Streetsblog New York City

Streetsblog had a chance today to ask the former Democratic chief of the House Transportation Committee, Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, about life since the 2010 election, when he lost by a hair to Republican Chip Cravaack. He said he’s spending his post-Congress time traveling to France, getting paid to say things he used to say for free, and telling his four kids and seven grandkids the story of his wife, who succumbed to breast cancer 20 years ago.

We also asked him for his thoughts about some major themes in transportation today.

On the “dissipation” of high-speed rail funds:

We reshaped Amtrak in the 2008 authorization, designating 11 corridors and creating a mechanism by which there could be competition from private sources and from state consortia, with Amtrak, to provide the passenger rail service in a particular corridor.

At first, I didn’t like that idea, but I spent a lot of time talking to Mr. Mica about it and as we talked, I said, “You know, that’s beginning to make more sense. We ought to challenge Amtrak. That’s a good idea; let’s put this into the bill.” And then we got consensus that high-speed should be defined as 110 mph, and that was in the bill. And we got a bill that George Bush signed!

So there was a structure against which to pit [the $8.5 billion in stimulus dollars for high-speed rail]. I thought that was going to happen. Instead, it was all put up for competition for various states to come forward and put a proposal on the table.

Wisconsin, for example: to Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago. That should have been done as part of the Midwest High-Speed Rail Initiative, with Chicago as the hub, south to St. Louis, east through Detroit to Cleveland and eventually to Cincinnati, and west to Minneapolis-St. Paul. That would have been one very defensible, manageable anchor.

The Northeast Corridor could have been another important anchor. The west coast, which is already underway: a third anchor to this system. And then some other amounts in the other corridors, depending on proposals that they would have and should have submitted to DOT.

Allowing pieces to be bid or requested by states dissipated the critical mass of investment. And I’m not saying that in hindsight – that was my concern at the time.

On the attack on Transportation Enhancements in Congress:

Transportation enhancements was the pivotal point of transformation at the end of the interstate era — an era in which travelers went where the road took them — to the era in which users of our system had a say in their quality of transportation and where that road should go in the future and how their transportation experience should be managed.

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Streetsblog sat down last week with Larry Hanley, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union and member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Yesterday, we published the first part of our interview, focusing on movement-building around transit. Here, we had a vigorous discussion about union rules and Buy America provisions that are the subject of some debate among transit advocates.

Tanya Snyder: There are some union rules that some transit advocates say are harmful, like the mandatory eight-hour workday and the restriction on part-time work, when transit especially has such peaks and valleys – you’ve got a rush hour in the morning and a rush hour in the evening, and all this dead time in between.

Larry Hanley: In most urban transit, you have a large number of bus drivers who work what are known as swing shifts, where they work in the morning rush hour, they work in the evening rush hour, they handle the question of peak service, and they essentially do the work of two people. It’s not their fault that demand for service falls off in the middle of the day; it’s just the reality of the business.

In Staten Island, in my local, the percentage of people in Staten Island transit who operate swing shifts, I think it’s 62 or 63 percent of all the work is swing shifts. And these are people working – driving – eight or more hours on almost every shift. They have time off in the middle, but they’re putting in a full day. Their day starts at 6 o’clock in the morning and ends at 6 or 7 o’clock at night. So, these are long days with hardworking people.

I think it’s really a cheap shot. I’d like to have people go down and hang out at a bank or a brokerage house and see how much time the executives really put in at their desk. But anyway, that’s my class war argument.

TS: Was “class war” off the record?

LH: No, class war is on the record! I agree with Warren Buffet. There’s a class war going on and his class is winning.

They are literally scraping bodies off highways because we have bus drivers falling asleep at the wheel, because proponents of bad labor policy were successful in the 1980s in deregulating that industry.

And as for what to do with these workers in the middle of the day, Congress, pandering to a small group of private bus companies – and this is an absolute obscenity – restricts public agencies from doing charter bus work. And this is nothing but pandering to private bus companies who have an inordinate amount of political influence. So, all over the United States, there are probably 100,000 buses that lay idle on weekends, lay idle in the middle of the day, when they could be used productively in the communities. They could be providing charter service to people all over our cities and providing better-rounded schedules, so that a bus driver who works the morning shift could actually do some charter work and have a full eight-hour day.

The charter restriction is on the level of the bridge to nowhere in terms of how much of a crazy rule it is, that is really responsive to the needs of a handful of people and harmful to the systems all over the country.

TS: What about just hiring workers part-time to handle either the morning or evening rush?

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Here’s the second installment of Streetsblog’s interview with Dan Biederman, head of the 34th Street Partnership and the Bryant Park Corporation. In the first part of the interview, Biederman discussed reactions to NYC DOT’s recent public space projects on Broadway, and why the reality on the ground is much better for Midtown than most press accounts have let on.

Ben Fried: Do you see any similarities between the changes happening to Midtown streets now and the restoration of Bryant Park 25 years ago?

Dan Biederman: Oh yeah. [With Bryant Park] it was outright opposition from the left, mainly saying the idea of private financing and management of public parks was undemocratic and unnecessary and the like.

I think there will be a time in the next three to five years when people will look back and say, how could we have been so opposed to that change?

So if you try to change things, you get opposition. Today it’s probably broader but less vociferous. We had a narrow group of opponents and they were vociferous. You would have thought the world would come to an end if a different approach would be tried at Bryant Park.

I sent [Janette Sadik-Khan] an email once when she was really under attack saying sometimes you just have to live through these things when you’re a change agent. And she knows that. She’s a strong person. It’s been good. I keep saying to people that this team is absolutely terrific. I’ve worked with DOT since 1980. This is the best the agency’s ever been by far.

BF: What sets them apart?

DB: Her accessibility. Making deadlines. Meeting deadlines. Looking abroad for models. Something this city doesn’t do enough of. I do it a lot. I’ve always complained New Yorkers think all the wisdom in the world is in these 13 square miles. To the point where when I did Bryant Park I had a Boston architect, a Philadelphia landscape architect, a Philadelphia adviser. The only New York people were Holly White and Hugh Hardy. But I had people from Boston and Philadelphia making the initiative and everybody said, “You don’t have to go to those cities for expertise. We have all the expertise you’ll need in New York.” It’s ridiculous.

So yeah — accessibility, meeting deadlines, models from abroad, just a mid-agency management strength. Rational answers come back. They’re really trying to improve the city, and I think in the end – I think there will be a time in the next three to five years when people will look back and say, how could we have been so opposed to that change? I don’t expect whoever the next mayor is to reverse this. I can’t imagine it.

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Streetsblog sat down last week with Larry Hanley, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union and member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Hanley started his career in New York as a bus driver in Brooklyn and then Staten Island, from 1978 to 1987. He became active in the transit union and worked his way up the ranks until winning election last fall as its youngest president ever. He is known for his creative responses to attacks on the union, including attempts to privatize express bus service, and his ability to build coalitions across many sectors.

Hanley started as president of the ATU the same week I started at Streetsblog. I remember that first week, hearing excited chatter about this transit firebrand taking the helm of the union.

Below is the first installment of Streetsblog’s edited interview with Hanley.

Tanya Snyder: Starting with the reauthorization: nothing is going to happen until after the recess, they’ve got this battle between two years and six years, the funding levels are miserable in either version – how do you organize your way out of this? How do you respond?

Larry Hanley: The only thing that can actually straighten out the problem is if the people – huge numbers of people – start to articulate a different vision. We need leaders to articulate a different vision and we need people to understand that were heading into a dead end financially, and we’re destroying all the things that made America a great country. And I think that we’ve been sold out by corporate interests that control the politicians.

And the only antidote to that is to try to figure out a way to mobilize the public, and we’re doing that. We’re actively ramping up our communications and trainings, and we’re providing a roadmap to our local leaders and members for how they can organize their communities around transit.

We were able to persuade the unpersuadable — people like Giuliani — because we built broad-based community support, including traditional Republican strongholds.

We don’t think that there is a short-term solution. We think Congress is so out of touch with the needs of the people who live in this country that the only remedy is to convince large numbers of people in districts to go after their members of Congress and straighten them out.

TS: You’ve been involved in coalitions at the local, regional, and national levels for a long time around transit. How have you seen them evolve? How do those coalitions compare now to when you started?

LH: The coalitions that work are the ones that can really get buy-in from non-traditional partners. There are very few places where labor unions partner, for example, with the real estate community and the Chamber of Commerce. But I found that to be a really successful formula back in New York. We were able to persuade the unpersuadable — people like [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani, a guy who was on his own mission — because we built broad-based community support, including traditional Republican strongholds. And we persuaded them that it was in our collective interest, that there was such a thing as a collective interest — that’s really been taken out of the debate publicly. But when we convinced them that there was a collective interest in having better mass transit and cheaper mass transit, they pretty quickly persuaded Giuliani and [Gov. George] Pataki to support it, despite the fact that they had internal pressure in their own political circles not to.

Our goals are really mainstream, but they’re not treated that way.

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Before Dan Biederman came to Bryant Park, there were no movable chairs, no free movies on summer evenings, no kiosks selling sandwiches and refreshments. No lunch time crowds and not much in the way of civic life or social activity, either. There was, basically, an open-air drug market in the New York Public Library’s backyard.

In 1980, Biederman co-founded the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, beginning a long career in public space management. He blended a business executive’s managerial expertise with an urbanist’s sense of what makes places work — the latter honed at the side of pioneering public space analyst William “Holly” Whyte. Property owners in other parts of Midtown sat up and took notice of his success at Bryant Park, and by the 1990s he was also leading the 34th Street Partnership and the Grand Central Partnership. Today he continues to oversee the Bryant Park Corporation and the 34th Street Partnership, while also bringing lessons from his New York business improvement districts to cities all over the country.

A firm believer in the importance of a quality pedestrian environment, Biederman has advanced a number of street safety and public space improvements over the years. In 2009, NYC DOT’s reclamation of Broadway for pedestrians and cyclists augmented two of the 34th Street Partnership’s big public space success stories: Herald Square and Greeley Square. When the city announced the changes would be permanent last year, Biederman stood in front of the TV cameras and said, “This is a 21st century idea.”

Streetsblog recently sat down with Biederman at his Sixth Avenue headquarters, across from Bryant Park, to talk about the transformation of Broadway, the 34th Street Transitway, and how New Yorkers adjust to change. The first installment of the edited interview is below.

He started off our discussion by noting that critics of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan have managed to command more attention than her supporters.

Ben Fried: Any theories as to why?

Dan Biederman: First, cab drivers are terrible participants in public fora. They don’t know shit because they’re on the phone all day long, yet they’re able to drive. The fact that they’re also, in their minds, better transportation analysts than people who went to school in that subject and have all kinds of citywide roles, baffles me. But the view of most business people is that you can count on cab drivers to tell you what the right answer is. I think that’s crazy. They will tell you that they’re annoyed that something isn’t going their way, but they don’t have the broader view.

We don’t pay that much attention to Steve Cuozzo. I think he’s a great real estate reporter but he doesn’t know this field.

They don’t understand because they over-emphasize the inconvenience that is experienced right after a change. They don’t understand that things work themselves out because people eventually get smart, including them. If 34th Street had been closed from Fifth to Sixth [for the transitway plaza], it defies belief that cab drivers would continue driving right into the blockage and therefore there would be horn-honking at Seventh Avenue and Sixth Avenue from now till the rest of time.

But if you could go into the mind of the average building manager in midtown Manhattan, that’s what they’re picturing: “Cab drivers are right because if you close something there will be horn-honking and trouble.” So we can’t make transportation policy that way. We have to go with the better-informed people who either are consulting or working for DOT.

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Rep. Richard Hanna is one of 19 freshmen Republicans on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. (Duncan Hunter is the 20th new Republican on the committee, but he’s not a freshman.) He represents New York’s 24th District, which includes Cooperstown, Utica, Norwich and the Finger Lakes. He’s a licensed pilot, an NRA member, and the founder of a crisis fund for women. We caught up with him to talk transportation and asked him some questions from our readers.

Streetsblog: [Yesterday] was your debut on the T&I Committee. I wanted to ask about your priorities for the reauthorization. Are you hoping for a six year bill?

Hanna: Yes, absolutely. And Chairman Mica has made it clear that that’s also his goal. So I think if we work together, hopefully we can put something together before the August recess.

SB: And you owned a construction company.

RH: Yes, maybe you heard what I said; I said I hope to add value at the intersection of practicality and what goes on here. So we’ll see if my world and this world have something in common.

SB: There’s some tension between building highways and building transit: which is more cost effective, what should we be focusing our time and scarce resources on – where do you come down on that?

RH: I’m going to wait and see. I think mass transit and high speed rail are interesting concepts. But you have to remember, we’re at a point in our history – it’s not like building the transcontinental highway or railroad – it’s a little different now. We’re really in a budget crisis and we have to be a little more thoughtful about where we spend money. But if something makes sense – if there are corridors that are dense enough that at some point they can break even or self-support mass transit between certain areas – I’d certainly be happy to look at it.

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The opposition of some Republicans to any transportation policy that doesn’t follow the highway-oriented status quo seems to be reaching a fever pitch this election season. Just look to New Jersey, where Republican Governor Chris Christie just killed the ARC rail tunnel. Or to Wisconsin, where gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker has made opposition to rail central to his campaign. Or to Colorado, where Tea Party-backed Dan Maes launched a bizarre attack on the city’s modest bike-sharing program.

Lately, in fact, it seems like public spending of any kind is anathema to the Tea Party-embracing GOP (though rising star Christie has been quite content to borrow and spend on highways). With Republicans poised to make major gains in Congress next month and the Obama administration planning a push for infrastructure investment, some sort of bipartisan arrangement will have to be reached to make progress on reforming the nation’s highway-centric transportation system.

The people behind a new transit-friendly think tank – The American Conservative Center for Public Transportation – think they can clear some space for a less polarized discussion of transportation policy. The center is the brainchild of conservative rail transit proponent William Lind and former Federal Transit Administration division chief Glen Bottoms, who aim to convince skeptical conservatives about the value of transit.

The center just rolled out its website on Friday, so we caught up with Bottoms to find out about the effort. (The transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Streetsblog: Why should conservatives support public transportation?

Glen Bottoms: We have three main reasons that we pitch to other conservatives. One is that we must reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Right now 90 percent of recoverable oil is controlled by foreign governments, most of which don’t wish us very well. Second is economic development. We’ve found that using streetcars in cities downtown spawns development. And third is that conservatives are traditional. Streetcars are a way to preserve neighborhoods by effectively promoting neighborhood cohesion and vitality.

SB: The stereotype is that conservatives hate transit. Is that true?

GB: If it’s not, most conservatives are doing a good job of hiding it. The Republican gubernatorial candidates in Wisconsin said if elected each would give the all the money for high-speed rail back and cancel the project. In Ohio, the Republican senatorial candidate and gubernatorial candidate both came out against high-speed rail. In Tampa, they’re going to hold a referendum in November on a sales tax to fund capital improvements to the region’s transit, and the opposition is coming from conservatives. It goes on and on…

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Naomi Doerner, Samelys Lopez, and Karyn Williams are planners, New Yorkers, and cyclists who set out about a year ago to change their profession. Responding to the lack of diversity in the planning and design fields -- and within the bicycling community -- the three of them formed the non-profit Velo City last September. Their goal is to introduce young people from diverse communities to the fields of urban planning and design, using cycling as a gateway.

How, you ask? Doerner is a transportation planner, Lopez a project manager for an affordable housing organization, and Williams a landscape architect. They've been through the gauntlet of professional training and navigated the early phases of their careers in planning and design. This summer they will also be teachers, leading high school students from the Lower East Side through a curriculum they call "Bikesplorations," which they're putting on with support from Recycle-a-Bicycle.

On seven Saturday sessions, equipped with orange Batavus bicycles donated by the Dutch government, they will bike the streets of the LES and visit different public spaces -- connecting planning concepts to places the students encounter in their daily lives. They hope to open students' eyes to career options they may not otherwise encounter until a later age. (Velo City is in the home stretch of a fundraising drive to provide the students with stipends for the summer -- you can help put them over the top here.)

Doerner, Lopez, and Williams recently sat down with Streetsblog to talk about Bikesplorations, why they banded together, and their goals for Velo City. Here's what they had to say.

Ben Fried: So tell me a little bit about how Velo City got started. Where did the idea come from?

Karyn Williams: Samelys and I met and we’d been going on bike rides, and we were discussing that we were all urban planners and wanted to do something different. And through our bike riding, we’d go on rides to different neighborhoods, exploring the city, and we decided that we wanted to give back to the community. And we noticed that one way we thought we could do it was through urban planning and through cycling. So we came up with the program, the idea to introduce students to issues of urban planning and design through cycling.

Naomi Doerner: We thought there really was no better way to see our city, learn about the city, explore the city than to access it quickly and sustainably on a bike. So that was really the impetus. We began researching groups that do cycling programs for youth, and we didn’t really find any that were specifically focusing on urban planning. We found advocacy groups, we found groups that focused on bicycle maintenance. And they were all really interesting, but we kind of thought there was this other component. And what we could offer, in terms of our skills and knowledge base, was planning and design.

KW: I guess I should also say that another impetus for it was that we noticed there wasn’t much diversity, one, in our chosen profession of urban planning, and also in terms of the cycling community here in New York. So that was one of the things we also wanted to address through our program, to target under-served communities and under-served youth.

BF: Tell me about the curriculum. How do you make that connection between the activity of cycling and the discipline of urban planning?

Samelys Lopez: The curriculum is geared towards exposing kids to urban planning and community development. Every week, we’re going to have guest lecturers come and introduce different topics, because really the purpose is to introduce students to these issues so that they can become active, engaged citizens in their community and effect change. We are trying to inspire them to make change in their communities through urban planning and social justice.

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With Albany's legislative session drawing to a close, the state legislature is considering several initiatives to promote sustainable transportation and livable communities in New York state. One of those initiatives is the State Smart Growth Public Infrastructure Policy Act -- or the smart growth bill, for short. If enacted, the smart growth bill would shift state spending -- on roads and sewers, for example -- toward areas that have already been developed. Rather than subsidize more sprawl, New York would invest in its existing communities.

The sponsor in the Assembly is Sam Hoyt, who’s represented Buffalo since 1992 and serves as chair of the committee on local governments. In his time at the capitol he's made livable communities a top priority, creating a fund for bike path construction, strengthening tax credits for historic preservation, and championing smart growth.

We spoke to Hoyt about why New York needs smart growth legislation, its prospects in Albany, and the differences between smart growth upstate and in New York City. We also talked about New York’s plans for high speed rail and Buffalo’s downtown-destroying highways.

NK: Let’s start by talking about what the smart growth bill does.

SH: The state has been lacking for some time in both acknowledging the problems associated with sprawl and actually being part of the problem in terms of inducing and incentivizing sprawl. The purpose of this legislation is to get the state -- the governor’s office and all of the executive level departments -- to embrace a set of smart growth principles and then insist that the investment of infrastructure dollars be consistent with those principles and the plans associated with the towns and municipalities where the money would be invested. There doesn’t seem to be any recognition that we keep building infrastructure where it doesn’t exist while, particularly in upstate cities, you have a vast network of existing infrastructure that is abandoned or unused that could be used for some development and save the taxpayers a whole lot of money.

NK: So why exactly is the state incentivizing sprawl, and how? Is it intentional?

SH: I don’t think it’s intentional, it’s again not recognizing -- I mean, one of the problems of the smart growth movement has been our failure to package this in an economic message and a taxpayer cost message. The fact of the matter is, every time we build a new highway, a new road, new sewer infrastructure, we’re dramatically adding to the tax burden of the municipality that has to provide the cost of building and maintaining that infrastructure. Is it by design? No. But is it shortsighted and ignorant? Yes.

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The last two years have been full of dismal news for transit riders in New York City. Revenue streams for transit have nosedived during the recession, with Albany plundering dedicated MTA taxes for good measure. The payroll tax state legislators passed last year hasn't lived up to expectations, making their failure to enact congestion pricing or bridge tolls even more burdensome for New Yorkers. Sweeping service cuts are going to take effect in less than two months, and discount MetroCards for more than half a million students are on the chopping block.

In the second part of our interview with transportation chair Jimmy Vacca, we discuss these issues and what the City Council can do about them. Read the first installment -- all about street safety -- here.

Ben Fried: In a couple of months the MTA Board is going to vote on student MetroCards. How can the City Council keep this program adequately funded?

Jimmy Vacca: Well, we are willing to help, and we’ve indicated we want to help, and we want to have a discussion with the MTA about how we can help. We also think, though, that Albany has a major responsibility in this, and we’ve lobbied hard in Albany to get the MetroCard issue put on the front burner. We still have hope in Albany, I think, but we do realize that the council may have to do something. It’s hard for us to discuss exact budget numbers in light of the fact that we don’t know what we’re talking about from Albany. But I’m committed to saving the student MetroCards, very, very committed to it, and we’ve been doing everything we can.

I think with the economy we’re in, that this may be a year-to-year situation until things improve. The MTA has stated that in September 2010, the student MetroCards will go to half-fare, and then the year after there will be none at all. So I want to avoid the half-fare of course, but then the year after we have an even greater obligation.

BF: What sort of signal are you looking for from Albany? What would let you know that they’re serious and that you could come to the table with them?

JV: I’m looking to see that they adopt a budget and that both houses agree on something. We hope that they can reconcile their differences, give us a reasonable number, and then I know that my colleagues in the council are willing to do something. We realize we have an obligation too.

You have to understand one thing that happened here in Albany is that we had about $149 million in what was called a ‘lock-box’ for mass transit. People paid more taxes, license registration fees, a mortgage recording tax. They paid these taxes thinking that this money went to a lock-box for the MTA, and then in December when the state had a financial crunch and they did all these one shots, to have that money taken out and put into the general fund only worsened the crisis the MTA was in. It’s also a question of faith. They’re not transparent. It only came out when we started to find that the money wasn’t there.

BF: You voted for congestion pricing two years ago. Do you see road pricing, either congestion pricing or bridge tolls, playing a role in putting the MTA on more solid financial footing?

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