Streetsblog New York City

From the New York Times' new City Room blog comes a post entitled "Congestion Pricing: Has David Bested Goliath?"

Hint: "The answer might depend on who you think is the giant."

Which coalition has been winning so far in the congestion pricing wars? So far, at least, the pro-congestion pricing forces have been on the defensive, even though they appear to be much better organized and financed and have the support of three bedrock organizations of municipal influence: the Partnership for New York City, the Regional Plan Association and the Citizens Budget Commission.

But it is not clear that supporters of congestion pricing have won enough public support, despite having achieved broad support among organized interests. Meanwhile, opponents of congestion pricing, like the Queens Civic Congress, have had a lower test to meet; their goal is to defeat the traffic fees by raising just enough doubt and skepticism -- with a public that is already doubtful and skeptical.

No matter that the overwhelming majority of commuters to Manhattan do not need to drive, or that the money raised from traffic fees would be used to improve mass transit across the city. The point is that the opponents of congestion pricing, like the Queens Civic Congress, have so far managed to create enough doubt around the idea -- a doubt that has swayed many Assembly members.

Of course it's easy to raise doubt and skepticism about a complex issue when one's arguments are largely unburdened by facts. Take this passage on Council Member David Weprin from today's Metro, in which the paper itself -- as does the City Room passage above -- refutes a rote, yet mostly baseless, objection to congestion pricing.

"I represent a district in eastern Queens that for most people is four or five miles from the nearest subway,” he said. "It is also not accessible to buses. You can’t tell me that they’re going to start building subways and changing bus lines in time if they’re going to adopt this congestion tax now."

Yet that is the stated intention of the Bloomberg administration, which hopes to first increase bus service to areas that lack subway access before implementing congestion pricing. More than half of the projected $500 million federal grant would supposedly go for transportation improvements. For example, one neighborhood in Weprin’s district -- Bayside -- is already slated to get new and expanded bus service under the mayor’s long-term sustainability plan, dubbed PlaNYC.

Weprin, though, remains unconvinced.

"The mayor is asking Albany to act now on the congestion tax and to worry about the public transportation improvements later," he said. "That’s backwards."

So Weprin wants to kill the plan to finance the improvements he says are needed before the plan he wants to kill can be implemented.

David and Goliath? Sure, if this version has a looking glass...

Speaking on his weekly radio show on WABC, Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced he would veto the City Council's legislation capping the number of pedicabs in the city at 325:

However, the mayor also said he may be amenable to a revised version that simply raised the cap on the vehicles, known as pedicabs. He suggested 500 as a limit.

Bloomberg had supported the pedicab regulation measure as it moved through the City Council. But during a bill signing ceremony on March 14, he postponed his decision after hearing arguments from a group of pedicab drivers who said the proposal would cost them their jobs.

"Let the free marketplace decide," Bloomberg said Friday during his weekly radio show on WABC.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for the mayor, said that Bloomberg did favor the bill's measures that called for basic safety and insurance regulations for pedicabs.

The mayor acknowledged it's likely the City Council could override the veto, but urged citizens to lobby for a cap removal or one that's higher.

All across the city neighborhood groups are coming together to re-envision and plan their own communities. In the last few months we've seen valuable community-planning processes taking place in Hell's Kitchen, the Meatpacking District and, to a certain extent, along Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. People aren't waiting around for real estate developers or city agencies to tell them how their neighborhoods should be. They are going out and doing the thinking and planning themselves.

Add the neighborhoods around Grand Army Plaza to the list of communities taking pro-active steps to create a streets renaissance in New York City. Grand Army Plaza Coalition organizer Rob Witherwax describes the GAPco community workshop event in more detail:

Recently, we've witnessed a great example of community planning and traffic engineering from the top down (DOT Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia's one-way plan for 6th and 7th Avenues) and seen how well it was received by its intended beneficiaries. However, on a much quieter note, we have also participated in a great example of grassroots community planning: the GAPCo Community Workshop, held on Saturday, March 10 at the Brooklyn Public Library.

GAPCo, as you may recall, is the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. It was formed just over a year ago to study Grand Army Plaza and propose ways to improve access to, and through, Grand Army Plaza for all user groups. GAPCo has grown organically to comprise many community stakeholders: private residents, civic and business associations, cultural organizations like Prospect Park and the other Heart of Brooklyn members, activists, and the city government (community boards, elected officials, and bureaucrats alike). Everyone got on the bandwagon early, and participated: in a site walk-through, the formulation of 14 short term fixes, and taking ownership of the Plaza through clean up efforts.

Read more...

The B67 bus veers around a double-parked van blocking a car parked in front of a fire hydrant as a Bugaboo-pushing nanny strolls by Councilmember David Yassky and Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White calling for more sensible parking policy this afternoon in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Every drivers knows that it can be nearly impossible to find a legal parking space in the neighborhoods in and around Downtown Brooklyn but, until today, no one had ever tried to quantify the problem. No Vacancy (PDF download), a new study by Transportation Alternatives, finds that nearly half of all of the vehicles clogging the vital shopping avenues of Park Slope are occupied by drivers who are simply looking for a parking space. T.A.'s study, which riffs off the work of UCLA professor Donald Shoup, author of the acclaimed (and remarkably entertaining) High Cost of Free Parking, found that:

• 94% of the area's metered parking spaces are occupied with nearly 100% of spaces occupied at peak periods.
• Nearly one in every six vehicles parked along 7th Avenue is illegally parked, with the rate of illegal parking rising exponentially as the curb fills.
• Nearly two-thirds of local traffic consists of vehicles circling the block looking for parking spaces!

White says "When one in two cars is simply circling the block in search of parking, the curb is being mismanaged. This study shows that Brooklynites are suffereing from needless traffic and dangerous illegal parking that could be easily eliminated through inexpensive improvements like market-priced Muni-Meters and residential parking permits."

Yassky has been pushing the City to explore the possibility of a residential parking permit program for the neighborhoods around Downtown Brooklyn for three years now. Many believe that residential parking permits and better management of curbside parking space could help reduce unnecessary automobile trips into transit-rich Downtown Brooklyn. Jointly conducted by the Downtown Brooklyn Council, DOT and EDC, the residential permit study (PDF download) ultimately recommended not going forward with a residential parking permit program. The $75,000 study was one of the only concessions that the Bloomberg Adminsitration made to neighborhood groups during the extensive rezoning of Downtown Brooklyn.

• Report: No Place To Park In Park Slope (NY1)
  

In the latest issue of Mobilizing the Region, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign questions how the Bloomberg Administration's purported commitment to long-term planning and sustainability squares with the Department of Transportation's opposition to Intro. 199, City Council legislation aimed at collecting better data on how New York City's streets are managed and used:

Testifying before the City Council on Intro. 199, a bill to improve NYC transportation data collection and performance measures, outgoing NYCDOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall challenged the bill's suggestion that New York City's transportation-related data collection efforts don't go far enough. Commissioner Weinshall told the Council, "the City Charter already requires the submittal of objectives and indicators as detailed in the Mayor's Management Report (MMR) and, therefore, any legislation to require additional reporting seems redundant."

Press coverage of the hearing focused on Weinshall's statements that traffic congestion is more a matter of perception owing to bigger vehicles rather than growing numbers of them. Leaving aside the obvious fact that vehicle size matters to congestion-the same number of people driving trucks take up a lot more room than if they were on bicycles - the absence of any real information about traffic or congestion trends in the city in the commissioner's testimony seemed to argue for the Council's proposal.

Tri-State concludes:

The Bloomberg administration missed a golden opportunity to build support through Intro. 199 for new metrics of sustainable transportation. The Council should pass Intro 199, explicitly charging the city administration to come through with a way to measure progress on sustainability goals.

Clarence Eckerson and the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign are proud to introduce their newest project, Streetfilms.org, the video blog, or vlog, if you will:

Here's an editorial one wouldn't expect to see in The Times: An unabashedly pro-bicycle manifesto anointing cycling as "the cheap, green answer to so many contemporary troubles" and urging city authorities to use congestion-charging revenues to create a first-class cycling infrastructure.

Alas, this remarkable editorial was published not in the New York Times, but in the Times of London. Here in New York City our leading editorial board is busy pushing the police to hand out more traffic tickets to bike riders while debating State Senator Carl Kruger's absurd proposal to fine pedestrians who cross the street while listening to an iPod.

Cycling, the London Times editorial argues, "is a way to reduce stress and demonstrate an environmental conscience at the same time." The modern urban cyclist "is making an elegant and intelligent response to pollution and traffic congestion." The editorial even alludes to Peter Jacobsen's revelatory "safety in numbers" finding, something I've never seen in a mainstream, general-audience publication:

Cycle lanes need to be better protected from motorists. There would also be safety in numbers. At 2 per cent ridership, London lags far behind cities such as Berlin (10 per cent), Copenhagen (20 per cent) and Amsterdam (28 per cent), where the cyclist numbers influence driver behaviour.

Even the obligatory mention of bad biking behavior feels half-hearted and concludes on a rising note:

Those who ride on [sidewalks], who head in the wrong direction down one-way streets, and who smugly jump traffic lights with no care for others, are certainly stoking contempt for this bespoke form of transport. But the majority should not be tarred with that brush. British cyclists are to be admired for their courage, if not always for their manners.

The contrast between London and New York City's civic elite is stark. "Far too many traffic officers fail to hand out tickets to bicyclists who don't follow the rules," the Gray Lady scolded earlier this month, in that ridiculous iPod editorial that, actually, had nothing to do with cycling. The Times' most recent editorial on bicycle policy, Cyclists, the Police and the Rest of Us, seemed to imply that people who ride bikes in New York City are not, well, "the rest of us."

The London Times editorial steers way clear of casting cyclists as The Other. Here's how it wraps:

London has a unified transport authority. It must join up the dots. It is unacceptable for the world's foremost capital city to have a patchwork of cycle routes which peter out timidly on the road to nowhere. It may seem paradoxical that an intermediate technology is now the future. But it would be churlish not to encourage cycling as the cheap, green answer to so many contemporary troubles. May those who cycle be blessed with clean consciences, stronger arteries and safer journeys.

Just so. And may some of us live to see the day when our paper of record dons its glasses, clears its throat and delivers a ringing endorsement of cycling in our city. It's just a matter of time.

Photo: Dave Gorman / Flickr

We are interested in creating a new feature -- a collection of links to Streetsblog-ish web sites in other cities around the world. Ideally, this collection of links will represent the best, most comprehensive, most readable group of Livable Streets bloggers anywhere.

We could really use the help of the Streetsblog online community to build this collection. If you know of a site that fits the bill, or if you wouldn't mind spending a few minutes poking around online to find some good potential sites in specific cities, please do. Just add your finds to the comment section.

Here are some starter links to give you a sense of the kinds of sites we've been finding so far...

Boston:
http://newtonstreets.blogspot.com
http://www.livablestreets.info

Toronto:
http://bikingtoronto.blogspot.com

Portland:
http://www.bikeportland.org

Cleveland:
http://www.gcbl.org

Washington DC:
http://washcycle.typepad.com
http://pedshed.net

San Fran:
http://bikecommutetips.blogspot.com

Berkeley:
http://www.localecology.org/localecologist

Miami:
http://www.transitmiami.blogspot.com

London:
http://www.kingscrossenvironment.com

Vancouver:
http://sfucity.wordpress.com/about/

DOT has gotten back to me with some answers.  

As Streetsblog reported Monday, New York City's Department of Transportation failed to follow through on a 2004 pledge to build potentially life-saving pedestrian safety improvements along the Third Avenue corridor where a 4-year-old boy was run over and killed last Tuesday.

Streetsblog asked DOT why the pedestrian safety recommendations were never implemented despite a March 19, 2004 announcement by DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall that DOT would make an "immediate review" of the Third Avenue corridor and accelerate "$4 million in funding for capital improvements associated with the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming... from Fiscal Year 2009 to Fiscal Year 2006."

Here is a reply, from the agency's press office:

DOT has acted on many of the recommendations of the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Report since it was published in June 2004 and improved conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. On several streets in Downtown Brooklyn, DOT has reduced the number of travel lanes, added medians and left turn bays, adjusted signal timings, converted one-ways to two-ways and added parking, all to slow vehicles down and discourage through traffic. Miles of bike lanes have been installed, including a physically separated path on Tillary Street. Leading Pedestrian Intervals (LPI) were installed at 9 locations and LPI studies will begin shortly at 3 more intersections.

Capital work was delayed because the construction was more complicated than initially anticipated. Preliminary plans for all 250 recommended neckdowns were completed by DOT in March 2005, but underground utilities issues led to the need for more complex designs. The project has been divided into two phases to be handled by the Department of Design and Construction. The first phase, in the capital plan for fiscal year 2008, is fully funded at $5 million and includes the construction of neckdowns at 101 locations at 43 intersections.

To put the 2008 date in perspective, the public demonstrations that led to the creation of the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project began in 1996.

New York City's Department of Transportation failed to follow through on a 2004 pledge to build potentially life-saving pedestrian safety improvements along the Third Avenue corridor where a 4-year-old boy was run over and killed last Tuesday.

DOT's announcement of $4 million in funding for the installation of "median extensions, neckdowns and other traffic-calming" measures recommended by the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming plan was made after the February 9, 2004 deaths of Juan Estrada and Victor Flores. The Park Slope fifth graders were run over and killed by a gravel-filled truck at Third Avenue and 9th Street in circumstances eerily similar and almost exactly three years prior to Tuesday's tragedy

Last week, 4-year-old James Nyprie Rice was killed at the intersection of Third Avenue and Baltic Street in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn (newspaper stories had him incorrectly named as James Jacaricce). The boy and his 18-year-old aunt were walking in the crosswalk with the pedestrian signal giving them right-of-way when a yellow General Motors Hummer, driven by 48-year-old Ken Williams of Brownsville, made a right turn off of Third Avenue and ran them over, killing the boy and injuring his aunt. Juan Estrada and Victor Flores were also killed by a right-turning truck while walking in the crosswalk with the right-of-way. In both cases the drivers walked away with a summons from police.

As reported Thursday on Streetsblog, the May 2003 final report of the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project had recommended a set of pedestrian safety measures -- a "gateway treatment" consisting of "neckdowns" and a "raised crosswalk" for the intersection of Third Avenue and Baltic Street. These particular traffic-calming measures (illustrated at right) are designed specifically to protect neighborhood streets from through-traffic and help prevent the type of "right turn conflict" that killed all three boys.

The pedestrian safety recommendations were never implemented despite a March 19, 2004 announcement by DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall that DOT would make an "immediate review" of the Third Avenue corridor and accelerate "$4 million in funding for capital improvements associated with the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming... from Fiscal Year 2009 to Fiscal Year 2006." These funds, according to the commissioner's statement would "enable DOT to install median extensions, neckdowns and other traffic-calming initiatives." Fiscal Year 2006 ended on June 30.

The 2004 deaths of Estrada and Flores made the front pages of all of the dailies and Commissioner Weinshall's commitment to accelerated traffic calming was made following an unusual and emotional joint meeting of City Council's Transportation, Education and Pubilc Safety Committees. The March 1, 2004 public hearing, which opened with a moment of silence for the two Brooklyn boys, was convened to press DOT for pedestrian safety improvements around city schools and at the location where the two boys died.

Since March 2004 the Department of Transportation has accelerated the planning of its once-moribund Safe Routes to Schools program and provided Downtown Brooklyn and surrounding neighborhoods with a number of spot traffic-calming, pedestrian safety and bicycle infrastructure improvements, many of which are illustrated in this PDF document. At Third Avenue and 9th Street where Estrada and Flores died, DOT "granted to pedestrians" a seven second head start across the intersection ahead of motor vehicles, a traffic-calming measure known as a Leading Pedestrian Interval.

Yet, three years after Commissioner Weinshall's apparent commitment, DOT has not built neckdowns, median extensions or any other significant, physical pedestrian safety measures along the dangerous Third Avenue corridor.

The three fatalities above aren't the whole story either. On December 7, 2006 a 6-year-old boy named Andry Vega, was fatally struck at 3rd Avenue and 46th Street in Sunset Park by a truck running a red light.

Though pedestrian fatalities, on the whole, have declined in New York City in recent years, Third Avenue appears to be bucking the trend.