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

Chairman Jim Oberstar calls transportation enhancements "the point of transformation" for transportation. Photo courtesy of Oberstar's office.

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.

Enhancements is the breakthrough transformation of our surface transportation system in the post-interstate era. If it were eliminated, it would erode public trust and acceptance of our surface transportation programs.

On how he would pay for his 2009 bill if he were defending it in this fiscally conservative Congress:

I would still insist on a restructuring of the categorical programs, to reduce those categories from 108 to four formula programs and to require the intermodalism that is depicted in my plan. And by law, you can require that the modal administrators meet monthly. There is nothing to impede the secretary of transportation from doing that now, from convening a monthly meeting of FRA and Federal Transit Administration, Maritime Administration, and all the rest. But they haven’t done that, regardless of administration.

So do it by law! You will develop a safety plan. What can highways learn from aviation and safety? What can waterways learn? What can highways learn from waterways? All of these need to be done intermodally.

So you give the public a sense of accomplishment, of simplicity and clarity, transparency of the program. And then you have freight corridors to deal with the farm-to-market movement of goods and inter-city goods movement, which is a segment of that bill, and then the metropolitan mobility and access provision that addresses the fact that 50 percent of vehicle miles traveled in this country are in urban areas and we are wasting $110 billion a year just sitting in traffic.

And then requiring states to develop plans, and defend them, and be accountable to them. It’s doable; we did that. I had a hearing every month on the stimulus investments and made state DOTs and USDOT and the wastewater treatment agencies and the aviation authority all come and say, what did they do with their money, how did you invest it, what are the benefits from it? So you include that accountability, clarity, and performance.

And then project delivery – in the current law it’s not widely understood. But I crafted 42 pages of legislative language to expedite project delivery. The result: 47 projects – these are big ones, these are $100 million-and-above-sized projects – have had a 36 month reduction in permitting, which means you’re almost cutting in half the time it’s taking for permitting — without denigrating the environment, without denigrating historical preservation, without overriding local permitting interests and requirements.

So, you require better performance, better project delivery, and then you can ask the public. If I were still there, I’d be saying, now we go to the public and say, “We have funded our surface transportation system with the user fee, so you have a claim on the future investments, by which you pay at the pump and now you have something in which you can have confidence that it will be used effectively. There will be much greater accountability.

Then you can appeal for an increase in the user fee or a combination of funding mechanisms, which we provided for in the metropolitan access and mobility provisions.

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.

ATU President Larry Hanley says diminishing worker protections is not the way to a stronger transit network. Photo: Workday Minnesota

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?

LH: Many of these places already have part-time bus drivers. Now, there’s the broader economic argument: If we move our entire society to part time employment, how do you sustain families? How do you sustain a culture, when everybody’s working part-time and has to work three different jobs?

But when you get into an area like driving a bus you really ought to think for a minute about the safety of people forced, for economic reasons, to go out and have multiple jobs and run the risk of not being conscious when they’re driving a bus.

We’re seeing the impact of the de-professionalization of inter-city transit right now, where they are literally scraping bodies off highways all over the country, because we have bus drivers that are falling asleep at the wheel, because the folks who were proponents of bad labor policy were successful in the 1980s in deregulating that industry. And the consequence has been that bus drivers now in the over-the-road industry are paid somewhere around 30 or 40 percent of what they were paid in 1980. And they are falling asleep at the wheel, driving buses off highways. And these accidents are happening all over the place because the people who make those arguments about bus driving being a part-time job were successful. They won it. And now we have a transient work force. They’re not professional drivers.

If the goal is to race to the bottom, to get the cheapest products, which means the cheapest labor, we ought to be mindful that we’re ruining the lives of American kids.

TS: So if part-time work isn’t a good solution, would cross-utilization of workers be an answer – for example, having maintenance people who can’t work during rush hours do other sorts of customer service during those times?

LH: Well, that’s done in some places, but I don’t know of too many places where the maintenance people stand around waiting for the buses to come in off the street. Every bus system has a number of buses that are spares that allow them to have maintenance done 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s the way they work. So I think it would really be the rare exception to find maintenance workers who don’t have buses to work on.

TS: What about on rail tracks?

LH: I don’t know that much about rail. I’m a bus driver.

But you know, there are a lot of simplistic ideas and simple people that go out and try to push out the idea that somehow after running transit systems for well over 100 years the labor relations system has not sorted out all these issues, but they have. And periodically, you’ll find some story about some rule that comes from 100 years ago on the railroad that is glaringly inefficient today, and if you talk to the folks in rail unions you’ll find they’re willing to change a lot of those rules. But we don’t have that much with regard to that stuff.

TS: Some transit advocates are also critical of things like Buy America provisions because it costs transit agencies more money.

LH: This is the Wal-Mart question. This is whether or not we have a country at all anymore.

If the goal is to race to the bottom, to get the cheapest products, which means the cheapest labor, then we ought to be mindful that while we’re preserving the fiscal integrity of the MTA, we’re ruining the lives of American kids. We’re making it impossible for them to get a job. And if you look at the unemployment rates today, as staggering as they sound, it’s 9 percent overall, but for college educated kids it’s 4 percent. Which means that people who lack a college education no longer have a future in America. They just don’t.

We have forfeited our jobs. It’s not like somebody came here and took them away. We have allowed our wealthy to become citizens of the world while the poor remain loyal, patriotic citizens of the United States. And those citizens of the world have transferred our employment, transferred our futures, all around the world only for their own personal interest so they can make more money. So that now, we have people in China and India and all across the world competing with American kids. And at the same time we’ve invested their money, we’ve borrowed from their future, not to give them a better education but to give them the best fighter bomber we can make and the best drones to kill the Flintstones.

This is about a moral crisis in America. And then they have the gall to come back and make all these arguments about American people being inefficient or American people not working hard enough and why shouldn’t they all be part time. But the central issue is that we have allowed corporations like Wal-Mart to wring every ounce of hope out of young Americans’ lives.

The Bryant Park lawn, 2010. Dan Biederman says opposition to the private management of a public park in the 1980s was more vociferous than the opposition encountered by NYC DOT's Midtown street reclamation projects today. Photo: Ed Yourdon/Flickr

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.

BF: Do you think there’s something missing from how they’re trying to communicate?

DB: It seems like they don’t have that many testimonials, and they could do that, but it’s not too common to have somebody come in and endorse from other cities.

I tell you — and this is in other cities too — the first comment anybody makes to me when I start consulting on a park in another city is, “We adore Bryant Park. Were you involved in there? We think it’s great, incredible what you did. This is not Bryant Park.”

Everywhere’s provincial. They all apologize for it but then they proudly say, “We’re a provincial town. You’ve got to appeal to our ideas.”

And I say — privately I say – that’s not a very constructive position because all the tools in Bryant Park work anywhere, every one of them: movable chairs, private financing, programming in off hours, gorgeous restrooms. There is nothing that is New York-specific about that. So why would you lecture me about how this park needs different treatment. They’re not talking about “this is a 900 acre park so that’s why Bryant Park doesn’t work in it.” These are parks that are very similar. “This park is not Bryant Park.” So New York does the same thing.

BF: What do you think is behind that? Is it just nativism?

DB: The funny thing is after they do that, when we’re having dinner or something, they’ll say, “This is a very provincial town.” I’ll say, “Every town is provincial. “

You have no idea. Boston – my father was a Bostonian and I lived in Boston for two years and my son lives there now. I’m really a quarter Bostonian person. They just – if you haven’t been there for forty years living and working in the city, you’re a foreigner. It is very provincial. Philadelphia’s very provincial. Everywhere’s provincial. They all apologize for it but then they proudly say, “We’re a provincial town. You’ve got to appeal to our ideas.”

BF: I was down in Manhattan Beach covering a public meeting on a bus rapid transit project for Nostrand Avenue and what they said was, “You know the project that they did in the Bronx, Fordham Road? That’ll work in the Bronx but Brooklyn is different. It’s not going to work here.”

DB: You want to know the ultimate of that? Movable chairs. We did a block from Times Square five years before Times Square was civilized. We started movable chairs in Bryant Park in 1992. Times Square was a disaster. People – criminals – went to work in Times Square and went right through Bryant Park on their way. They’d get out of the subway and go over to Times Square to commit crimes. We lost no chairs. As Holly Whyte predicted we wouldn’t.

And I went all over the United States advising, “You need to have movable chairs and tables in your park.” And people said, “Well that may have worked in New York but it won’t ever work here.”

I said, do you realize what you’re saying? We were one block from the most dangerous block in New York and maybe America and it worked perfectly fine there, but you’re telling me in Providence or Richmond or Pittsburgh or Baltimore, you’ve got a more dangerous environment? This is crazy. New York was dangerous. This worked. We created social order there. We can do it here. That’s provincialism. But everybody’s provincial, as they say.

BF: So when you travel these days then, and you’re consulting in other cities, are other cities interested in street reclamation projects?

DB: Philadelphia definitely is. I’m up in Boston a lot. I saw something in the Globe that suggested that Menino might be moving in this direction. I think there’s a network of [bike] lanes that he was working on. Dallas. It’s such an auto city but they’re just starting to get it and one of the things that’s influential is a rail trail – Katy Trail – that’s very successful. They absolutely love it. So I think that’ll come.

Where else? Pittsburgh, not too much yet. Newark, not too much yet. Newark has these suburban drivers coming in and it has much too much street width. Broad Street. I don’t know if you know Newark but Broad Street is much too wide. We’ve said it to the mayor’s people. We work closely with them. They’re terrific. And I think that there’s a chance it’ll move in that direction. Miami, nothing that much yet in Miami. Atlanta, nothing that much yet although they’re talking about streetcars and the BeltLine.

BF: Does it feel like what’s happening here is expanding the realm of possibility in these other cities?

DB: Yep. Especially the walkable cities. That’s good.

President Larry Hanley is considering ways to broaden the ATU to include passengers and other transit supporters as members. Photo courtesy of the ATU

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.

TS: To some degree, you have that coalition now, at the national level. The Chamber is knocking down doors, asking for a bill and pushing for a gas tax. Is that helpful?

LH: It’s helpful in the short term. Whether or not we can sustain that in the long term is debatable. Unfortunately, the climate politically is such that whenever there’s a connected labor issue, coalitions like that can break down. We’re hoping that doesn’t happen this time. Our sense is, people arrive at that door based on their own self-interest.

TS: The people at the Chamber aren’t transit people. Do you share interests with them?

LH: We do share interests with them; the question is, who controls their political agenda? Around the country, our local unions – although the connections are not yet made – they do share interests with small business owners, people whose businesses depend upon a thriving transit system. They do have an interest in working with our union. The question is, can you convince them of that? Can you convince, first, the local leaders in our union, and the members, that those are worthy relationships?

We want to build a long-term understanding of what it means to have a thriving transit system throughout the country. And that’s not what brings all those folks to the table right now. I think it’s immediate interest, immediate fear about the economy, the interest their constituent businesses have in getting their companies back to work. We have a broader and deeper long-term agenda.

TS: You mentioned real estate and the chamber – who else should be in this coalition?

LH: Anybody who cares about global warming, the environment; who cares about the economy; who cares about the moral crisis that America faces with the war, the fact that we are engaged in bombing and killing people all over the world for oil, which we’re then using to destroy our environment; faith-based groups who have both practical concerns for their parishioners and constituent groups, but also people who have moral concerns about the way the country’s headed. Transit provides an opportunity for a very broad based coalition.

Here’s a newsletter from 1996 – this is not something I planned, but I happen to have this stuff handy – “Chamber of Commerce Coming on Board, Realtors Next” – “The Merchants Associations Support the $2 Fare Because It’s Good For the Staten Island Economy.”

We had religious groups, pastors of churches. I spoke at just about every Rotary and Kiwanis club on Staten Island. I had all kinds of happy dollars and funny things exchanged in front of me. We weren’t selling snake oil – we were selling a better economy, a better environment, a better Staten Island, so we were embraced by all kinds of people who just saw it as a good deal for their city.

We weren’t selling snake oil – we were selling a better economy, a better environment, a better Staten Island, so we were embraced by all kinds of people who just saw it as a good deal for their city.

And we also had a rider group. One of our mid-term goals is to try to organize riders. We have 100 passengers who ride our buses and trains for every one of our members. And we want to organize them.

TS: Would they be ATU members or sort of like a straphangers union?

LH: I don’t know. I just heard a story about Argentinean teachers who reshaped their union, and they don’t call it the teachers union anymore; they call it the education union. They have affiliate or auxiliary memberships for people who come in contact with the education system – parents, janitors, school bus drivers. That’s one of the things we’re discussing here, is whether we want to build an organization with membership. But whether they’re members or not, they certainly have an interest in supporting transit.

In Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts – this summer – we have two locals up there, and they hired an organizer to ride the buses, directly organizing riders to support public transit. That’s what we did in Staten Island. We had college students riding the buses, having people fill out postcards addressed to politicians, urging them to lower the fare and get new equipment and get bus lanes into Manhattan.

TS: So they sign the postcards, but you’re not necessarily involving them in a long-term coalition.

LH: Yes we are. We established a database. And from the database we began to mail and call for meetings. And we started to have meetings of passengers on a regular basis. And the passengers themselves began to self-organize.

So then we had bus captains, people who said ‘I want to control my bus, I’ll be in charge.’ So then whenever we had a flyer, we had a reliable network of passengers who would take 100 flyers and distribute 50 in the morning on the way to work and 50 in the evening on the way home. In this newsletter, it says we delivered 10,000 signatures to Mayor Giuliani. And when we did it, we had a press conference at City Hall, and we had a couple hundred people there. And most of them were passengers, who came on their lunch hour.

Our arguments are community-building arguments. We’re fighting downtown about whether to restore taxes to millionaires and billionaires, to the 1/10^th of one percent of our society that has so much money that, if they spent the rest of their lives burning it, they could never get to the bottom of the pile. But we’re giving them tax breaks.

We’re raising the fares on the buses in Cincinnati and New York and everywhere else around the country. That’s a tax! So politicians hiding behind the notion of ‘I’m not going to raise taxes’ is ridiculous.

But we’re raising the fares on the buses in Detroit and Cleveland and Cincinnati and New York and everywhere else around the country. That’s a tax! So politicians hiding behind the notion of ‘I’m not going to raise taxes’ is ridiculous. They’re raising taxes all over the country by simply withholding funds from our systems. Their policies are forcing taxes to be increased on the people who can’t afford to pay them. That’s a regressive way to raise taxes.

TS: Let’s get back to the idea that the people who ride transit are those that are least able to pay. I wonder sometimes about the concept that “transit-dependent” people are poor – do you use that when you’re trying to connect transit with social justice and equity, or is that a harmful stereotype, that the only people who ride transit are those without other options?

LH: That’s what’s used against us politically – racism, classism, lack of concern for poor people. Down in Clayton County, Georgia last year, they eliminated all the bus service in the county. The government in Atlanta had persuaded a whole bunch of poor people to move out to Clayton County so that they could do gentrification in Atlanta, and it was OK because they had a way to get back into Atlanta to get to work, which was to take the bus. And then a minute later, they eliminated all the bus service in Clayton County. And there were people who had full time jobs, worked every day, played by the rules, and now couldn’t get to work.

And nobody thinks those people are too big to fail.

Our political society thinks it’s OK to do things like that. And it’s because the people who ride buses and trains are seen in the light that you just cast them in, with the exception of some large cities.

I was fortunate to come from a city where transit was something that everybody was involved in – rich people, poor people rode transit. People that have options ride transit because it’s a better alternative. That gets to the question of, do we provide alternatives that attract people who have other options, or do we intentionally make transit unattractive to people so they don’t ride it? So I think we have to work on different tracks: to fight and organize the people who currently ride it, but at the same time fight to improve it and increase the funding for it so it becomes available to folks who would use the option if it were not so limited.

Our conversation with Larry Hanley continued, venturing onto the prickly topic of whether union rules and labor protections hurt transit agencies by costing them more money. Stay tuned for the second half of our interview tomorrow.

Herald Square, summer 2010. Photo: Ed Yourdon/Flickr

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.

Dan Biederman

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.

BF: As president of a few Midtown BIDs, you have to both represent the property owners that you’re talking about and advocate for change to some degree. How do you end up balancing that?

DB: I usually try to calm them down by saying, “First, you need to understand this very arcane field of traffic.” People confronted with new regulations will alter their behavior, and it’s not as simple as saying if 34th Street has less traffic on it, there’ll be more traffic on 35th and 33rd and 36th and 32nd. Things are not that simple.

The second way to walk that tightrope is, very often the owners who are upset with some of Janette’s plans have specific problems, and I find the agency fairly responsive to those very specific problems. For example, the 34th Street transitway, we said a number of times to the DOT, there are three or four really specific points being raised against you. One is, Vornado has a garage that enters out into the eastbound lane of 34th Street now. What do we do about that? The Empire State Building has a concern about tourist buses. Third was Macy’s and their parade. Fourth was retail on the north side of the street between Seventh and Eighth, raised by the owner of the Pennsylvania Building, 225 West 34th. Plus we wanted 33rd Street opened westbound. [It is currently interrupted by pedestrian space at Broadway.]

If you can make those people happy, all that will be left is the general concerns, as far as our district goes, about curb access, and I think two or three of those problems have disappeared. I don’t hear the Empire State Building squawking. Macy’s is satisfied because of the elimination of the Fifth to Sixth pedestrianization, although I never was 100 percent sure why that hurt their parade plans.

So those are the five points that were left after all the shouting and hubbub. 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. He just loves to scream and rant about it.

BF: I think it would help to clarify exactly who the BIDs speak for. Is it entirely property owners? Is it retailers?

DB: Owners, tenants and in some cases the retailers are the owners. Macy’s owns their real estate. So owners and tenants, which includes retail and office tenants and office owners and the employees, theoretically, in those buildings. We try to speak for all. The people that pay the freight are the owners and tenants.

With the initial plans come screaming and yelling. A lot of times it’s not really accurate.

Now I try to lead on this because I feel after 30 years of doing this job, I’m pretty well qualified to steer the district’s point of view in a certain direction. When people challenge me on whether this is good for the district who are influential owners and tenants, I say, “Are you telling me you would like to go back to Broadway the way it was two years ago with lanes of traffic rushing down past Macy’s and Greeley Square? I’m convinced you don’t.” The real estate community is starting to come around.

BF: What does that look like? How skeptical were they in 2009 compared to today?

DB: A lot of this skepticism bubbles up from below. The principal in the past was normally more open to changes than somebody three levels down, who’s the building manager. Building managers are as stubborn about change in the street pattern as taxi drivers are. They sound very much like taxi drivers when they talk about this stuff. So with the initial plans come screaming and yelling. A lot of times it’s not really accurate.

For example, “Traffic will continue heading right in that direction and there will be horrible traffic jams.” Well, now we’ve had Broadway Boulevard, as we call it, in for a long time. What’s happened? Sixth Avenue is clearly moving faster. There’s no question about it at Herald Square. Traffic is moving better. At Seventh Avenue there’s debate. [Janette's] numbers show a tiny decline in speed. The screamers say that it’s much worse. I think her numbers are probably accurate. It’s a tiny bit worse.

I’m starting to hear some advanced property owners say that they think Broadway retail is more valuable than it was before.

Broadway is a pleasure because if you walk across Broadway – when you leave this meeting, you ought to go west on Broadway at 40th Street at rush hour, it’s just fantastic. In the old days you’d have to rush across. You’d think you were going to be run over from cars rushing through Times Square. They finally got through the Times Square bottleneck and they’re going to race down and make up the time.

Now we have a quieter environment, much better for retail. People walking in a New York manner in all different directions. It’s a pleasure.

I kidded Janette. I said when I go past 40th and Broadway, if I’m carrying something, I start reading. She said, you shouldn’t read and cross streets. But I said, that’s how confident I am the traffic has calmed. If a car’s coming, it’s coming at 12 miles an hour so I can take evasive action. I’m enjoying this immensely. Traffic has been calmed by this move. There are very few cars going between 40th Street and 35th Street right now.

BF: How do you measure success? Are there ways to gather information that the BID is pursuing?

DB: We haven’t been scientific about it but we’re pretty good urbanists at this point, so we know and improve the pedestrian environment when we see it. We’re really good at this. There’s no doubt the pedestrian environment is better. If you can get that at the expense of only a tiny bit of decline of one avenue and a great upgrade in the other, then you’ve got a success.

Now I am hearing from some people – they think Ninth Avenue is worse. I don’t. The parts of Ninth Avenue that they claim are worse are not in my district so I have not stood on the corner of Ninth Avenue and 39th Street and analyzed it. My traditional view is the Lincoln Tunnel decides whether Ninth Avenue is bad or not. Because anybody on Seventh going south knows, if they’re a New Yorker, that it’s not a great idea to go down Ninth. If you’re coming from the west side and you’re trying to get to Chelsea, Eleventh might be a good answer but Ninth, everybody thinks Lincoln Tunnel at almost all hours of the day.

To me, at least the stuff that affects us most – Sixth better, Seventh at least close, maybe a tiny bit worse, pedestrian environment upgraded. This is a better deal for our district. I’m starting to hear some advanced property owners say that they think Broadway retail is more valuable than it was before the change, including the owners of this building. [Blackstone owns 1065 Sixth Avenue.] They own a lot of Broadway buildings – they said this change has led to measurable increases in retail rents on Broadway.

Just like two-way traffic is better for retail, 12 mile-an-hour traffic is better for retail. It’s completely accepted by everybody who knows anything about urban planning.

Coming up in part two of the interview: Biederman discusses the caliber of NYC DOT under Janette Sadik-Khan and reveals the ultimate example of NYC provincialism.

Richard Hanna outside the old GE building in Utica. Image: Bryon Ackerman / Utica Observer-Dispatch

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.

SB: There’s also some talk about whether things like bike lanes for urban transportation, so people aren’t having to get in their cars to go two miles, whether those fall under a federal bill or whether they should be done locally.

RH: It’s great if it’s done locally; maybe it should be designed locally. But highway money is a little different than money from general revenue in that it is a user fee, a gas tax on both diesel and gas, and it needs to go back into the communities.

And I think it would be nice if earmarks didn’t pollute the process, that they were somehow based on merit, and merit meaning not just your rank and seniority but the merit of the project. So I look forward to weaving through all that. You know, I’m kind of new here.

But I think of myself as a fiscal conservative, a guy who’s deeply invested in cutting back the cost of government and at the same time I’d like to see this money go back to communities especially in the northeast where they have aging and failing infrastructure: sewer, water, bridges, roads, all of that. So it’s needed, but it needs to be spent wisely.

SB: Some people say that gasoline at this point costs less than its weight in bottled water –

RH: Yeah, it does!

SB: – And there’s going to be a time when that’s not possible anymore. Do you envision a future where driving is the privilege of the very rich?

RH: I think it’s possible, depending on the cost of fuels, but it isn’t in the foreseeable future. One of the reasons the user fee is down so low is because people are driving less, cars are going further, we see a lot of electric cars on the road. So the matrix that made up the revenue stream has changed dynamically.

I think one of the big questions this Congress may face in the next couple years is, going forward, how do we pay for this if we’re only taxing gas and diesel fuel, and it isn’t enough. What do we do about that – do we live with what we make and take in, or do we expand it somehow?

SB: Well, we can either spend a whole lot less, we can raise the gas tax, or we can switch to a VMT fee.

RH: We can make local communities pay for their own things, states pay for their own things and the federal government live within their means. I’m really inclined to think that way. We are burdened to death in this country with taxes. There’s nothing about any of that that I would change lightly. But we’ll see what the future brings.

SB: But shifting it to the state just means that states are burdened and people are burdened with state taxes.

RH: That’s right, but they might be able to make better choices. And they’re in a position to design and understand their communities better and what they need. People building something that they want with money that they’re given – block grants aren’t a bad idea really.

SB: There have been some new administration programs like TIGER that are more competitive; instead of just doing block grants and formula grants, really having states compete each other for innovative projects.

RH: That’s nice, that’s more value added, more ideas that come out of those things. There’s nothing wrong with following best practices and letting people get out there and compete. You learn more and you get smarter and somebody may come up with something that surprises you.

SB: What do you think of Ray LaHood?

RH: I don’t know him very well. I’ll let you know.

Here I turned off my microphone and we kept chatting for a minute. I switched it back on when he said he’d graduated from Reed College and thought Portland was doing some really interesting things with transportation.

RH: They’ve really adopted a lot of things in Portland that are more environmentally friendly, that make sense, and they’re working well. But you have a community there that’s enforcing it, that wants it. I think we need to rethink how we do everything.

SB: Do you see that in your district?

RH: I have an aging infrastructure, and it’s a rural community. People travel long distances between points. The opportunities for mass transit there are pretty limited. Things like bike paths, we have. But most everybody I know drives half an hour to an hour to work. So it’s tough. You need a certain density to make things work and we don’t have it.

SB: Do you see any possibilities there so that people don’t need to drive an hour to work? That’s two hours of your day.

RH: If you’re a farmer, your farm is where it is. So many of our cities aren’t doing very well, so that the density’s even lower than the geography and buildings of the city would suggest. So the capacity to build something that’s considered efficient about probably are more limited.

SB: Do you see a lot of suburban sprawl?

RH: You do, there’s an awful lot of sprawl. But we have enormous amounts of land and it’s mostly farms. About 80 percent of our district is farming or related to farming.

SB: Well, Portland did the urban growth boundary.

RH: Yeah, I like that a lot. I lived in Portland when they were doing that. Portland’s an interesting place. They invented the bottle law. I was there and watched that happened; I was in college at the time.

SB: What year did you graduate, if I may ask?

RH: To tell you the truth it was 1976. Reed College: a rare place. They know I’m a Republican but they haven’t called for my diploma yet.

Glen Bottoms, pro-transit conservative.

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…

SB: What is it about transit that seems to irk conservatives so much?

GB: At this point, any increase in taxes seems to bring people out of the woodwork. Take the gas tax, which hasn’t been raised since 1993. Even a one cent increase in taxes has become a real anathema. Conservatives tend to look at cars and highways as freedom, as if they are a basic American good. And they think roads pay for themselves. Of course, if you read Bill Lind’s article “Rail Against the Machine”, you’ll see that the huge amount of money put into highways over the last 60 or 70 years has been one of the main reasons that public transportation has fallen on such hard times.

SB: What percent of highway funding is subsidized by the government?

GB: Fifty-eight percent of highway funding comes from user fees, including the gas tax, with the rest coming from general revenues. People like to say that mass transit is subsidized. That’s true, but so are highways. Before our massive public highway program, public transit was privately operated and maintained. When you subsidize one mode of transport against the other, it’s no mystery who wins. Free-market conservative adherence to highways rather puzzles us because it’s certainly not a free market outcome.

SB: How do conservatives respond when reminded how much highways are subsidized?

GB: It’s one those things that doesn’t correspond with their beliefs, so they just ignore or disparage it. If you read the material by Randal O’Toole and Wendell Cox, you’ll see that they specialize in half-truths. There was a statement by Daniel Patrick Moynihan that said: you’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.

SB: What sort of “half-truths”?

GB: One example: they keep saying that only two percent of total trips in the metropolitan area are by mass transit. That means absolutely nothing. Transit doesn’t serve everywhere, we know that.

What you have to look at are the corridors where transit is competitive. If you look, for instance, at the District of Columbia, 40 percent of people entering the downtown area in the morning rush hour are carried by transit. And that’s been stable for the last twenty or thirty years. Forty percent, that’s a huge number.

So to get that two percent, they include truck trips, trips to the laundry, trips to the grocery, etc. You can make the overall percentage of transit trips look smaller depending on how you count. For example, if you take your car and go to the laundry, then the grocery store, then the drug store, then home, each of those are counted as one trip. Right there, that gives you four trips during one outing. But, if you take transit downtown, do the same errands, and come back that counts as just two trips. Some conservatives have fastened onto the “small” percentage of transit trips overall as a reason for not supporting transit, but it’s partly an anomaly in the way things are counted.

SB: Is there something in the way that liberals have tried to sell transit that has actively turned conservatives off?

GB: When liberals use environmental benefits as a justification for transit that is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. They don’t buy that. Likewise, conservatives don’t respond well to the idea that transit is worthwhile because transit “helps” transit-dependent people who don’t have cars. It works better to remind conservatives that we take transit just as much as everybody else.

SB: What about the argument that transit and active transportation can help reduce obesity and health care costs? Will that resonate with conservatives or just stink of nanny-government?

GB: I’ve seen studies bearing this out, and they certainly make sense to me. Sprawl keeps us in our cars, and reduces the amount of exercise we get. Current land use patterns are not healthy. But for most conservatives, it would be the latter.

SB: How big is your center, and how is it funded?

GB: Right now we are a shoestring operation. We are small, but looking to grow in the future. We’re funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. We’re with the American Conservative, under the umbrella of the American Ideas Institute, which just recently formed. The amount of support and encouragement we’ve received so far has been quite gratifying.

SB: What do you think of Obama’s pitch for $50 billion in infrastructure investments as a way to kick-start the economy?

GB: It’s too little, too late, I’m afraid. When Obama first became president, he should have made clear that one of the centerpieces of his administration was going to be bringing back the infrastructure in this country. I’m sure Mr. Oberstar and others who came out to support him are saying privately: “Jeesh, I wish he’d done that a year-and-a-half ago.”

SB: Would transit work better if it was run more often by private companies?

GB: It’s something we need to look at. In Europe, they have gone to public-private partnerships (PPP) to build rail transit systems, which has worked well in some areas. The EU is moving towards privatization of transit operations, but keeping planning and infrastructure improvements as a state responsibility. I should note that PPP’s haven’t always worked when they’ve put too much risk on the private sector. The Croydon light rail, which serves a borough of London, is an example of this.

SB: Do you get labeled as a turncoat or a Republican in Name Only (RINO) for supporting transit as a conservative?

GB: Based on what I’ve read so far, not yet. Of course, the usual suspects are going to say we’re wrong, and give their nostrums and tired old reasons for opposing transit—it’s a waste of money, we need to build more roads, and we’re suffering from congestion because we don’t invest enough in highways. Still, we haven’t seen anybody get really nasty yet.

SB: Do you support buses as well as rail?

GB: Well, buses are part of public transportation, but our emphasis is on rail. We feel that rail gives you the biggest bang for the buck over the long term.

SB: Are there specific projects that you’ve seen bipartisan support on?

GB: Oklahoma City — not exactly a bastion of liberalism — is a good example. They had a referendum last November to extend a tax that would pay for improvements downtown to make the city more walkable. It includes a streetcar connector, and the referendum passed rather handily. Cincinnati has approved a plan for a streetcar circulator. It didn’t have a whole lot of bipartisan support, but it had enough to get it through.

SB: Which Republicans do you see as emerging leaders on the topic of transportation?

GB: Well, one of the things we’re going to try to do is identify members of Congress who would think favorably of our proposals. One of our biggest friends in the Senate is Bob Bennett from Utah, but he didn’t make it [past] the primary. John Mica is a powerful person, and we’re hoping we might be able to talk to him. We’re looking at various places where we can identify people on both sides of the aisle who would be amenable to our message. It isn’t going to be easy.

The Velo City founders, ready to ride. Left to right: Samelys Lopez, Karyn Williams, Naomi Doerner.

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.

KW: The theme for this session is going to be public space. So the first two weeks we will look at public space as it relates to parks, what we traditionally think of as public spaces. And then other days we’ll be looking at NYCHA housing and the tower-in-the-park, and how the buildings relate to the public space.

SL: While we know a lot of kids cycle, we really wanted to have them see things from this urban planning bent. The whole purpose of what we’re trying to do is introduce urban planning and community development at an early age, so that they can consider urban planning as a profession.

BF: You mentioned one of the impetuses behind the program is the lack of diversity in the urban planning field. If we had a more diverse planning profession, do you think the product or the process of planning would change?

SL: It is interesting because I find Naomi and I kind of bonded in graduate school because we took these urban planning classes, but we felt like the professors weren’t necessarily addressing the issues that affected our communities the most. And when you would bring up these issues people did not feel comfortable talking about it. Even though the program was housed in the school of public service.

BF: What issues weren’t people comfortable with?

SL: I think issues of race, class and diversity and how that affects things like affordable housing, economic development.

ND: They were talked about, but the discussions would unfold around these very controlled topics, like people really couldn’t venture out to say or talk the way that they felt. We could see that there was a lot of holding back from the program administration, and from the students.

Also, we were in a minority in our program, and one of the reasons I came to New York City is because it is the cultural mecca of our country. I thought that going to planning school here would be representative of the diversity in the city. And I found, sadly, that it wasn’t.

And we thought, “What if there weren’t as many barriers to access information about urban planning? What would communities look like then?” Just as you were saying: how would development unfold if more communities of color were actually participating and making decisions about their own communities? And we think it would be very different, so we’re trying to do that.

KW: I had a bit of a different experience, working in planning and in the design field as well. I worked in Baltimore City for a while as a community planner, and I sort of felt that I was hired to represent an African American community -- in a little bit of tokenism because it felt like nobody else wanted to touch it. It was like, “Let’s put Karyn in there.”

It was a huge project I was working on, and I’m like 24 and I’m managing a multi-million dollar project which really should have been left up to a senior planner. But I felt that everyone was scared of that base issue and didn’t want to touch it, so they’re like ‘Let’s put Karyn in there’ in a situation where I was well over my head. And that speaks to a larger societal issue, where people feel in order to relate to another group you must be from that group. And on some level it is true and on some level it is not necessarily true, but...

ND: We just need to be able to talk about it.

KW: From the design perspective and the design field, people sometimes think that architects or landscape architects, they really just work for huge developers doing condos or rooftop gardens. It doesn’t seem that there are other facets to the professions and that design can be used as a tool for advocacy. I almost feel that if the design professions are to remain relevant to a larger group of people, I think we need to encourage more diversity.

ND: Karyn and I went to the Academy for Urban Planning -- They had a career day so we went. The Academy for Urban Planning is a high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn. And they do all of their education just like a normal public school, but they do it through urban planning. Math, science, all through the same lens of urban planning. So we went and presented what we do on a day-to-day basis.

The kids were kind of like, ‘Wow,’ because we showed all these different models and schematics. And one of the questions that a girl asked, who was very interested, she said, ‘So how long did you have to go to school for that?’ And this really speaks to our point.

We said, "Well, a lot, but it doesn’t mean that you have to go to school for the whole time. You can become involved in your community and work on things like this if you think this is what you want to do. We just didn’t find out about it until much later." Then she said, "How much math do you have to do?" [Laughs]

But it was a great experience because a lot of young people, particularly young people from diverse communities, they don’t even know this is a possibility. And I think that is really what we want to do, we want to present these opportunities. We really want them to know, “Yes, we did, and you can, and you will if you want to, and we will support you. Let us know how.”

SL: I feel like youth really want to get involved with their communities and they want to have a voice and they want to effect change, but they may not know the best way to go about it. Like when we discovered urban planning at a later age in life we realized wow, you can pursue this as a profession and you can make changes this way. And it would be great to have youth feel the same way and feel just as empowered.

BF: On the bicycling side of things, in your experience has the bike advocacy community seemed like it is not as expansive as it could be?

KW: I moved to New York about three years ago from Toronto, and I never learned how to drive until I was 25, so I always just rode my bike and it was never a big deal. When I moved to New York everyone was saying, "You ride a bike? I didn't know you were that kind of person." One friend said, "I didn’t think you were that cool." I’m like, "How does riding a bike make you cool? It is just something you do."

I have noticed that there is a different culture here around bike riding that hasn’t existed in other places where I have lived, or that I have noticed.

ND: I think that with the infrastructure you are starting to see different types of riders, but I think the diversity within the cycling community in and of itself, we think that it could use a boost. But I mean any progress is good progress. One really cool thing about the Lower East Side: There are a lot of inter-generational riders. There is a whole host of Asian Americans and Puerto Ricans and they are older, they are seniors. And yeah, I like that, especially on the Lower East Side, but I don’t think New York as a whole -- it is a very, very diverse place but...

SL: It would be great to bring those different sub-cultures of cyclists together, if they can ride together and just explore different aspects of the culture that makes them similar.

BF: What is the next planning or transportation project, big or small, that you would really like to see in New York?

KW: We would like to see, similar to how they have Walk Score, we would love to see something that talks about how livable is your neighborhood, which includes not only walkability but bikeability, transportation, public space, parks -- a comprehensive study.

ND: It would definitely be a technical, GIS-based project. We would really love to take maybe the Lower East Side or a small subsection of New York and do something like that and then have it expanded. We have talked to a couple of organizations about the possibility of doing that.

BF: So we’re talking about a neighborhood map, where you can add layers to show where certain qualities are lacking or something like that?

ND: Like a web-based map similar to Walk Score, where you could put a location in or your address. So then based on maybe a certain radius, take all these different layers or components and run it through this algorithm that would then give you an index or score for livability, and use that as an advocacy tool, really, to say, "Hey look, there is an issue with safety here. And even though you have all these great things going on there is a problem, so maybe you need to work on that.:

KW: I’d love to see, on a different note, just the East Side connected and be able to ride all the way down around Manhattan on an off-road bike path basically connecting the Hudson River to the East River.

BF: So what happens after the summer? What's next?

ND: There is talk of a summit. I’m not going to go any further, but there is talk of a summit.

KW: A bike summit.

ND: I guess it has got to do with bikes, right? Yeah, there is talk of a summit.

KW: But in terms of Velo City we do want to keep going.

SL: And expand it potentially to every neighborhood in New York.

ND: We’d love for Velo City to be in every city. Not necessarily us, but open source. We want other places to do this because we think it is needed everywhere.

State spending on infrastructure to support exurban McMansions drains people and resources from urban centers -- and costs taxpayers a bundle. Photo: highflyingknight12/Flickr

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.

Assembly member Sam Hoyt.

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.

NK: You framed smart growth as something particularly necessary for upstate communities. In Buffalo, for example, the metro area has tripled in land area over the last fifty years while staying about constant in population. But do you think this is a specifically upstate need?

SH: No, it isn’t exclusive to upstate. It’s Long Island, it’s New York City, it’s across the board. I think it’s accentuated by this strange dynamic that you just cited, that we’ve had a decline in population, a decline in economy, yet a dramatic growth in terms of the geographic area in which people live and people work, and that just causes enormous problems.

When some big developer wants to build a huge subdivision or office park, we quickly say, “Oh good. That’s growth, that’s development.” And we will subsidize the project by constructing sewers and building highways or roads, and it has a very disastrous multiplier effect, because it empties out the urban core where the infrastructure exists, it makes it more difficult for the workforce to be able to get to the jobs that may be created, and it dramatically increases the burden on the taxpayer, who has to pay for the construction and ultimately the maintenance of the new development.

"We’ve had a decline in population, a decline in economy, yet a dramatic growth in the geographic area in which people live."

NK: Do you think it will be as easy to attract new development into the urban core as it is to the suburban areas?

SH: We’re not saying that a project can’t be done. We’re saying that if you want state government assistance, then we’re going to insist that the first priority be that it be done where infrastructure already exists.

We have to kind of change the mindset, and this is the first attempt. Frankly, I’ve introduced more comprehensive and some may say extreme smart growth proposals. This isn’t by any means extreme, it’s just a message to the entire apparatus of state government that we are going to promote investment where there is an existing infrastructure as opposed to providing resources to perpetuate sprawl.

NK: How does this bill differ from those stronger ones you introduced?

SH: I had a comprehensive smart growth proposal several years ago that mimicked the Portland model, the Urban Growth Boundary, where essentially a boundary is set around a city. Investment within the boundary, yes; investment outside the boundary, no. The end result, in my opinion, has been exceptional. Portland is considered one of the most livable communities in the world, or at least in the United States. But there are powerful organizations and special interests that want to be very cautious.

NK: Even though it’s a more moderate approach, do you feel this bill has enough teeth?

"You have a vast network of existing infrastructure that is abandoned or unused that could be used for development."

SH: We’ve been toiling at this for a long time. Eliot Spitzer set up his smart growth cabinet; David Paterson kept that around and kept it active, it’s met on a regular basis. There will be a new governor come January 1st, and we’ll see what his views are with regard to smart growth. So the answer to the question is: I wish we could go further and yet I think that it’s a very significant step in the right direction. I hope that it will pass both houses and be signed into law by this governor. And the next governor hopefully will enforce it among his executive agencies, but also join us in going further.

NK: While we’re talking about the politics of the bill, where are you finding the strongest support and opposition?

SH: The support is coming from mostly upstate, the Westchester area, and Long Island. In Westchester, Suzi Oppenheimer, she’s been a great champion. And opposition? We’re going to find out where the opposition is in the next three weeks, because the heavy push to enact this into law is now. But to date, maybe because it hasn’t been viewed as imminent, there has not been much opposition at all.

NK: You didn’t mention New York City legislators as being particularly supportive. Any idea why?

SH: I don’t mean to imply that they’re opposed to it, it just isn’t viewed as much of a crisis in New York City compared to other parts of the State. I think that the concept of sprawl is considered more of a suburban and upstate urban problem.

NK: Is there a way to better explain to New York City’s representatives that every bit of sprawl on the end of Long Island, say, is investment that doesn’t come into the city?

SH: Yeah. Plus the problems that we’ve talked about with the workforce. The workforce is typically in the city, and we make it more and more difficult to get the city workforce to where the jobs are. So yeah, maybe we failed to -- I failed to educate the New York City delegation as to how this is having a negative impact on them as well. The shrinking population and economy has made it just more of an upstate issue than in New York City, so we’ve got to do better in getting the New York City delegation motivated and acting on this.

"You can’t just add another lane to a highway each time it reaches capacity."

NK: I want to talk quickly about a few other initiatives you’ve worked on. One of your stated priorities is waterfront redevelopment. In Buffalo, the Skyway Bridge and Route 5 are ranked third on a list of Freeways Without Futures by the Congress for New Urbanism.

SH: Are they really? Route 5, unfortunately, is outside of my district, but it’s certainly been a big issue in Buffalo. Those of us who promoted turning that into an at-grade boulevard failed. Unfortunately, this is another example of DOT not being terribly enlightened. They went ahead and pushed through this elevated highway. It’s 20 feet above grade, to move people as quickly as possible in and out of the city. A boulevard would have been a lot more sensible. It would have allowed for greater development in the area, greater access to park and waterfront space.

The Skyway has long been debated. I think the primary concern there is just cost. Whether redirecting traffic, tunneling, or making it at grade, it would almost be a Big Dig situation, because it goes right through the heart of the city. But it is definitely a deterrent to the investment taking place on Buffalo’s waterfront of late. So that’s still on the table, nothing imminent, but a lot of us are pushing for some sort of elimination of the elevated highway.

NK: You’re also the co-chair of the Assembly Task Force on High Speed Rail. I’ve heard criticism of current plans to do an Albany to Buffalo line, saying there’s not enough population on the route for the distance it’s traveling. Others say we need to be investing more in the northeast corridor instead. You’ve called for it going to Toronto. How do we do it right?

SH: I’m a strong believer in making it an international corridor. I say the three greatest cities in North America -- don’t laugh -- are Toronto, New York City, and Buffalo, and then there’s all the great cities in between. When you talk about major population centers, Toronto and New York City are probably the most significant in North America as far as I’m concerned, and connecting those two, ridership and usage could dramatically increase.

If you just talk Albany to Buffalo, yeah, one could say the population base isn’t there. If you do a simple survey, it might seem that the ridership isn’t there. But I maintain that if you dramatically increase the speeds, on-time reliability, frequency of trains, modern equipment -- as someone who drives the Thruway once or twice a week, seven months a year, I can tell you -- that will bring a lot of people off of the highways. It potentially could also increase tourism in these upstate cities because the passenger transportation opportunities aren’t available today. You can’t take a plane from Rochester to Albany without transferring to two or three different cities.

We are seeing dramatic growth at both ends of the line; you can’t just add another lane to a highway each time it reaches capacity. We’re seeing dramatic growth in the airports and diverting that traffic onto the rails makes sense. That’s not to say we shouldn’t invest more in the northeast corridor, we should, but what Barack Obama has been talking about is connectivity

NK: One final question: How do you get to work?

SH: In Albany, I walk. In Buffalo, I’m walking a lot more. And from Buffalo to Albany, I used to take the train, but it became so unreliable that I now drive.

Jimmy Vacca at last week's City Council hearing on Intro 120. Photo: Noah Kazis

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?

JV: Again, possibly. I’m a little concerned about the lock-box. The congestion pricing plan was supposed to be another lock-box, and I certainly would not be for it if Albany said that this was going to go to the general fund as well. I think that this lock-box now has to be more carefully defined. I also think that we have to be cognizant of the fact that certain parts of the MTA bailout from last year have not been fully realized. The payroll tax, for example, they’ve not gotten the revenue from that because that tax was a very difficult tax to collect initially, and that may be a better revenue stream for them.

I also have hope we can convince the federal government to get involved, to get us into the federal transportation act. There’s not significant money in the federal transportation act for New York City when it comes to operating expenses, and that is the ideal way to go.

When I say ideal, we had some pushback when it came to our proposal regarding the stimulus money because we were going to take $50 million from capital and use that money in operating. Many of the construction trades pushed back and they said, "You know, whenever you remove capital money from any type of agency, it means jobs. Our people are hurting." And I know that that’s the reality.

In my own district this weekend I ran into electricians from Local 3, and they’re all telling me, “Jimmy, we’re on unemployment 39 weeks, 49 weeks, it’s unbearable, we have no idea when we’re going back.” So the federal government assisting us through the federal transportation act is something my staff is very much involved in. We’re in touch with Schumer, Gillibrand, our local congresspeople; we’re working with the speaker's office on this to get them interested in investing in mass transit long term. There are only so many Band-aids you can put on the MTA, and we’ve been Band-aiding it for years.

I’m concerned about fares going up. I don’t want to out-price the system. I want to encourage people to use it, but if the fare goes up much higher? This is the worst economic time we’ve had, people are being hit all over the place.

BF: Hypothetically, say Albany does show signs of putting together some sort of package for student MetroCards. The city is going to have to scrounge around for some money too and we have our own budget crunch. One thing that we reported on earlier this year is that yellow school bus costs are really skyrocketing in New York. Is that something the transportation committee could look into and hold a hearing on?

JV: Certainly. And I would want to work with the education committee, Bob Jackson on that. I have to tell you that Chancellor Klein did announce a couple of months ago that he was going to be implementing a phasing in of reducing special education transportation costs. But I caution you about that, because I’ve heard this so many times before.

Right now if you’re in special education you get transportation to schools that are often distant from you, because special education children are not home zoned. Many times their local elementary schools do not have the exact program that their Individual Education Program requires them to have. Chancellor Klein is now saying that he is going to home zone disabled children and make sure that the program they need is there. If that happens, it will mean a significant reduction in school bus transportation cost, but I’ve heard that before. This was supposed to be implemented back in 2001, even before Chancellor Klein came. But I think that it would help.

I also think we have to look into the whole issue of contracting, The DOE has so many consultant contracts, and outside contracts, school buses being some of them, that we have to start looking at those, and I would be willing to have a hearing on that.

BF: The city’s first Select Bus Service route goes through your district. What’s your evaluation of it so far?

JV: I like it. I like it, I support it. I know that there were some issues outside my district on Fordham Road. In that community many of the merchants felt that they were not adequately consulted and that parking was taken away and not replaced. But I think those issues are being worked on. Where my district is concerned, the quickness of the bus has shaved off an incredible amount of time, and people have commented that they’ve liked it very much. I have to tell you that initially the community was opposed to it, but I felt it was good, so we stuck with it.

BF: That’s really the major way that the city is planning to expand and improve transit services in the next few years, through surface transit improvements. Is that something you would recommend to other districts?

JV: Yes. I mean, the quicker the bus goes the more people will be inclined to leave their cars home, and I want to encourage that. So yes.

JV: Today I took the car, last week I took the train. Today I took the car because I’m going to be down here very late. We have the Greek Heritage Celebration at City Hall. I have to return to my district for a meeting after the function. The car is preferable to me if I’m hopping around, especially within the Bronx, but there are other days when the train is fantastic, I took the train three days last week.

BF: What bridge did you take today?

JV: Third Avenue.

Bret Collazi (Vacca spokesman): The un-tolled one.

BF: Is the district office by the 6 Train?

JV: Two blocks.

BC: It’s not far, yeah. We’ve gotten a lot better at taking the train since getting involved in transportation issues more. And it’s more than just because we should be doing it, it’s more convenient for us.

JV: It’s more convenient.

Vacca sketches out a street in his district where speeding is a problem. Photo: Noah Kazis

Vacca represents an eastern Bronx district where car ownership is higher than the New York City average, and he's come in for some criticism here on Streetsblog for supporting the five-minute grace period for parking violations. But he also has a long history of advocating for safer streets and slower cars, going back to his days as a district manager for Bronx Community Board 10. He will tell you that his number one transportation concern is safety.

In addition to serving as a gatekeeper for legislation, the transportation committee chair can exercise oversight of city agencies and use his bully pulpit to encourage or obstruct street re-designs. Since taking over the committee, Vacca has appeared with Speaker Christine Quinn several times to take positions on issues like transit cuts and making streets safe for seniors. We recently wrote about his performance during a public safety committee hearing, where he chided NYPD for not releasing crash information to the public.

Last week, Vacca and his spokesman, Bret Collazzi, sat down with Streetsblog for a conversation about how the City Council can support safer streets and better transit. We also talked a little bit about parking.

Here's the first part of our interview, with more to come tomorrow.

Ben Fried: When you were a district manager for a community board, you were a big booster of Safe Routes to School, and last week you were out with AARP lobbying for complete streets legislation...

Jimmy Vacca: Yes, twice.

BF: What can the City Council do to support street safety programs like Safe Routes to School, Safe Routes for Seniors, and the growth of the bicycle network?

"Cycling has become a growing thing in New York City, and where individual communities want that kind of support, I want to give that kind of support."

I had Commissioner Sadik-Khan come to my district two weeks ago. We’re looking at two specific stretches, both near schools. And we came up with a plan where we’re going to be doing painted center medians so that cars have a narrower girth, so to speak, and hopefully that will slow them down. We’re going to see if that is going to work, and if not, I have to come back to the table with more stuff. So I’m very much committed to the pedestrian safety issues. It rings true in my neighborhood, and throughout the city. I think that we’re going down the right path.

But I think it will help people, and I’ve told this to DOT, if they’re willing to speak to community boards about their warrant necessities: what triggers their saying no and saying yes. I may have a hearing on that at a certain point. If you asked me right now, “Jimmy, when do they say no to a speed bump?” -- well, the criteria I’ve been told is that it cannot block a driveway, and it cannot go on a bus route. Yet I know other cases where they’ve been rejected and their answer is “because it’s too far away from the intersection.” If that’s the case, why don’t I know this? What do we have in writing that tells me so I can challenge DOT? As John Q. Public lobbies for street calming measures, I think the city has got to tell us universally what is their policy.

But I will tell you that the biggest thing I hear from people in my district, as a local councilman more than as a chair for the transportation committee, is the reality that traffic is too fast, and that they have difficulty crossing the street, and that we’ve got to reduce the speed of cars. So I think traffic safety is very, very high on my plate.

BF: Let’s talk about the enforcement side of things. The Post just this weekend ran a story about how speeding is really common among cabbies. Can the transportation committee exercise some oversight function of the police department?

JV: Yes. I’m worried about speed too. I think TLC has a role to play. I’d like to know where their inspectors are. We’re going to be working on a whole bunch of TLC issues and I think that the police and the TLC have to do more.

I don’t think it’s limited to cabbies, I think there are a lot of people who speed, and sometimes they’re going nowhere fast. It’s not an emergency for them, it’s just par for the course. Speeders have got to say, “Hey, this is not a crisis,” and understand that they’re part of the problem.

When I was district manager, there was a very, very vulnerable street in my district for speeding. No stop sign for like 12, 13 blocks, you could just go through. So what I had DOT do, I had this electric speed indicator and it would tell you how fast you’re going. I had it out there for about five weeks, and people came to me and said, “Jimmy, we’re sorry, we didn’t know.” They were doing 40 and they never realized it. And I know that we can’t have these speedometers on every street in the city of New York, but I thought that this was very helpful. So I often bring this up, and I say, “Let’s not complain about everyone else, let’s see what we’re doing.” It’s got to be an education process.

BF: Deborah Glick has a bill in the State Assembly that would allow for a speed camera enforcement demonstration program in New York, like our red light camera program. Is that something that the transportation committee and the council could issue a resolution in favor of?

JV: I like the idea, and I will look into it. I think those cameras have been very helpful, I was one of those who voted on the Council to increase the amount of the cameras we had.

BF: When it does come to street design, often what we’ve seen from DOT lately has been to make the lanes narrower and you put in pedestrian refuges at the intersections. But some projects can get expensive, if it’s a capital improvement, and it can also take a long time if it has to be put out to bid.

"Speed limit signs have not worked. They're ignored, they’re almost irrelevant."

BF: DOT can sometimes be tentative because they often get pushback when they propose something new. We saw this on Ninth Avenue, where the protected bike lane wasn't popular with everyone right away, but now most people agree it’s provided a big safety benefit. And the debate over public process has grown heated at times, even when the DOT has gone to the community board and the relevant stakeholders before a project goes in. How do you think the public process for these projects should work, ideally? Is there any way you would change the community board process?

JV: I want the community boards brought in the process very early. I understand that there may be people on some of the community boards who are resistant to change, or who think that other solutions, the more traditional solutions of traffic lights and stop signs are the answer, as opposed to some of the more innovative ideas DOT is proposing. You know I was a community board district manager for 26 years, so I know about the community board process. Sometimes people on the community boards are a little hesitant to change. I think that we have to realize that many of the attempts to calm traffic have not worked in the past, so we have to be open to other ideas to calm traffic.

BF: What’s an example of something that hasn’t worked?

JV: One thing that hasn’t worked: the speed limit signs have not worked. They're ignored, they’re almost irrelevant. Now you may say to me, “Well Mr. Vacca, that’s an enforcement issue, we need police.” But then the police will come back, and the police will say “Mr. Vacca, we do what we can, but we don’t have the manpower to sit at these locations ten hours, 12 hours a day.” Many people will say to me, “We want ‘Children at Play’ signs.” And the implication is that when a driver sees “Children at Play,” he will slow down. I think DOT stopped making those signs about four or five years ago. The reality is almost any block can have children at play.

BF: So what do you think of these newer approaches that we see where the traffic calming project will make the lanes narrower, and expand pedestrian space, often times they’ll put in a bike lane?

JV: I think it bears consideration. I think every part of our city is different. Some streets are one-way streets, and some streets are two-way streets. Do you put a bike lane here, do you put the build outs there? But I do think we have to do something about speeding, and do think that many of these approaches have.

BF: About the bike network, you told the newspaper City Hall that the city should do what it can to support burgeoning cycling communities. Could you elaborate on what that would entail?

"We do have people on community boards for 25 and 30 years, and is that fair to others who want to serve, who probably are denied a seat?"

BF: I think you could end up with a chicken-or-egg situation, where the parts of the city that have investments in safe bicycle infrastructure then have more cycling, and if you don’t put that sort of investment into other neighborhoods, you won’t see the increased use, because people will feel it’s not safe enough to go out and ride their bike.

JV: And that’s something I will need to look at. Certainly in my district, for example, on Tremont Avenue I put a lot of bicycle racks in because I felt that you could go shopping and you could go to the gym and you could just get on bicycles and go, and they’ve not been used.

BF: Tremont, that doesn’t have a bike lane if I’m correct, right?

JV: No. I don’t know if it’s a safety issue, or if it’s a fact that many times when people live in what I still call a two-fare zone, when you live in the outskirts and you’re not near a train, you tend to use the car. So I think we have to pursue safety in almost every respect. When it comes to bikes, car traffic, pedestrians, safety is my overarching concern.

BF: When a new bike route is introduced, it’s going to ruffle some feathers at first. So when you see these disputes pop up, as they inevitably do, do you draw lessons from what’s happened as we’ve seen neighborhoods grow acclimated to the bike infrastructure that they’ve received?

JV: Yeah. And my old experience is to try to mediate disputes. I think that with mediation and compromise, sometimes those mediation and compromises leave everybody unhappy, but they're unhappy equally, and you get progress. So that's why I believe in the community board structure, I think that's where it should start.

BF: I'm going to float one community board reform idea: term limits. What do you think?

JV: That’s an idea [laughs]. I have thought of that. Certainly when I was district manager I was successful in convincing the board to keep term limits for the chair. We had a two-year term limit for the chair. But we do have people on community boards for 25 and 30 years, and is that fair to others who want to serve, who probably are denied a seat?

BF: Is now the time to be thinking about this? It’s charter review time, right?

JV: It’s charter review time. I guess anything is open for discussion.

John Samuelsen, left, at a rally for federal transit funding with Reverend Jesse Jackson earlier this month. Photo: Noah Kazis

Streetsblog readers often ask about the role New York's biggest transit union is playing in tough legislative fights over issues like road pricing and bus lane enforcement. Under Toussaint, the TWU was quiet in the campaigns to win transit funding in Albany by enacting congestion pricing or bridge tolls. Recently, Samuelsen has perhaps been most visible on the national scene, joining social justice and environmental advocates to push for increased federal funding for transit service.

Last week we got on the phone with Samuelsen to talk about what his union is up to at City Hall, Albany, and Capitol Hill, why you seldom see Local 100 teaming up with MTA management to lobby lawmakers, and what his membership thinks of congestion pricing and bridge tolls. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation.

Ben Fried: The big transit story of the year is the service cuts that are on the table and which the MTA Board has voted to enact. Lets start by outlining how the TWU is responding to the cuts.

John Samuelsen: There are significant lobbying efforts going on in Albany with some bills in the mix that have the potential of stopping the whole thing. First of all let me backtrack. [MTA Chair Jay] Walder and the MTA were given a billion dollars in federal stimulus money in 2009. Out of that billion dollars they could have used roughly $100 million to pay down the service cuts and to use for the operating budget.

So Walder, who had that money in the bank, and probably still has that money in the bank, refused to use that $100 million, and instead enacted $93 million in cuts across the board, Long Island Railroad, Metro North, and New York City Transit, and MTA bus. So that’s the first thing I wanted to say, because that sets the tone for a lot of our reaction.

"There’s a recognition by the union that we don’t want to hurt middle or working class people that have to drive their cars into Manhattan, or small business owners. But there’s also a recognition on our part that that’s an excellent funding mechanism for mass transit, and that it’s green, it’s good for the economy."

The second item in Albany is the bill that’s being carried by Keith Wright in the Assembly that would put a two year moratorium on any kind of service cut that the MTA proposes that could have a potential negative impact on rider safety in the subway. And it’s being carried by Dilan in the Senate. Those are two items that we’re working on heavily now in Albany.

In addition, working with the transportation committees on both sides, and the authorities committees to come up with enough budgetary cash in order to give the MTA the savings equivalent that they would make from laying off the 500 or so station agents. Also bearing in mind that a lot of the statutory funding that is earmarked for the MTA was confiscated by the state and put into the general budget.

BF: Has the TWU conveyed concerns to the legislature about the way they confiscated those funds? Could you share your thoughts on how to ensure that transit taxes actually go towards transit?

JS: We certainly have conveyed to the legislature, the Senate transportation committee, as well as folks on the Assembly side, are working on getting that money back for the MTA, right now as we speak. And the union has explored and is still exploring the potential for acting against the New York State government for taking money that’s ours that we’d earmarked towards mass transit, and using it elsewhere.

BF: What form would that legal action take?

JS: We’re exploring the possibility of a lawsuit against the state for redirecting funds that are earmarked to the MTA, and putting them to use elsewhere.

BF: Has anyone mentioned the possibility of crafting legislation that would function as a lock box? The idea that surfaced a few years ago when congestion pricing was being debated, to legally set aside transit taxes in a way that current law does not.

JS: Yeah. I think the Senate transportation committee is exploring that, and that absolutely needs to be done. Because otherwise every time the state finds itself in a crisis, transit is going to take a hit in New York.

BF: We see the MTA and the city pushing for bus rapid transit as the avenue where they can expand access to transit and improve service the most. Can you tell me about the TWU’s views on Select Bus Service?

JS: You’re talking about bus rapid transit on Second Avenue, right, and Third Avenue, and Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn?

BF: Right. First and Second in Manhattan, and Nostrand in Brooklyn, yeah.

JS: Local 100's in favor of better service for our New York City transit riders, and of course we’re in favor if more people start riding the buses, that’s more jobs for Local 100 members.

BF: Has the TWU taken a position on the bus lane enforcement camera legislation?

JS: We’re not against it as long as it doesn’t have a negative impact on our operators, and as long as it doesn’t give the MTA some back door reason to bring disciplinary action against bus operators.

BF: So as long as the cameras are strictly focused on the street, on the road?

JS: Yeah. Are you talking about a bus pulling into a bus stop and there’s a car parked in the bus stop, and the camera takes a picture of the plate, and the car with the plate gets a ticket in the mail? We don’t have a problem with that, particularly if it raises revenues for the MTA.

BF: How would you characterize the relationship between the TWU and transit advocates? I saw Reverend Jackson’s appearance a few weeks ago where the TWU was joining with advocates to call for a greater federal funding of operations.

"There has to be a paradigm shift in the way decision makers in this country think about funding mass transit. It’s an essential service along the lines of sanitation service, fire service, police service."

There’s a recognition on the part of the riding public that mass transit is an essential service that needs to be properly funded by government, and that recognition also exists in the labor movement. There’s a recognition that transit services are green jobs, and are good for environment, that every bus that goes by, or every train that goes by takes 60 or 100 cars off the road. There’s a recognition by the labor movement, and by President Obama’s administration, as well as rider and environmental groups, that that’s the case.

So mass transit is the future, and the government has to start funding it as if it is the future. And there has to be a paradigm shift in the way decision makers in this country think about funding mass transit. It’s an essential service along the lines of sanitation service, fire service, police service.

BF: So along those lines, do you think there’s a role for road pricing in New York to fund transit service? Congestion pricing or bridge tolls, those sorts of things.

JS: Those issues are still under discussion at our executive level, and the local is still fleshing out its position on those issues.

BF: What sort of debate comes up at the local about whether these are good ideas?

JS: There’s a recognition by the union that we don’t want to hurt middle or working class people that have to drive their cars into Manhattan, or small business owners. But there’s also a recognition on our part that that’s an excellent funding mechanism for mass transit, and that it’s green, it’s good for the economy. And we’re down with that. So we’re still debating that amongst ourselves, what our exact position is going to be on that.

BF: In this budget session we’ve seen the hospital operators and the SEIU team up and ask for new revenue streams from the state, and we haven’t seen the MTA and the TWU team up that sort of way.

"The union has explored and is still exploring the potential for acting against the New York State government for taking money that’s ours that we’d earmarked towards mass transit, and using it elsewhere."

BF: That’s an area where management and the union are not asking for the same thing together?

JS: I think we’re asking for the same thing, but due to the history of the relationship it wouldn’t be precise to say that we’re asking for it together. They have a diametrically opposed position to us on some of the financial issues, on some of the fiscal issues, and that’s a big problem. They actually refused to use the $100 million available from the billion dollars in stimulus money that they got in 2009 to pay down the operating budget. They just engaged in $93 million worth of cuts that would have been avoided had they used the $100 million available to them from the stimulus money they got in 2009.

BF: Have they told you why they won’t go that route?

JS: They haven’t really given me a precise answer as to why they won’t go that route. They’ve given me a specific answer, but I think the reason is they oppose the use of the stimulus money to pay down the operating budget. It has to do with the philosophical desire to get rid of the station agents. I don’t think they want the money to be dealt out. I don’t think they want the state or the federal government to hand them $20 million and say, “Keep all the station agents working.” I think that philosophically this new MTA leadership doesn’t believe what everybody else in New York City believes, which is that the station agents provide a vital role to the passengers of the New York City transit system. I think they just want to get rid of them, so they don’t want the dough.

BF: One of the problems that transit advocacy encounters is forming a coalition that’s strong enough. And the event with Reverend Jackson seems to hint at a potential broadening of the green jobs/transit advocacy coalition. Could you talk a little bit about how you see that coalition growing in the future?

JS: I think that the coalition is already at the point where we can make a difference in Washington, D.C. I think it’s the first time ever that there’s a wide array of organizations that have come under one umbrella to push for a permanent mass transit funding. I think it’s only going to grow and get stronger. And yes, I think we’re going to have the ability to really impact the way the decision makers in Washington think about mass transit.

BF: And in Albany, do you see that process happening at the state level?

JS: Well a year ago they passed a payroll mobility tax when they were facing the identical crisis that they’re facing now, except now it’s a little more severe. I think there’s more talk going on right now in Albany about the creation of new streams of dedicated funding, or increasing the existing streams of dedicated funding, so I think that’s going to happen too.

BF: What’s your trip to work like everyday? How do you get to work?

JS: If I take the train, I take the Q train from Brooklyn into Manhattan. If I have business in lower Manhattan I usually take the Q train to DeKalb and get on the R. I take it into lower Manhattan, or downtown Brooklyn. If I’m going to the Upper West Side where the union is, I drive. I ride the train a lot during the day, even if I drive to work.

Burden leads a workshop helping a hospital in Calgary design its pedestrian space. Photo: Dan Burden.

Last week Streetsblog spoke to walkability expert Dan Burden about how new design guidelines for urban streets can replace the suburban, car-oriented standards that have become the norm throughout America (read the interview here).

Burden has been advocating for walkable neighborhoods for more than 30 years, including 16 as the bike and pedestrian director for Florida's Department of Transportation. He's traveled to over 2,700 communities across the United States and Canada to help them figure out how to build safer, more sustainable transportation systems. So while we had him on the phone, we wanted to pick his brain a little more.

In the second part of our interview, we discussed why transportation reformers shouldn't recoil from public process, as long as that process is well-designed. Burden has faced more than his share of what he calls "the screaming meanies" over the years, and here he talks about some of his experience building a base of support for livable streets that can withstand the inevitable opposition.

Noah Kazis: A lot of your work focuses less on generating the content of planning, but on getting people to collaborate. What is the role of public process in designing walkable communities?

Dan Burden: In about 1978, after I’d been out trying to promote bicycling, I realized that there is a huge pressure just to keep doing the same thing that others did. When we got to a public meeting, we couldn’t get enough people to show up. I realized that everything that we want to do to change America had to revolve around good quality public process. The product, the technical side of things we did, was the easy side; it was the public process side that’s the real tough ingredient. 

So I went back to school, got my masters in interpersonal communications to learn how to work with the public, to talk through issues and take ownership of the change, whether the change was to build a park or design streets for walking. It’s a fairly radical departure from before, when we let the professionals do all the work for us. It’s really a matter of reinventing public process, using techniques that we refer to as informed consent. 

You get people to create the plan themselves -- as citizens, as advocates, as stakeholders of a community -- and then they’ll come to the public meeting when the screaming meanies show up, which they will. Now the planning staff and the elected leaders have somebody to support them.

NK: So what about those issues where it seems like the public is opposed to a livable streets reform? In New York, one example might be parking, where across the city you get these vocal calls for more and cheaper parking. 

DB: I think the process really has to include taking a good solid technical look at things, how things actually work. I was just in Vernon, British Columbia and they want to rebuild their city center. The business community wanted more on-street parking in front of their buildings and they wanted more off-street parking. They had these ugly parking lots spread throughout the entire downtown like a grey cancer. It was really affecting whether people would want to live downtown or walk downtown. We could do traffic calming by putting in more back-in angle parking on the street, and then removing more and more off-street parking, but we had to work our way through it by completely getting across that we were listening. 

But then we got to transportation demand management: the idea that over time we shouldn’t just look at building more parking to have more people come downtown to shop, but at eliminating the parking over time. We’re only able to do that, of course, if we get more people to walk, more people to bike, more people downtown, more transit service. The businesses got that. It’s really better to develop a master plan and do the things that make this a cooperative, collaborative process where everybody is going to change their practices and behaviors. Because everyone agreed that the new city center should be very different than the old city center, where we were all car dependent and speeds were high.

NK: As someone who’s been in government and outside of government, what are the ways that ordinary citizens can best influence policymaking?

DB: I think the average citizen should just study Obama himself. Becoming an advocate for change in a person’s own neighborhood is the right place to begin. As you learn how to work with people, how to really listen and understand what people need in the neighborhood and then start building some of these things, that’s really the right place to begin. Anyone who thinks that they can skip over that and just jump into a higher level is just missing the whole point, that all great leaders are coming out of the neighborhoods. 

One of the people whom I most admire, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, was sensitive enough that after getting his Harvard law degree, he got into the legislature in his own state around Portland and worked through a number of local issues, really got into the legislation. He held a county elected position, a city elected position, was the public works director. He really got that anyone who wanted to become an elected leader had to first become a community advocate. And that’s truly part of the greatness of Portland, that the advocacy got built so well. Over time their annual meetings grew so large, that they had to take over entire high schools in order to handle all the workshops that took place. 

NK: I know you've worked across the country, but do you have any New York-specific experience you’d like to share with our readers?

Burden helped ensure that the Hudson River Greenway's path by the new Goldman Sachs headquarters worked for cyclists and the firm's employees. Image: Business Insider.

I did not get to participate in the recirculation of the Broadway area, but I’ve been watching it. It was just amazing. I got to work directly with Sam Schwartz, who was sharing with me that the early work that was done for Earth Day -- it’s got to be 40 years ago now, when he was deputy commissioner -- was only laying the groundwork for what was eventually worked out on Broadway. 

NK: Do you have any wish list for what would be next in New York?

DB: The big wish would be that we continue to take out lanes as appropriate. I also wish that we would get rid of some of the one-way systems that have moved traffic very well, but make the traffic horrendous. I am hopeful that some day we’ll eliminate 90 percent of the one-way streets. They create too much speed. 

So, yeah, I’m very hopeful. I do a lot of work on Long Island, and I know that parts of the boroughs are representative of the attempts made over the years to speed up cars. But I think we’re going to see over time that the lanes become so precious and the parking so rare that people are going to turn more and more towards walking and cycling and transit throughout the entire city.

Brad Aaron: In an interview with Transportation Alternatives' Reclaim Magazine last year, you pointed to the thankless nature of traffic duty as one cause of lax enforcement. Can you talk a little more about that?

Peter Moskos: Police work can basically be divided into two categories: work that assists the public and work that obstructs the public. Like all public servants, police are loved when they do the former and hated when they do the latter.

But police work, more so than other jobs, needs the support and cooperation of the public to be effective. People love police when they catch criminals and maintain order. People hate police when they tell you what you can't do and write tickets. Crimes get solved when people talk. And people won't talk to police if they hate the police. So from a police perspective it makes sense to define police work in a way that maximizes the good and minimizes the bad.

"Police don't like always being the bad guy. But that's what traffic enforcement is. Nobody thanks you for an accident that didn't happen."

Police already do enough thankless work. And while it makes sense that criminals don't like police, there's no good reason for the general public to have unpleasant interactions with the police. Police don't like always being the bad guy. But that's what traffic enforcement is. It's shit work and people hate you even when you do a good job. Nobody thanks you for an accident that didn't happen.

It's interesting that when cars first appeared on our roads, there was debate about whether traffic was a police matter at all. Leading police figures of the early 20th century, such as August Vollmer, called the "father of American policing," argued against it. But Vollmer lost this battle.

You don't really have to be a police officer to write a ticket. It's better for the police to contract the hate out to others. While somebody needs to enforce traffic regulations and write tickets, it doesn't have to be the police. In the 19th century, police stations used to be homeless shelters. Then we decided that wasn't a job for police officers. We could expand the authority of traffic enforcement agents ("meter maids" for the politically incorrect) to cover traffic stops. This would free up police to focus on something other than cars.

BA: New police chiefs in San Francisco and Los Angeles are reaching out to cyclists and other street safety advocates. Could such an effort by NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly help raise the profile of traffic policing so that it is perceived as something beyond grunt work?

PM: It would make me feel warm and fuzzy if Kelly said that bike safety was a top priority. But that wouldn't do anything to change the car-centered attitude of the rank-and-file. And it wouldn't change the nature of traffic police. Honestly, it is grunt work. But look, police will do what they're ordered to do. And if Kelly said that all officers needed to write five traffic citations a day, it would get done.

And while quotas are horrible for arrests and criminal citation, I don't see anything wrong with traffic quotas because traffic violations are everywhere. Officers can write as many or as few traffic tickets as they want. And it would be better if they wrote more.

BA: Do you believe applying the "broken windows" theory to traffic crime -- tracking and preventing relatively minor infractions in order to reduce violations that could result in injury and death -- would bring results comparable to those NYPD has achieved in other areas?

PM: When police cracked down on turnstile jumping in the 1990s, felony crime on the subways plummeted. That was Broken Windows in action. The "Broken Windows" theory of crime prevention says that community disorder, like an unfixed broken window, leads to more disorder and then serious crime. So the job of police is to work with the community to identify and enforce quality-of-life issues, maintain order, and create an environment less conducive to other criminal behavior. You crack down on the little things not just for the sake of cracking down but to have an impact on more serious crime.

Can that be applied to driving? Probably not. But to apply Broken Windows to dangerous driving would be an interesting experiment. It's important to remember that Broken Windows is not zero-tolerance policing. Broken Windows is problem solving combined with police discretion. But sometimes what is needed for traffic violations is simple mind-numbing zero-tolerance enforcement. It's grunt work. And since nobody else does it, it becomes the job of police.

BA: We talk a lot about "windshield perspective" on Streetsblog, and it is commonly believed that one reason police don't seem to have much interest in the perils faced by pedestrians and cyclists is that they mostly travel by car. As a former officer, does this ring true to you? If so, what can be done?

"In a crash with a car, why is it that a bike or pedestrian has to be 100 percent right to not be at fault, but all a car has to do is stay at the scene and not be drunk?"

PM: Absolutely! Unlike most New Yorkers, police are very car-focused, both on and off duty. The problem is worse for police who are from the suburbs and have never lived in the city. They simply do not get Jane Jacobs and what makes urban life function and fun. The car corrupts the very nature of city living.

For instance, even if I could wave a magic police wand I wouldn't stop jaywalking in New York City. It's beneficial to urban life here. But you wouldn't know that if you've never walked the streets.

That's because as drivers, police are often frustrated by New York pedestrians. I mean, I've driven in New York and pedestrians are frustrating. But so what? Unlike drivers, pedestrians won't kill you. Cars and drivers need to be held responsible for the danger they present, and the harm they do to the urban environment.

In a crash with a car, why is it that a bike or pedestrian has to be 100 percent right to not be at fault, but all a car has to do is stay at the scene and not be drunk? If a speeding car hits a jaywalking pedestrian, our sympathies should be with the pedestrian. But police almost always take the side of the driver. For some reason going "just" five miles over the speed limit or accelerating through a yellow light is seen as normal behavior. I mean, most drivers don't want to kill you. They just drive stupidly until they do.

Every other aspect of our criminal justice system uses punishment as a deterrent. Why shouldn't we apply that philosophy to reckless driving?

The police attitude could change by having police officers who live in the city. Or at least have more officers patrol on foot or bike. It would be nice to have a system where police officers could actually be promoted to foot patrol. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.

BA: Does traffic enforcement come up in your classes? If so, in what context?

PM: No. Not at all. I guess, just like most cops, I don't consider it real police work. The cop in me finds it boring. And the professor in me wants something more intellectual. What a shame! But maybe I can include something next semester. I'm always looking for new material to bring to class!

A template for an urban street in "Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares." Source: Claire Vlach, Bottomley Design & Planning.

One of the foundational documents in our country's history of car-centric street design is what's known as the Green Book. These engineering guidelines, which have been published in various editions by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) since the 1930s, are only "green" if you're looking at the cover.

"We should take control of our streets. If 85 percent of our motorists are driving faster than we want them to, then we need to redesign the street."

Fortunately, these engineering standards are shifting. One important step is a new report co-authored by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). "Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach" aims to define a more humane engineering language for streets. The report is intended to supplement the Green Book by laying out a set of design standards that make sense in places where people can get around by foot or on a bicycle.

Dan Burden leading a walkability workshop in Lepeer, Michigan this February. Image: Michigan Municipal League

As the founder and executive director of Walkable Communities, Inc., Burden travels the country helping people plan and develop more sustainable neighborhoods. In 2001, Time Magazine named him one of the six most influential civic leaders of tomorrow. Burden spent 16 years as bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the Florida Department of Transportation, so he was able to share with us his experience as both an advocate and an administrator.

Here's the first part of our interview:

Noah Kazis: Let's start with that new ITE and CNU report that you participated in. What's its significance?

Dan Burden: A couple of big breakthroughs occurred with that publication. One where we struggled hard, but finally broke free, is setting a target speed for roads. Before, there was always the driving speed, which had to be higher than the posted speed to provide "forgiveness" to drivers. Of course, drivers totally figured that one out, and they'd drive faster than the posted speed. In these guidelines, they're supposed to design the road for the speed that we want to elicit from the driver.

NK: Who is the target of this report? Who's going to be implementing its recommendations?

DB: Any city or county engineer -- anyone who is going to be professionally responsible for setting street standards for their own community -- will be able to find that now there's an official resource provided by the Federal Highway Administration that they can pull language from. It is truly an authoritative source. This collective body of professionals got together and agreed upon these new criteria.

NK: Is this a shift for ITE? Many of us think of transportation engineers as very conservative, very car-centric.

"The AASHTO Green Book is built for rural America and for suburban America. It was never designed for downtowns. It was never designed for the average neighborhood street."

NK: Besides bringing the posted speed and the design speed into alignment, what are the other innovations in this report?

DB: A lot of language was created to allow a more liberal interpretation of flexibility. We shouldn't force any given category of street to fall under very tight constraints. We really need permission to build narrower roads, to use less asphalt, to green up the streets, to emphasize the need for walkability and bicycling, to bring down speeds on roads.

The CNU/ITE report explains how adding bike lanes requires changing details like the turning radius of an intersection.

The report sets the platform for creating that livability. It covers the planning aspects, it gets into the broad-based principles and then it gets down to the exacting details and explains why 10-foot and 11-foot lanes are superior to wider lanes. It gives more flexibility while providing specific language that an engineer and a planner could pull for their own street standards.

NK: How do these guidelines and recommendations get turned into change on the street? Where does the federal government come in? The state and local governments?

DB: First of all, there's always been a misunderstanding about federal standards. It doesn't matter what state I go to; I can hear some folks in the state agency say, "Well we have to do this, because the federal government says that these are the standards." The federal government does not set standards. They help create publications, they provide a lot of guidance, but they truly have no desire or ability to set the standards that a local government would impose.

The key is influencing those in state government to realize that they're in charge, that whatever language they create can then be inserted in a local street system that happens to involve state funding. In some states, the total street system, from an alley to a lane to an arterial, is set by state guidelines. In Florida, we have what's called the Green Book committee; I used to sit on it for about 15 years. We came up with guidance for what every category of road would be and then whoever built the road -- certainly any private developer -- had to follow those standards if they wanted to turn the road over to the community. They gave a baseline for certain margins of safety and performance.

"The clear zone that's required -- how far you have to set back trees or other fixed objects from the roadways -- was determined years ago by one phone call from a committee of AASHTO to the General Motors test track."

NK: So are you arguing that states should take a step back from transportation planning and let local governments move in?

DB: Yes I am. I feel that the people who end up populating the committees that set these standards are not keeping their ears close enough to what's going on in a given neighborhood. By the time you're high enough up in the chain of your state agency, you no longer go to public meetings, you no longer read every document that comes out. So you're trying to make decisions that are good for everybody, even though you've reached a point in your career when you're no longer grassroots.

NK: What does that detachment lead to?

DB: You feel like you have a responsibility to keep raising the bar but in many cases the bars gets raised with absolutely no scientific evidence. For example, the clear zone that's required -- how far you have to set back trees or other fixed objects from the roadways -- was determined years ago by one phone call from a committee of AASHTO to the General Motors test track. So they're talking to one person at the test track -- for cars -- and the guy said 100 feet and [AASHTO] said, "No, that can't work, we can't buy 200 feet of right of way everywhere." So they negotiated and said 60 feet would eliminate a lot of the crashes. That's how they determined it. If you went back and studied how a particular measure came to be, it's, "OK, if I agree with you it should be 15 feet rather than five, then will you agree with me on my point about this topic?"

The CNU/ITE report is context-specific: What's next to the street should influence the design of the street itself.

NK: In terms of the internal politics of state departments of transportation, is there some sort of bias in how the roads are designed?

DB: Historically the AASHTO Green Book, which is still what most people will quote and many state design guidelines are built around, is built for rural America and for suburban America. It was never designed for downtowns. It was never designed for the average neighborhood street. It was designed for this new America we were building, where we wanted to keep the greatest flow of vehicle movement. So we come up with things like turning radii on the corner of an intersection, driveway flows, everything based on a suburban and a rural application.

NK: Do you think that momentum toward livable streets -- among both engineers and the state departments of transportation -- is going to continue?

DB: I know it's going to continue. For example, take complete streets. Every state that adopts a complete street philosophy now comes together to try to figure out, well, What does this really mean? So it builds on itself. I was in Columbus, Ohio, where the state has adopted a complete streets package and now everybody is quickly trying to figure out, Do we always have bike lanes or do always have this or that? So, yes, I think that, along with Secretary LaHood's recent comment that pedestrians and bicycles will have equal considerations in designing and building and funding our streets, that this is shaking up the industry.

Obviously we're crafting new buzzwords and we've got more enlightened secretaries of transportation, but we're also going to realize we cannot continue to build roads that are not sustainable. They create more drainage impacts, more heat gain, more use of oil for asphalt or processing concrete. These resources are going to put us in a non-compete situation with the rest of the world where we're just trying to keep our system working. In many cities now the individual is spending 20 percent, even 25 percent, on their transportation out of their take-home pay. That's not sustainable at a personal level.

We met McCormack at the June traffic justice forum for Manhattan district attorney candidates. Here, he talks about crash investigations, the "rule of two," and the difficulties that can arise in obtaining and using vehicle "black box" data.

Brad Aaron: What were your general impressions of the Manhattan DA forum? In your opinion, were the pledges for increased prosecutions following pedestrian and cyclist deaths and injuries feasible under current law?

Joseph A. McCormack: I thought the forum was fantastic. Clearly, any of the candidates invited will be aware of the importance of pedestrian and cyclist safety issues and the need to back up concern with resources. I don't know if they pledged increased prosecutions as much as increased awareness and investigation which is certainly feasible under the current law.

BA: There was a lot of discussion on Streetsblog, following our write-up of the forum, about the "rule of two." How prevalent is the "rule of two" standard in determining whether to prosecute drivers involved in crashes resulting in death or serious injury? Who normally makes these decisions -- the police on the scene, an ADA on the phone?

JAM: The rule of two was explained in the Maureen McCormick interview and by [Transportation Alternatives General Counsel] Peter Goldwasser on the comments following your story on the forum. It is a rule of thumb used by most members of the criminal justice system from investigators to judges. Your education on it is helpful. I teach prosecutors and police officers in NYC that it can be used to understand some of these crimes but they must be aware that one factor, if egregious enough, standing alone, may impute criminal culpability. Cases such as Cabrera [Editor's note: People v. Cabrera is discussed in the Maureen McCormick interview linked above] make both understanding and prosecuting these cases more difficult, making the real lesson to be learned even more important. These cases are fact-driven and so the single most important rule at the outset is to be sure to fully investigate and gather the facts.

BA: Is the "rule of two" standard more likely to be applied in cases where a pedestrian or cyclist is the victim, rather than a driver or vehicle passenger? In other words, is it considered more difficult to prove negligence when a vehicle hits a person, rather than another vehicle?

JAM: There are no separate "rules" for investigating and prosecuting pedestrian or cyclist crashes versus car crashes. The only difference I can think of at all is sometimes, in the absence of witnesses, we can figure out more from the resultant damage to a vehicle but in some cases we are also able to figure out how a crash occurred when it involved a pedestrian or a cyclist from evidence gathered at the scene. I feel they are treated the same both by investigators and legally. The so called rule of two certainly makes no distinction and I don't feel there is one in practice.

JAM: The police department has protocols that are constantly being updated and examined in the hope of making them the most effective. I am sorry, but I can't speak directly about cases I have no actual knowledge about.

I would like to explain a little about "black boxes" and what they are and what we do about them. The forum and the questions posted on your blog seemed fairly confused about them.

Every crash, no matter who or what is involved, is scrutinized for Electronic Data Recorder evidence.

Every crash, no matter who or what is involved, is scrutinized for Electronic Data Recorder (EDR) evidence. By the way, the so-called "black boxes" in cars are actually silver. Quite a few years ago the NYC STOP DWI Program run by the DOT paid for training by the national expert in EDR recovery. Once I had the funding, we had all of the NYPD Detectives and many of the Highway Patrol Unit Techs assigned to investigate crashes trained for two weeks. We also got funding to purchase the equipment to download the EDRs. In the years since we have upgraded this equipment as needed with recurrent funding from STOP DWI. So, New York City is right at the cutting edge with EDRs.

Still though, these EDRs are not an automatic cure-all. First off, they may not record any data if the vehicles airbag system doesn't deploy. A car can crash or strike a pedestrian or cyclist and not set off its airbag. We then get nothing. Also, the kind of car involved is a significant factor. Some makes and models are capable of being downloaded and some are not. Some manufacturers maintain that their vehicles do not have EDRs. Some manufacturers refuse to help police download their cars. And some manufacturers have EDRs that do not record information useful to a crash investigator. If a car has a readable EDR sometimes there are other problems that prevent the data from being retrieved such as crash damage, power loss or if the EDR resets itself before the information is gathered. The one thing I can assure you of is that we try.

Brady Street, which boasts some of the best street life in Milwaukee, has flourished thanks in part to the defeat of a nearby freeway spur and the redevelopment that followed. Photo: Steve Filmanowicz.

In the second part of our interview (read the first part here), Norquist discusses these victories and setbacks, and how federal policy can help cities and towns do the right thing.

Ben Fried: Expanding the transit system in Milwaukee has been a very long, protracted process. You wanted to build light rail. What sort of resistance did you meet from other public officials?

Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland -- the regional planning commissions they have really aren’t looking out for city interests, they're looking out for the exurban interests.

It’s frustrating, because Milwaukee was always ranked by the Federal Transit Administration as one of the best places to put in a light rail, because it was built around the street car system. There was over 350 miles of street car in Milwaukee at the end of the war, 200 miles of inner urban. We had a really, really good transit system and by 1958 it was all gone. But the land use patterns were all built around street car lines. Now I think my successor, Tom Barrett, has got himself some clout with this. They put an earmark in the budget bill that just passed that gave him control of a nice big chunk of money, so he might be able to get that street car going.

BF: So the dispute between you and the county executives, is that emblematic, would you say, of the basic problem with MPOs?

JN: It depends on who runs the MPO. New York and Chicago have their MPOs under control. We have enough clout in Chicago that the local regional planning commission -- CMAP -- they're not going to turn around and screw Chicago. Chicago has a lot of representation on CMAP’s board. In New York, basically New York runs its own regional system -- sometimes the metro system has too much interference from the state, but basically New York City can call its own shot when it comes to planning. And that’s not true in a lot of cities. Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, the regional planning commissions they have really aren’t looking out for city interests, they're looking out for the exurban interests.

BF: We’ve got a potential freeway teardown project here in New York, the Sheridan Expressway, it was number two on CNU’s list of the top teardown candidates. Could you walk us through what you had to go through with your freeway teardown in Milwaukee -- who did you have to win over to achieve that?

JN: The Sheridan is ready to go. It has a nice low traffic count, so it’s hard to argue that it’s really necessary. But what did I go through? Well, the first thing was, it’s so counterintuitive to do these things that the first reaction was from very reasonable people -- ordinary citizens, the traffic engineers, neighborhood people, even very progressive people -- “You want to do what? You want to tear that -- what?” You know, it doesn’t compute, it sounds like a wacky thing to do. You have to have patience and spend a lot of time in meetings letting people beat the living hell out of you. And then you get to a certain point where people say, “Hey, wait, I think I understand what you mean. You’re saying the freeway’s a blighting influence.” And you just go through all the arguments against it, but the biggest argument for it is it just makes the place function a lot better and add more value and be a place where people actually want to be.

In the mid and late 70s a whole bunch of legislators were elected who were against freeways, people who organized and went door to door. If we hadn’t won those battles Milwaukee would have been devastated.

So you go through all these value calculation fights, and then finally you need to play your political cards. In Milwaukee the anti-freeway movement began in early 70s, and in the mid and late 70s a whole bunch of legislators were elected who were against freeways, people who organized and went door to door, they won the battles. If we hadn’t won those battles Milwaukee would have been devastated, but we’ve killed about half the freeways they had planned on building. And that saved the city really from being in a very similar situation to what Detroit is in right now.

BF: Are some of the freeway projects the Wisconsin DOT is planning now, are those in metro Milwaukee?

JN: We have several on there, they're all unnecessary, they're all dead weight loss. It’s really disgusting and it shows you how hard it is to get them to look at it in a different way. The I-94 widening -- it’s already six lanes, they want to make it eight lanes from Milwaukee down to the Illinois border. And they want to do a new interchange, called the “Zoo Interchange,” which will cost close to $1 billion. A lot of these stimulus projects are completely unnecessary and they don’t make sense. To route your grade-separated traffic through the most expensive real estate in the state of Wisconsin? It’s insane. They don't do it in Europe. They have freeways, but they're between cities, not in cities. They go around the outer edge with belt lines, but they don’t jam up through the most built-up places, because it just concentrates traffic and creates more congestion at the nodes.

A lot of these stimulus projects are completely unnecessary and they don’t make sense. To route your grade-separated traffic through the most expensive real estate in the state of Wisconsin? It’s insane.

Look at it not just from a big city standpoint, look at it from a medium- or small-sized city standpoint. Let’s say you were in New York wine country and you come to Ithaca. In the old days, instead of a bypass they’d have a truck route around the outer edge of the street grid. You might go a little bit faster, 35 miles an hour instead of 25, but it’s a little longer distance, so it’s pretty much an equal choice whether you drive through the middle of town or you go on the outer edge. And if you're driving a truck and you're going on through-traffic you take the truck route.

Well, now they don’t even have that option anymore, all they have is a Mercedes-Benz test track, a highly-banked, grade-separated freeway that routes all the traffic around the city and then you get the inevitable death of any retail in the middle. You end up with antique shops and empty buildings. And then you get the big boxes out on the beltway.

These small towns, they don’t need beltways. Give them another option and they might choose it. If they still want to build a beltway and they want to help pay for it, fine, but the feds should give them the kind of options that allow urban real estate development, job development, walkability, connectivity, all these things. Higher economic performance, higher environmental performance. Those are all possible when you create a wide variety of choices, instead of just going right to grade separation. That’s basically saying, "We only fund through-traffic -- if you want to go a long distance, we’re into funding it."

The feds don’t look at it in terms of the economics. Traditionally, there’s three purposes for a road: movement, economic and social interaction. Those are the three things that traditionally a thoroughfare in an urban area did for thousands of years. That’s what it was. And then in the last 60 years it’s all dumbed down to just one thing -- vehicle movement -- and the other stuff doesn’t matter. Well that’s really stupid. The federal government collects a lot of taxes from hardworking people in the United States, and they shouldn’t just think that the only purpose of investment in transportation is through-traffic.

How can federal policy encourage walkable street networks instead of highways and sprawl? Image: CNU

At the moment, however, the scene on the ground shows how far we have to go before the reality catches up to the rhetoric: State DOTs flush with federal stimulus cash are plowing ahead with wasteful, sprawl-inducing highway projects. Ultimately, you can't end car dependence or create livable places without enlisting the very people building those roads -- the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), state DOTs, and other entities that shape local policy. How can the feds affect their decisions?

The Congress for the New Urbanism has some intriguing answers. During the stimulus debate, CNU proposed a new type of federal road funding that would help to build connected grids -- the kind of streets that livable communities are made of. The proposal didn't make it into the stimulus package before the bill got rushed out the door, but the upcoming federal transportation bill will provide another chance. CNU President John Norquist -- a four-term mayor of Milwaukee who first got into politics as an anti-freeway advocate -- was down in DC last Thursday to share his ideas with Congress. Streetsblog spoke to him afterward about what's broken with national transportation policy and how to fix it. Here's the first part of our interview.

Ben Fried: During the stimulus debate you sent a letter to James Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and among other things you said that discussion of national transportation policy often presents a "false dichotomy" between transit funding and road funding. What did you mean?

They are taking this stimulus money and using it for roads that people really don’t even want.

Freeways don’t work in rush hour; they're slower. Like in Washington, DC, Connecticut Avenue is faster at rush hour than the Potomac Freeway. The Potomac Freeway goes down to about two to six miles an hour during the peak hour, whereas Connecticut Avenue goes down to about eight to thirteen miles an hour. So you're really talking about the federal government investing billions and billions of dollars in stuff that reduces the value of the economy. How bad is that?

BF: So say they do implement some good metrics that get at street network connectivity…

JN: What would that be? Let me tell you. Right now the metrics are minimums -- you need at least 12 feet for a highway lane, whereas in Vancouver no lane can be bigger than three meters, which comes out to nine feet ten inches I think. Their biggest lane can be nine feet ten inches…

BF: These are federal requirements?

JN: No, but they all feed into the same system. The feds don’t even do the requirements directly -- in the federal highway program they reference the AASHTO Green Book. These are rules, they're just not stated as rules… On the interstate system you can’t have a lane that’s less than 12 feet wide, so that actually is a rule there. You have all these metrics that make everything bigger -- turning radii and ramps, the length of ramps -- all these things designed to have the vehicles move faster without having to slow down when they get off the freeway, that sort of thing.

Right now the system is biased towards trying to make everything like Brasília, where all the arterial street intersections are grade-separated. It’s the most lifeless city in the world.

Look at the Embarcadero Freeway. When it was torn down, the trips actually got faster, because people were able to enter the street grid of northeastern San Francisco without having to overshoot the mark or undershoot where they want to go and then go in a direction they don't want to go. So by removing the freeway and re-enriching the street network, it actually made traffic distribute better. Then it was a better setting, obviously, for real estate and job development, because the views of the bay were restored and streets are better.

So what are the metrics? The metrics would be intersection density, block size -- you would reward intersection density. And the feds can do that, they can say that states could draw federal money and add to the density of a street network, creating more mobility that way.

And the metric we use is 150 intersections per square mile, which wouldn’t just be like Manhattan or Philadelphia. In Wausau, Wisconsin, which is the home of the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Dave Obey, we counted 158 intersections per square mile. That’s counting alleys. You look at all these places that have high intersection density and they're very likely to be valuable settings for jobs and real estate, and they're also very good for distributing local traffic.

Freeways don’t work in rush hour; they're slower. Like in Washington DC, Connecticut Avenue is faster at rush hour than the Potomac Freeway.

BF: It seems like there also has to be some sort of system of incentives in place, because there’s so many MPOs that are just going to be stuck in their old habits…

JN: Are you talking about MPOs or DOTs?

BF: Let’s say both.

JN: I would argue in the majority of cases the MPOs just function as an arm of the DOT. There’s this myth that some of the regional planning commissions are out there trying to do what's right. And that’s true in some cases, but in the vast majority it’s just this same mind frame that they have at the DOTs. Some DOTs are more progressive than others. My current favorite is New Jersey where they're really exploring these ideas of funding more urban streets, like replacing the freeway in front of Trenton, along the river, and putting in a boulevard instead.

BF: So how do you get the state DOTs to embrace this?

JN: Right now they're encouraged not to even think about doing this stuff. Like in Wisconsin, there’s really no projects in Milwaukee, because Milwaukee is built out with streets and so forth, so all the money goes to brand new roads. Or expanding existing roads like I-94 between Milwaukee and the Illinois line, a total waste of money. They’re saying it’s $250 million to widen it, it’s probably three or four times that. Here they are, taking this stimulus money and using it all for roads that are really the kinds of things that were considered good back in the 1960s and 70s, but now are pretty much discredited. A lot of these road projects are controversial -- local groups that aren’t connected to government contracts are resisting them -- and all of a sudden the feds come along and fund roads that people really don’t even want. It’s pretty bad. In southeastern Wisconsin the MPO is the biggest supporter of building all these giant roads. Sometimes the smart growth movement says, "Well, we should give the MPOs more say." I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

If you need to have a stick, you have to know what you're going to hit, or if you have a carrot, you have to know what you want to fund, that’s why you get right back to metrics. The first step is to allow federal funds to be used to bring street networks up to a standard of 150 intersections per square mile. So if you have a suburban sprawl kind of situation where the intersection density is like at 40 per square mile, if you have a project that’s going to bring that intersection density up to 150, then the state would be eligible for getting federal funding to go in and do that.

You need to have standards that engineers can respect and if you have standards that they respect, they’ll do wonderful stuff.

If the feds say, "That’s okay, that’s good, that’s just as good as the other method," that would be a big step forward. I don't know that we can get it to say, “You must do this the more urban way.” I think that would be a little bit harder to do and I don’t even know that it’s necessary. Especially young traffic engineers that are just coming in to the field, I think they’re kind of eager to look at some different models. And if you look at ITE now, which is a very traditional group, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, they're really getting more and more excited about the idea of networks.

Even the ones that aren’t on the program yet, they're still interested and they kind of want to know what everything is about. So that’s where the metrics come in, then they respect it. Look at the 1920s, if you were a civil engineer and you're going to Purdue, you’re going to learn the two rod street -- two rods from the center lane to the building line, 50 feet of pavement with eight foot sidewalks. Add it up, it’s two rods in each direction, four rods altogether. That’s what you find all over America and particularly in the midwest. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Mattoon, Illinois. Frankfort, Kentucky. You're going to find these exact same streets. And it’s a great street for retail, for a downtown main street. It is Main Street -- and the engineers did that, they were trained to do it, they obeyed orders and they did it. If they go to traffic engineering school now they're going to learn minimum 72-foot arterials, three moving lanes in each direction with a turn lane, and then they blow out the sides with 100-foot setbacks -- you can widen the street later, you know -- and big parking lots.

That’s what they’re taught, that’s all they're taught. They're not taught the other model, because the regulations don’t even mention the other model for the most part. You need to have standards that engineers can respect and if you have standards that they respect, they’ll do wonderful stuff. They’ll create Market Street in San Francisco – new! -- if they had a standard that said it was okay to do that.

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Stay tuned for the second part of our interview with John Norquist, in which we discuss the problem with "shovel-ready" projects, what it takes to win a freeway teardown fight, and how to build your way out of congestion.

In the coming months Streetsblog will turn increasing attention to Capitol Hill and the 2009 federal transportation reauthorization bill. With hundreds of billions of dollars up for grabs, organizations are mobilizing to influence the outcome of the debate. One thing many of the groups pushing for mass transit, smart growth and livable streets have in common is funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. The old adage says “Follow the money,” so Streetsblog spoke with foundation Managing Director Nicholas Turner.

Aaron Naparstek: What kind of work is Rockefeller Foundation doing in the transportation sector right now?

Nick Turner: We’ve undertaken an initiative that’s focused on trying to advance a more equitable and sustainable transportation paradigm in this country. When you look at the cost of transportation for low-income families, you see this is the second highest cost for working Americans. Then if you look at the slice of those who earn twenty to fifty thousand dollars a year, it’s the highest cost. Having to own and operate a car eats up 30 percent of household income.

The second thing that made us alight on transportation again was the climate impact. With transportation accounting for 33 percent of emissions in this country we thought it was essential to look at the lever of federal policy and funding as a way of reducing that impact.

The third thing, and it’s smaller than the other two, is when we look at this country and other developing countries we see an increasingly tattered social contract. Investing in sustainable and equitable transportation, and the building of that infrastructure, is a source of good jobs and increases access to good jobs for lower income Americans.

Transportation should be seen as a tool to achieve a variety of social benefits and ends. Transportation is not an end in and of itself but it should be a tool to enhance quality of life for people.

We see an increasingly tattered social contract. Investing in sustainable and equitable transportation, and the building of that infrastructure, is a source of good jobs and increases access to good jobs.