Workplaces have decentralized. Commuting patterns are no longer radial, from suburban residences to central cities. Now they are complex weaves across broad megaregions. Yet the infrastructure system hasn't adapted.

The Times published five letters in response, including this one from Transportation for America's David Goldberg:

David Brooks is spot-on with his call for major investment in transportation infrastructure, both for near-term economic stimulus and for a sustainable recovery. His recommendations of what to build are outdated, however.

As he notes, a way to put people to work would be to repair and maintain our existing highways, bridges and transit systems. But building new highways was the project for an earlier era, the 1950s, when gas was cheap and President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Interstate System.

Today we urgently need to build the infrastructure for a clean-energy economy and reduced dependency on oil. Soaring gas prices made our vulnerability clear: Americans flocked to public transportation or took to their bicycles only to find the transit systems underfinanced and the roads dangerous and inhospitable. Half of our urban-dwelling citizens found they had no transit at all.

If we're going to go into debt to build for the future, we must do so to complete our transportation network with high-speed rail, modern public transit, streets that support safe biking and walking, and, yes, well-maintained highways.

Dave Alpert at Greater Greater Washington picked up the exchange, noting how cities such as Charleston, South Carolina are already moving beyond the default presumption that transportation investment equals road-building.

And BikePortland's Jonathan Maus, recalling an earlier Brooks column that dismissed cycling as transportation, offered this take on transportation spending priorities:

Should we invest billions into highway projects that cater to "mobility" of single-occupancy vehicles (like we did in the 1950s) and throw scraps to everything else (like we do now)? Or, will we look to create world-class biking cities where possible (because bikes offer the best return on transportation investment of any mode) and then invest in things like passenger rail, streetcars and bus-rapid transit?

Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.

The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases.

Meanwhile, America's historically underfunded transit systems are also struggling with rising fuel prices and record demand. No word yet on how taking money away from transit to pay for highways fits in to George W. Bush's plan to end America's oil addiction but maybe time for Americans to take a good, hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves what kind of nation do we want to be?

Move over Weinermobile.

Queens Congressman and 2009 mayoral hopeful Anthony Weiner released a manifesto of sorts yesterday. "Keys to the City" lays out his plan, in broad strokes, to "keep New York the capital of the middle class." Toward the end, Weiner touches on transportation policy. While he remains opposed to congestion pricing, he comes out in favor of making "alternative modes" more viable:

Finally, as evidenced by my work as a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to secure millions of dollars for pedestrian and bicycle transportation options, we need to make our existing infrastructure safe and friendly for alternative modes of moving from Point A to Point B. Integrated neighborhoods -- where individuals live, work and play in close proximity to one another, as Jane Jacobs once exalted -- demand that we enable those who want to commute without polluting to do so safely and easily.

It will be interesting to see how the "close proximity" pitch plays to the anti-development, down-zoning crowd that is certain to be an energetic part of the 2009 election. The language is still pretty vague and not attached to any specific plans, but a candidate who raises an idea can then be expected to elaborate on it.

This morning I took a tour of the MTA's newly completed East Side Access tunnel 140 feet below Midtown Manhattan. My laptop is about to run out of batteries and, of course, I left my power cord at home. (It's a good thing I'm only in charge of running a blog and not, say, a 22-foot diameter, 850-ton tunnel boring machine.) So I'm just going to publish these photos with minimal text. I'll fill in the details later. Warning: If you're not a serious infrastructure geek, you might just want to skip this post altogether.

Joe Trainor, MTA Capital Construction

Sixteen flights down.

Reminds me of a Merle Travis song.

The "man car." Not the fanciest press junket.

Heading southbound towards Grand Central.

Left curve end. Right curve start. 

Digger.

Blow torch.

Manhattan schist.

Sandhogs.

Drill tip.

 Drill tip and worker.

Back to 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue in all of its sweltering, stylish, SUV-choked glory.

Cycling intimately acquaints you with every bump, slice, crease, divot, ledge, ripple and of course pothole in a street, because not noticing means you might get thrown off your steed into bone-breaking and life ending car traffic.

While riding along Lafayette Street in Manhattan, or Bergen Street in Brooklyn, or essentially anywhere in New York City, what I notice is surfaces that can only be described as poor and frankly dangerous for someone on a bike.

New York City is not the exception in this. It's been true in every city I have ever lived in in the United States, which includes some geographic and cultural diversity. Abroad, that's not so much the case, particularly in the prosperous countries of Western Europe. They notice the difference when the travel here, let me assure you. A few years ago when I was living in Boston a friend from Germany surveyed the pot-holed streets in Cambridge around the prestigious university of Harvard with some amazement.

"It reminds me of a Third-world country," he said with a grin. "Apparently no one cares!"

I don't think that's the case, but streets here do seem unusually bad. Why is that so?

When I swerved to avoid a pothole, I would tend to curse City Hall, and particularly the Department of Transportation. It's responsible for the streets. Why doesn't it do a better job maintaining them?

Then it hit me that my logic really wasn't inclusive enough. Most of the bumps and bruises on city streets relate to what is underneath the streets, because most of the bumps and bruises are caused by repairs after the streets have been opened up for some kind of work on electrical, gas, steam, water, phone or subway lines. And DOT doesn't own these utilities; other institutions do, including private companies. When Verizon puts in a new phone cable, or Con Edison repairs a gas line, its crews tear up the street, and its crews repair them. And not surprisingly, their crews may not put as high a priority on repairing streets as they do on installing phone cables or gas lines.

Then there are the other public agencies with interest below the street, like the water lines managed by the city's water department, and the subway and train lines managed by big public agencies that answer to the state.

What it adds up to is many institutions, all working beneath the streets, and then repairing them afterward, often with private subcontractors, which then adds an additional variable to the task of keeping streets neat.

If you look at the relatively smooth streets of places like Germany, France or Scandinavia, what you generally find is fewer private companies laying public infrastructure like water, gas and electric lines, and more public ones.

New York City and American cities follow the Anglo-Saxon model, derived from Great Britain, of letting private companies do much of the primary work in installing infrastructure. This saves taxes in the short run, but can create inefficiencies and bumpy streets in the long run. As I said in my latest book that just came out in paperback, Beneath the Metropolis, London didn't even have a public water system until early in the 20^th century. Before that it had a half dozen competing private water companies, all tearing up streets to lay their own lines, (and sometimes sabotaging their competitors). New York had a similar condition with its gas and electric lines before a company with the name Edison "consolidated" them into one corporation.

Having multiple private companies and public agencies responsible for the care of the street creates many opportunities for miscommunications and poor or faulty work. Folks I know at DOT tell me quite a few horror stories.

Is there a way we can make our streets better, without completely reorganizing our economy? There is, and that is better public oversight. As I have talked about regarding other issues in the city, an important but relatively neglected part of government is diligent and conscientious oversight of private companies doing public work. This can be making sure a developer puts in the right kind of escalator in a subway station, to making sure there are good paving standards for private companies to follow, and having enough resources to make sure those paving standards are met.

While Mayor Bloomberg's recent plan to send out squads of folks on foot and bike to methodically inspect the quality of the streets is a good one, what is needed even more is rigorous enforcement of standards that already exist for the care and maintenance of streets, regardless of who is doing the work.

Flickr photos by JSSchumacher and Susan NYC

Last week, MTA PR man Jeremy Soffin sent along an interesting news blip about the gigantic tunnel boring machine chewing up the schist beneath 60th Street in Manhattan for the MTA's East Side Access project. It turns out that blogger Michael Frumin knows "a guy" who's working on that project. Frumin visited the tunnel entrance in Sunnyside, Queens and snapped a bunch of photos that give you some sense of the humongousness of the project. 

The overriding feeling I had throughout was of being inside, around, and on top of a Sandworm in the novel Dune. What really impressed me was the number of people necessary just to put one of these things together, and the enthusiasm of all the people working on the project (sweating it out under 200 feet of bedrock).

MTA Deputy Director of Media Relations, Jeremy Soffin, sends this along:

As you know, the first tunnel boring machine for the East Side Access project has been chewing its way under Manhattan for almost a month, and we just wanted to provide a short update. The machine has now tunneled approximately 1,350 feet. While the machine generally averages 50 feet per day, we had a record performance yesterday of 114 feet. The machine is now operating underneath 60th Street near Lexington Avenue. In total, the machine will bore approximately 7,200 feet total to 38th street. A second TBM has been assembled in the "launch box" at 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue and will begin tunneling a parallel tube shortly.

East Side Access will bring LIRR trains into Grand Central Terminal for the first time.

You can find more information on the construction here.

Photo: robert the bear/Flickr

People's 311 is a "crowdsourcing" response to the Street Conditions Observation Unit (SCOUT) program, a new team of inspectors dispatched by the Mayor's Office of Operations to drive every city street (in scooters) once per month and report problem conditions to 311. McLaren and Lambert think this is something citizens could help with. They eventually plan to map all photos for a more comprehensive picture of reported problems.

Check the Stay Free! Magazine Blog for details. And for more experiments in crowdsourcing, see Brian Lehrer's SUV count from earlier this month, and, of course, Streetsblog's favorite project, Uncivil Servants.

In June, NYU's Wagner Rudin Center of Transportation Policy & Management teamed up with the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council to host an event focused on current and future freight needs in the New York metro region. Their report cited increased consumption and congestion as serious challenges to moving goods in and around the city:

Since 1980, New York City's population has increased by 14%, to just over 8 million people in 2000. Now, the city is expected to grow by another million people by 2030. This means more demand for freight in the future. In 1998, commodity flow in the NYMTC region totaled 333 million tons. Foods accounted for 47 million tons; clothing accounted for 2.8 million tons; and 70 million tons of gasoline was delivered. As the population of the New York metropolitan area swells, the expected impact on freight needs will be astounding. NYMTC's Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) estimates that the 31-county tri-state population will grow to 26 million, or 1.5 million more households, by 2030. At the same time, NYMTC's Regional Freight Plan (RFP) estimates the annual commodity flow in the region will grow to a staggering 490 million tons by the year 2025 - an almost 50% increase in freight tonnage. All of this freight will be moved on the region's currently over-burdened transportation system.

In the Keynote address, the Commissioner of the New York State Dept. of Transportation stated there is no room to build new roads downstate. While trucks will most likely remain the dominant mode of transporting freight, several different modes will become increasingly necessary to meet future demand:

Commissioner Glynn emphasized that we need to be better prepared for the needs of today and for the future by diversifying the investment to achieve modal balance in goods movement and mitigate congestion on our transportation network. To do this, increased rail access and modal share are important, but will not be a panacea for region's freight challenges. It will be a notable feat for freight rail to attain a desirable 10% market share of the long distance commodity flow for the East-of-Hudson market. To accomplish such an increase, we will need a long-term commitment and the cooperation of the region's many transportation agencies and stakeholders.

You can read the entire report here.

Ian Dutton of the Houston Street bike safety initiative snapped these photographs of yet another never-before-seen street design feature here in New York City. This is what's called a "Bike Box" at the  intersection of W. 9th St. and Sixth Ave. Bike boxes allow cyclists approaching the intersection with a red signal to position themselves at the front of the line of vehicles. This makes bike travel faster and the right turn onto northbound Sixth Avenue safer.

New bike boxes are also being striped in on Carlton Avenue at Bergen Street and on DeKalb and Flushing Avenues in Brooklyn. Technically, these aren't New York City's first-ever bike boxes. There have been previous attempts to install them in various spots but the design of these new ones seem to be much bigger, clearer, cleaner and closer to what you see in bike-friendly cities elsewhere.

One city that appreciates its bike boxes is London. Traveling on a German Marshall Fellowship in March I met with John Dinunzio, a Project Coordinator with the London Cycle Network (or LCN+), working to build out that city's bike infrastructure. John and his team are big proponents of bike boxes. I saw a lot of them throughout London. London motorists mostly seem to respect the bike boxes. Let's see if New York City drivers do the same.

The Staten Island Advance ran an article last Thursday about a "perfect storm" of crushing Staten Island-bound traffic on the Gowanus Expressway and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. To give you a sense of the frustrated tone of the article, it was entitled "21-Month Nightmare: Agency Offers Zero Solutions for Verrazano Lane Mess." Here's how it began:

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A best man missed his nephew's wedding rehearsal.

A truck driver was forced to pull over and cool his heels.

Countless commuters rued that extra cup of Joe before leaving work.

And then there was the pizza delivery to a group of exasperated bus riders left stewing in the parking lot that was the Gowanus Expressway last Friday afternoon.

Experts say there's no way to fully manage the crush of rush-hour traffic expected to continue for the next 21 months while lanes are closed on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Island commuters don't care what the experts have to say.

Their bottom line: Fix this mess.

Otherwise, it will be a long, hot summer.

"I could have gone to Florida in as long as it took me to get home," fumed Grasmere's Marlee Tanenbaum, who was stuck for two and a half hours aboard an X2 express bus Friday evening. "It is so insane that it's unbelievable. I am outraged!"

If this isn't the perfect argument for why we need congestion pricing, I don't know what is. The fact that so many people are crushing onto the bridge shows that it is too cheap to travel over it. The toll is $9 (charged toward Staten Island, the direction of this jam), but that obviously is not enough to prevent this kind of traffic. Motorists want travel to be cheap and fast, but one who demands cheap travel can't turn around and complain about how slow it is.

Instead of using rational pricing to solve the problem, officials are horsing around with palliatives aimed at making it easier to drive, which of course will encourage more traffic. A Verrazano traffic working group made up of elected and agency officials managed to avoid the issue of pricing or tolls, but did come up with some ideas to speed up traffic without inconveniencing anyone. (It's magic!) Specifically: "An increased police presence, and the dispatch of traffic agents at certain Brooklyn intersections near the bridge, to help keep traffic moving smoothly, without backing up local neighborhood streets."

Prediction: None of these things are going to achieve the hoped-for increase in traffic speed. But congestion pricing -- with funds directed towards more and better mass transit -- should solve it just about instantly.

In fairness, more sensible proposals came from Councilman Vincent Ignizio, who suggested speeding up implementation of a fast ferry to the island's South Shore and fast-tracking the planned extension of the Staten Island Expressway's bus-only lane. More to the point, however, motorists' expectations need to be managed better. They need to be told that their commute can be more expensive, it can be done in a bus or a ferry, or they can remain stuck in traffic on the Verrazano. There are no other options.

Clearly, the bridge's $9 toll should be raised, if it's not doing the job. The Staten Island Ferry is already free, so maybe pay people 25 cents to ride it. I'm not even kidding. Better yet, impose congestion pricing in Manhattan, and fewer people will drive to Manhattan, leaving fewer people to be stuck fuming on the Gowanus.

The BQE, as seen from Lorimer Street.

All this talk about Robert Moses lately leads one to think about the Freeway Revolt.

In 2004 the DOT began what turned into a 2 year study of Well, the study is now complete and they are planning to implement the changes in late 2007. The study has confirmed that many additional safety improvements are needs near schools to make them safer for kids to walk to school.

From a press release issued by the Mayor's Office:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today joined Department of Transportation (DOT) Commissioner Iris Weinshall and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein to announce the completion and release of  "Traffic Safety Maps" for each of the city's 1,471 elementary and middle schools following an examination of accident histories around each school, as well as upgraded school crosswalk signs at each school, and comprehensive traffic safety reports for 135 priority schools located around the city.   The maps, which identify traffic signals, all-way stop signs, speed bumps, and crosswalks maps, are designed to help students and parents find the safest routes to and from school.  DOT will soon begin distributing these maps to schools, and they will also be online at DOT's web site starting next month.  Mayor Bloomberg also announced that DOT has already begun to implement the safety enhancements recommended in the traffic safety reports for the 135 priority schools, and that the City plans detailed studies for 135 additional public, private and parochial elementary and middle schools. DOT will also begin a similar program for 40 high schools in late 2007. Mayor Bloomberg made today's announcement at P.S. 21 in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx .

We'll have more on the specifics later in the day.

One of those subtle aspects of life that serves to normalize auto transport as the only thing going is the way most maps are designed to barely include railroad tracks and stations, presumably so as to avoid interfering with roads and Interstates and their giant identification shields. But when we plug some fun data into Google mashup mapping, it is clear that the rail system serving the metropolitan area is extensive, probably more extensive than most people realize. This screenshot shows the location of stations served by New York City's four passenger railroads: Metro-North in blue, NJ Transit in green, the LIRR in red and Amtrak in purple.

Below those pushpins are the roads, where it is hard to imagine that in 30 or 40 years electric cars will not have advanced into everyday use. Electrification of the automobile fleet is rightly seen as a way to continue to enjoy the benefits of mobility while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring, to borrow a phrase from Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, that none of the money we send oversees to buy oil comes back to us in the form of terrorism. Electrification of the auto fleet is an important project that will take enormous investment if it is to succeed. Electrification of rail transport, on the other hand, was perfected more than a century ago. It has not yet been fully implemented in our area, though it ought to be. Below the fold is a map showing the portions of the New York City regional rail system that remain to be electrified.

Stations marked in green are served by electric trains, those in brown, diesel. There are clearly a lot of sections that remain to be electrified. Specifically, these are:

Long Island Rail Road

• Montauk Branch
• Oyster Bay Branch
• Port Jefferson Branch east of Huntington
• Ronkonkoma Branch east of Ronkonkoma

Metro-North Railroad

• Hudson Line north of Croton-Harmon
• Harlem Line north of Southeast
• Danbury Branch
• Waterbury Branch
• Port Jervis Line
• Pascack Valley Line

New Jersey Transit

• Main Line
• Raritan Valley Line
• Bergen County Line
• North Jersey Coast Line south of Long Branch
• Boonton Line north of Montclair State University
• Pascack Valley Line 

Caveats Emptor: 1) Diesel-powered trains are orders of magnitude less polluting than automobiles when measured in terms of people moved per mile. 2) Electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. But not all of it.

Streetsblog: The City just released a major bicycle safety study and announced a plan for "unprecedented" bike infrastructure improvements. What does today's announcement mean for cyclists?

Ryan Russo: In the past, we were doing about twenty-five miles of bicycle facilities a year. Right now we are on pace to build forty miles in the current fiscal year (Editor: New York City's fiscal year starts July 1). Next year we're going to pick up the pace and build seventy miles. In 2009 we're going to build ninety miles. So, we are, essentially, quadrupling the output of our bike facilities. That is unprecedented and will create a dramatic change in the city's bicycle network.

SB: Do you see bike lanes as a critical safety feature on New York City streets? Do they really help make cyclists safer?

RR: I think bike lanes are very helpful. I'm a cyclist myself. I bike to work. I bike for my errands, I don't own a car and am very bike dependent. In fact, sometimes I bike too often. I don't want to take the subway and I'll get stuck in the rain a lot. Bike lanes help with safety in a lot of subtle ways and not-so-subtle ways. For motorists they help create the expectation that they are going to find cyclists on the roadway. And they help to make the movements on the roadway more predictable in terms of where the cyclist is expected to be and where the motorist is expected to be. Bike lanes are also useful for laying out the core network. They help aggregate cyclists onto particular routes so that they all end up on the same street rather than dispersing throughout the network. This helps motorists on those corridors get used to the cyclists. There is a lot more to bike lanes but the bottom line is, yes, I think they are very useful.

SB: So, now I've got to ask: What kind of bike do you ride?

RR: Laughing. I ride a model of a Giant bicycle. It's called the Bowery. It's a messenger-style bike although I replaced the drop bar with a straight bar because I prefer a more upright position on my bicycle even though it's less hip.

SB: Does your bike commuting inform your job? Are you riding around the city looking at design issues and thinking, "I'm going to take care of that when I get back to the office?"

Ryan's bike.

RR: Absolutely. My design perspective and my idea of what makes sense on the streets are informed by my experiences on the road and my interactions with motor vehicles. My learning as a designer evolves and is an iterative process and I'm always looking for opportunities to make improvements.

SB: What is your advice to advocates and community organizations who are working to make New York City's streets better for cyclists, pedestrians and mass transit users? What would be the most productive way for the Livable Streets Movement to work with DOT?

RR: That's a really interesting question. The reality on the ground right now is that cyclists are a minority street user. On most corridors cyclists don't outnumber pedestrians or vehicles. When we install bike lanes we give cyclists a disproportionate percentage or roadway space relative to their numbers. Some communities have had a problem with that given all of the competition there is for different uses of our valuable street space. So, I think that the Livable Streets Movement can help educate people who might see bike lanes as a less-than-worthwhile use of street space.

SB: Other advice?

RR: I'd like to see a more cooperative relationship. I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of common ground in many of the things that we all want to accomplish. So, let's find that common ground and make things happen.

SB: Towards that end, what are your goals in your new job? What are you trying to accomplish?

RR: I'd like to improve the interconnectedness of the bike network and make sure the network works at key connections like we did on Tillary Street and we'll be doing on Sands Street in Brooklyn. I'd like to make sure we have good connections to popular bicycling facilities like the Hudson River Greenway, Prospect Park, and Central Park. And obviously, safety is something we'd like to see improve.

Before and After: Tillary Street in front of the federal court, Downtown Brooklyn.

Before and After: The plan for Sands Street beneath the Manhattan Bridge.

SB: In a recent letter to the Times you noted that the City's plans for bike lanes are sometimes voted down by community boards. Why does DOT even allow community boards to vote on whether to improve important safety measures? Why not treat bike lanes as a kind of non-negotiable design element, like crosswalks?

RR: Well, how do you think we're going to get 200 miles built in three years!?... Look, what I said in the letter is that we have to work harder to get community board support for these projects which is why I suggested that Livable Streets advocates give us a little hand. At the end of the day the street is ultimately DOT's purview. But we're not going to stop working with communities. We're keeping them in the loop and advising them of our plans and listening to their feedback and we're going to take it into account. But we're also going to try to meet our targets and make these improvements to bike facilities. If you want to see how difficult this can be do a background search on the local newspaper articles that were written when we installed bike lanes on the Shore Front Parkway (pictured below) and Commonwealth Boulevard in Queens .

SB: Those weren't popular with the community?

RR: That's an understatement.

SB: But you went in and put them in anyway?

RR: Yeah. In August.

SB: What kind of complaints do you hear in communities like those when you come in with a bike lane?

RR: If I had to boil it down into three categories of complaints, first there's the worry that bike lanes might somehow slow down traffic. Second, there are concerns about the impact of double parking during street cleaning operations and the higher fine for a parking ticket in a bike lane. Finally, there are negative perceptions of cyclists themselves.

SB: I know we've got to wind up here, so the big question is, do you read Streetsblog? And do you love it?

RR: Laughing. You know, I think there are a lot of people here who read it but I've got a new job and I'm very busy with a big commitment to pedestrians and schools and I'm just not finding the time.

Montreal: A two-way, buffered bike lane on a residential street.

Montreal: A two-way, physically-separated bike lane on a busy avenue.

Berlin: Bike lanes along this busy avenue are clearly differentiated from the street and sidewalk using color and physical separation.

Berlin: Bike lanes often share sidewalk space but are clearly separated from pedestrians.