All posts from Streetsblog New York City

The Upper West Side wants parking rules to apply on Sundays, too. Photo: dumbonyc/Flickr
According to a report in DNAinfo, Community Board 7 on the Upper West Side is taking the rare step of asking the city to end the giveaway of free curbside parking. The community board approved a resolution calling for paid Sunday parking in its meeting last night by a vote of 21 to 12, with five abstentions, DNAinfo’s Leslie Albrecht reports.
Sunday parking has been free all over the city since a 2005 vote by the City Council (inspired by a Freddy Ferrer mayoral campaign gambit) decreed that no one should have to “pay to pray,” overriding a Bloomberg veto. (Note to out-of-town readers: NYC churchgoers who ride the subway or bus to worship still pay to pray.)
After living with the results of the law for a few years, CB7 is looking to reinstate meter rates and increase turnover in scarce spaces.
“The result of the ‘pay to pray’ law has been almost zero turnover on many commercial streets on the Upper West Side on Sundays,” explained CB 7 member Ken Coughlin, who voted for the resolution. “Merchants have been complaining that their driving customers can’t find parking spaces.”
Given that a 2008 study by Transportation Alternatives showed that in one 15-block area of Columbus Avenue, cruising for cheap metered parking adds up to 366,000 miles a year, free Sunday parking must add an incredibly destructive volume of traffic to the neighborhood’s streets.
To reinstate metered parking on Sundays, however, the Upper West Side needs permission from the City Council. Gale Brewer, who represents the area, said she has no plans to introduce such legislation. “It’s not going to move,” she explained. “The City Council passed legislation only a few years ago on the topic and my colleagues in Brooklyn and Queens feel very strongly on the subject.” Brewer believes that it wouldn’t be possible for legislation to carve out an exemption from the “pay-to-pray” law for one neighborhood, though she says her staff is looking into it.
Coughlin, however, suggested that there’s precedent for allowing different rules in different neighborhoods. “For example,” he suggested, “sidewalk cafes are allowed in some neighborhoods but not others.” If Brewer’s right that the council isn’t going to reverse itself on citywide Sunday parking, this legal point becomes the central question for Upper West Side residents looking for relief from excessive Sunday traffic.

If you get around on a bicycle in Upper Manhattan, the St. Nicholas Avenue bike lanes are essential. They’re the only on-street lanes in the borough between 120th Street and 160th Street. Many cyclists don’t even bother with the lanes, though, because they’re routinely filled with parked cars.
Normally one might ask the NYPD to enforce the rules of the road on St. Nicholas, but at least in the 28th Precinct, such a request seems futile. At precinct HQ between 122nd and 123rd, a line of police vehicles stick their noses out into the bike lane day after day, completely obstructing it. Pedestrians aren’t spared; some cars are parked halfway or entirely on the sidewalk. And these aren’t just squad cars positioned for a speedy exit in case of emergency. Many of the cars appear to be personal vehicles bearing police union bumper stickers or other markers that the owner carries some official authority.

The New Jersey plate on this car suggests it's an officer's personal vehicle. Other civilian cars had police bumper stickers. Photo: Noah Kazis.
When a police car parallel parks in the bike lane, it's no surprise that car owners feel entitled to neatly line up in the bike lane on the next block. Nothing about the cars on the far block marked them as belonging to police officers. Photo: Noah Kazis.
One of many cars parked on the sidewalk. This one blocks path from the crosswalk, too. Photo: Noah Kazis

The four Democrats running to replace Eric Schneiderman in the State Senate - Miosotis Muñoz, Mark Levine, Anna Lewis, and Adriano Espaillat - met last night to debate transportation policy. They were joined by Green Ann Roos, not pictured.
Five candidates vying to become Upper Manhattan’s next state senator met in the 168th Street Armory last night to make their case to the car-free voters of Riverdale, Inwood, Washington Heights, West Harlem, and the Upper West Side. At a debate sponsored by Transportation Alternatives and WE ACT for Environmental Justice, important differences emerged over how best to solve the MTA’s budget crisis and make streets safe for pedestrians and cyclists.
Democrats Adriano Espaillat, Miosotis Muñoz, Mark Levine, and Anna Lewis were joined last night by Green Party candidate Ann Roos. Whoever wins, the victor’s first term will be dominated by the ongoing budget crisis afflicting the state of New York, which affects transit quite directly. State legislators made the MTA’s funding crisis even worse last December by stealing more than $100 million in dedicated transit taxes to plug gaps in the general fund. The debate began with a revealing discussion of how each candidate would secure adequate funding for transit given the current fiscal climate.
Assembly Member Espaillat, considered the front-runner due to an advantage in name recognition, strong fund-raising and prominent endorsements, began with a warning: “It would be irresponsible of me to say there’s not a deficit that’s going to hit across the board,” he said. Without new revenue, the legislature will be forced to make impossible choices between priorities like education, health care, and transportation.
Though he didn’t make a specific revenue proposal during the debate, afterwards Espaillat told me that “congestion pricing is certainly something that we must bring back to the table.” He argued against cobbling together a piecemeal funding scheme for transit, saying that “the main engine of economic development in our community” needs a “solid revenue stream.” Even so, he maintained his opposition to any tolls over the Harlem River bridges, which carry torrents of toll-shopping drivers through the district.
Mark Levine, considered to be a close second to Espaillat, also argued that congestion pricing would be the best solution. “I also support, short of that, a plan to toll the East River bridges,” he explained. Harlem River bridge tolls were conspicuously absent, however, a stance that he earlier explained to Streetsblog by characterizing those bridges as essentially local streets.
The other two Democrats, Muñoz and Lewis, each suggested reinstating the commuter tax to raise revenue.
While each candidate disregarded moderator instructions to offer transit solutions aside from the standard calls to better manage the MTA, Lewis was particularly vociferous in her denouncements of the authority. “I don’t believe it’s because they’re underfunded,” she argued in response to Espaillat and Levine. “What they’ve done is, for the most part, cooked their books. It’s all a lie.”
Roos rejected any attempt to balance the budget that would affect working- or middle-class New Yorkers — which, in her view, even encompassed road-pricing solutions that would benefit lower-income residents. “I am opposed to fare hikes,” she said. “I am opposed to service cuts. I am opposed to borrowing. I am opposed to congestion pricing. I am opposed to tolls on the East River Bridges. I am opposed to a commuter tax.” What isn’t Roos opposed to? A more progressive income tax and a stock transfer tax, she said, could fund transit and more.
In contrast to some other districts, none of the candidates here dwelled on the most recent round of service cuts. Instead, they emphasized the need for more capital improvements. With tiles falling from station ceilings and broken elevators making it difficult to reach the deeply-buried stations uptown, poor maintenance seemed to be a higher priority than lost bus lines.
After station repairs, though, each had a different priority for improving local transit. Levine would restore lost bus services, while Lewis would work on accessibility for the disabled. Espaillat suggested adding two new Select Bus Service routes to the district — which includes the Fordham Road SBS — one along 181st Street into the Bronx and one connecting to downtown.
When it came to improving street safety, each candidate promised to support the construction of more protected bike lanes, to the extent that they could as a state representative. Levine, who began his remarks by noting that he is a T.A. member and that his whole family bikes, praised the bike lanes on Ninth Avenue and Broadway, saying they’ve “proved the fears of local businesspeople to be unfounded. I think this is ultimately economic development.”
Other suggestions varied widely, however. Lewis put the burden of safety on the victims, pushing helmet laws for cyclists and suggesting that when walking down poorly lit streets, “perhaps we need to ask ourselves to wear protective outerwear to make it easier to see people.” The latter suggestion drew some muffled laughter from the audience.
Levine laid out a laundry list of improvements, including narrowing lanes, expanding medians, and installing countdown clocks at every pedestrian crossing. “Enforcement of the current laws is unacceptably weak,” he said, arguing that police in Upper Manhattan were even less attentive to traffic safety than in the rest of the borough. Overall, he suggested, “I don’t think that motor vehicles should have a monopoly on our streets.”
Muñoz suggested increasing penalties on unsafe drivers. “You’re in a vehicle, you’re in a weapon,” she said.
Espaillat began by calling for lower speed limits, “because it is often speed that leads to these very tragic accidents.” He spent the bulk of his time, though, proposing a comprehensive traffic study of the area. The study would focus on the prevalence of two-way north-south avenues, he suggested, saying that the pedestrian crashes he heard about usually involved cars turning off of those avenues. The DOT’s recently-released pedestrian safety study backs up Espaillat’s intuition, finding that almost half of all pedestrian fatalities in the borough occur on major two-way streets.
In a lightning round of questions at the end of the debate, each candidate promised to support a residential parking permit program and bike/ped access on the state-run Henry Hudson Bridge.
Voters will choose between the four Democrats soon: Election Day is less than a week away, on Tuesday, September 14.

One of the most gripping local transportation debates in the country has been unfolding in Seattle, where the replacement of a highway along the waterfront known as the Alaskan Way Viaduct presents an opportunity to completely rethink a core piece of the city’s transportation system. So far, public officials have cast their lot with a plan to replace this elevated highway with an underground highway buried within a deep-bore tunnel.
State and city officials have proposed converting Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct into a tunnel. Photo: The Seattle Times
Dan Bertolet at PubliCola argues that the tunnel plan is based on the erroneous assumption that maintaining car capacity transcends all other transportation objectives. Excess urban highway infrastructure, even if you deck it over with parks and public space, is antithetical to promoting more sustainable transportation, Bertolet writes:
A common argument made in support of a deep-bore tunnel to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way viaduct is that by putting all those cars underground, we’ll end up with a better pedestrian and cycling environment on the city’s downtown streets, the waterfront street in particular. That position may sound logical, but not unless you disregard several key realities of cars and cities.
First of all, focusing on how the tunnel would impact downtown streets ignores the impact it will have elsewhere. As I discussed in a previous post, car infrastructure inherently sabotages travel by walking, biking, and transit. The reinforcement of car dependence caused by the tunnel will dwarf any progress on alternative modes that might be made in isolated pockets of downtown Seattle.
Furthermore, there is a major flaw in the underlying premise that with a surface-only viaduct replacement scheme, utilizing the downtown street grid to make up for lost car capacity along the waterfront would force us to take space away from bikers and pedestrians. Because that premise only holds if you accept that car capacity is sacred.

New York City’s removal of car travel lanes along Broadway is an unqualified success story. They didn’t have anywhere else to put all those displaced cars, but that didn’t stop them from doing it anyway. And this rejection of the “car capacity is sacred” mindset is the path that Seattle policy makers will also have to get on if we ever hope to make a meaningful transition from our current state of unsustainable car-dependence…
Whatever configuration of street ends up getting built along the Seattle waterfront, it will eventually fill up with cars, even if we spend billions on a bypass tunnel.
In the case of the viaduct, to me that choice is a no-brainer: a low-speed, two-way, four lane boulevard along the waterfront. Yes, this will constrain car capacity. But here’s the reality: Reining in capacity is the only way we will ever make significant progress towards reducing driving, a goal that is not only aligned with basic principles of sustainable urbanism, but also happens to be an adopted goal of the State of Washington.
Elsewhere on the Network, Cyclicious highlights an upcoming bicycle safety discussion taking place in Orange County, California, where an average of one cyclist per month is killed on the roadways; Missouri Bicycle and Pedestrian Federation assails a proposal in St. Charles County to ban bikes on several roads; and Tucson Velo asks what amenities compel people commute by bike by examining a local map comparing Census data on travel modes.

The critical multi-year transportation bill, which lawmakers have sidelined since last summer as they’ve quarreled about how to pay for it, looks to be back on the agenda after President Obama’s pugnacious Labor Day speech, in which he called on Congress to ramp up investment in transportation. The broad outline of Obama’s plan calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, constructing 4,000 miles of rail, and rehabilitating 150 miles of runway over the next six years.
Florida GOP representative John Mica supported a long-term transportation bill in 2009, but quickly came out against the President's infrastructure plan this week. Photo: PBS/Blueprint America
While that may look like a lot of road spending compared to rail, transportation reformers see cause for optimism in the use of the word “rebuild” — which implies that the emphasis will be on fixing existing roads instead of constructing sprawl-inducing new highways. The outline also calls for “significant new funding” for the creation of new transit projects, and for ramping up investment in “safety, environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness, and livability.” Those criteria have all been hallmarks of the US DOT’s TIGER program, which distributes competitive grants to local transportation agencies from what has been a relatively small pot of money.
Congress typically authorizes a major transportation spending bill every six years, but political gridlock over the raising the gas tax or securing other funding streams has stalled the reauthorization of the bill since it expired in 2009. In the interim, lawmakers have passed a series of stopgap spending measures to keep the transportation system functioning, even as Jim Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, has lobbied hard for Congress to take up the full bill.
Monday’s proposal represents the first serious effort from the President to tackle America’s transportation policy inertia, which is preventing any significant progress from the highway-oriented status quo. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are undoubtedly eager to pass a bill that will show voters they’re doing as much as possible to address high levels of unemployment, which are making a Republican rout of the mid-term elections look increasingly likely.
Predictably, the GOP does not look willing to lend a hand. Republicans have already lined up against Obama’s proposal, and another protracted and nasty fight over a major White House initiative looks likely. Immediately after the announcement, House Minority Leader John Boehner released a statement opposing the plan, and on Tuesday he released another one calling the plan an “exercise in futility.”

Meanwhile, House GOP Whip Eric Cantor called the White House effort “another play called from the same failed Keynesian playbook.”
For a sign of how lockstep the opposition has quickly become, the real bellwether is John Mica (R-Fl), an influential Republican who has supported infrastructure spending in the past. Mica has also heaped scorn on the President’s plan. “I don’t know what planet these people have been living on for the last 18 months,” he told The Hill. “They hijacked the $862 billion so-called stimulus, leaving less than 7 percent in the bill for infrastructure, and they failed to ensure that even this small percentage of funds would be spent expeditiously.”
The contorted argument seems to be that because the stimulus bill didn’t devote enough spending to transportation, or get it out the door fast enough, a bill devoted entirely to transportation spending and focused on a quick jolt of $50 billion doesn’t deserve support.
In the likely event that Republicans take control of the House in the mid-terms, Mica is the GOP representative who would replace Oberstar as chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

This memorial to Eric Ng, killed in 2006 on the West Side Highway, is no derelict bike. Photo: richdrogpa via Flickr.
The Department of Sanitation has backed off its controversial plan to remove ghost bikes from the streets of New York, relenting to a public outcry in favor of the memorials to cyclists killed while riding. Proposed rules governing the removal of derelict bicycles released in June would have taken away even the best-maintained memorials, but the final version published on Friday [PDF] specifically carves out an exemption for ghost bikes.
Originally, Sanitation was only going to spare what it called “ghost riders” for an extra few weeks. Ghost bikes would have been removed thirty days after being tagged with a notice, compared to five days for ordinary derelict bikes. The new rules, however, include a specific exemption for (the now-properly named) ghost bikes in the definition of what counts as a derelict bike. A statement attached to the rules declares that “under these rules ghost bikes will never be deemed to be derelict.”
This is a victory almost entirely attributable to the bike activists who mobilized over the issue. The revisions were made solely “based on the written comments and the public hearing that we had,” said a spokeperson from the Sanitation Department, which received over 250 comments on the proposed rules.

The new rules also set the terms under which abandoned bikes can be removed from where they are locked. Sanitation has established five criteria to determine whether a bike is derelict. Starting October 4, the department will tag any bike attached to public property that meets three of those criteria. Seven days after getting tagged, the bike would be disposed of. If applied fairly, that could clear away truly abandoned bikes and free up space for people to park the bikes that are functional and actively used.
The criteria are:
(i)  the bicycle appears to be crushed or not usable;
(ii)  the bicycle is missing parts, other than the seat and front wheel, including, but not limited to handlebars, pedal or pedals, rear wheel and chain;
(iii)  the bicycle has flat or missing tires;
(iv)  the handlebars or pedals are damaged, or the existing forks, frames or rims are bent; or
(v)  seventy-five percent or more of the bicycle, which includes the handlebars, pedals and frames are rusted, along with any chain affixing such bicycle to public property.”

There’s one loophole to keep an eye on, though. If any bike “creates a dangerous condition by restricting vehicular or pedestrian traffic,” state the rules, it may be removed immediately, whether it’s derelict, a ghost bike, or otherwise.

Recession or depression? Estate taxes or death taxes? How events or policies are named, or “framed,” has become crucial to their viability. Indeed, the ascendancy of the right wing in the U.S. in recent decades is attributed in part to the Right’s mastery of political phraseology to demonize leftist and even centrist policies.
For the majority of people who use Times Square, Broadway is much broader than it was before the city re-purposed space from vehicles to pedestrians. That's not how the Times has framed the project. Photo: Payton Chung/Flickr
Framing affects the struggle over street space as well. Tabloid headlines about “kamikaze cyclists” and “two-wheeled terrorists” in the 1980s literally framed bike messengers as Public Enemy #1 and emboldened Mayor Ed Koch to try to ban bicycling in midtown. Road widenings are still customarily branded as “improvements” rather than simply identified as expansions. Most news outlets report plane crashes as crashes but call car crashes accidents.
With this in mind, let’s train a verbal lens on the New York Times’ full-page treatment yesterday of the Broadway road diet.
The article, by Times transportation reporter Michael Grynbaum, is exemplary in many respects. It thoughtfully lets transportation guru Jeff Zupan declare that the stepwise transformation of Manhattan’s central thoroughfare is boosting the status of pedestrians throughout town:
“It’s given people a different feeling about walking in the city, that the pedestrian isn’t a second-class citizen who has to always be on the lookout of getting run over.”
On the key issue of traffic flow, Grynbaum notes that Broadways’ “awkward three-way intersections with other avenues created gridlock,” and he has Janette Sadik-Khan explain that “We’re making the [street] network work like it was supposed to.” To back up the DOT Commissioner’s appeal to New Yorkers to embrace Broadway as a “green ribbon,” Grynbaum invokes “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, whom he dubs “the éminence grise of the city’s traffic circles”:
“It sounds counterintuitive that removing a street can make things better. But it was a mistake in 1811 when they left Broadway in as a traffic street.”
Educational indeed… for readers who make it to the tenth paragraph. But earlier, more prominent passages may imprint a less appetizing picture on other, perhaps more typical readers:

[U]nder the Bloomberg administration, Broadway has been transformed, from a grand avenue that ferried automobiles on a scenic route through Midtown to a narrow passageway with barely more room for cars than a sleepy street in Greenwich Village. (second paragraph)
The Great White Way … has been diminished by a bicycle lane and a green-painted, traffic-free section intended for pedestrians …” (caption)
In two years, roughly three and a half miles of the street’s moving lanes have vanished … For the first time in New York’s modern era, Broadway no longer offers a continuous path from the Bronx to the Battery. (third paragraph)
And, in case anyone missed the point, the full-page diagram tracing the street from Columbus Circle to below Madison Square Park is headlined “Not So Broadway.”
The takeaway, then, is mixed. Readers who go the distance are treated to the wisdom of NYC’s leading transportation lights. But those who merely inhale the first few bits learn that Broadway has been “diminished” even though only the motorized lanes have shrunk; and that parts of the once-Great White Way have “vanished” rather than been repurposed. The “grand avenue” renowned as a “scenic route” through the heart of the city is no more — the implication being that New York itself is being made less grand, even, gasp, “pedestrian.”
Perhaps inadvertently, the piece’s heavy reliance on talking heads may serve to reinforce another negative frame: that Sadik-Khan and other city officials are “imposing” alien ideas on New Yorkers, even though the midtown business community — through the Times Square Alliance — generated the initial momentum for the pedestrian reclamation of Times Square, and even though we know public opinion of the transformations is quite favorable.
The article’s true soul may reside in the lone everyman quoted, whom Grynbaum describes as “a daily car commuter from Queens who was parked on Broadway at 33rd Street the other day“:
I know they’re trying to beautify the city, but it’s killing the drivers. It’s frustrating. They don’t want you to drive into the city.
This fellow comes off as reasonable, even sweet. Yet his “daily car commute” costs other New Yorkers — truckers, bus riders, and his fellow drivers — a collective 3-4 hours in lost time valued at $100 or more each day. Framing the city’s ongoing traffic disaster in these terms may be crucial to maintaining Broadway as a permanent “green ribbon,” not to mention winning the rest of the livable streets agenda, from pedestrians’ rights to traffic pricing, that can make New York a city fit for working and living.

President Obama gave the first outlines yesterday of a $50 billion plan for new infrastructure investment, which would provide funds for the expansion of high-speed rail and local transit systems, road construction and repair, and runway upgrades at airports. A centerpiece of the proposal is the creation of a national infrastructure bank, which would pool public and private funds to finance transportation projects.
President Obama touts his $50 billion infrastructure plan yesterday in Milwaukee. Photo: New York Times
The infrastructure plan also offers a glimpse of the administration’s priorities when it comes to the reauthorization of the national transportation bill. Here’s a sampling of what Streetsblog Network members are saying in response:
Transportation for America called the plan “fundamental to the long-term health of our economy.” Director James Corless issued this statement:
The Administration has recognized that the earmark-driven, unaccountable spending of the past must end. The President today has promised to press for carefully targeted investments in those projects that compete best in satisfying clearly articulated national goals for energy security, safety, affordability, environmental sustainability and economic competitiveness.
Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic asks how the timing of the infrastructure push will affect its chances in Congress:
It is not clear how much enthusiasm the Congress holds for what is being portrayed as a second stimulus, nor how much can actually be built with the money, which would be invested over a period of six years though mostly at the front end.
James Rowen at The Political Environment had a front row view of the President’s speech, given at a labor rally in Milwaukee:
I loved the administration’s commitment to a national passenger rail system; jobs and growth for Milwaukee will be and already are the local outcomes.
Rowen thinks the plan might win broad support, even in this divided political climate, though not necessarily for the right reasons:

Obama’s plan will keep road-building at a very high pace, so the highway lobby and its allies in both parties, in all legislators, have nothing to fear from the train alternative getting some funding.
Expect more details on the plan to surface soon. The Times reports that Obama will deliver a speech in Cleveland tomorrow introducing a “broader package” of proposals tied to the reauthorization of the transportation bill.
Elsewhere on the Network, M-Bike.org outlines Detroit’s plans for revitalization via a “Strategic Framework” of interconnected dense neighborhoods surrounded by greenspace; Extraordinary Observations explores what lessons we can learn about “free” parking from the characters of Seinfeld; and Baltimore Spokes goes into detail about the Black Hawk, Colorado bike ban.

Candidates for the 31st Senate District: Miosotis Muñoz, Mark Levine, Anna Lewis, and Adriano Espaillat. All except Lewis have confirmed they will attend tonight's debate to talk transportation.
Labor Day and the Jewish high holidays make this an abbreviated week, but with the critical primary elections just seven days away, the state’s political world is going full-tilt. Tonight, at least three of the four candidates running to replace Eric Schneiderman in the State Senate will meet at a debate co-sponsored by Transportation Alternatives, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance to talk about how they plan to provide for the transportation needs of the Upper West Side, West Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and Riverdale.
Whoever wins the seat will be replacing one of the more pro-transit members of the State Senate. Before entering the Senate, Schneiderman represented the Straphangers Campaign as a private attorney, and in office he publicly embraced PlaNYC. However, even Schneiderman remained out of sight during the most recent fights over MTA financing.
The three candidates expected to show up tonight are Adriano Espaillat, Miosotis Muñoz, and Mark Levine. Espaillat currently serves in the Assembly representing an overlapping district; Muñoz was an aide to Congressman Charlie Rangel and Manhattan borough presidents C. Virginia Fields and Ruth Messinger; Levine was chair of Community Board 12’s transportation committee and founded a credit union for low-income Upper Manhattanites. A fourth candidate, Anna Lewis, has not yet confirmed whether she will attend, according to a DNAinfo report.
Streetsblog last looked at the race in June, noting that while each of the candidates to represent this largely car-free constituency expressed strong support for transit, none would support tolling the free Harlem River bridges that run through the district. Plenty of other revenue sources got the thumbs up: Espaillat was a vocal congestion pricing supporter, Muñoz wanted to reinstate the commuter tax, and Levine was even willing to toll the East River bridges on top of a commuter tax. But when it comes to new tolls inside the district, these candidates seemed to draw the line.
To find out where they stand on transit funding, what they’d do to improve pedestrian and cyclist safety, or to pose your own question, show up tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the Armory Foundation, located at 216 Ft. Washington Ave., between 168th and 169th Streets. The debate will be moderated by West Side Spirit reporter Dan Rivoli and Columbia urban planning prof David King.

Without a bollard, what would have been the next thing or person in this car's path? Photo: Transportation Alternatives
Via Gothamist — check out this bollard on the Hudson River Greenway at work.
One of the strange and dangerous things about the greenway is that car traffic crosses the car-free path at several points. Twice in 2006, motorists killed people using the greenway. On December 1, 2006, cyclist Eric Ng was run down by Eugenio Cidron, who was speeding on the greenway at 60 mph  for a mile after driving away drunk from a party at Chelsea Piers. Earlier that year, Dr. Carl Henry Nacht was killed by an NYPD tow truck operator entering the tow pound at 76th Street.
A year after Ng’s death, Transportation Alternatives issued a call on Streetsblog for safety improvements to the greenway, including the installation of fixed bollards, like this one, to keep motorists from driving onto the car-free path.
I look at this picture and feel a mix of reassurance, satisfaction, and terror. How is it possible for someone to run into one of these high-contrast yellow-and-black plugs, about the height of a toddler, in broad daylight?
Streetsblog will be offline Monday and back publishing on Tuesday. Enjoy the long weekend, folks.

A tipster sends this picture of one of the city’s new bike racks that, someway, somehow, got wrenched out of the pavement. We’re told that the sidewalk at Fulton Street and Rockwell Place in Brooklyn had a big chunk missing where the bike rack would have been.
After this bike rack design won a 2008 competition to replace the U-rack as the city’s standard unit of on-street bike parking, NYC DOT committed to installing 5,000 of them within three years.
I don’t know what tore this one out. Maybe a car ran up on the sidewalk and knocked it loose, or maybe someone yanked it out with their bare hands. If it was vandalism, the nice thing about this rack design is that, unlike a U-rack, ripping it out of the sidewalk doesn’t really help someone steal the bike. Still, it seems like the bolts anchoring this thing in the ground could stand to be sturdier.
If you see a busted bike rack, here’s where to report it to NYC DOT.

Between calls for renewed stimulus on the one hand and for deficit reduction on the other, Washington, D.C. is stuck. A new report by the Transportation Equity Network, however, shows one easy way out of that political stalemate: shifting our transportation spending to transit.
According to the report, written by University of Missouri-St. Louis researchers Todd Swanstrom, Will Winter, and Laura Wiedlocher, every dollar spent on funding transit creates more jobs than spending on roads. Specifically, each billion dollars spent on transit creates 36,108 jobs while the same figure can only buy 30,319 jobs. That means that by reassigning some federal spending from roads to transit, Congress could boost employment without adding a cent to the deficit.
What’s more, the feds could create even more jobs by making sure those transit dollars went to operating budgets rather than capital projects. A billion dollars in transit capital projects creates 23,788 jobs, the authors say, less than road funding. But spending a billion dollars on operations generates 41,140 jobs.
So what kind of impact could that have on our struggling economy? The researchers pored through the transportation plans of 20 metro regions and figured out how much each was spending on roads and transit. Using those numbers, they show that by shifting 50 percent of each region’s highway spending to transit, you could create 180,150 more jobs. And that doesn’t even include enormous regions like Dallas, Houston, or Miami; across the country, the number of new jobs would be even higher than 180,000.
Of course, the report’s conclusion depends on the accuracy of those job formulas. The multiplier for highway spending was taken from a model contracted by the Federal Highway Administration and adjusted downward by the authors to exclude the cost of land acquisition, while the transit formulas were taken from a report by the American Public Transit Association.
Spending on transportation operations, like this bus driver's salary, create the most jobs, according to a new report. Photo: Vagabond Shutterbug via Flickr.
Between calls for renewed stimulus on the one hand and for deficit reduction on the other, Washington, D.C. is stuck. A new report by the Transportation Equity Network, however, shows one easy way to put people back to work without increasing federal spending: shifting our transportation investment to transit.
According to the report, written by University of Missouri-St. Louis researchers Todd Swanstrom, Will Winter, and Laura Wiedlocher, every dollar spent on funding transit creates more jobs than spending on roads. Specifically, each billion dollars spent on transit creates 36,108 jobs while the same figure can only buy 30,319 road jobs. That means that by reassigning some federal spending from roads to transit, Congress could boost employment without adding a cent to the deficit.
The multiplier for highway spending was taken from a model contracted by the Federal Highway Administration and adjusted downward by the authors to exclude the cost of land acquisition, while the transit formulas were taken from a report by the American Public Transit Association.
The report also shows how the feds could create even more jobs by making sure those transit dollars go to operating budgets rather than capital projects. A billion dollars in transit capital projects creates 23,788 jobs, the authors say, less than road funding. But spending a billion dollars on operations generates 41,140 jobs.
And operating budgets are in desperate need of stimulus. Transit systems across the country have been raising fares, cutting service, and shedding jobs since the onset of the recession, and the crisis far from over. In Pittsburgh, for instance, the Port Authority is currently moving ahead with plans cut bus service by 35 percent and raise fares.
So what kind of impact could shifting transportation investment have on our struggling economy? The researchers pored through the transportation plans of 20 metro regions and figured out how much each was spending on roads and transit. Using those numbers, they show that by shifting 50 percent of each region’s highway spending to transit, you could create 180,150 more jobs. And that doesn’t even include enormous regions like Dallas, Houston, or Miami; across the country, the number of new jobs would be even higher than 180,000.