Streetsblog New York City

It’s one version of an urbanist’s dream: a 125-acre sanctuary where walking and biking are the primary mode of transportation; a community of narrow streets where cars don’t intrude.

Well, one man is seeking to make that vision a reality rural Maine. Tracy Gayton, a former Maine banker, has given his vision the title Piscataquis Village, and built a design philosophy around the insights of Nathan Lewis at New World Economics and J.H. Crawford at Carfree.com. Gayton is recruiting individual investors, in a Kickstarter-like model, to raise $2 million — the amount he estimates is needed to clear regulatory hurdles and buy 500 acres in Maine’s Piscataquis County. (Of that land, 375 acres will be for agriculture, parks and car parking outside village lines, so residents will still be availing themselves of the auto.)

Emily Washington at Network blog Market Urbanism points out that this type of development, unfortunately, might not even be possible in a more developed environment thanks to inflexible zoning codes that protect the primacy of cars:

To me, this case illustrates the effectiveness that covenants have for shaping land use over an area broader than individual lots without the coercion of zoning.

Tracy has created a presentation on the preliminary objectives for Piscataquis Village. He writes: “We envision a settlement evolving organically and growing incrementally. Those people or groups of people that wish to pursue their own, various versions of the Good Life within the bounds of the Village are welcome.”

This project reminds me a bit of seasteading, the libertarian vision of a bottom-up society living on a water vessel to escape government coercion and violence. While I believe that most of the initial Piscataquis Village investors are from Maine and wish to continue living there, the projects’ rural location draws attention to the impossibility of a similar village emerging in the open space of, say, Howard County or Loudoun County because the realities of the political planning process would make it impossible to escape street width, parking, and setback requirements.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Charlottesville Tomorrow reports that a Virginia Supreme Court ruling has handcuffed the state’s planning commissions. World Streets says the transportation reform movement should adopt the “slow” mantra that has revolutionized thinking about food choices. And Stop and Move explores how the lack of resources and public input can lead to mediocre planning results.

Until last fall, the state’s planning for a new Tappan Zee Bridge was a model of public outreach. It included over 280 public meetings and one outreach center open full-time on each side of the bridge.

Under Governor Andrew Cuomo, however, the project has been “fast-tracked.” Transit was axed from the bridge and the project is hurtling forward without basic information being provided to the public. Tellingly, the outreach centers have been shuttered; shown above is the Nyack site as of yesterday.

The sign in the window says “Space For Rent.” Let us know in the comments what it should really say.

“A leading voice for better urban design for the sake of good health.” “A public health/social justice hero.” Dr. Richard Jackson, chair of environmental health at UCLA, is a leading voice for transportation reform whose work has linked America’s sprawl to the nation’s high rates of obesity.

The former director of the Center for Disease Control’s Environment Health Department will take to the airwaves Tuesday in an interview with PBS’s Tavis Smiley. The interview will run in coordination with Dr. Jackson’s four-hour documentary series, Designing Healthy Communities (check local listings).

Dr. Jackson spent years researching public health epidemics and zeroed in on car dependence and sprawl as leading factors in America’s diabetes and obesity epidemics.

“We have built America in a way that is, I believe, is fundamentally unhealthy,” Dr. Jackson says. “It prevents us from walking. It inhibits us from socializing. It removes trees and the things that make our air quality better. We could not have designed an environment that is more difficult for people’s well being at this point.”

He adds: “Two percent of the United States’ gross domestic product goes to the treatment of diabetes. This is a crushing economic impact.”

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There was no grand unveiling of the House’s five-year transportation bill today, but a summary of the bill has been kicking around for a few days. While there aren’t any hard numbers available yet, the “American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act” looks like a return to 1950s-style transportation policy. It is particularly unkind to transit and bike/ped programs, and to cities in general.

The bill’s overarching themes, again in the absence of official language, seem to be:

• Funneling as much money as possible to highways
• Eliminating programs “that do not have a federal interest,” which apparently includes all dedicated funding for bicycle and pedestrian programs
• Doing away with discretionary transit programs, which would presumably spell the end for the very successful TIGER
• Giving even more power to spend that money to state DOTs, not cities and metro regions
• Shortening the environmental review process
• Augmenting gas tax revenue with a yet-unspecified revenue stream from oil and gas drilling

One example the summary gives of a project not in the federal interest is the Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program, which distributed four $25 million grants “to demonstrate how improved walking and bicycling networks can increase rates of walking and bicycling.” One of those grants went to Minneapolis, which is making great strides in promoting biking and walking. If reauthorized at current levels, NTPP would account for 0.04 percent of the bill’s total appropriations.

The “flexibility” afforded states to minimize spending on bike/ped and transit, as well as the bill’s reliance on oil drilling, have advocates outraged. The Sierra Club’s Jesse Prentice-Dunn told Streetsblog that the bill represents “a significant step backwards for safe biking and walking.”

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The Weekly Carnage is a Friday round-up of motor vehicle violence across the five boroughs and beyond. For more on the origins and purpose of this column, please read About the Weekly Carnage.

Fatal Crashes (2 killed this week, 11 this year, 3 drivers charged*)

• Midwood: 58-Year-Old Pedestrian Hit by One Driver, Fatally Struck by a Second in Hit-and-Run (ABC 7, NY1)
• Staten Island: Nelson Coelho, 23, Struck Trying to Cross SI Expressway (Post)

Injuries, Arrests and Property Damage

• Greenwich Village: 63-Year-Old Pedestrian Hospitalized With Head Injuries After Driver Hits Her (DNA)
• UWS: Crash Involving Cab Driver Injures Pedestrian, Sends Vehicle Into Scaffolding (DNA)
• Bronx: Man Driving Tractor-Trailer Illegally on Hutchinson River Pkwy Crashes Into Overpass, Injures Bridge Inspectors (DNA, Post)
• Midtown: Ten Injured in Collision on Park Avenue (DNA)
• Crown Heights: Two-Car Crash on Eastern Parkway Leaves Seven Injured, Six Seriously (DNA)
• Dyker Heights: Four Pedestrians Struck in Two Separate Crashes; No Criminality Suspected (News)
• Tompkinsville: Drunk Driver Smashes Into Pole, Injuring Passenger (Post Blotter)
• Sunnyside: Driver Injured After Her SUV Flipped in Two-Car Crash (Advance)
• New Brighton: Woman Driving With Suspended License, 3-Year-Old Son in the Backseat Nearly Runs Down Cop (Advance)
• Cypress Hills: Carjacker Crashes Minivan Into Divider During Police Chase (DNA)

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How does Andrew Cuomo plan to pay for the new Tappan Zee Bridge? The state isn’t saying — and it isn’t letting the public weigh in, either.

The Cuomo administration won’t release its financial plan for the bridge until April or May, according to a report in the Journal News. That’s just months before construction is scheduled to start, and months after the state starts soliciting proposals from contractors. It’s far too late for New Yorkers to debate the right way to pay for the enormously expensive bridge.

In the meantime the administration is refusing to disclose its current thinking on the bridge financing or to provide the numbers that might let New Yorkers weigh the options themselves. Repeated Streetsblog inquiries to the governor’s press office have been ignored. A Streetsblog freedom of information request for financial plans generated by state agencies or by Merrill Lynch, which the state contracted to perform financial planning for the Tappan Zee Bridge, was denied on the grounds that they were inter- or intra-agency materials. Streetsblog has appealed that decision.

The Cuomo administration isn’t even letting legislative leaders in on its thinking. In a hearing held Wednesday, Senate Finance Committee Chair John DeFrancisco noted that the legislature has to approve Cuomo’s budget, including his transportation spending, by April. “Tell me how we can do that when the answer is almost uniformly, ‘We are still studying it’?” he asked NYS DOT Commissioner Joan McDonald, according to the Times Union.

Finding the money to pay for the new Tappan Zee won’t be easy. Right now, the state’s official price tag, as stated in its draft environmental impact statement, is $4.64 billion for the bridge, though many press reports have put the cost at $5.2 billion. The high cost is due to the state’s desire to build a bridge twice as wide as the current one (but which still won’t include transit lanes).

The question of how to pay for the bridge should concern all New Yorkers. As Streetsblog reported yesterday, if the bridge were funded entirely by the drivers who cross it, a conservative financial analysis estimated that the one-way E-ZPass toll would have to rise from $4.75 to around $16 just to cover the cost of construction. In a more extreme but still plausible scenario, it would take $30 tolls to pay for the whole thing. Would Cuomo tolerate tolls that high?

If Cuomo won’t accept $16 tolls, where would the extra revenues come from? In a scenario where tolls double but don’t triple, there would still be a gap of at least $1.2 billion dollars.

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Over the last few years, greater Indianapolis has been thinking big about transit. They developed a plan to double bus service and add new rail lines. They even identified funding (a 0.3 percent income tax hike) and built a viable political coalition around the vision — which represented a dramatic shift away from the old car-centric approach that has dominated transportation planning there for decades.

All that work is now hanging in the balance of a partisan standoff unrelated to the actual transit plan. Network blog Urban Indy reported yesterday that an Indiana House committee had voted down the transit legislation 11-10 after a Republican lawmaker inserted language into the bill that would make the transit system “right-to-work.”

The folks at Urban Indy, who have been advocating hard for this bill, are beside themselves. But a shred of hope remains, explains blogger extraordinaire Curt Ailes:

To be clear, the transit portion of the bill never seemed to be at the heart of the debate over HB1073; it was always the labor. The bickering could be see as an extension of the passionate debate of the past few weeks over Right to Work legislation which passed the House yesterday with Democrats coming up on the losing end of that debate.

This officially puts HB1073 in the failed bills category but does not altogether bury it from being passed in some other form this session.

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The City Planning Commission approved a Rudin family request to build 50 percent more parking than allowed at the site of the former St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. The commission’s unanimous approval came last Monday despite opposition to the parking garage from the local community board and evidence that Rudin hadn’t met the city’s own requirements for granting exemptions to parking maximums.

The advisory recommendations supposedly guiding the commission had been split over the garage. Community Board 2 urged that no garage be allowed at all, as the entrance would be the fourth on a single residential block of West 12th Street. Borough President Scott Stringer, however, approved of the Rudin request to build 152 parking spaces, rather than the 98 the developers would be allowed under the city’s parking maximums.

Additionally, the commission’s report suggests that all community members who testified on the issue of the parking garage at its public hearing opposed the extra parking spaces. “A number of speakers in opposition stated a concern for the proposed garage on 12th Street,” reads the report [PDF]. “These speakers said that the requested special permit to increase the size of the garage should be denied.”

Regardless of those recommendations, it’s debatable whether Rudin was even eligible for a special permit to exceed the parking maximums. To get such a permit, developers need to show that there isn’t enough available parking in the area to meet the projected demand from project residents.

Calculations performed by both Streetsblog and the Municipal Art Society show that wasn’t the case in the Village. “When the residential units are expected to be built there will be 740 available overnight spaces and 154 available weekday midday spaces within a quarter mile radius of the site,” wrote MAS in testimony submitted to the City Planning Commission [PDF]. “This is more than enough spaces to accommodate the 137 cars that the applicant is estimating will result from the addition of 450 new housing units.”

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