Streetsblog New York City

Gary Toth is director of transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces. This post first appeared on PPS’s Placemaking Blog.

Would you use a rototiller to get rid of weeds in a flowerbed? Of course not. You might solve your immediate goal of uprooting the weeds — but oh, my, the collateral damage that you would do.

Yet when we try to eliminate congestion from our urban areas by using decades-old traffic engineering measures and models, we are essentially using a rototiller in a flowerbed. And it’s time to acknowledge that the collateral damage has been too great.

Image: Andy Singer

Image: Andy Singer

First, an explanation of what I call the “deadly duo”: travel projection models and Levels of Service (LOS) performance metrics.Travel projection models are computer programs that use assumptions about future growth in population, employment, and recreation to estimate how many new cars will be on roads 20 or 30 years into the future.

Models range from quite simplistic to incredibly complex and expensive. Simple models deal primarily with coarse movements of vehicles between cities, while complex models deal with the intricacies of what happens on the fine grid of urban areas. To be truly accurate, growth projection modeling can be expensive. Therefore, absent compelling reason to do otherwise, most growth projections tend to be done using less expensive techniques, which usually lead to overestimates.

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Andrew Cuomo's big infrastructure push, the New York Works Fund, won't include transit projects. Why? Photo via Wikimedia.

Despite the fact that over one quarter of the state’s population takes transit to work, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s marquee infrastructure program won’t invest in public transportation. With so much still unknown about the governor’s “New York Works Fund” — including very basic information about how it will be structured — the reason why Cuomo is excluding transit remains elusive.

State DOT Commissioner Joan McDonald confirmed that transit won’t be included in the fund at a legislative hearing two weeks ago. According to the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Manhattan State Senator Liz Krueger asked McDonald whether any transit projects would be eligible for the fund. “McDonald answered in the negative,” reported Tri-State’s Nadine Lemmon.

“The senator thinks it would be tragic if the state did not prioritize significant investment in both upstate and downstate mass transportation maintenance, modernization and expansion,” said a spokesperson for Krueger, who confirmed Tri-State’s account.

While the fund won’t include transit, it will provide funding for highways, bridges, municipal water systems, dams, and even state parks and historic sites. In his State of the State address this January, Cuomo said the fund would “master plan, coordinate, leverage, and accelerate capital investment,” and “leverage state investment by a multiple of 20-to-1.”

Exactly what the fund is, however, isn’t at all clear. “There’s no legislation or language,” explained Tammy Gamerman, a senior research associate with the Citizens Budget Commission who’s been following the New York Works Fund. Right now, she explained, the “New York Works Fund” label doesn’t refer to an actual fund so much as a way of conceptually packaging infrastructure spending. “It’s a way of thinking about different infrastructure investments together, rather than as separate.”

The governor’s office has not responded to Streetsblog requests for an explanation of how the New York Works Fund is set up. “The governor hasn’t revealed exactly what will be done or and how much of it was scheduled to be done anyway by repackaging of existing aid to minimize new spending,” reported the Associated Press last month.

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Next Wednesday, February 15, is the date for Council Member Peter Vallone’s hearing on traffic safety.

Peter Vallone (l) and James Vacca

Responding to some 2,500 letters collected by Transportation Alternatives following the hit-and-run death of Brooklyn cyclist Mathieu Lefevre, Vallone announced that his public safety committee would address NYPD traffic enforcement. The hearing will be co-chaired by transportation committee chair James Vacca.

“It’s encouraging that the two chairs are treating this as a public safety concern, and are taking a long look and showing leadership,” says Juan Martinez, general counsel for TA.

In addition to crash prevention, Vallone and Vacca are expected to delve into how NYPD conducts crash investigations, an issue that is making headlines thanks to the Lefevre family’s pursuit of information from the department about the crash that killed their son. Says Martinez, “They have serious questions about the line — that in New York if you want to kill, do it with a car — whether that’s actually true.”

Anyone who wants to testify at next week’s hearing may send an e-mail to Martinez by the evening of Monday the 13th, with the subject line “Feb. 15.”

One of these bike-share workshop participants is the star of this classic Streetfilm.

It was another evening of hands-on bike-share station planning at Manhattan Community Board 2 last night, as New Yorkers hunched over maps of SoHo and Greenwich Village, marking the best places to site bike-share kiosks.

If you live or work in the bike-share service area, you really ought to mark your calendar for the station planning meeting in your neck of the woods. There’s something very gratifying about the process that NYC DOT and Alta Bikeshare have put together for people to rate different sites. Each time you put a sticker on the map, you’re shaping the bike-share system in a small but tangible way.

The other thing is that you never know who else will show up. Last night, former Talking Heads frontman and one-time Summer Streets spokesperson David Byrne was in the house, marking up a map. If the pattern holds, it looks like Jay-Z will be on hand for the Manhattan CB 6 workshop later this month, and John Franco and John Starks might turn up at Brooklyn CB 2.

Happy news out of Denver. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was in town yesterday for a tour of the under-construction West Rail Transit line, part of 122 miles of passenger rail the region is planning as part of its FasTracks program.

Denver's plan to add 122 miles of passenger rail is boosting the local economy. Photo: The Fast Lane

The secretary’s blog, The Fast Lane, discusses how this project promises to be, on many levels, a winner for the Mile-High City:

The enthusiasm in yesterday’s crowd was electric. It’s not hard to see why. The West Rail Line is 85% complete, and the mock-ups and progress to date indicate a beautiful, state-of-the-art transit system. The new line will allow tourists and commuters to spend less time in traffic and less money on gas. That’s something everyone can appreciate.

Not only will the FasTracks program provide an efficient and cost-effective way to get to and from work, school or the airport; but it is also creating jobs right now. There are more than 500 men and women working on the West Rail Line alone. FasTracks estimates that its plan will eventually provide work for 4,200 others.

But we can’t be content to see this progress in just one city. All across America, there is work to be done on projects like the West Rail Line. More and more Americans are looking for greater choices in transportation today, and it’s important we provide the funding to ensure transit remains one of the available choices. Now is the time to connect people who need work with the work we need to do improving our nation’s transit centers, highways, railways, airports and ports.

This is exactly the type of investment in the future that other cities would miss out under the House GOP proposal to strip transit projects of dedicated federal funding stream.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Mobilizing the Region reports that political leaders in the New York-New Jersey region are united in their opposition to the House transit proposal. Streets.mn asks if traffic engineers’ roadway classification system is an outdated way of understanding transportation dynamics. And Suburban Assault introduces Dallas’s first bike café.

If you make your home on the Louisiana coastline, upstate New York or the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, chances are you live near a highway that really has it coming. It’s big. It’s ugly. It goes right through city neighborhoods. And it just might be coming down soon.

New Orleans' Claibourne Overpass is this year's Congress for New Urbanism choice for "Freeway without a Future." Photo: CNU.org

Latest week the Congress for New Urbanism released its updated list of “Freeways Without Futures” — 12 transportation anachronisms that are increasingly likely to meet the wrecking ball.

This year’s top finisher was New Orleans’ Claiboure Overpass — a 1960s-era eyesore that replaced a thriving, tree-lined commercial street at the center of the city’s oldest, most culturally vibrant black neighborhood. The teardown for this highway has some real traction; a master plan to remove the elevated portion is expected to be endorsed by City Council shortly, according to CNU.

The Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx is runner up, the same position it held in CNU’s 2008 Freeways Without Futures list. This riverfront disaster was bestowed by the master highway builder himself, Robert Moses. Residents of the Bronx have successfully fought off two separate proposals to expand the Sheridan, which runs right along the Bronx River. A coalition of community groups and advocates called the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance has led the charge to replace the freeway with housing and parks, and a group of cities agencies are now examining teardown scenarios with the help of a federal TIGER grant.

The third-place finisher is New Haven’s Route 34 (the Oak Street Connector), which is slated for demolition. New Haven received TIGER funds to convert the road into a pedestrian-friendly boulevard and local officials are currently haggling over the design details — there’s a chance they’ll opt to replace a highway with a road that feels like a highway.

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Congress members Joe Crowley, Charlie Rangel, Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney joined MTA chief Joe Lhota to decry the House Republicans' attempt to end dedicated federal funding for transit. Photo: Noah Kazis

Four New York City members of Congress joined the chairman of the MTA today to bluntly denounce the House GOP’s anti-transit transportation bill.

“It’s the worst piece of legislation you could ever imagine,” said MTA chief Joe Lhota, a Republican who served as the city’s budget director during the Giuliani administration.

“The worst transportation bill we have ever seen,” agreed Representative Jerry Nadler, a liberal Democrat.

Though the Republican proposal includes a number of other reasons for New Yorkers to hate it, such as eliminating the Safe Routes to School and Transportation Enhancements programs, which fund bicycle and pedestrian improvements, today’s presser focused on the attack on dedicated transit funding.

Currently, about 20 percent of federal gas tax revenues are devoted to transit, which provides the MTA $1 billion per year in dedicated capital funding. The transit agency gets another $400 million a year from the federal general fund. Under the Republican proposal, all transit funds would come from the general fund, where they’d have to compete with defense, health care and other spending priorities.

That $1 billion a year is absolutely necessary for the MTA to continue repairing the system and building expansions, and it could disappear entirely. Charlie Rangel, former chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, which passed the anti-transit provision, said he asked influential House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan where the money to pay for transit would come from in the general fund. “The answer was they did not know at that time,” said Rangel.

The four Congress members in attendance did not mince words about the House bill. “Not even worth a warm bucket of asphalt,” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Nadler said the bill exposed the attitude of the Republican Party toward transit riders: “You’re second class citizens. We don’t give a damn about you. Just disappear.”

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Southwest corner of Park Terrace West and W. 218th Street. Photos: Brad Aaron

The city recently replaced four parking spots at Park Terrace West and W. 218th Street, in Inwood, with a no standing zone. The 34th Precinct reportedly requested the change to give drivers exiting Park Terrace West, a northbound one-way street, a better view of east-west traffic on 218th.

Inevitably, car owners accustomed to parking at the intersection complained, and those complaints, many of which were posted on a neighborhood email list, led to a story by DNAinfo. Here’s a taste:

At least seven residents said they were ticketed or towed after the new signs went up late last month.  Local parenting email list InwoodKids was recently flooded with parent complaints about the new parking regulations.

Inwood mother Beth More said she and her husband were ticketed and towed in the new zone on Jan. 5 after arriving home from the holidays.

“We had no idea the new signs were posted,” she told DNAinfo. “In fact, we were sure our car was stolen at first and never even thought to look up.”

The couple has appealed the $75 parking ticket and will fight for reimbursement of the $185 tow charge.

“I, like many others in the neighborhood, question if this really was a matter of safety or simply an opportunity for the city and police precinct to ticket more,” she said.

Several city and police sources said summonses issued just days after the new signs were installed are likely to be dismissed.

In case the no standing signs still don’t get the message across — a possibility, considering the illegally parked car out of frame in the above photo — on Sunday I saw a couple of homemade posters warning drivers not to park near the intersection.

I have driven this corner. I also walk it regularly. As a driver it was very difficult to detect whether cars on 218th were approaching without either inching into the Park Terrace West crossing or nosing into cross traffic. As a pedestrian I also appreciate that drivers have better sightlines. While it’s understandable that some were angry about being caught off guard, the idea that the city would look to raise revenue by clearing four parking spots at a blind intersection — and installing the proper signage, no less — smacks of Agenda 21-level paranoia.

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The Republican presidential campaign recently produced a couple of characteristic bits of what Americans, for lack of a better word, call “news”: Newt Gingrich declaring that New Yorkers “live in high rises and ride the subway” and thus don’t care about gasoline prices; and Tea Party “activists” in Virginia, Florida and Maine convinced that smart-growth initiatives are — wait for it — a UN plot!

Unfortunately, nuttiness like this is no new thing, and its reach is longer than you might think. It has its roots in an antiquated and peculiarly American belief system that is standing in the way of improved urban livability.

Let’s start with gas prices. In recent weeks, Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and House Speaker John Boehner have all played to the notion that gas prices have doubled since President Obama took office. The price of gas is notoriously volatile; the national average price has actually fallen in 45 of the past 100 months (Excel spreadsheet). So a fair accounting would employ the U.S. average over an entire presidency, as in this chart, for the three most recent:

The chart makes clear that it was former oilman George W. Bush, not Obama, who came closest to presiding over a doubling of gas prices.

At one level, Gingrich and company are merely shilling for the Keystone XL pipeline. But of course excavating Canadian tar sands oil and piping it to Houston is so costly and energy-intensive that without high gas prices, the venture would collapse.

That aside, consider what Gingrich is really saying when he derides New Yorkers as elitists because each uptick in the price of gas doesn’t make us itchy to start a new war. In one way, he has a point. Unlike our countrymen trapped in punishing commutes and paying off two-car garages, we big city dwellers are fairly well insulated from fluctuating gas prices. And unlike big-box suburbs and the Sunbelt, which were built on the inefficiency of cars, highways, supersized houses and office parks, New York is built on the efficiency of dense neighborhoods and public transportation.

To anyone with common sense, that difference makes the ‘burbs brittle and cities resilient. To Newt, it makes city dwellers suspect.

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