Streetsblog New York City

Manhattan Community Board 7 approved a resolution Tuesday in support of protected bike lanes for the Upper West Side. According to Streetsblog readers who attended and the Westside Independent web site, a mostly positive discussion on the merits of such improvements -- in front of a packed house of residents wearing "Protected Bike Lanes Protect Everyone" stickers -- preceded a 28-7 vote. Here's the reso in full:

Protected bike lanes have brought measurable safety improvements to other neighborhoods in Manhattan.

Many members of the Upper West Side public, business community, and elected officials have all expressed support for protected bike lanes in petitions, surveys, letters, and public testimony.

Community Board 7 wishes to encourage safe responsible cycling in, to, and from this district.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT Community Board 7/Manhattan supports the Department of Transportation's initiative to create protected bike lanes and requests that DOT prepare a proposal for Class 1 protected bike lanes on Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue (including information on projected impacts on: bike safety, pedestrian safety, business operations and interests, parking, truck traffic etc.) that would be subject to review and comment by Community Board 7.

We also have word that Community Board 8 unanimously approved a "pro-bike" resolution last night. More details on this jarring development as they become available.

A few exciting technology-related items have come over the transom in the past couple of days. 

First, courtesy of Streetsblog Network member Living Car-Free in Big D, news of Walkshed, a prototype web application to measure walkability. Building on the concept embodied by the popular Walk Score app -- which allows users to see what amenities are close to any given address -- Walkshed goes to the next level. Rather than measuring "as the crow flies" distances, it factors in the presence of sidewalks, highways and other variables when calculating the pedestrian accessibility of things like grocery stores, movie theaters and other services.

It also allows users to customize their preferred amenities. For some people, being close to a day care facility is a priority. For others, it's nightclubs. Walkshed lets you tailor the program's preferences.

The creation of Aaron Ogle (@atogle), Walkshed is so far only available only in a beta version for the city of Philadelphia, but the possibilities are exciting.

In another welcome web-based development, Google announced yesterday on its Lat Long Blog that the availability of new data means that bike directions are forthcoming (date unspecified) from Google Maps (h/t to TOPP's own @philipashlock).

And finally, SeeClickFix -- which enables citizens to report everything from potholes to unheated apartments to their local governments -- has just launched the capability for 25,000 more towns around the country to use the service. You can find out more about how SeeClickFix works here.

Keep clicking.

Today was International Walk to School Day, and according to this Audi commercial, if you participated you're a big loser.

In all seriousness, this has to be one of the most obnoxious spots we've featured on Streetsblog. Basically, per Audi: If you take transit, you're a glutton for punishment; if you ride a bike, you're a hapless weenie.

But Audi owners? They're just like you: "trying to do their part" for the environment. Only they do it by driving a $30,000, fossil fuel-burning, CO2-emitting private automobile. Though it is "clean diesel" -- you can pretty much drink that stuff, right?

And judging by how the A3 is portrayed zipping along a curvy mountain road, leaving lesser vehicles in its wake, you'd best stay out of the way while Audi drivers go about saving the planet. Weenie.

Chris Leinberger discusses strategies to develop walkable urban spaces in the United States. Photo: Mathew Katz

If the American Dream of the Baby Boomers was all about being able to have a car and a house in suburbia, the new American Dream is having the choice between living in drivable suburban places and walkable urban ones.

That's according to Chris Leinberger, a land use strategist at the Brookings Institution, who spoke today at the Walk21 Conference. There's a simple supply-and-demand argument, Leinberger says, for creating more walkable urban space: About the the same number of people want to live in a pedestrian-friendly environment as those who want to live in a drivable suburban one, but the supply of housing in walkable urban areas makes up only 5 to 10 percent of housing nationwide. As millions of New Yorkers know, that leads to exceedingly high prices. 

But that's not always a bad thing. Sarah Gaventa, Director of CABE Space in the U.K., said that her organization managed to prove that walkability adds value to nearby property and attracts investment. CABE developed a scale to rate pedestrian-friendliness called the Pedestrian Environment Rating System (PERS). For every point on the PERS scale, neighborhoods saw a 5.2 percent increase in residential prices and a 4.9 percent increase in retail rent. Attracting more retail and consumers also means more jobs, though there should be incentives to maintain local businesses and affordable housing, Gaventa said. Having proof that making a space more pedestrian friendly will add value to it is a great way to convince those in power that change -- and a more comprehensive strategy -- is needed.

IBM's Smarter Planet project, which uses technology (and sometimes plain old polling) in an effort to revamp urban infrastructure, today signed deals with transit agencies in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. to "smartly" manage the ins and outs of keeping trains and buses running.

New York's LIRR, San Francisco's BART, and D.C.'s Metro plan to install the Maximo software, a program that anticipates and schedules preventive maintenance on rail cars, tracks, buses, and other equipment. Reads an IBM press release:

The LIRR will use IBM technology to manage and maintain approximately 1,180 rail cars, locomotives, and their associated parts to improve operations and passenger safety. As part of a project expected to be completed in 2012, IBM will also be helping the LIRR expand its asset management system to include facilities, bridges, and tunnels.

The move could prove particularly beneficial for D.C., which was urged by federal safety regulators to phase out the older rail car model that was involved in a fatal accident in June but found itself short of cash to fund a full-scale replacement. In a statement on the IBM deal, Metro's deputy information technology chief said a recent meeting with China's Guangzhou Metro, which also uses Maximo, helped pave the way for the agreement.

Tell DOT you prefer the safer, saner Times Square. Photo: nickdigital/Flickr

If you're enjoying these new public spaces, and don't want to see Times Square return to the state pictured above, now's a good time to say so.

The City Council Transportation Committee will consider a slate of bills Thursday. Several of them should be of particular interest to livable streets advocates. Here's a rundown.

• Intro 624: This is Jessica Lappin's effort to hold businesses responsible for traffic law violations committed by bike delivery personnel. The bill was inspired in part by Upper East Side constituent complaints about restaurant employees and other commercial delivery workers riding on sidewalks.
• Intro 901, from committee chair, presumptive comptroller-elect and rock star John Liu, would mandate all commercial parking facilities to set aside 10 percent of spaces, or 10 spots, whichever is less, for car-sharing programs.
• Intro 947: Responding to the deaths of Robert Ogle and Alex Paul and Diego Martinez and Hayley Ng, Queens Council Member Elizabeth Crowley's bill would raise the fine for unattended idling vehicles to $250. The current fine: five bucks.
• Continuing his crusade against the travesty that is parking enforcement, Vincent Gentile's Intro 1076 would require DOT to give 60 days notice to community boards and council members in advance of changes to parking meter regulations.
• Intro 1077, another Gentile bill, looks as if it would basically codify DOT's current practice of presenting new projects -- pilot projects, specifically -- to community boards prior to implementation.

In the end the votes matter most, but it's interesting that Gentile, for instance, is not a co-sponsor of Crowley's anti-idling bill or Liu's car-sharing intro, but is on board with Lappin's commercial cyclist regulations. Guess we all have our priorities.

Tomorrow's hearing, one of the last of Liu's tenure as committee chair, convenes in the council chambers at 10 a.m.

The Obama administration has brought both good news and bad news to transit riders. But here's a positive sign you haven't heard before, straight from Federal Transit Administration chief Peter Rogoff: In the nine months of the new presidency, the FTA has fielded more requests for information "directly from the White House" than in the entire eight years of the Bush administration.

President Obama, on a train. Photo: NYT

Rogoff, formerly a veteran aide to the Senate Appropriations Committee, dropped that intriguing fact and several others in a speech yesterday at the American Public Transportation Association's annual meeting in Orlando.

In fact, the FTA chief openly marveled at the White House's appetite for talking up transit.

"[E]ven though we provide an unprecedented amount of material to the White House on these issues," Rogoff said, "we still don't know who is writing all this stuff. We don't need to know. We just need to soak it in and keep leaning forward."

In no-holds-barred style, Rogoff, also declared an end to the days of highways taking precedence over transit because the former falsely purport to be"paid for" by user fees.

"That paradigm is now dead," he said. "It's been dead for well over a year, [since] the highway trust fund first had to be bailed out with an $8 billion infusion of general fund revenues. The only thing that's happened since then is that Congress was required to put billions more in general fund revenues into the highway trust fund to keep our highway investments flowing."

Check out Rogoff's complete remarks after the jump.

Photo: Hannah Whitaker/New York Magazine

It's probably a good sign that New York Magazine just published "The Everything Guide to the Bike Commute." When New York tackles a topic, it means it's becoming more mainstream for their own particularly affluent slice of the city's population. And the more people safely taking sustainable, clean forms of transportation to work, the better.

The guide is far from comprehensive, and is geared for the most part to those who are relatively new to biking the city's streets, offering basic safety tips and recommendations on stuff to buy (this is New York magazine, after all). Perhaps the most useful item is a step-by-step guide to the city's new Bicycle Access Law, for office workers who want their employers to offer bike parking.

And even the most dedicated bike commuters will likely be impressed by the magazine's profile of Joe Simonetti. He's a clinical social worker who for 10 years has been bike commuting 44 miles from Westchester to midtown -- a three-hour ride he does twice a week, complete with illegal scenic shortcuts and a breakfast stop.

In honor of International Walk to School Day, we're going to look at a post from Minnesota's Twin Cities about what you might call Wouldn't It Be Great If You Could Walk Your Kid to Preschool Day.

Streetsblog Network member Net Density makes the excellent point that for parents of preschool-age children, having child care within a quarter-mile of their homes can be the make-or-break factor in whether they choose an active commute (by foot, bike, or transit).

After some impressive number-crunching, the blog's author comes up with the conclusion that only between 13 and 16 percent of people in Minneapolis-St. Paul live within that distance of adequate child care options. Which makes for a planning challenge:

Most people don’t make housing decisions based on child care access, so depending on what you can afford, and where you want to locate, good child care access may or may not be available in your area.

So as planners and policy makers trying to leverage the multiple benefits of a non-auto commute (health, environmental, social), what role do we have in trying to improve this access? Or, in other words, how can we address this barrier and allow more people to get active? What tools can we use to do so?

Anyone out there want to step forward with some ideas? We're listening.

More from the network: Cincy Streetcar Blog has an excellent photo essay that makes a case against Issue 9, an anti-passenger rail initiative on the ballot in that city this fall. Bicycle Ambassadors demonstrates some justified pride about Philadelphia's bike commute numbers. And Portlandize takes on the question of who pays for bike infrastructure -- and auto infrastructure.

We linked to a story in this morning's headlines about yesterday's brawl between a yellow cab driver and a pedicab operator in midtown. A Fox 5 reporter on the scene covering the sex scandal du jour caught the whole thing on video. Via Gothamist, here it is.

It looks like the pedicab driver, tired of being honked at by the cabbie, throws his coffee at the taxi as the two exchange words. Not the most conciliatory course of action, to be sure, but the cab driver then raises the stakes considerably, accelerating and slamming into the pedicab. The pedicab operator hits the taxi with both fists, the cab driver exits the vehicle, and a street brawl ensues in the middle of the intersection of Broadway and 53rd.

The pedicab operator eventually throws a trash can at the cab driver, then pedals away. The cab driver sticks around to talk to police. You can't hear what they're saying, but at one point he appears to be pointing to damage to his cab. As with other drivers who've attacked cyclists and pedestrians with their vehicles recently, it's doubtful he 'fessed up to instigating the collision himself.

From a livable streets perspective, there's a lot to digest here. Consider this an open thread on incivility, street space hierarchy, vehicular violence, pedicabs and yellow cabs, or whatever strikes you about this pathetic episode.

Our first user-generated slide show, on bike traffic, was a lot of fun. (See it here.) This time out, we're looking for pictures that show cars -- the most inefficient form of transportation -- hogging public space.

Reader Evan Goldin has already sent along a few, including the image at right, which he snapped with his iPhone at the 22nd Street Caltrain Station in San Francisco. He says it's a common situation for the commuters leaving the station to be forced into a tiny space by cars parked so that they take up half the sidewalk.

You see this stuff all the time, right? People and bikes being pushed aside by cars? Take some pictures of it. Send them to sarah [at] streetsblog [dot] org. Or tag them "streetsblog" and "spacehog" in Flickr. We'll make another cool slide show.

So far almost all our submissions are from the coastal states. Let's change that. We want to see what you're seeing in the South, the Midwest, the Southwest. Everywhere. Outside the U.S. is good, too.

Get your entries in by the end of the day Friday, and we'll get the results up next week. We can't do it without you.

We've posted many times on NYPD bus lane abuse, so it's nice to have this reader-submitted shot. This scofflaw driver was tagged Monday evening on E. 57th Street between Madison and Fifth -- just in time for bus passengers to witness a rare act of traffic law enforcement.

With new MTA chief Jay Walder citing bus lane blockage as a top priority, hopefully we'll be seeing a lot more of this. Who knows, maybe there's even an order of concrete on the first 100 days' agenda.