Streetsblog New York City

If you live in New York City, chances are you've already done your part this Earth Day with a car-free commute to work. As this week's featured Streetswiki article by DianaD reminds us, vehicle ownership in the five boroughs is far less common than in most areas of the U.S. -- even in relatively auto-centric Staten Island, where 18 percent of households are car-free.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, only 8% of American households do not own a car. Vehicle ownership is strongly related to distance traveled. People in households with at least one vehicle travel twice far as those in households without a vehicle. They also use a car for more than 90% of their trips, while those without a vehicle travel on foot or via transit 57% of the time. Households with a vehicle walk or take public transit for only 1% and 8% of their trips, respectively.

In addition to a more pedestrian-friendly street grid than most Americans enjoy, most New Yorkers owe their car-freedom, of course, to the MTA. However, even as the city looks to expand sustainable transportation options to complement its overworked mass transit system, the majority of its citizens remain at the mercy of motoring class lawmakers who spew anti-MTA vitriol like so much noxious CO2.

It would have been nice this April 22 to wake up to headlines announcing that the Fare Hike Four and their ilk had come to realize that they could, and should, promote a healthy transit system while reducing congestion and pollution. Unfortunately, news that good only comes on April 1.

This morning Sarah wrote about the excessive width of many American roads, which makes speeding all too tempting for drivers. So I'm going to bookend the day with this StreetsWiki entry on road diets -- the practice of reducing the number of travel lanes -- from author Andy Hamilton:

Photo: Dan Burden.

Road diets are anathema to traditional traffic engineering principles because they tend to reduce roadway capacity. However, in practice, road diets can cause vehicle speeds to readjust to a more optimal speed, increasing the throughput of vehicles per lane. For this reason, road diets sometimes reduce congestion, and generally always increase safety for all users of the roadway. Studies in Seattle found that road diets decreased the rate of crashes by 6%.

The need for road diets comes from the fact that multi-lane urban roads are built to handle large volumes of traffic during the morning and evening rush hours. Generally, during the other 22 hours of the day, the road is larger than necessary. This abundance of spare pavement encourages speeding, and places bicyclists and pedestrians at far higher risk than a typical two-lane road.

One of the references in this entry comes from Dan Burden and Peter Lagerwey's "Road Diets: Fixing the Big Roads," available as a PDF from Walkable Communities. It's a bit of an oldie but definitely a goodie if you're looking for more facts, figures, and stories about implementing road diets.

This week's featured StreetsWiki article is a detailed history of New York City community boards, by Lily Bernheimer. Evolving from then-Manhattan Borough President Robert F. Wagner's "Community Planning Councils" of the 1950s, the citywide system as we know it was established in 1975.

Ideally, community boards act to "foster community-based planning," but the very nature of the appointment process has often made them susceptible to top-down interference -- a reality that has more than once had an impact on the livable streets movement.

Board members are intended to convey community interests to their borough president (often in opposition to business or development), and yet are entirely beholden to him or her for their appointment. C. Virginia Fields served as Manhattan Borough President during her 2005 campaign for Mayor and was accused of "using her community board appointments as a kind of political club, selecting people who supported her in her race and firing those who did not." Still worse, in May of 2007 Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz "purged" Community Board 6 of nine members who had voted against the Atlantic Yards development he supports. After an even more dramatic purge of Bronx CB6 surrounding the Yankees Stadium proposal, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion was quoted to have said, "My very clear expectation is that these appointees are there to carry out a vision for the borough president and the leadership of this borough, and that's simply what I expect."

That said, as the entry notes, community boards are not without their success stories, even though they are limited to an advisory role. And if nascent efforts to reform the system take hold, the future may yield more benefits than setbacks.

In the meantime, this entry could benefit from a section on community boards and livable streets. There's certainly plenty of material. If you're game, the first step is setting up a Livable Streets account. 

It's no April Fools Day joke: Somehow, Livable Streets Community members have yet to create a StreetsWiki article on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

It's a heavy lift, for sure, but imagine the spin-off entries: Doomsday, The Fare Hike Four, bridge tolls, "so outside the box," MTA debt (with lead author Larry Littlefield, natch). The possibilities are endless.

Another chapter in the MTA saga will unfold tomorrow morning as transit riders fill out invoices addressed to David Paterson, Sheldon Silver and Malcolm Smith, "calling for commuters to be reimbursed for fast-approaching fare hikes." The event, sponsored by a coalition of advocacy groups, will run from 8:00 to 10:00 at Union Square, on the north side of 14th Street across from Whole Foods.

To help pen the story of the MTA, you'll need a Livable Streets account to get started. Like a drive over the East River bridges, it's totally free. 

We turn our attention this week to two StreetsWiki entries on how to get new bike racks for your neighborhood. A post originated by the Livable Streets Initiative's own Lily Bernheimer invites wiki users to submit info on prime potential locations "so that requests may be submitted to the NYCDOT in a more organized and pre-vetted fashion," while Lauri Schindler offers advice from the Park Slope Civic Council on how to place a bulk request with DOT.

The step-by-step process involves outreach to both the city and the neighborhood. As Schindler writes:

Our approach shifted some of the legwork from the DOT to the community, and as a result our request moved through the process rather quickly. Your neighborhood can do it too.

There is incredibly high demand for CityRacks these days around the city, so the more organized you are, the better. Understand that there may be a delay of several months before the racks are installed, especially during the warm season, but once you see orange dots at the proposed locations, racks will follow.

With makeshift bike racks in the form of parking meters rapidly disappearing and the possibility of more post-doomsday riders hitting the streets, demand isn't likely to drop anytime soon. Wonder if some of that stimulus cash could help hire more CityRacks installers.

One of the big challenges that federal policymakers will soon have to address is how to pay for a new generation of transportation investment. The federal gas tax, pegged at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, just isn't up to the job in its current form. There's a whole range of ideas on the table to fix the problem, and in this week's StreetsWiki entry, John Boyle, advocacy director for the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, points us to a potential revenue stream for transit, smart growth, and bike-ped projects:

The Clean Low-Emissions Affordable New Transportation Equity Act is a bill that sets aside revenue from a cap-and-trade program in a future climate bill towards green transportation projects that reduce greenhouse gases. CLEAN TEA was introduced in the House of Representatives in the 2009 session as H.R. 1329 and in the Senate as S. 575.

Under CLEAN TEA, ten percent of the revenue would be used to create a more efficient transportation system and lower greenhouse gas emissions through strategies including funding new or expanded transit or passenger rail; supporting development around transit stops; and making neighborhoods safer for bikes and pedestrians.

CLEAN TEA is contingent on some pretty big ifs, like whether a cap-and-trade program will make it through Congress. But the Obama administration projects raising $80 billion a year from auctioning off carbon emissions permits, and CLEAN TEA has sponsors from both parties in the House and the Senate, so this is definitely an idea with some momentum.

Ready for some transit system envy? This week's StreetsWiki entry comes from Livable Streets member Andrew Nash, who fills us in on how surface transit became the mode of choice in Zürich, Switzerland:

Photo: Nicholas Kibre/Wikipedia

The first thing one notices about Zürich is that trams are ubiquitous downtown. The city considered changing its tram network several times (either placing the trams underground or replacing the trams with a metro system), but voters rejected spending money on these ideas. However, in 1977, Zürich voters did approve an initiative to make the existing surface transit system work better by providing transit priority for trams and buses.

Transit priority means that public transit vehicles are given priority over other forms of transportation through such measures as traffic signal control, transit-only lanes, and traffic regulations. Watch carefully as a traffic signal changes from red to green just when a tram arrives at the intersection. Transit priority was not a new idea, but Zürich has succeeded in implementing it to a greater degree than almost any other city in the world. Zürich's public transit priority program is described in Implementing Zurich's Transit Priority Program.

Combined with Zürich's regional rail network, the extensive implementation of transit priority techniques enables the city to provide subway-like service without a subway, Nash explains. If the Zürich article interests you, check out Nash's entry on optimizing traffic signals for surface transit -- he's looking to add information about other cities that have implemented such systems.

There's no place quite like Times Square, and no exact precedent for the reclamation of street space along Broadway that Mayor Bloomberg and NYCDOT unveiled last week. But London's pedestrian improvements to Trafalgar Square certainly invite comparison. DianaD describes those changes in this week's StreetsWiki entry:

Because it formed the intersection of some of London’s busiest roads (junction of Whitehall, The Mall, The Strand and Charing Cross roads), Trafalgar Square had become an "undignified traffic roundabout." Visitors had to cross several lanes of traffic, which carried 1500 cars per hour, to reach the central monuments.

The redesign, completed in 2003, transformed the space in front of the National Gallery from this:

To this:

Check out Diana's entry for more of the story.

If New York could set up red light cams and speeding cams at its discretion to catch scofflaw motorists, there's no doubt the city would be a much safer place. When it comes to automated enforcement, however, the state legislature holds many of the cards. Fortunately, there are other techniques available to NYPD to better protect pedestrians -- techniques that don't require Albany's blessing. One of them is the "Crosswalk Sting," described by Andy Hamilton in this week's StreetsWiki entry:

We're walkin' here! Photo courtesy of Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center Image Library, Dan Burden.

A Crosswalk Sting or "pedestrian decoy operation" is an enforcement and public education action in which plainclothes police officers cross at marked or unmarked crosswalks, and drivers who fail to yield to them are given warnings or tickets. An important aspect of the action is notifying the media ahead of time to ensure good coverage of the crosswalk sting, providing broader community awareness. Crosswalk stings have been found to significantly increase yielding by drivers.

Skeptical that this technique would have much of an effect in a big American city? It's certainly no substitute for automated enforcement, but in Miami, Andy reports, one study documented safer driver behavior in the wake of crosswalk stings:

Extensive anecdotal reports suggest police and residents find that crosswalk stings increase yielding by motorists to pedestrians in crosswalks. Very few controlled studies have been performed. A 2004 study of a sting operation in Miami, Florida, found that crosswalk stings did in fact increase yielding.  Further, the researchers found, "these increases were sustained for a period of a year with minimal additional enforcement, and that the effect generalized to untreated crosswalks... as well as crosswalks with traffic signals."

How great would it be if an NYPD sergeant tipped off the Shame Shame Shame crew (although maybe Arnold Diaz isn't the man for the job) and busted some crosswalk violators on New York's mean streets? That officer would be a hero in my book.

The inclusion of $825 million for Transportation Enhancements in the stimulus package should help pay for a lot of bike projects. Writing for Citiwire this week, transportation analyst Sam Seskin suggests investing a chunk of that stimulus money in bicycle boulevards, as opposed to bike lanes or cycle tracks. What are bike boulevards? This week's StreetsWiki entry explains:

Bicycle boulevards are lightly-trafficked streets that prioritize bicycles. Although many routes have no bike lanes, bicyclists are free to use the middle of the street, sharing road space with cars. Motorists on these routes expect to see bicyclists and therefore travel with caution. Designated streets should be distinguished with uniformly colored signs and bold pavement markings.

For novices or younger riders, bicycle boulevards provide a transition between bike paths and high-traffic shared roads. But they are also quite useful for experienced riders because of their reduced traffic and connectivity.

The cost of implementing a bicycle boulevard network is significantly less than constructing bike paths or trails.

In Portland and Berkeley, transportation planners have created bike boulevard conditions by diverting automobile through-traffic and slowing down the cars that remain. The resulting bike-friendly corridors are a key component of Portland's strategy to increase bicycle mode share and expand the appeal of cycling beyond the "young and fearless" demographic.