Streetsblog New York City

Every day, 32,000 bus riders traverse Manhattan on 125th Street, crossing Harlem at a glacial pace. Improvements are on the way as part of the next round of Select Bus Service improvements, with DOT and the MTA recently holding a second public workshop (PDF) for the project, though the precise changes that bus riders can expect remain to be determined.

The M60 is the busiest of the street’s four major lines, carrying 9,600 passengers per day, with most of them making local trips (only one in ten M60 riders take the bus to LaGuardia Airport). As it moves down 125th Street, the M60 spends 60 percent of its time stopped in traffic and moves at an average of 2.7 miles per hour, according to a DNAinfo report on this Monday’s workshop. That’s not any faster than the typical walking speed, and far below the citywide average bus speed of 7.7 mph.

What’s causing these delays? A big part of the answer will come as no surprise to anyone who takes the bus in Harlem: Illegal parking. Bus drivers must constantly weave around illegally parked cars and jockey with traffic, slowing their trips to a crawl.

DOT set up a camera on every block of 125th Street between Second and Amsterdam Avenues, taking a photo every 60 seconds from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. The camera between Fifth and Madison Avenues captured double-parked drivers 41 percent of the day, according to DNAinfo.

At the first public workshop, DOT and MTA announced that 125th Street is in line to receive a slate of improvements similar to those seen on other Select Bus Service corridors, including dedicated bus lanes, off-board fare collection, low-floor buses, priority for buses at stop lights and reducing the number of stops served by SBS buses. Scheduled for completion by 2014, the changes are projected to speed rides from Morningside Heights to LaGuardia by at least 12 percent, with the biggest gains coming between Lexington Avenue and the airport, where trips will be up to 18 percent faster.

The rampant illegal parking also highlights the need to price the curb and enforce the rules so double-parked vehicles don’t block the bus lane.

Read more…

This morning, as lawmakers inside the Michigan statehouse heard testimony on the creation of a regional transit system for greater Detroit, supporters held a musical demonstration outside, singing “Ain’t no mountain high enough to keep us from getting a regional transit authority.” The singers, who hailed from the city proper and its suburbs, are hoping the divided metropolitan region can finally enact the transit unity that has long eluded it.

The fragmentation of Detroit’s transit system, which is currently served by the Detroit Department of Transportation within city limits and the suburban SMART bus system outside, is a major culprit of the region’s poor transit service.

This is the twenty-fourth time over the last few decades state leaders have attempted to create a regional transit system for greater Detroit, and it seems like this proposal could go the distance. Yesterday, the Michigan Senate gave its support to plans for an RTA, setting aside some vehicle registration fees toward the goal.

The Michigan House of Representatives this morning heard testimony on legislation that would open the door for an RTA. Supporters told representatives that passage is a top priority of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder. A representative of the suburban SMART transit system said that for every public dollar devoted to transit  in southeast Michigan, the region could expect to reap as much as eight dollars in added private investment.

Megan Owens of the group Transit Riders United said the House is not expected to decide the matter until next week. But where past attempts have been thwarted by suburban-urban tensions, Owens is feeling hopeful that this time a regional system will prevail, thanks to the broad coalition that advocates have built.

Read more…

The city and state need to shift gears to create a more resilient transportation network in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a group of New York University transportation researchers argue in a report released this morning. Chief among their recommendations: New York must get serious about Bus Rapid Transit and create permanent, physically-separated transit lanes to keep bus riders from getting stuck in traffic.

With the subways unable to cross the East River due to power outages and flooding, “the exceedingly intense traffic gridlock that the city experienced was reminiscent of scenes from Sao Paulo and Jakarta: emerging megacities that struggle to provide adequate capacity,” write authors Sarah Kaufman, Carson Qing, Nolan Levenson, and Melinda Hanson of NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management.

A wide variety of transportation options picked up the slack in the storm’s wake. Privately-owned commuter vans filled gaps in transit service, the East River Ferry doubled its typical fall weekday ridership to more than 7,400, and 30,000 bike commuters — more than double the average — crossed the East River bridges.

A make-shift system of express buses served the most people, with subway passengers transferring to buses at three locations in Downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg. At the two transfer points in Downtown Brooklyn, the MTA loaded 3,700 passengers per hour onto the Manhattan-bound “bus bridge,” which the report hails as “New York’s first truly exclusive busways.”  The report lauds interagency cooperation after the storm, noting that NYPD’s bus lane and HOV-3 enforcement played a critical role in keeping the way clear for bus riders.

While the long lines waiting for buses showed that “impromptu Bus Rapid Transit” can’t replace full subway service, the authors say the post-Sandy transport plan also illustrated how real BRT routes could enhance the city’s transportation options. As Capital New York noted last week, NYC’s Select Bus Service is a solid upgrade over conventional buses, but doesn’t perform well enough to qualify as Bus Rapid Transit.

Read more…

Supporters of livable streets may hear about the “flexibility” of transportation dollars and cringe – after all, that word often refers to the ability of states to use bike/ped money for road building. But flexibility can work both ways. Between 2007 and 2011, states devoted $5 billion in surface transportation funds — known in some quarters as “highway money” — to transit programs, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The GAO just issued its second report on state flexing of highway dollars for transit. In its first report, the GAO found that states used 13 percent of their flexible highway funds for transit. That share has declined to 10 percent. The GAO did not offer an explanation for the drop.

Since 29 percent of federal transportation dollars are available to states to spend on just about any surface mode, that means about 3 percent of all federal funding is getting “flexed” to transit. Between 2007 and 2011, the GAO found, “four states — California, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia — accounted for the majority of flexible funding transferred to FTA for transit projects.” Each of those four states used more than 25 percent of their flexible funds for transit. Meanwhile, 16 states sent transit less than 2 percent of their flexible funding, with Arkansas, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Delaware, and Hawaii flexing nothing.

The variation between states highlights a rarely remarked upon aspect of transportation funding: There’s a lot of room for states to spend more on transit under current law, if they choose. In fact, transit dollars go farther when states use these funds, because they only have to pony up the same local match that’s required for highways – usually 20 percent. The local match for transit projects is typically upwards of 50 percent.

Read more…

New York City transit riders haven’t had much to be thankful for recently. Sure, countdown clocks have arrived on some subway lines, and buses are moving faster on the routes where the MTA and NYC DOT have implemented Select Bus Service. But overall, the story of NYC transit the last few years has been about service cuts and fare hikes, as the MTA struggles with rising costs and volatile revenues.

The worst of it is that paying more for less service was preventable. Twice in the last five years, proposals to stabilize transit funding gained political momentum only to stall in Albany — first in 2008 when congestion pricing cleared the City Council but died in the Assembly, then in 2009 when a handful of NYC-based state senators blocked the establishment of bridge tolls on the East River and Harlem River crossings. It was abundantly clear that some state legislators thought they could act against the interests of their transit-riding constituents with impunity.

One person with an inside view of the bridge toll saga was John Raskin, who at the time served as chief-of-staff to one of Albany’s most pro-transit legislators, State Senator Daniel Squadron. In 2011, Raskin brought his background in community organizing and politics to a new project. With a braintrust that included Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign and Michael Freedman-Schnapp, the policy director for City Council Member Brad Lander, Raskin set out to complement and strengthen NYC’s transit advocacy coalition.

What emerged is a new organization, called the Riders Alliance, focused on grassroots transit advocacy and mobilization. After laying the groundwork for six months (and landing some impressive press coverage), the Riders Alliance is making its public launch tonight at the Bubble Lounge on West Broadway.

I recently got on the phone with Raskin to talk about what the Riders Alliance has been up to in its formative days, the role the organization fills in the universe of NYC transit advocacy, and what it takes for riders to get through to Albany. Here’s our Q&A, edited for length and clarity.

Ben Fried: What was the need you saw — what led you to launch the Riders Alliance?

John Raskin: There are a lot of organizations involved in transit advocacy, and they do really important work: Transportation Alternatives, the Straphangers Campaign, Tri-State Transportation Campaign, RPA, and many others. But no one is going neighborhood by neighborhood and building the grassroots constituency to support transit. We’re working on local issues, both to address the very local problems that impact people’s experience riding the subway or bus, and also to develop grassroots leadership in the community who can advocate for their own needs.

We’re already working with one group of transit riders in Bay Ridge who are interested in more frequency on the R, as well as improved bus service. We also have a group of G train riders who are interested in more service, better communications with riders, and common-sense changes to stations on the G Train.

BF: Transit advocacy campaigns have struggled to get traction in the state legislature, and you’ve seen that up close. How can people get the attention of legislators in Albany?

JR: There’s a stereotype that Albany legislators don’t care about their constituents’ concerns. But one surprising experience I had in Albany is that legislators are often very responsive to constituent needs. What that means is that it’s the responsibility of advocates to get constituents to get in touch with their legislators about local issues that matter. I think transit is one of those issues.

Read more…

Remember those wizards of counter-intuition, the Freakonomics guys? You know, the ones who told their audience that it’s safer to drive drunk than to walk drunk? Well, in his latest piece for NPR’s Marketplace, which ran with the headline “Save the Earth, Drive Your Car,” Stephen Dubner talks to Clemson University’s Eric Morris and arrives at the ridiculous conclusion that driving is greener than transit.

The intellectually dishonest argument rests on the per-passenger energy consumption of cars versus buses. Buses are potentially much more efficient than cars, Morris admits. But many buses are underutilized: The average bus carries just 10 passengers, while the average car carries 1.6. As a result, Morris says, those traveling by bus consume 20 percent more energy per passenger than people driving in cars. (American trains, he concedes, are two-thirds more efficient than cars on this measure, but he qualifies that by saying the “number is warped a bit by the New York City subway, which is just a monster of efficiency.”)

So let’s say you’re an average, environmentally-concerned Joe, and you take this segment to literally mean that you should, in fact, “drive a car” to “save the earth.” How would that affect the environment? Well, the decision to take transit would consume essentially no additional energy — you would be using the system that’s at your disposal. While driving a car would spew greenhouse gases into the air that would otherwise stay in your fuel tank. It is pretty clear which choice is better for the environment, and it’s the intuitive one.

Midway through the article, after slagging transit with their big, attention-grabbing counter-intuitive point, Dubner and Morris admit that getting more people to use existing transit is unequivocally good for the planet. What they actually want to warn people about is building new transit, which won’t work “in places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Memphis” because the routes will be under-used. This, too, is incredibly dishonest.

Places like Cleveland have weakened the transit systems they were endowed with by creating every possible incentive to drive. If anything, the “hidden side” of this issue that Morris and Dubner play up for its counter-intuitive shock value — energy consumed per passenger mile — just points to the disastrous environmental consequences of planning communities around driving. The low ridership on Cleveland’s passenger trains is testament to poor planning, not an indictment of transit. Check out the pedestrian environments around some of Cleveland’s rapid transit stations:

Read more…

While some coastal areas in Staten Island cope with the devastation of Sandy, the city is moving ahead with a public meeting tonight about a parking-saturated mega-development for the north end of the island. According to one developer, the project will include “every possible bit of parking” that can be built there. At the same time, the developers will contribute nothing to improve surface transit to the site, even though it is located in the most transit-accessible part of Staten Island and the MTA is planning a new busway that will directly serve the area.

The city’s proposal to build a 1.46 million square-foot regional shopping, entertainment, and hotel complex in St. George would concentrate development in a transit-accessible location and improve pedestrian connections between Richmond Terrace and the waterfront. But these benefits stand to be overshadowed by a huge amount of parking — 2,200 spaces — that will disrupt the pedestrian environment and attract street-clogging car trips.

The project will include between 50 and 125 retailers, a 200-room hotel, waterfront restaurants, a banquet facility, and — who could forget? — the world’s largest ferris wheel.

Today, the site has 1,606 parking spaces, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation: a 230-space EDC lot southeast of the Staten Island Yankees stadium, two DOT commuter lots totaling 556 spaces at the Staten Island Ferry terminal and an 820-space EDC lot northwest of the ballpark. The complex as currently proposed would include 2,200 parking spaces, which is intended not only for visitors to the new development but also Staten Island Yankees fans and ferry riders, according to EDC.

“All the parking spaces that were removed for these developments will be replaced, and then some,” Mayor Bloomberg said at the press conference announcing the development.

“We’re kind of hoping that demands at certain hours of the day will offset each other,” Joe Ferrara of project developer BFC Partners told the Staten Island Advance. Streetsblog reached out to BFC for more information but has not received a reply. A three-level garage on the “south site” (the retail-hotel complex near the ferry terminal) will have 1,250 spaces, while 950 (plus 20 spaces for buses) will be in a garage on the “north site,” which will have additional retail and restaurant space and the New York Wheel.

When asked why 950 spaces are planned for the north site, Richard A. Marin, president and CEO of New York Wheel, LLC, told Streetsblog, “We’re at 950 because that’s basically what we can fit into the space that we have” without obstructing the views of nearby residents. “It’s not because of any programmatic things that we’re doing,” he said. “We literally are putting every possible bit of parking on that spot that we can.”

The project’s north site is seeking LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council to be designated as one of the nation’s most environmentally-friendly new buildings.

Read more…

In addition to some of the high-profile measures that we covered already, Election Day brought many successes on some smaller ballot initiatives. According to the Center For Transportation Excellence, pro-transit campaigns had an 80 percent success rate this year at the ballot box, with more ballot measures coming up for a vote than any previous year.

Arlington County, Virginia voted by a 4-to-1 margin to approve a $32 million bond, with about half the proceeds supporting Washington Metro capital projects and the rest paying for street repair, bike/ped infrastructure, and traffic calming. The path to victory is easy in Arlington – it’s the country’s third-wealthiest county, and no bond measure has failed there since 1979, according to the Washington Post.

Richland County, South Carolina, home to the city of Columbia and the University of South Carolina, passed a one-cent sales tax – one-quarter of which will pay for regional bus service, with the rest funding road improvements, greenways, and bike lanes.

In Lynden, Washington, outside of Bellingham, voters approved a 0.2-cent sales tax hike expected to bring in $300,000 over two years to pay for road maintenance and walking trails.

And Stephenson County, Illinois, approved an advisory measure voicing support for a countywide transit system funded by federal, state, and local sources.

Much of this information comes from the Center For Transportation Excellence, which tracks transit-related ballot measures. CFTE doesn’t track referendums for road projects, so don’t take the passage of these measures to mean that transit is uniquely successful at the ballot. The biggest bond measure to pass this year — for anything — was $1.3 billion for roads in Arkansas. Despite the fact that it levied a half-cent sales tax to pay for the bonding, voters approved it 58 to 42. Alaska also approved a $453 million bond measure to pay for ports, harbors, and roads. And Maine approved a $51.5 million bond for road repair [PDF].

Read more…

Last night delivered some good results — and some disappointment — for transit-related ballot initiatives around the country.

The biggest disappointments came from Los Angeles, Memphis, and Houston.

A measure to continue the half-cent sales tax for transit in Los Angeles County until 2069 was narrowly defeated, falling less than two percent short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage, Damien Newton reports at Streetsblog Los Angeles.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had championed Measure J, which would have raised revenues to accelerate the pace of construction projects like the West Side Subway. But a coalition of bus riders and other interests who don’t fit the “anti-transit” label opposed the 30-year measure, saying the projects favored new construction over existing riders. Still, the referendum got a “yea” from 65 percent of voters — a clear majority, but not quite the two-thirds vote required in California.

Meanwhile, residents of the city of Memphis rejected, in a 60-40 vote, an innovative measure to impose a one-cent gas tax hike to fund transit improvements. The measure would have generated between $3 and $6 million annually to shore up the city’s bare-bones transit system, the local ABC affiliate reports. Memphis is unusual in having the authority to impose its own gas tax, separate from state and federal gas taxes, but it appears that resident declined to use that authority this time around.

Transit suffered a loss in Houston as well. The region’s voters upheld Metro’s policy of diverting one-quarter of the revenues collected for transit to road projects. The measure was opposed by transit advocates like Houston Tomorrow‘s David Crossley, who argued that this transfer has cost the Houston region $2.7 billion in transit improvements over the past 35 years.

On to the good news: There was cause for jubilation in Virginia Beach and in Orange County, North Carolina.

Read more…

It’s Election Day — finally! The top of the ticket has sucked most of the oxygen out of the room, but don’t forget that there are 19 transportation-related measures on ballots across the country. So far this year, pro-transit measures have an 86 percent success rate at the ballot, and there are more transportation amendments being voted on this year than any other in recent memory. Here’s Streetsblog’s overview of the big ones.

Yonah Freemark took a look at some of the most important local elections here, spotlighting 11 charter amendments and one mayoral race, in Honolulu, which we also profiled. And below, we crib from Jeff Wood’s fantastic roundup of where to find election results at his blog, The Overhead Wire. He’ll also be live-blogging and tweeting election results.

For a little historical perspective, here’s Jeff’s coverage of the 2008 results and the 2010 results and, of course, the fantastic wealth of information at the Center For Transportation Excellence’s website.

What follows is from The Overhead Wire.

California
Alameda County is looking for a half cent sales tax increase in order to help AC Transit operate better bus service and build a horrible BART extension to Livermore. Measure B1 results can be found here. 

Los Angeles County needs a 66.6% or higher vote to extend 2008′s Measure R so that projects can be fastracked. Measure J results can be found here.

Colorado
El Paso County is looking to pass a sales tax measure that would benefit rural transit capital projects. Results can be found here.

Hawaii 
The Mayors Race is likely to decide the direction of rail transit over the next decade. Ben Cayetano wants to halt the project and has his own plan for BRT. Honolulu election results here.

Read more…