There's been a lot of brouhaha lately about New York University's plans to expand its main campus, and the (sometimes successful) efforts of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation to thwart and scale back those efforts. As a former Village resident, I feel the GVSHP is wrong, but so is NYU.
I've lived in the Village and been a regular visitor all my life. There's something about the Village that's never felt right to me, but I've only recently acquired the vocabulary to describe it. It's Bleecker Street. It's also Houston Street and West Third, but I feel it most on Bleecker, in part because I avoid that part of Houston.
Bleecker Street is dead to me. I don't mean that the Red Lion has seen better days, although that may be true. I mean that when I walk from Sixth Avenue to Broadway on Eighth or West Fourth Streets, there's always something going on. There are stores, or NYU buildings bustling with students, or there's Washington Square. When I walk on Ninth or Tenth Street it's almost all residential, but with beautiful brownstones and carriage houses, and lots of stoops with interesting-looking people coming and going.
This is important because the Village has one concentration of shops around the subway stations at Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and another around those at Broadway and Lafayette Street. I regularly find myself on a trip to the Village with one thing to do near Sixth Avenue and one near Broadway, and I'm not the only one. There's steady traffic from one side of the neighborhood to the other, for work, shopping, entertainment and study. There's no direct subway connection, and the one bus is slow and unreliable, though, so most people walk.
When I walk down Bleecker Street, it's a jumping, happening place from Sixth Avenue (or even Seventh) to La Guardia Place. From Mercer to Broadway it's quiet and residential, but it works. From La Guardia to Mercer, Bleecker Street is dead. There's one ugly driveway on the north side and a couple of pedestrian paths on the other, in a stretch that's two blocks long (Wooster Street doesn't go north of Houston). The rest is just blank walls on one side and windows with curtains drawn on the other. Yeah, there are a few trees. So what? They don't help.
Houston and Third Streets are similar, at least on one side, and so are Mercer Street and La Guardia Place. Third Street is actually worse, because it's much wider in that area, and much less pedestrian-friendly as a result. Why are they this way? There are two black holes that are sucking the life out of those streets, and they have names: Washington Square Village and Silver Towers.
There is some interesting history behind these superblocks, fairly well summarized in the Wikipedia articles I linked in the above paragraph. The area was considered a slum in the days of Jacob Riis, and beginning in 1954 it was condemned, cleared and divided into three superblocks. The north superblock was given to NYU, and it now holds several NYU buildings. The central superblock was given to a private partnership including Paul Tishman, who built Washington Square Village, with 1200 apartments over a 650-unit parking garage. The south superblock was originally given to the developers, but after they couldn't get financing it was turned over to NYU, who built the Silver Towers and a Mitchell-Lama building over an underground parking garage. In 1964 the developers sold Washington Square Village to NYU, giving it control of all three blocks.
I'll write more about the current fight - and the problems with what both sides are saying - later.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
The Tao of economic incentives
I haven't yet read Gernot Wagner's new book But Will The Planet Notice: How Smart Economics Can Save the World, but I heard him interviewed by Leonard Lopate, and the approach he's promoting seems very sensible. If there is a major economic incentive encouraging people to do negative things (drive, accept plastic bags, buy food sweetened with high fructose corn syrup), is it easier to fight that behavior directly, or to change the incentive?
We can think of this as an application of the Tao, or of Ueshiba's notion of enveloping your adversaries. If you prefer, you can think of it as leverage: if someone is using a lever to magnify their force on an object, is it better to push back on the object, or on the other person's foot? You can also think of it as getting past the superficial story to the real story underneath. The best kind of compromise is when it doesn't matter whether anyone gets what they said they want, but everyone is getting what they really want.
One example of incentives working in transit is Hasselt, Belgium, which is usually held up as a paragon of free public transit, but where it seems that the key was actually converting the government-sponsored inner ring road from an incentive to drive to a "Groene Boulevard" where buses and bikes have priority. However, in order to pass both free transit and the Groene Boulevard, their promoters had to convince the citizens of Hasselt that it was "their" town, their mobility plan, and their bus system. Getting to the levers is not easy, and neither is controlling them once you do.
We can think of this as an application of the Tao, or of Ueshiba's notion of enveloping your adversaries. If you prefer, you can think of it as leverage: if someone is using a lever to magnify their force on an object, is it better to push back on the object, or on the other person's foot? You can also think of it as getting past the superficial story to the real story underneath. The best kind of compromise is when it doesn't matter whether anyone gets what they said they want, but everyone is getting what they really want.
One example of incentives working in transit is Hasselt, Belgium, which is usually held up as a paragon of free public transit, but where it seems that the key was actually converting the government-sponsored inner ring road from an incentive to drive to a "Groene Boulevard" where buses and bikes have priority. However, in order to pass both free transit and the Groene Boulevard, their promoters had to convince the citizens of Hasselt that it was "their" town, their mobility plan, and their bus system. Getting to the levers is not easy, and neither is controlling them once you do.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Three factors in density
I concede defeat on one aspect of the density thought experiment: the commenters convinced me that there are places that don't have "the density to support transit" even if everyone who wants to go anywhere takes the transit. Phelan, California and Fort McMurray, Alberta may be examples of this. However, there are three aspects of the story that I'm sticking to:
1. If these places can't support transit, most of them probably can't support roads either. That's "support" either in the sense of inducing enough tax revenue to pay for their construction and maintenance, or providing a public service that would be considered worth the investment.
2. Most of the places that are generally claimed to "not have the density to support transit" are of the kind that would have the density to support transit if it had a 100% mode share.
3. As Jonathan said, if you make driving expensive or unpleasant enough (or if you just don't bother to make it cheap and comfortable), people will move to places where they can access things easily through walking and transit. That's the transportation-land use cycle that I identified in 2008 (here seen in a cleaned-up version by Pantagraph Trolleypole).
So the next time you're tempted to say something about "the density to support transit," ask yourself these three questions:
1. Would transit work if it had a better mode share?
2. Does the area have the density to support roads either?
3. Would people live or work more densely if the car infrastructure was less subsidized?
1. If these places can't support transit, most of them probably can't support roads either. That's "support" either in the sense of inducing enough tax revenue to pay for their construction and maintenance, or providing a public service that would be considered worth the investment.
2. Most of the places that are generally claimed to "not have the density to support transit" are of the kind that would have the density to support transit if it had a 100% mode share.
3. As Jonathan said, if you make driving expensive or unpleasant enough (or if you just don't bother to make it cheap and comfortable), people will move to places where they can access things easily through walking and transit. That's the transportation-land use cycle that I identified in 2008 (here seen in a cleaned-up version by Pantagraph Trolleypole).
So the next time you're tempted to say something about "the density to support transit," ask yourself these three questions:
1. Would transit work if it had a better mode share?
2. Does the area have the density to support roads either?
3. Would people live or work more densely if the car infrastructure was less subsidized?
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Density thought experiments
In recent posts, I've discussed how density isn't all that important in transit demand, how the idea of "supporting transit" is problematic, and how different people have different goals for transit, and density affects these goals differently. Because my own goals (see the top of this page) are wrapped up in a feedback loop based on mode share, my most intermediate goal is getting people out of their cars.
Transit mode share, in fact, is where density is least relevant. This may seem surprising, but only if you believe that density is the only way to control the relative value that people get from various modes. The transit boosters who worry about density actually believe that it's possible in the short term to increase the value of transit by throwing more money at it, but that that's unsustainable in the long run. Their big blind spot is that we actually have quite a bit of control over the value of driving, if we can find the political will.
This brings us back to the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership:
1. Give transit its own right-of-way and good terminals
2. Make it hard to use cars
3. Make it expensive to use cars
4. Profit!
Many transit advocates have enough exposure to the concept of (3) in the form of congestion pricing and gasoline prices, but they seem very resistant to considering step (2), probably because they don't want to be accused of wanting to take anyone's car away. The Very Serious People are all afraid to talk about decreasing the size of the road network.
But what if, while Spain was building all those high-speed rail lines, they didn't also pump billions into a truly gigantic highway network? If drivers faced constant congestion on old highways, wouldn't we expect higher ridership on the trains? Wouldn't we also expect that if the highway network was old and small enough, but the train network was the size it is today, eventually there would be enough demand for the trains that they would be completely profitable - operations and capital?
You can do the same thought experiment with any place. No matter how sparsely populated it is, just subtract some roads while keeping the rail and/or bus network constant, and eventually the place "supports transit." Take Wyoming. Now imagine it without interstate highways. Would that be enough to support restored passenger service on the train lines? How about if we turn all the roads to gravel?
Back in 2010, I had a similar discussion on Human Transit about the supposed convenience of cars. A lot of people had problems with the idea that convenience was dependent on the quality of the infrastructure, but I think I showed that if you throw enough money at any transportation system you can make it feel convenient to its users.
Similarly, if you make the car infrastructure shitty enough and expensive enough, you can make transit feel like a bargain. Density may make it politically easier to support transit expansion or harder to support road expansion, but that's not a matter of "the density to support transit," it's "the density to make it likely enough that transit will receive more political support than roads," which is not the same thing at all.
If you're really not convinced, I challenge you to come up with a place, or a route, where you can't increase transit ridership by taking away roads or increasing prices. If you want data, I have density and mode share figures for all of the municipalities and census-designated places in the New York Combined Statistical Area. Go for it.
Transit mode share, in fact, is where density is least relevant. This may seem surprising, but only if you believe that density is the only way to control the relative value that people get from various modes. The transit boosters who worry about density actually believe that it's possible in the short term to increase the value of transit by throwing more money at it, but that that's unsustainable in the long run. Their big blind spot is that we actually have quite a bit of control over the value of driving, if we can find the political will.
This brings us back to the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership:
1. Give transit its own right-of-way and good terminals
2. Make it hard to use cars
3. Make it expensive to use cars
4. Profit!
Many transit advocates have enough exposure to the concept of (3) in the form of congestion pricing and gasoline prices, but they seem very resistant to considering step (2), probably because they don't want to be accused of wanting to take anyone's car away. The Very Serious People are all afraid to talk about decreasing the size of the road network.
But what if, while Spain was building all those high-speed rail lines, they didn't also pump billions into a truly gigantic highway network? If drivers faced constant congestion on old highways, wouldn't we expect higher ridership on the trains? Wouldn't we also expect that if the highway network was old and small enough, but the train network was the size it is today, eventually there would be enough demand for the trains that they would be completely profitable - operations and capital?
You can do the same thought experiment with any place. No matter how sparsely populated it is, just subtract some roads while keeping the rail and/or bus network constant, and eventually the place "supports transit." Take Wyoming. Now imagine it without interstate highways. Would that be enough to support restored passenger service on the train lines? How about if we turn all the roads to gravel?
Back in 2010, I had a similar discussion on Human Transit about the supposed convenience of cars. A lot of people had problems with the idea that convenience was dependent on the quality of the infrastructure, but I think I showed that if you throw enough money at any transportation system you can make it feel convenient to its users.
Similarly, if you make the car infrastructure shitty enough and expensive enough, you can make transit feel like a bargain. Density may make it politically easier to support transit expansion or harder to support road expansion, but that's not a matter of "the density to support transit," it's "the density to make it likely enough that transit will receive more political support than roads," which is not the same thing at all.
If you're really not convinced, I challenge you to come up with a place, or a route, where you can't increase transit ridership by taking away roads or increasing prices. If you want data, I have density and mode share figures for all of the municipalities and census-designated places in the New York Combined Statistical Area. Go for it.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Density and our goals
On my last post I got some great comments! Jeff "Pantagraph Trolleypole" Wood pointed us to Pushkarev and Zupan suggesting that commercial density is more important than residential density back in 1977; Jeff summarized that argument in 2010. So that's where a lot of this comes from.
Richard Layman points out that some parts of the transit network can reinforce others, and that it may therefore be valuable for apparently unjustified transit routes and runs to be cross-subsidized by "popular" routes, or even by the government. Jeff also pointed to the value of high-speed rail in inducing dense development near stations, and I think if we put these together we get something that Germà Bel's analysis misses: that an "unprofitable" high-speed rail line can be worth subsidizing if it gets people to downtown stations where they will walk and ride transit instead of driving.
Bel himself left a comment pointing out that any transportation investment yields private benefits (which should probably be paid for by the user) and public benefits (which could be paid for by the government), and pointing us to an interesting study of the new Italian high-speed rail network (PDF). I think that's very important, but I would add that the public and private benefits are not a matter of universal agreement, and especially with the public benefits there will be people who disagree about the relative value of transit cross-subsidy or economic development or emissions reductions. The debate is not just a matter of how much a project affects these outcomes, but how much the outcomes matter.
With that in mind, let me try to clear up a few more things about return on investment. If our goals are to induce economic development then we'll be looking at measures like levels of employment and tax revenue generated by that development. If we don't care about any of that and we just want to make sure that this project doesn't bankrupt the state, we'll be focused on capital and operating outlays. Either way, density of development plays a role. Just as importantly, though, we need to look at the transportation system as a whole consisting of redundant bus, rail and private auto networks, and figure out the most cost-effective way to make use of it. It's idiotic to declaim the waste on high-speed rail while ignoring the ROI of the multitude of inefficient highway expansion and rehabilitation projects. As Chuck shows, development density improves the ROI of both road and transit infrastructure.
As you can see at the top of the page, my goals are to increase access and improve society while reducing pollution and carnage and avoiding resource depletion. Because of that I may look at individual measures like access to jobs and services, pollution, fatality and injury levels, and rate of depletion of the various natural resources used by transportation and development. Many of these metrics are sensitive to the density of residential, commercial and industrial development.
However, other than access, all those goals require getting people out of their cars. This means that I can look at VMT reduction as a long-term goal, and increasing the mode share of transit and walking in the short term. More importantly, there's a cycle of government and private investment in transit. The more transit ridership there is, the less subsidy will be required, and the more money that will be available for expanding the transit network. In addition, the more transit ridership there is, the more political support there will be for government investment in expanding the transit network. Conversely, the less driving there is, the less political support there will be for driving subsidies. Transit mode share is really key here, more important than any of the individual measures.
Transit mode share, in fact, is where density is least relevant. This may seem surprising, but only if you believe that density is the only way to control the relative value that people get from various modes. I'll talk more about that soon.
Richard Layman points out that some parts of the transit network can reinforce others, and that it may therefore be valuable for apparently unjustified transit routes and runs to be cross-subsidized by "popular" routes, or even by the government. Jeff also pointed to the value of high-speed rail in inducing dense development near stations, and I think if we put these together we get something that Germà Bel's analysis misses: that an "unprofitable" high-speed rail line can be worth subsidizing if it gets people to downtown stations where they will walk and ride transit instead of driving.
Bel himself left a comment pointing out that any transportation investment yields private benefits (which should probably be paid for by the user) and public benefits (which could be paid for by the government), and pointing us to an interesting study of the new Italian high-speed rail network (PDF). I think that's very important, but I would add that the public and private benefits are not a matter of universal agreement, and especially with the public benefits there will be people who disagree about the relative value of transit cross-subsidy or economic development or emissions reductions. The debate is not just a matter of how much a project affects these outcomes, but how much the outcomes matter.
With that in mind, let me try to clear up a few more things about return on investment. If our goals are to induce economic development then we'll be looking at measures like levels of employment and tax revenue generated by that development. If we don't care about any of that and we just want to make sure that this project doesn't bankrupt the state, we'll be focused on capital and operating outlays. Either way, density of development plays a role. Just as importantly, though, we need to look at the transportation system as a whole consisting of redundant bus, rail and private auto networks, and figure out the most cost-effective way to make use of it. It's idiotic to declaim the waste on high-speed rail while ignoring the ROI of the multitude of inefficient highway expansion and rehabilitation projects. As Chuck shows, development density improves the ROI of both road and transit infrastructure.
As you can see at the top of the page, my goals are to increase access and improve society while reducing pollution and carnage and avoiding resource depletion. Because of that I may look at individual measures like access to jobs and services, pollution, fatality and injury levels, and rate of depletion of the various natural resources used by transportation and development. Many of these metrics are sensitive to the density of residential, commercial and industrial development.
However, other than access, all those goals require getting people out of their cars. This means that I can look at VMT reduction as a long-term goal, and increasing the mode share of transit and walking in the short term. More importantly, there's a cycle of government and private investment in transit. The more transit ridership there is, the less subsidy will be required, and the more money that will be available for expanding the transit network. In addition, the more transit ridership there is, the more political support there will be for government investment in expanding the transit network. Conversely, the less driving there is, the less political support there will be for driving subsidies. Transit mode share is really key here, more important than any of the individual measures.
Transit mode share, in fact, is where density is least relevant. This may seem surprising, but only if you believe that density is the only way to control the relative value that people get from various modes. I'll talk more about that soon.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
What does it mean to "support transit"?
Last week I singled out Richard Layman for repeating the chestnut "Spain doesn't have the population density to support economically many of the lines, based on ridership." Again, let me make clear that Richard is far from alone in assuming that density is required to support transit, and that his blog is informative, insightful and well worth reading for urban issues. He was also a good sport in leaving a comment on my post; unfortunately all the comments made it clear to me how deep the idea is ingrained in our understandings of transit.
A number of people have addressed this issue before. Richard mentions Steve Belmont and linked us to a scan from his book (see also David Alpert's take). Alon mentions Gary Barnes and his concept of "perceived density" (PDF); the Austin Contrarian has his own idea of perceived density.
I had a great idea for a phrase, "density is not destiny," but like most ideas it turns out that someone's thought of it before you; in this case it was Paul Mees, and Jarrett has an interesting discussion. But all these discussions are frustratingly myopic, assuming that the competing road network is a constant force of nature beyond political influence.
Instead of looking at the concept of "density," let's look at "support." What does it mean to support a transit line? Is it complete financial self-sufficiency, as Germà Bel demands for the Spanish high-speed network? If that's the case, then very few transportation projects anywhere would qualify. Is it the simple existence of the transit line? Then Newburgh's three-line transit system would qualify, since it exists, but that's not a very enlightening criterion. Is it a certain threshold of mode share, as the discussion at Greater Greater Washington would suggest? That's more promising, but it's not all.
Let's bring in some Strong Towns thinking. Chuck Marohn looks at any transportation project and asks, what is the return on investment? And it turns out the answer is connected to density. The ROI for a street, bus line, train line or ferry dock, it turns out, is dependent on the benefits derived from that investment. If it's a government investment, it has a "public ROI" indicating the benefits accrued to the public, whether in the form of tax revenue or any other goal.
ROI is the benefits divided by the costs. In transportation, sewers, utilities and other public projects, the costs are spread out geographically, so the ROI depends on the density of the benefits. That is where density comes in.
A number of people have addressed this issue before. Richard mentions Steve Belmont and linked us to a scan from his book (see also David Alpert's take). Alon mentions Gary Barnes and his concept of "perceived density" (PDF); the Austin Contrarian has his own idea of perceived density.
I had a great idea for a phrase, "density is not destiny," but like most ideas it turns out that someone's thought of it before you; in this case it was Paul Mees, and Jarrett has an interesting discussion. But all these discussions are frustratingly myopic, assuming that the competing road network is a constant force of nature beyond political influence.
Instead of looking at the concept of "density," let's look at "support." What does it mean to support a transit line? Is it complete financial self-sufficiency, as Germà Bel demands for the Spanish high-speed network? If that's the case, then very few transportation projects anywhere would qualify. Is it the simple existence of the transit line? Then Newburgh's three-line transit system would qualify, since it exists, but that's not a very enlightening criterion. Is it a certain threshold of mode share, as the discussion at Greater Greater Washington would suggest? That's more promising, but it's not all.
Let's bring in some Strong Towns thinking. Chuck Marohn looks at any transportation project and asks, what is the return on investment? And it turns out the answer is connected to density. The ROI for a street, bus line, train line or ferry dock, it turns out, is dependent on the benefits derived from that investment. If it's a government investment, it has a "public ROI" indicating the benefits accrued to the public, whether in the form of tax revenue or any other goal.
ROI is the benefits divided by the costs. In transportation, sewers, utilities and other public projects, the costs are spread out geographically, so the ROI depends on the density of the benefits. That is where density comes in.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Navy Road and the projects
Ben Fried at Streetsblog said it all in just fifteen words:
I'm going to blather on about this for much longer than Ben just so that you might get the idea that there's something here, and pay attention to it, and maybe tweet a link to this post. But really, Ben said just about everything that needed to be said. If you like, you can stop reading and make your views known to the DOT and NYCHA and Councilmember James.
One of the reasons I write this blog is because there are things that get under my skin, and I just need to answer them and get it out there. One of them is people who think they've got a wonderful pro-pedestrian solution that nobody's thought of: pedestrian overpasses.
Sometimes pedestrian overpasses are the best solution. For example, when every other crossing of the Long Island Expressway involves fighting with half a dozen turning cars driven by entitled jerks, it's really nice to have your own little ramp with no cars around. In Strong Towns terms, pedestrian overpasses are good for crossing roads, which are in turn built to get cars from one place to another as fast as possible.
Most of the time, though, pedestrian overpasses suck. They're at their worst when they cross streets that have wide sidewalks and retail, like I've seen in Santo Domingo. In these cases, a driver who wants to cross the street has a huge advantage over the pedestrians who have to climb up, over and down. Underpasses, as used on Queens Boulevard and in Paris and London, are just as bad. In Strong Towns terms, pedestrian overpasses are bad for crossing streets. In fact, they're one of the ways that streets get turned into stroads.
So now let's turn to the topic of Ben's tagline: Navy "Street." The Brooklyn Paper story he linked to gave the basics: Navy Street is a popular route between Fort Greene and Park Slope to the south and the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the north, and for two blocks in between (joined together into one superblock) it passes between two subsidized public housing projects, the Farragut Houses (population 3,440) and the Walt Whitman Houses (population 4,276). There are buffered bike paths on either side of the street, and fences blocking pedestrians from accessing or crossing the street from the projects. In the middle of the superblock there is a pedestrian bridge across the street from one project to another.
Every once in a while, some young sociopaths get the idea that it would be fun to go up on the bridge and throw things at the cyclists passing below. Last August, they hit computer programmer Stephen Arthur in the face with a brick, seriously injuring him. The city responded with typical bureaucratic non-solutions: they first stepped up police patrols of the area, and now they're going to cover the overpass with a mesh fence.
Ben's one-liner gets to the heart of the problem: why is Navy Street like this in the first place?
In Strong Towns terms, this section of Navy Street is not a street, or even a stroad. This is a road. It has fencing on both sides for the entire length. It's been about twelve years since I spent much time in that area, but I seem to remember that there was no bike path, just four lanes of car traffic. This road was designed to speed cars through the projects to the Manhattan Bridge and the BQE, without stopping or interacting.
If I lived in those projects, I would probably detest Navy Street for cutting my home off from other parts of the city and bringing noise to my building, just so that outsiders could get through the area faster. If I were an alienated teenager who'd spent his whole life as the target of abuse and discrimination from white people who were mostly well protected behind glass and steel, I'd want to throw something at those cars. And if I saw a less-protected, slower-moving, well-fed-looking white guy going by, I might just throw something at him. It's not right, but I understand where the impulse comes from. In some sense, you could say, they're angry at Bob Moses for designing the projects and the road this way, and at all the people who supported him, and at all the people who maintain this degrading Corbusian environment. They can't throw bricks at them, so they throw them at Stephen Arthur.
By putting in the bike lane, the DOT acknowledged that drivers going to the BQE are just not important enough to justify four lanes of traffic. The bike lane was a good start, but as Ben says, they need to finish the job. Arthur already asked the city to take out the fences, so that if the kids throw things at him again, he can at least try to chase them, but that would be counterproductive. The DOT needs to take down the road and put in a street that serves the project residents and not just the people passing through. As you can see from the pictures, there's room to put sidewalks all along the street. In the unused "open space" NYCHA can put out benches and tables so that other residents can sit by the street, and those eyes on the street may deter potential thugs. Maybe even, as Holly Whyte suggests, have movable furniture, good public bathrooms and food vendors.
With the extra lanes and the fence gone, the cars will be going so slow that there will be no need for a pedestrian bridge; it can be replaced with a raised crosswalk. Hopefully then the residents can meet the cyclists passing through eye to eye, as equals, with respect, and no one will want to throw anything.
If you've read through to the end, at this point you may want to make your views known to the DOT and NYCHA and Councilmember James. Or maybe you want to donate to Streetsblog, so they can keep paying Ben Fried for those great insights.
How About an At-Grade Crosswalk Instead of a Ped Bridge With Fencing Over Navy Street?But because he said it in the middle of a "Today's Headlines" post, I think it didn't get picked up the way it should have. I would have tweeted it, but it's hard to pick out.
I'm going to blather on about this for much longer than Ben just so that you might get the idea that there's something here, and pay attention to it, and maybe tweet a link to this post. But really, Ben said just about everything that needed to be said. If you like, you can stop reading and make your views known to the DOT and NYCHA and Councilmember James.
One of the reasons I write this blog is because there are things that get under my skin, and I just need to answer them and get it out there. One of them is people who think they've got a wonderful pro-pedestrian solution that nobody's thought of: pedestrian overpasses.
Sometimes pedestrian overpasses are the best solution. For example, when every other crossing of the Long Island Expressway involves fighting with half a dozen turning cars driven by entitled jerks, it's really nice to have your own little ramp with no cars around. In Strong Towns terms, pedestrian overpasses are good for crossing roads, which are in turn built to get cars from one place to another as fast as possible.
Most of the time, though, pedestrian overpasses suck. They're at their worst when they cross streets that have wide sidewalks and retail, like I've seen in Santo Domingo. In these cases, a driver who wants to cross the street has a huge advantage over the pedestrians who have to climb up, over and down. Underpasses, as used on Queens Boulevard and in Paris and London, are just as bad. In Strong Towns terms, pedestrian overpasses are bad for crossing streets. In fact, they're one of the ways that streets get turned into stroads.
So now let's turn to the topic of Ben's tagline: Navy "Street." The Brooklyn Paper story he linked to gave the basics: Navy Street is a popular route between Fort Greene and Park Slope to the south and the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the north, and for two blocks in between (joined together into one superblock) it passes between two subsidized public housing projects, the Farragut Houses (population 3,440) and the Walt Whitman Houses (population 4,276). There are buffered bike paths on either side of the street, and fences blocking pedestrians from accessing or crossing the street from the projects. In the middle of the superblock there is a pedestrian bridge across the street from one project to another.
Every once in a while, some young sociopaths get the idea that it would be fun to go up on the bridge and throw things at the cyclists passing below. Last August, they hit computer programmer Stephen Arthur in the face with a brick, seriously injuring him. The city responded with typical bureaucratic non-solutions: they first stepped up police patrols of the area, and now they're going to cover the overpass with a mesh fence.
Ben's one-liner gets to the heart of the problem: why is Navy Street like this in the first place?
In Strong Towns terms, this section of Navy Street is not a street, or even a stroad. This is a road. It has fencing on both sides for the entire length. It's been about twelve years since I spent much time in that area, but I seem to remember that there was no bike path, just four lanes of car traffic. This road was designed to speed cars through the projects to the Manhattan Bridge and the BQE, without stopping or interacting.
If I lived in those projects, I would probably detest Navy Street for cutting my home off from other parts of the city and bringing noise to my building, just so that outsiders could get through the area faster. If I were an alienated teenager who'd spent his whole life as the target of abuse and discrimination from white people who were mostly well protected behind glass and steel, I'd want to throw something at those cars. And if I saw a less-protected, slower-moving, well-fed-looking white guy going by, I might just throw something at him. It's not right, but I understand where the impulse comes from. In some sense, you could say, they're angry at Bob Moses for designing the projects and the road this way, and at all the people who supported him, and at all the people who maintain this degrading Corbusian environment. They can't throw bricks at them, so they throw them at Stephen Arthur.
By putting in the bike lane, the DOT acknowledged that drivers going to the BQE are just not important enough to justify four lanes of traffic. The bike lane was a good start, but as Ben says, they need to finish the job. Arthur already asked the city to take out the fences, so that if the kids throw things at him again, he can at least try to chase them, but that would be counterproductive. The DOT needs to take down the road and put in a street that serves the project residents and not just the people passing through. As you can see from the pictures, there's room to put sidewalks all along the street. In the unused "open space" NYCHA can put out benches and tables so that other residents can sit by the street, and those eyes on the street may deter potential thugs. Maybe even, as Holly Whyte suggests, have movable furniture, good public bathrooms and food vendors.
With the extra lanes and the fence gone, the cars will be going so slow that there will be no need for a pedestrian bridge; it can be replaced with a raised crosswalk. Hopefully then the residents can meet the cyclists passing through eye to eye, as equals, with respect, and no one will want to throw anything.
If you've read through to the end, at this point you may want to make your views known to the DOT and NYCHA and Councilmember James. Or maybe you want to donate to Streetsblog, so they can keep paying Ben Fried for those great insights.
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