where the objective is to break down boundaries and create value through synergy, the MTA, as currently constituted, is the antithesis of a well-integrated, "flat" organization.

The third area is customer service. A new initiative that Howard Roberts has begun to implement is a rider report card. This is something he and I talked about when we were running the NYCT Bus System in the '80s. Howard then implemented it fully at SEPTA, and he found it to be very helpful. He actually was able to increase the grade in Philadelphia.

The fourth piece is system expansion, system improvement and planning. We have a huge agenda both in terms of the mega-projects and in terms of implementing the new technologies that will enable us to have better public information, better real-time control of our trains, and faster movement of our buses...

RW: Speaking of sustainability, how does the Mayor's sustainability plan affect you?

ES: I'm very supportive of the Mayor's plan. I worked very closely with the Mayor and Deputy Mayor Doctoroff when the Mayor released PlaNYC, especially the congestion pricing component because I feel strongly that the concept of congestion pricing is critical to the city and to the region. I'm pleased to have been named by the Governor to the Congestion Mitigation Commission. The MTA worked very hard, standing shoulder to shoulder with the City, on the Urban Partners application to seek federal support for the MTA's operating and capital budget.