Streetsblog New York City

Friday’s transit forum hosted by Transit Workers Union Local 100 and a coalition of rider advocacy groups offered an opportunity for a more more detailed discussion of transit policy than this year’s mayoral race has seen so far. While the candidates offered few specifics about how they would improve transit for the millions of New Yorkers who depend on trains and buses, clear differences emerged, especially on the question of how to increase funding for the debt-ridden MTA.

Five Democrats — former City Council City member Sal Albanese, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Comptroller John Liu, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and former comptroller Bill Thompson — were on hand, as were former Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrión, running on the Independence Party line, and Manhattan Media publisher Tom Allon, running as a Republican. Conspicuously absent was Republican Joe Lhota, whose resume includes a recent one-year stint as MTA chair.

The transit issue that the mayor can control most directly is the allocation of street space. How much real estate should be dedicated exclusively to transit, so riders don’t get bogged down in traffic? More than anyone else, the mayor has the power to decide.

Albanese had the most specific proposal, calling for 20 new Select Bus Service routes by 2018. De Blasio said he wants more Bus Rapid Transit outside of Manhattan, citing a JFK-to-Flushing route as an example. When Streetsblog asked after the forum if the Bloomberg administration has been implementing the SBS program quickly enough, de Blasio said he didn’t know enough to say if implementation was going slowly, but that the implicit answer is “yes” because his vision calls more more BRT in the outer boroughs.

Carrión, who called for a new goal of providing 30-minute commutes from the city limits to the CBD, cited the Select Bus Service route on Fordham Road as a successful transit enhancement, noting that it has won over merchants who were initially skeptical. Quinn and Thompson, meanwhile, spoke about improving bus service, but not specifically about SBS or BRT. And Liu said that Bus Rapid Transit should be part of the city’s transit mix, but didn’t get more specific than that.

On the issue of funding the MTA, the mayor has far less direct control than the governor and the state legislature but still commands a powerful bully pulpit that can set the agenda.

Read more…

Here's a chart breaking down New York Times exit poll results from the mayoral election.

What sticks out to us is not so much that 3 percent of voters rated transportation as the "one issue" that mattered most to them, since many who participated could care a great deal about transportation and you wouldn't know it. Notice instead how Bloomberg dominated the issue of economy and jobs, even in this terrible downturn, despite Thompson's attempts to portray livable streets improvements as assaults on small businesses.

Obviously, despite the low level of interest indicated here, transportation matters. Otherwise pols wouldn't drone on about the MTA ad nauseam. But what do these numbers tell you?

Mike Bloomberg defeated Bill Thompson yesterday to claim a third term as New York City mayor, but no one except the mayor's own staff is calling the five point margin a victory for the incumbent. The headlines today are all about Bloomberg's surprisingly lackluster showing. After breaking his own records for campaign spending and mounting a juggernaut political operation, the mayor could barely muster a majority of the votes.

And how few votes were cast. Total turnout -- 1.1 million out of about 4 million registered voters -- looks to be even lower than in Ed Koch's election to a third term, back when a million fewer people lived in the city. Participation in New York City's democratic process hasn't been this paltry since the days before women were enfranchised.

The Thompson camp appeared to take some satisfaction in the relatively close finish. Still, Democrats have got to be second guessing themselves today. No doubt much hand-wringing will ensue about the failure of President Obama and local power brokers to rally around the party's standard bearer.

But here are some numbers to chew on: Thompson lost by 50,000 votes, and New Yorkers make more than two million bus trips every day. What if the Democratic candidate had actively campaigned on specific ideas to improve bus service? Vastly outspent or not, Thompson couldn't clear the bar set by Freddy Ferrer in 2005 despite an electorate that seemingly felt little enthusiasm for the incumbent. (Disgust with the term limits extension may explain why Bloomberg himself garnered 200,000 fewer votes than he did four years ago, even though his approval rating, at 70 percent, remains quite high.)

Instead, when it came to New Yorkers' transportation concerns, Thompson sounded few consistent themes except the notion that self-serving complaints from a few local merchants should take precedence over safety gains and transit improvements on our streets. The Democratic Party -- purported defender of the working class and the environment -- failed to make the connection between urban transportation, economic opportunity, and sustainability.

Read more...

With extremely low turnout expected for tomorrow's mayoral election, Bill Thompson and Mike Bloomberg canvassed the city over the weekend trying to drum up some enthusiasm for their candidacies. For Thompson, the itinerary included a stop in Bedford Stuyvesant this Saturday to protest plans for improving bus service along Nostrand Avenue.

Hopping off the campaign truck at the corner of Fulton and Nostrand, Thompson and the entire citywide Democratic ticket joined local council rep Tish James for a quick show of solidarity with Nostrand Avenue Merchants Association president Lindiwe Kamau. Kamau takes issue with bus improvements planned for Nostrand because, she claims, dedicated bus lanes will eliminate curbside parking along the corridor. Here's the thing: The most recent renderings of Select Bus Service on Nostrand [PDF] depict buses operating in an existing travel lane. The curbside parking lane would still be there.

That didn't stop Thompson, James, John Liu, and Bill de Blasio from lending their support for a few minutes, standing beside Kamau and repeating stock phrases about "protecting small businesses." The biggest constituency they addressed appeared to be the press. About four reporters were on hand, outnumbering Nostrand Avenue merchants by approximately four-to-one. After a light cycle or two, the pols hopped back on the truck and were driven away.

If the Democratic ticket had walked over to the B44 stop around the corner, they would have found a much larger and more captive audience to address. Their message might not have gone over very well though.

Read more...

Mayoral contender Bill Thompson continues to elaborate on his opposition to the city's expanded bike infrastructure. In an interview published Friday, Thompson told the Downtown Express that just because injuries are down on Grand Street since the installation of a protected bike lane last year, doesn't mean those improvements should be preserved.

According to Dept. of Transportation statistics, accidents of all types are down by nearly 30 percent on Grand St., but Thompson said those were not enough reasons to keep the lane.

“Then you move forward,” Thompson told the Express. “So you'll have a safer street where the businesses are going to wind up closing? That's not what you're looking to do. You're looking to strike that balance so it works.”

He said last week that he would have his transportation commissioner take a new look at any lanes that seemed to be problematic, such as along Grand St. and in Astoria, though he did not promise to definitely close any. He favors bike lanes and suspects ones on wider streets such as on Eighth and Ninth Aves. are working better.

So in Thompson's view, safety gains on Grand Street, proven by measured reductions in injuries, are no match for unfounded accusations that, all evidence to the contrary, bike lanes are bad for business. The implication: car traffic propels commerce even in dense, walkable lower Manhattan. Also, let's not forget that the vast majority of Grand Street's curbside parking has been retained. Eliminating the bike lane would simply allow motorists to resume driving faster and double-parking without blocking vehicles behind them. How is that good for business?

I'm not sure whether candidate Thompson can be swayed by studies, common sense, and the vision of a city where better streets for pedestrians and cyclists attract more foot traffic for local businesses. At this point, it seems pretty clear that his ear is more attuned to whoever whines the loudest.

Tonight at 7:00, mayoral contenders Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson face off in the first debate of the general election. Andrew Hawkins at City Hall News has some good pre-debate reading for New Yorkers who care about how this election will affect the future of our streets and public spaces.

To date, Thompson has uncorked a steady flow of escalating anti-bike lane statements, couched in a demand for greater "community input." The argument never squared with DOT's habit of seeking community board approval for bike projects, nor does it jibe with recent resolutions in favor of protected bike lanes passed by Manhattan Community Boards 7 and 8. So Hawkins' sources offer up a few other explanations for Thompson's stance:

George Arzt, a veteran Democratic political consultant, said Thompson appears to be making a grab for working class, outer borough votes with his calls to remove bike lanes and dump Sadik-Khan.

"It's a 718 issue, as we used to say," said Arzt. "He sees this as an advantage to do something for the car drivers, many of whom hate the bicycle lanes and are fearful of running over a cyclist."

Read more...

The current iteration of Grand Street, by most any objective measure, has to be considered a success. In the year since it was reconfigured to host the city's first parking-protected bike lane, with the blessing of Community Board 2, injuries are down 30 percent, with about 1,000 cyclists using the lane daily.

Other recent street safety projects are paying off with similar dividends, according to DOT data:

• After the Ninth Avenue protected bike lane was installed in 2007, injuries among all users dropped 56 percent.
  
• The protected Broadway bike lane between 42nd and 35th Streets brought a 50 percent drop in injuries.

Given quality of life improvements like these, it would make sense for mayoral challenger Bill Thompson to promise to at least stay the course, if not to one-up the incumbent. And in his responses to the Transportation Alternatives Candidate Survey, Thompson comes across as a big believer in the benefits of livable streets. New MTA revenue streams, expanded BRT service, ramped-up traffic enforcement, on-street parking reform -- when playing to the TA crowd, the candidate is nearly pitch perfect.

But depending on whom he's talking to, Thompson is either eager to expand on the safe streets initiatives of the past few years or eradicate them on day one -- starting with a shake up at DOT and removal of the Grand Street lane.

If increased safety and community board approval wouldn't be enough for a project to be judged a success by Mayor Thompson, what criteria would he use? Though we were assured several times that the candidate supports bike lanes, our conversation with a Team Thompson spokesperson did little to clear things up.

"It's a wide range of factors," said the spokesperson. "It's not just the small businesses in the area, it's also the community. I can't comment on something in the future. I mean, obviously you have to look at each bike lane separately, right?"

Read more...

The latest production of the Yes Men hit the streets and the Web today: an Onion-esque "Special Edition" of the New York Post devoted completely to climate change, released ahead of this week's global summit at UN headquarters. Coming in at 32 pages in print, there's a lot here to digest -- including a fun take down of livable streets skeptic Steve Cuozzo, whose alter ego sees the error of his auto-centric ways.

It may be a fake edition of the Post, but it isn't fake news, says the group:

Everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

"This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem."

Take, for example, the city's own climate change report [PDF], which warns of a future New York beset by extreme heat waves, flooding and drought unless "all nations" reduce their carbon emissions.

The bright side, inasmuch as there is one, is that most New Yorkers are already committed to a relatively low-impact lifestyle simply by residing in a city where over 80 percent of the population gets around by walking, biking and taking transit. Hopefully copies of today's faux-Post will make their way into the hands of oblivious politicians like Bill Thompson, for whom urban carbon-cutters like bike lanes and pedestrian spaces are only as valuable as the next faux-populist sound bite.

Update: Daily Finance (via Gothamist) reports that NYPD detained three volunteers who were distributing fake Posts outside the News Corp. building in midtown.

Bill Thompson is making it pretty hard for New Yorkers who care about safe streets to get behind his campaign for mayor. With Tony Avella out of the way, Thompson has no bike lane-bashing rival nipping at his heels. There's no anti-livable streets flank to shore up. But that didn't stop the Democratic nominee from telling a NY1 crew that he'll rip out the Grand Street bike lane at the first opportunity:

While campaigning in Chinatown, Thompson questioned whether a bike lane on Grand Street and the other bike lanes across the city have hurt businesses.

Thompson said if elected, he would rip out the Grand Street bike lane and review other ones put in by the Bloomberg Administration.

"I'm in favor of bike lanes but you can't put bike lanes in without speaking to the community," Thompson said. "You can't put bike lanes that are doing damage to local businesses."

The city just came out with horrible employment numbers across the board and we're in the depths of a historic national downturn. Naturally, in his talking points about the local economy, the Democratic mayoral nominee turns to bike lane removal.

Pandering to anti-bike sentiment under the guise of speaking up for "the community" doesn't pass the smell test when you're talking about a project that the local community board approved 33 to 1. So if Thompson is really in favor of bike lanes, maybe he needs a refresher on what that actually means.

Read more...

I didn't get to watch last night's Democratic mayoral debate between Bill Thompson and Tony Avella, so I missed the high drama that ensued when the candidates were asked if they'll retain Janette Sadik-Khan as transportation commissioner. Good thing Brian Lehrer played excerpts on his show this morning (check the 13:40 mark). Now I know the answer from both: "No."

Thompson got started with a restrained, "I think you bring your own team to the table." Then Avella took the first rip at the city's new bike lanes and public plazas.

"There has to be community involvement," he said. "You can't just dictate from the top: 'Hey, tomorrow, here's a bike lane, here we're gonna close off the street,' without having communication with the elected officials, the community boards, and the neighborhoods, and that's why she should be fired."

This prompted an escalation from Thompson: "I favor bicycle lanes, however, you are hearing the complaint all over the city of New York, because the communities have not been consulted. They've been ignored. Bicycle lanes have been dropped upon them and there has been no discussion. That's wrong and that shouldn't continue."

Avella and Thompson don't seem to have a very good grasp of the facts on this issue. DOT's plaza program is entirely opt-in. They won't build a plaza in your community unless someone from the neighborhood asks for it. New Yorkers are basically competing with each other to get these public spaces added to their streets. Oh, and attacking the new plazas on Broadway is kind of like pledging to pave Bryant Park at this point.

Read more...