Streetsblog New York City

A long walk across Queens Blvd. at Grand Ave., Elmhurst, circa March 2001. Photo: Jeff Saltzman

Departing Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall often cites the pedestrian safety improvements she ordered for Queens Boulevard as the greatest accomplishments of her six years in office. Before taking over DOT, the Queens Boulevard death machine was killing an average of 9 pedestrians a year, including an astounding death toll of 18 in 1997 alone. Once DOT began focusing on pedestrian safety along Queens Boulevard, the death rate fell to just over three per year. Today, crossing Queens Boulevard on foot is still a challenge but it's a lot safer than it used to be.

As City Hall mulls the future of its Department of Transportation, it is useful to recall the decades of pedestrian carnage on Queens Boulevard and what it took, finally, to staunch the bloodshed. Because it was Queens Boulevard where Iris Weinshall, the city's newly appointed transportation commissioner, overruled her agency's top traffic engineers for the first time and, in so doing, achieved what she often says is her proudest accomplishment.

In late 2000, the Daily News launched a crusade to tame the "Boulevard of Death." Newsday followed suit, and the 7.1 mile long, 12 lane, monster street dominated their contest for Queens readers. The tabloids ran more than twenty-five newspaper articles spotlighting the horrible conditions, including five front pages.

Prodded by the media coverage, the city's new DOT commissioner, a transportation policy neophyte, instructed her traffic engineers to make walking across the boulevard safer and easier. But the engineers resisted. Increasing pedestrian crossing times, they said, would would back up traffic to the Queensboro Bridge and motorists would be stuck fuming. Weinshall, frustrated by her top engineers' apparent inability or unwillingness to trade motorist convenience for pedestrian safety, shared a candid revelation with reporters: DOT's traffic engineers, she said, were "thinking from the motorist's viewpoint."

I entered a turnstile in the Financial District on Saturday, bound for the Upper West Side. The 2 train was running on the east side and the 3 wasn't running at all below 14th Street. So I went instead to the A and the C platform. The C train wasn't running, period.

With the C train out and the 2 and 3 trains FUBAR, the A train, when it finally came, was absolutely packed. Any New Yorker except for -- I'm guessing here -- the richest 1% and the poorest 1%, is familiar with this condition during rush hour, but hopes to avoid it on the weekend. But not this weekend. I had one person in each armpit, while, confounding the laws of physics, I was simultaneously in someone else's armpit. Each stop took a half an hour to get through because the people were blocking the doors open as they crammed into the cars. Someone near me was asking her traveling companion if there wasn't some kind of maximum allowable limit to the number of people who could be crammed into a subway car. Packed as it was, the train frequently crept through the tunnels at a snail's pace because there were workers repairing the tracks or platforms. When I got off at 59th Street, the platforms were being torn up as the floors were being replaced.

It is nice to see investment in mass transit, but somehow, one wishes this investment wasn't quite so ... thorough.

Just as I was considering cursing the MTA for the comprehensiveness of its maintenance operations, I was reminded of who to blame. Above the heads of all these people standing in the aisles, there was a 1938 photograph of the smirking face of a young Robert Moses, standing, arms folded, in front of a giant map of New York's arterial roadways (not the photo above). It was part of an advertisement for an exhibition (third item) celebrating Moses, the dawn of the automobile age, and the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Triborough Bridge.

Now I remembered where to direct my angst over the sorry conditions underground. By systematically starving mass transit to pay for his grandiose automobile projects, the subways were on life support by the time Moses died in 1981. A year later, the MTA began its mammoth program to bring the stations and tracks back into a "state of good repair." More than two decades later, this program continues, creating the need for weekend service curtailments just as the city is bursting at the seams with new residents.

Cursing the MTA would have been misdirected. It is doing what it has to do. Work needed to bring the system up to a state of good repair is ultimately a good thing. But a crash program to restore the system wouldn't be necessary today if the planners of generation ago hadn't been so certain that the automobile was the answer to all transportation problems. And one busy Saturday underground, there was Robert Moses, staring down at a new generation of subway sardines, still mocking us.

I'm very familiar with the automobile age. Please, don't make me celebrate it.

The Committee to Keep NYC "Congestion Tax Free." Front row, left to right: John Corlett, Automobile Club of New York; Ray Irrera, Queens Chamber of Commerce; Council Member David Weprin; Lobbyist Walter McCaffrey; Joe Conley of Queens Community Board 2.

Ominous warnings relating to energy consumption have come recently from people on both ends of the political spectrum. The free-marketeers at the Council on Foreign Relations have issued a report warning that the United States cannot possibly kick its dependence on foreign energy and recommending drastic actions such as -- ready? -- gasoline rationing. Even more alarming, if also hopefully more far-fetched, a Russian who observed the collapse of the Soviet Union first hand, and still has an occasional kind word for communism sees disturbing parallels between that country before it fell and our country today.

Taken together, these writings describe a nation that needs to cut energy consumption now, which implications for urgently needed action at the national, state, local and individual levels. Amid these increasingly ominous signs, here in New York City, serious consideration of the single action that would offer the greatest reduction in local energy consumption for the least amount of work -- congestion pricing -- is nowhere because parochial local politicians are failing to think three feet beyond the borders of their districts. (I'm looking at you, David Weprin.)

First, via the Oil Drum, we learn that the Council on Foreign Relations has issued a pdf-formatted report that sounds an urgent tone about the security implications of the United States's dependence on energy imported from foreign, often hostile nations.

Council. On. Foreign. Relations. 

This is the illuminati speaking: A powerful group that has enormous influence, for better or for worse, on U.S. international policy. As a task force of 27 influentials frets that the global market on which oil is traded may not function properly in the future, it presents this chilling thesis: 

U.S. energy policy has been plagued by myths, such as the feasibility of achieving "energy independence" through increased drilling or anything else. For the next few decades, the challenge facing the United States is to become better equipped to manage its dependencies rather than pursue the chimera of independence.

Two concurring authors of the report issue a more dire statement in a concurring opinion: Our dependence on oil has:

Enriched and emboldened Iran, enabled President Vladimir Putin to undermine Russia's democracy, entrenched regressive autocrats in Africa, forestalled action against genocide in Sudan, and facilitated Venezuala's campaign against free trade in the Americas. Most gravely, oil consumers are in effect financing both sides of the war on terrorism. Transformation in the use of energy, especially in transportation where oil is unrivaled ... is essential.

The Dept. of Transportation's 2005 study showed there is no need to eliminate car-free hours during the holidays. So why did they do it this year?

Every November, year after year, the city sends two contradictory messages to motorists. On the one hand, it urges all those coming to the city during the holiday season to use mass transit. On the other, its Department of Transportation announces that to accommodate those who will be driving, the Central Park loop road will be open to traffic all day on weekdays from late November until early January, eliminating daytime car-free hours for the park's recreational users. In effect, the city is saying, "We encourage you to use mass transit, but if you want to drive, we have this lovely park you can motor through that we hope will speed your way to Midtown!"

This double message aside, DOT's own traffic data fails to demonstrate a need to throw open Central Park to traffic during the holiday season.

In 2004, the DOT studied the effects of entrance closings that had taken effect in November 2004 The report, published April 2005, can be found here: 2004 Holiday Traffic Plan: Central Park Drive Improvements (PDF file). As part of the study, the agency recorded traffic volumes at various entrances and exits on the loop drive and on several adjacent avenues both at the height of the 2004 holiday season (December 6-10 and 13-17) and after holiday hours had ended (January 10-14, 2005).

Unfortunately, DOT did not record traffic volumes during the five mid-day hours (10 am to 3 pm) that cars use the Park during the holiday period, but it did count cars during the morning and evening rush hours (7-10 am and 3-7 pm). One would expect that to justify opening Central Park to traffic all day, holiday traffic volumes would be substantially greater than during non-holiday periods. This is simply not the case. In fact, the data suggests there is less traffic.

See the world's first music video about shared-lane bike markings by Streetfilms Clarence Eckerson.

At times over the last two and a half years I have done quite a bit of organizing and advocacy work to help get new bicycle lanes and shared-lane markings installed on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, my neighborhood's main bike route. Though I was the community person leading the initiative and was often in close contact with the Department of Transportation staffers responsible for the project, I still found myself surprised when the bicycle stencils went down on the street a couple of weekends ago. The markings were different than what I had expected.

The main goal of the shared-lane markings, as I understood them based on my conversations with DOT, are to help motorists and cyclists know that bikes have a right to ride in the travel lane along the narrower stretch of the Avenue. As such, I expected that the stencils would be painted smack in the middle of the travel lane, similar to Berkeley, California's Bike Boulevard markings. Instead, the Fifth Avenue stencils, modeled after San Francisco's "Sharrows," were placed along one side of the travel lane, just outside the range of parked cars' doors.

Sharrows have been studied and tested and are supposed to provide real benefits to cyclists. Yet, to my eye, stencils along one side of the travel lane don't send the message that bikes have a right to the middle of the road. Rather, they seem to send the message that cyclists should be riding in the margins, squeezing between parked cars and moving traffic. I imagine a number of motorists will read them the same way and feel justified in blasting their horns at cyclists riding in front of them. This, I thought, was contrary to DOT and the community's goal for the shared-lane markings.

I don't bring this up to complain about the new markings or bash DOT. Overall, I think the stencils are a step forward and, though there was friction at times, I think the collaboration with DOT was constructive. I probably should have asked to see the design before the stencils went down. I bring up this issue to highlight the broader question of community involvement in designing and building New York City's growing bicycle network.

As thoughtful, involved (and occasionally cranky) cyclists debate bike lane design here on Streetsblog and as New York City's Department of Transportation embarks on its effort to produce 200+ miles of new bike lanes over the next three years, one of the big, outstanding questions is, simply: What is the most constructive way for cycling advocates and city government to work together and interact? How can we best put our heads together and use our resources to make New York a better biking city?

In trying to answer this question, it is worth taking another look at London' England's new Cycling Design Standards.

Why not Close New York City's Streets to Traffic More Often?

Sunday was New York City's 26.2-mile block party, a once-a-year occasion for residents and visitors alike to actually enjoy the city streets.

A recently announced economic-impact study of the 2005 race calculated that the marathon--complete with participants and spectators from near and far, sponsors, charities, media, prize money, and ancillary events--pours $188M into the city's economy, making it by far the city's most lucrative one-day sporting event. The race has such tremendous cache that nearly 100,000 applicants applied to be among the field of 37,000, and two-thirds of them traveled in from outside the area. And don't forget the other key numbers: two million spectators and 300 million TV viewers around the world. Concentrating on the race's impact in financial terms, however, is to miss its tremendous environmental, public health, and community-building benefits.

What makes the race so special that marathoners want to "run New York" more than anywhere else, and are willing to shell out megabucks to do so? Ask them, and they'll tell you that it's the city itself. In the days leading up to the race, marathoners see New York through rose-colored glasses. Training run in Central Park? Lucky you, we just happen to have more roadways closed due to marathon setup. Ready to pick up your number at Javits Center? Take a special free bus from Midtown! Need something to do on Saturday? How about a closed-street jog from the U.N. across 42nd Street and up to Central Park!

And then on Sunday, the whole city gets in on the action. For this one wonderful day, the same highway-like streets that shoot cars through our neighborhoods at all hours, making sidewalk socializing unpleasant and isolating neighbors from one another, magically transform into public commons. Spectators spill off of the narrow sidewalks into the roads as the sea of humanity passes by.

Of the ten largest cities in the United States, New York has far and away the greatest population density: 26,402.9 people per square mile, more than double the second densest big city, Chicago. The chart at right shows how the largest metropolitan areas stack up in terms of core population, overall population and core population density.  This fact alone should force New York City authorities to think differently than the rest of the country on all sorts of matters of public policy. New York is a quantitatively different animal than the other big American metropolitan regions in terms of percentage of people that live in the core, density and size of the core and size of the metropolitan area.

The movement for congestion pricing needs to start here, would inevitably start here and has started here. Here is a simple submission: People should pay for the privilege of bringing their air-polluting, noise polluting, lethal, two-ton pieces of private property onto the streets of such a dense place. But the reason for the payment shouldn't be for any of those unsavory attributes of the automobile.

Drivers everywhere should be required to pay for the cleanup that will be needed for their pollution, not just here. Many industries with more concentrated negative externalities, to use the economic term, are required to pay into funds that ameliorate the consequences of their pollution. G.E. had to pay to clean up the Hudson River after it contaminated the river with PCBs; motorists should have to pay to clean up their pollution too.

Noise pollution (namely, honking) isn't a problem unless there are people around to have to hear it. Here in New York, heavy fines are threatened on anyone who honks unnecessarily. We are also working toward a ban of audible car alarms.

As for the car's deadliness, its worst attribute, well, the engineers are working on it.

No, the best reason for congestion pricing is that cars get in the way of business.

As Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City says, "The gridlock on New York City's streets has become a brake on the city's economy." She warns, "It is going to be increasingly difficult for New York to market itself as a place where you can get the most done in the least period of time with the best workforce if we're not able to solve the congestion problem."

Traffic congestion slows you down when you're trying to get somewhere. It slows down the delivery of essentially goods throughout the city and slows the movement of people -- the city's most valuable economic input -- by clogging the roads that could be moving them along much more quickly with free flowing buses, cabs and bicycles. Traffic congestion gets in the way of emergency vehicles, no doubt contributing to the finding that heart attacks are more likely to be fatal in New York City than anywhere else in the nation. The fact that congestion pricing would lead to less air and noise pollution while improving the public realm is just a happy coincidence. But it is one that should make every New Yorker support congestion pricing, whether you're in favor of making New York into an efficient platform for commerce or you are concerned about a rise in sea levels or you simply want to live in a more pleasant, breathable city.

Congestion pricing is working in the world city most similar to New York and it would work here. In fact congestion pricing should be applied not just to New York, but to every city in the United States with more than 8 million people living at a density of greater than 25,000 people per square mile.

Talk about "eyes on the street," there is a group of New York City residents who patrol the city's streets and parks at all hours of the day and night, everyday. They are the city's dog owners and dog walkers. And they are under attack.

The boom in New York dog ownership owes itself in large part to an informal agreement that allows dog owners to take their dogs into parks between 9 pm and 9 am on any day of the week and let their dogs romp and roam parks unleashed.

Urban dog owners, like this one, know that their dogs are more well behaved when they have the chance to get a lot of exercise and socialize with other dogs and people. Where I grew up in suburban Staten Island, dogs were more territorial because, off the leash, they occupied only one small yard their entire lives, rarely interacting with other people and other dogs.

There is currently a lawsuit that would put an end to off-leash hours in city parks. Despite a 60 percent decline in the number of dogs bites in city parks over the past two decades, a Queens man wants the Parks Department and NYPD to enforce the city law mandating that dogs must be on leashes at all times in public.

That would be a bad enforcement policy. If the court rules that it must be enforced, many dog owners may be forced to leave the city for the suburbs. It also may encourage the return of criminals, drug dealers and anti-social behavior in park spaces that are currently well-used thanks to dogs and their owners.

The city's enforcement policy should continue to respect the current 9 pm to 9 am off-leash policy. The vast majority of dog owners realize that it is a privilege to let their pets roam free in the city parks and are good at self-policing. If a dog is particularly unfriendly or misbehaves frequently, an owner can be told to leash their dog. It's the sort of far sighted compromise that this city needs to do more often.

(Full disclosure: I was dog sitting an energetic Vizsla puppy this weekend)

Mayor Bloomberg offered a depressing-yet-enlightening dose of complacency about the city's traffic crunch this morning. Speaking at Museum of the City of New York's construction kickoff, Bloomberg explained that he'd arrived late because he'd been "huddled with Con Ed" to monitor power usage during the heatwave. After carping a bit about residents turning up their air conditioners at night, he turned to traffic. Normally he blames traffic for his tardiness, he noted, adding:

"Before I was mayor I blamed mayors for traffic. Now I blame Department of Transportation officials and Police Commissioners." After getting the laugh, the mayor gave the shrug: "We like traffic, it means economic activity, it means people coming here." Soon he left in a private car.

For those who are baffled at why New York City remains in the transportation policy dark ages, Bloomberg's off-the-cuff remark speaks volumes. While world cities like London and Paris are finding that reducing motor vehicle traffic in the urban core is a boon to local business, quality of life and overall competitiveness in the global economy, New York is still stuck in a 1950's traffic engineering mindset that insists the gridlock, honking, and spewing tailpipes of 1.1 million vehicles cramming into Manhattan each day is prerequisite for a healthy, vibrant urban economy.

Van Brunt and Wolcott Streets. Before paint, July 7. After paint, July 14.

The New York Observer's Real Estate reported that the woman struck by a mini-van pulling out of the Fairway Market parking lot in Red Hook on Thursday, July 6, has died. The Daily News identified her as Janett Ramos, 45, of Sunset Park.

Despite the rapid increase in Van Brunt Street traffic created by the new Fairway and Red Hook's booming development, the Department of Transportation has said that it will not begin studying the area's traffic until Fall. Nevertheless, the agency has restriped the intersection where Santos was killed as well as some other intersections along Van Brunt.

At the end of May, DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall found time between Fairway shopping trips to tell NY1, "We wanted the store to open up, we wanted to see people develop their traffic patterns, and then we'll be back here in the fall, we'll put our counters down, and we'll see if any of the corners will meet warrants to put up traffic lights."

Two editorial comments on the DOT's methodology in Red Hook:

1. Traffic signals and paint stripes are not the only or even the best tools for calming and controlling traffic in city neighborhoods. There is an entire school of engineering and street design called "traffic calming" (Warning: Links to a PDF document but it's worth the click). Van Brunt Street, a 16-block straightaway from the Battery Tunnel to the new grocery store, is a natural candidate for traffic calming.

We have reason to believe that DOT Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia does not like traffic calming and that he believes that his job is to keep the city's traffic moving, not to calm it. On June 23, 2003 at a meeting in Brooklyn Borough Hall, I watched Primeggia deliver the coup de grace to the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project, a six-year, $1.2 million community-driven initiative run by an internationally-respected consulting firm. Red Hook should not let one agency honcho stop it from demanding real traffic calming as a part of its development process.

2. Red Hook needs real transportation planning. In many cities, sometimes even in New York City, it is standard practice for transportation agencies to model and plan for traffic prior to the opening of big new grocery stores, cruise ship terminals and Swedish furniture behemoths. In Red Hook, Commissioner Weinshall has, essentially, chosen to identify trouble-spots by waiting to see where the traffic clogs and the bodies pile up. This is traffic engineering by body count.

It is similar to the methodology DOT used at Queens Boulevard, the infamous "Boulevard of Death," in the late 1990's. In the Queens Boulevard Pedestrian Safety Study, the City's consulting engineers only examined locations that had two crashes in the same spot. Their attitude was that one crash could just have been an accident. Two crashes indicates a real problem, worthy of mitigation.

On the one hand, you can't argue with success. Fatalities on Queens Boulevard are way down since DOT's re-engineering. Counting dead and injured bodies is clearly an effective way of identifying the worst vehicle-pedestrian conflict spots. On the other hand, it isn't particularly effective if you or someone you know is included in the counting.

There ought to be a way to plan and engineer New York City's streets without turning New Yorkers into human guinea pigs. But until we have a transportation agency capable of doing that, the beleagured residents of Red Hook may consider offering up a second human sacrifice at Van Brunt and Wolcott. That ought to warrant a traffic signal.

Photo: The Real Estate.