Transmillennial NYC?

A while back I was arguing with someone about "Bus Rapid Transit," and they suggested that New York should emulate the system used in Bogotá. I was skeptical; I've read about the Transmilenio and seen the Streetfilm, It didn't seem a good fit, but I felt like I didn't know enough.

The Avenida Caracas is 120 feet wide. Photo: Peter Angritt / Wikimedia.

I haven't been to the Colombian capital, but I've now looked at the network in more detail, and its applicability to New York area is extremely limited. Implementing anything resembling a Transmilenio corridor without converting general driving lanes to busways would require taking large amounts of land that is currently used for housing, retail or industry. I just don't see that happening on, say, Northern Boulevard or Church Avenue, and I don't want to see it happen.

The twelve Transmilenio corridors (not including the Carrera 7 stub) range from four to eight miles long, and are either at-grade or depressed, rarely elevated. They are all anchored by either the downtown or by a connection to another Transmilenio corridor. They fall into three types, as follows:

Photo: Felipe Restrepo Acosta / Wikimedia.

There is one corridor, the Eje Ambiental, that is roughly sixty feet wide. It could be emulated on any street of that width, like Fulton Street or Bergenline Avenue. I'm not going to consider those here, because they're everywhere.

Four corridors have sidewalks and at-grade crossings, like the Avenida de Caracas (see above); I call them Arterials. They have four to six lanes of car traffic and sometimes a bike path, and range from 120 to 150 feet wide.

The Autopista Norte is about 350 feet wide here. Photo: Felipe Restrepo Acosta / Wikimedia.

The other seven corridors have grade-separated crossings, and at least some of the car lanes are limited access, like the Calle 26; I call these Highway corridors. The corridors can be up to 450 feet wide and include six to twelve car lanes and sometimes a bike path or even two. There are planted medians and sometimes even parks in the medians.

With this in mind, here are the basic criteria for Transmilenio-style corridors:

1. At least 120 feet wide, so no Route 17 corridor in Bergen County
2. At least four moving car lanes after the busway is installed, so no Grant Highway corridor in the Bronx
3. At least four miles long, so no Whitestone Expressway corridor in Queens
4. At or below grade, not primarily elevated, so no Bruckner Expressway corridor in the Bronx
5. At least one good anchor, so no Route 18 corridor in Monmouth County

I will add the following for this exploration of New York, in keeping with our principles (see above):

6. No parallel trains. Some trains are overcrowded, but for this let's focus on corridors with no rapid transit service at all, so no Seventh Avenue corridor.
7. No adding lanes. If a corridor has functioning, accessible parkland, let's leave it, so no Mosholu Parkway corridor.
8. At least 140 feet wide if the avenue already allows curbside parking. On-street parking beats off-street parking, and it's really hard to get the city to install bollards, so no 164th Street corridor.

I am not making any attempt to forecast demand in this post, aside from restricting my exploration to New York City and the counties closest to it. If you do try to think about demand, keep in mind that demand is not static, and it responds to the availability of alternatives.

One thing that surprised me looking at the Transmilenio system was how many of the lines (seven out of twelve) are the "highway" type, with separated local and express carriageways and any retail or housing set back from the sidewalks (almost all of them have sidewalks, which is a lot more civilized than most of our highways here). But when people (like the person I was arguing with) talk about adopting Transmilenio designs in New York, they're almost always talking about arterial corridors within the city limits, so that's what I'm going to focus on for this post.

So, are you ready? Here they are, all five of them!

The thing about arterial corridors in New York City is that we don't actually have very many that fit the Transmilenio model. We have a lot of big, wide avenues that feel dangerous, but when we actually measure them it turns out most of them are only a hundred feet wide, like Church Avenue in Brooklyn or Gun Hill Road in the Bronx. Even Astoria Boulevard in East Elmhurst is only 120 feet.

The remaining Arterial corridors do not form a coherent network at all in the five boroughs. They don't even extend the subway network, because stroads like Kings Highway and Linden Boulevard only widen to Transmilenio widths half a mile or more from the subway. The best you can say is that some of them would provide new routes parallel to crowded lines, like West Street.

The most promising corridor is Woodhaven Boulevard. The City has finally succeeded in upgrading it to Select Bus service, but they never proposed Transmilenio-style high island platforms. They tried to get separated center lanes, but after a long, hard fight with motorists and bean counters they settled for converting some of the inner express roadway to dedicated lanes with median boarding.

Woodhaven is also paralleled by the dormant Rockaway Beach Branch of the Long Island Railroad, which would have much more capacity and be somewhat better located. If the Rockaway Branch is ever reactivated, a Transmilenio-style busway would just add capacity to that, the way an Ocean Parkway busway would add capacity to the F and G trains a few blocks away on McDonald Avenue. Not a bad idea, but not the transformative change promised by some people.

Does that mean there's no application for Transmilenio-style busways in New York? Not quite; things actually look a lot more promising in the suburbs. Stay tuned for that!

The O Train to Avenue H

One subway expansion proposal that always gets mentioned by people, but has never gotten any official funding or planning, is the "TriboroRx" line, using the Port Morris Branch, the New York Connecting Railroad and the LIRR Bay Ridge Branch to bring riders from Yankee Stadium to the Brooklyn Army Terminal, passing near the commercial centers of Astoria, Jackson Heights, East New York, Flatbush and Midwood.

In 2007, Michael Frumin modeled the potential demand for the line, and found promising results. When he was hired by the MTA I hoped it was a sign that there would be some planning, but it looks like they just wanted his modeling skills.

Some segments of the line only have room for two tracks: the New York Connecting Railroad from the Hell Gate Bridge to Fresh Pond Yard, and the Bay Ridge Branch from the Brighton Line to the Culver Line. The tracks are still used for freight, and will see more use if the Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel is built.

There are significant bureaucratic obstacles to running reasonably priced passenger service on the same track with freight trains, and overcoming those obstacles would require an amount of political will that no leader has shown recently. The alternative to sharing tracks would be lots of digging, concrete and steel to double-deck the line in those parts, either above or below grade. The Port Morris Branch, currently abandoned and neglected, would also require significant upgrades before it can be used by passenger trains.

Because of this, I suggested that we start the ball rolling by extending the G train south past 18th Avenue and west to the Brooklyn Army Terminal. I also suggested that we run trains along the section between the Brighton Line and Broadway Junction.

The map above shows one such possibility, proposed by the MTA as part of the "New Routes" plan in 1969. Under this proposal, the L train would be split into two routes. At Broadway Junction (or maybe Halsey Street) they would diverge, with one continuing to the L current terminus in Canarsie.

The other branch, which I'll call the O train, would travel parallel to the L within the right-of-way of the Bay Ridge Branch, skipping a few stops but connecting to the 3 train at Junius Street. It would then follow the Bay Ridge Branch west through past Brooklyn College (with a transfer to the 2 train), terminating at the Brighton Line with a transfer to the Avenue H station.

This is only one possibility. Another way to handle it would be to run the B trains 24/7, turning them east on the Bay Ridge Branch to Broadway Junction - although riders in Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay would probably complain about losing express service. A third would be to have the O and B trains overlap, providing more frequent service.

That seems to be all that can reasonably be done with the existing trackage without sharing tracks with freight trains or pouring lots of concrete. There is a four-track section between Broadway Junction and Fresh Pond Yard, but there's not much reason to send L (or J or C) trains up there. If you've ever taken the M to the end of the line you'll understand why - it's not much of a destination.

Running trains on this section would bring train service to a large section of Brooklyn that currently has none, and provide access to potential sites for new housing in these areas. There is no need to wait for a full build of the "TriboroRx" line - that was just somebody's idea. It should be explored now.

Could we build another Park Slope?

Do you like the modern towers of the Upper East Side?

Photo: Peter Cigliano / Flickr.

How about a nice gigantic Upper West Side prewar apartment building like the Ansonia?

Photo: wallyg / Flickr.

Or the brownstones of Park Slope?

Photo: Beyond My Ken / Wikipedia.

Or is all that too dense and urban for you? Maybe you'd prefer the lovely Victorians of Irvington, NY?

Photo: June Marie / Flickr.

Gorgeous places to live! Of course, you and I are not the only ones who think so. These are some of the most desirable locations in the country. There are millions of people who would love to live in places like these.

So why don't we build more?

Why not buy up a block of crappy 1960s Stately Homes in Woodside and replicate the Ansonia? Or raze some raised ranches in Massapequa and build a block of brownstones? Build a new Victorian main street leading down to the Croton station, where now there are strip malls?

It turns out that there are some attempts to do this. Andres Duany is involved in a project in Jersey City that looks pretty cool. If you know of any others in the New York area, please let me know!

Unfortunately, those projects are a drop in the bucket. Zoning rules across the region make it next to impossible to build big modern towers on the Upper West Side, or a new Ansonia in Park Slope, or a block of brownstones in Irvington, or a new Irvington in Scarborough. The Municipal Art Society's recently released zoning envelope map confirms that the massive downzoning conducted across the city by Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Burden reinforced this prohibition. And people wonder why rents keep going up...

Why we need a Brooklyn Bridge cycle track

I remember when you could walk or bike over the Brooklyn Bridge at almost any hour and not feel crowded. Those days are long past: walking over the bridge has become a major tourist activity, and commuting by bike has become extremely popular. Thanks to hard work by advocates, especially Transportation Alternatives, the city reopened the south sidepath on the Manhattan Bridge to bicycles and pedestrians in 2001, and the north sidepath to bikes in 2004, taking a lot of daily commuters and recreational walkers and joggers off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Photo: Jule / Flickr

Even with this additional capacity, the Brooklyn Bridge path gets a lot more cyclists and pedestrians than it can comfortably handle. Pedestrians complain bitterly about the cyclists, and vice versa. Often it is deserved: I've seen many thoughtless cyclists bombing down the offramp, and many clueless pedestrians drifting into the bike lane without looking. But mainly, the pie is too small for all the people who now want a slice. We need more capacity.

There have been proposals in the past to simply ban cyclists from the bridge, and the satirical @bikelobby account on Twitter has capitulated, but often the proposal is to build a new bikeway somewhere on top of the existing bridge structure, as with this 2012 proposal by City Council members Lander, Chin and Levin. I don't think we need to spend that much money; we should simply convert one of the current car lanes to a two-way cycle track.

Converting car lanes to cycle tracks is also not a new thing. It's been done over and over again by the city in the past seven years, first on Ninth Avenue, then Eighth and Kent and now even on the Pulaski Bridge, where the current multiuse path between Greenpoint and Long Island City is similarly strained. This would just be the same thing on the main level of the Brooklyn Bridge, and then the upper multiuse path could be dedicated to pedestrians. It's been proposed for the Brooklyn Bridge before, by Streetsblog commenters and Robert Sullivan.

You might think that the city could not afford to give up that car capacity, but in fact it might wind up increasing the total number of people who cross on the Brooklyn Bridge. There are no buses (or trucks) currently allowed on the bridge. The Manhattan Bridge bike path is well traveled, especially during rush hours, and the number of cyclists can rival the number of cars on nearby lanes.

Last month, at 7:30 on a Tuesday, Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms took a quick count on the Manhattan Bridge. He counted a hundred cyclists in two minutes and 23 seconds, a rate that corresponds to 2691 2517 vehicles per hour. By contrast (PDF), in 2010 the three outbound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge carry 3509 vehicles between 5:00 and 6:00 PM, or 1170 vehicles per lane per hour. The five outbound car/bus/truck lanes on the Manhattan Bridge carried 2382 vehicles, or only 476 vehicles per lane per hour.

In a subsequent tweet, Clarence acknowledged that his sample may not have been representative. "well I am sure that pace didn't hold up!" he wrote. "A dozen were on a tour group" But even if the typical peak counts are not that high (see this PDF from the city DOT), they are probably higher than 476 per hour, and maybe higher than 1170 per hour. This suggests that one of the lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge's main deck would carry more people in the peak rush hour as a two-way cycle track than it currently does as a single car lane.

Clearly there is more research to be done: more samples of peak hour bike and motor vehicle traffic, on both the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. I'm looking forward to the Streetfilm!

Imagining desire lines

You've seen them: lines where the grass is worn down, the evidence that enough people have walked a particular route as to kill the grass. They are called "desire lines" by landscape architects, and they are used to decide where to put new concrete or gravel paths.

This is a real desire line, showing the demand for an extension of the Motor Parkway to Glen Oaks. Click here to find out more.

The key point is that these bottom-up paths represent the desires of the people - the users of the space - in contrast with the top-down concrete paths that represent the desires of the planners and architects. The use of desire lines is an acknowledgment that sometimes the “wisdom of the crowds” – the aggregate of thousands of decisions made by hundreds of people, or more – can produce better outcomes than a handful of principled decisions made by educated professionals who may never actually use the space.

What are these better outcomes? Why do we care if people are walking on the concrete or the grass? Well, concrete is expensive and takes up space that could otherwise be planted with grass, so it pays to pour the concrete where it will be used. Dirt paths can be less comfortable, and some people don’t like the way they look. In general it’s more efficient for people to go where the infrastructure is, and for infrastructure to go where the people are.

It’s important to note that desire lines don’t tell you the whole story, because the decisions that create them operate within constraints imposed by others. For example, people may leave an asphalt path and cross a quadrangle diagonally to get to a door, because the asphalt path does not lead to a convenient door. Once they get through the door, they may travel down a corridor to a point just on the other side of a wall from the asphalt path. The best solution may not be to pave the diagonal path, but to open a new door in the wall.

Last week, Michael Kimmelman invoked the idea of desire lines to support his proposal for a streetcar running near the East River waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens. I read his post looking forward to hearing about how people are already trying to get from one part of the waterfront to another. Then I read it again, and again, but found no actual desire lines.

Kimmelman writes, "Cities also have desire lines, marked by economic development and evolving patterns of travel." Evolving patterns of travel, sure, but the only evidence he gives of these patterns is the Kent Avenue bikeway. Now I love the Kent Avenue bikeway, but it is no desire line. It’s a top-down effort, the result of years of collaboration between bike activists and city planners. Its popularity is largely due to the scarcity of safe alternatives.

I took Kent Avenue to work for a while when I worked downtown, but it was a significant detour for me. The quickest way for me to get downtown is the route of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but I can’t ride my bike on it, there is no bike access on the Kosciuszko Bridge, and the parallel streets are hostile to cyclists. It is the planned concrete path. My desire line is the one traced by the young, tough, fast cyclists commuting down Metropolitan Avenue.

Similarly, the economic development invoked by Kimmelman represents not the desires of the residents, workers or shoppers, but the desires of developers and city planners, and the hate – the opposite of desire - of NIMBYs. The process of planning and zoning in this city favors people who have a lot of money, people who have fancy degrees, and people who have the time and energy to sit through community board meetings and the connections to get appointed to the community boards. That is why those buildings are rising along the waterfront.

Stephen Smith pointed out that Kimmelman is ignoring true desire lines, notably the ridership of existing bus lines. "What is the logic in investing a billion or more in upgrading a moderately-trafficked bus route in Astoria before far more heavily-traveled routes in neighborhoods like Flushing and Elmhurst?" he writes. "It’s hard to discern any motivation beyond the fact that existing high-ridership routes like the Q44 or Q58 simply don’t pass through gentrifying areas."

Other desire lines include the presence of non-government-sanctioned transit lines, like the Jamaican and Haitian dollar vans on Flatbush Avenue, or the Chinatown vans to Flushing and Sunset Park. Patterns of travel in taxis and private cars (or even bicycles, but with care) are other possible indicators. The replacement of any one of these by a faster, more efficient, less crowded train would be an improvement comparable to the replacement of a dirt path with a concrete walkway.

But the existence of housing developments and a bike path do not constitute desire lines, even if they are popular. Using these signs of the will of developers and planners to plan a train line is not like the bottom-up process of using the tracks of multiple individuals to plan concrete paths.

I'm honestly puzzled as to why Kimmelman misused the term "desire lines" in such a conspicuous way. I don't think he's deliberately being misleading, but I really expected him to know better. My most charitable explanation is that he was so excited at this idea (which he got from Alex Garvin) that he didn't really think through the idea of "desire lines" before hitting "send."

At least he's smart enough to avoid calling it "a desire named streetcar."

Estimating crowded subways

It turns out that there's another hitch in estimating how crowded the subways are: in my last post I used the NYMTC's estimates of space per passenger from Table 20, but in the comments threestationsquare pointed out that they assume that every subway car has 602 square feet of space, which is definitely not true. Andrew suggested using the MTA's rush hour loading guidelines, which can be found on pages 26-31 of this PDF, and threestationsquare went with that. He also used the crowding in the 8AM hour, which makes sense since that's the peak hour for every line.

I'm on record as to the problems with loading guidelines. Capt Subway, who was a scheduler at the MTA for many years, added to my critique with his experiences, which are definitely worth a read. But the problems that the Capt noted are with the way the MTA measures compliance with the guidelines, and these are independent measures by the NYMTC. As Andrew noted, the rush hour guidelines are nowhere near as political as the off-peak guidelines, so I'm comfortable with that.

In every measure, however, the #7 train and the R have always been at the low end. This means that the capacity added in Long Island City has been a good thing, although as others have mentioned, a lot of people have moved into new apartments there since the fall of 2012, and more will come with Hunters Point South. There may not be any room left on the train by the time everything currently in the pipeline is built.

The J/M/Z and the 2/3 seem to have switched places, notably, so the zoning reforms should go in southern Bushwick rather than in Brooklyn Heights. But because there's still room on the R, we should allow some more residential development near Metrotech.

The Central Park West locals are an interesting challenge. As Jarrett Walker noted, when the "area served" by your station is half parkland or water, you need double the density to serve the same number of people - at least during the morning rush, when very few commuters are coming directly from Central Park. In consequence of the 2007 downzoning hysteria, that's not likely to happen soon. One thing that could help would be better crosstown bus service, so that more people can transfer from the bus.

It looks like, from the point of view of subway crowding, there isn't enough room to extend any of these subways. There may be the potential to reduce headways (which deserves its own post), but if not, I don't think it's worth a major capital investment if the rush hour loading is over 75% of the guidelines.

Infilling the subways

Commenter threestationsquare pointed out that I made an error in the chart I posted about overcrowded subways. He also noted that it's Table 20 of the NYMTC Hub-bound Travel Study that gives floor space per passenger during morning rush in 2012. Here's a bar graph based on it:

At the uncrowded end of this chart are the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road commuter trains, and this makes a lot of sense. First of all, they have more seats. They run long distances, and people should be able to sit all the way from Speonk or Purdy's. But they're also premium service. There's a very good argument to be made that they're oversubsidized, but if we want to cut the subsidies the place to do it first is in station parking.

The other big group of uncrowded trains are the #7 and the trains that run through downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights (the 2, 3, 4, 5, and R), and a major factor in this is that there are alternatives that get people where they're going faster. A lot of people transfer from the #7 to the N or Q at Queensboro Plaza, and from the R to the N at Pacific Street or the B at Dekalb Avenue. Many people who can walk to these trains will walk a block or two further to get a quicker ride to Midtown on the B, D, E, M, N or Q.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it makes room for infill development, bringing new riders who fill up the train afterwards. It has already been happening for years on the #7 train, for example, where people get off in Jackson Heights to transfer to the Queens Boulevard trains. The space they leave is filled up by people who live in Woodside and Sunnyside. When those people get off at Queensboro Plaza, their space is taken up by people coming from the new developments in Long Island City. Something similar happens with the R in Downtown Brooklyn, but to a lesser degree.

The new buildings in Long Island City use that space on the #7 train to help get people out of their cars, by increasing the amount of carfree housing available in the area so that moving to the suburbs and buying a car seems less attractive. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that completely. Even though LIC's zoning does not require developers to build parking, it encourages parking construction by allowing them to build taller if they build parking. The result is the blight of garages lining Fifth Street.

In Downtown Brooklyn, particularly near the R station at Metrotech, the 2/3/4/5 stations at Hoyt and Nevins, and the big transfer station at Borough Hall the city has pursued a single-use vision of office construction and bent over backward to discourage residential development. Senator Schumer, who lives up the hill in Park Slope, recently reiterated that party line. In addition to use and height limitations, this is also accomplished with minimum parking requirements. The residents of Brooklyn Heights have fought reforms in these areas as well. The result is that residential development has been pushed to Dumbo, Fort Greene and Boerum Hill, which are a long walk from most of the stations on the 2/3/4/5 and R.

In a future post I'll talk about potential extensions for other lines. But these areas have transit capacity to meet the demand for walkable, transit-accessible living space a short distance from Manhattan. They just need to be zoned to allow it, without requiring parking that will compete with the trains and add more cars to an area that already has way too many.

Light rail in New York City?

Last week I talked about the practical differences between light rail, streetcars, subways and commuter rail. We have light rail right across the river in Hudson County, and there have been several proposals for streetcars and light rail here in New York City. I want to mention a few possibilities and discuss their technical and political feasibility.

As I pointed out last week, the lower construction cost of streetcars and light rail comes primarily from shorter, lighter trains and lack of grade separation. These in turn limit your capacity and speed, meaning that if you build the wrong system you can wind up with overcrowded trains and frustrated passengers, and not get as many people out of their cars as you could with a heavier system. The consequences of this in turn are that if you can afford light rail, don't build a streetcar. If you can afford a subway or an el, don't build light rail.

With that in mind, consider Raanan Geberer's suggestion, "How about light rail on the old Rockaway line?" Geberer is clearly a supporter of transit and he's trying to be helpful, but the old Rockaway Beach Branch is completely grade-separated. It should be returned to Long Island Rail Road trains, or connected to the subway, along the lines of Capt. Subway's proposal, to take full advantage of its potential.

The Lower Montauk Branch in Glendale. Photo: Jim Henderson / Wikipedia.

Some of the supporters of rail on the Rockaway Beach Branch have mentioned the possibility of running light rail from Rockaway Park or Ozone Park onto the old "Lower Montauk" branch to Long Island City. The problem is that there are at least two freight trains a day that use those tracks. Because of the Federal Railroad Administration rules, the only way to run light rail would be to limit the freight trains to overnight hours. Unfortunately, I don't see enough potential ridership to justify that time separation. It might be more feasible to run a short diesel-multiple-unit shuttle, especially if it could be done without paying a lot of conductors.

So why do people like Geberer seem to think light rail would be so much better than subways or commuter rail? They are claimed to be quieter, but this is not really true. Yes, the heavier the train the more noise it makes, but that's a relatively minor factor. The noise is primarily a function of the supporting structure. The #7 train is elevated on reinforced concrete in Sunnyside and plain old steel everywhere else. You can have a conversation under the el in Sunnyside, but not in Woodside or Corona. This would not change significantly if you ran light rail trains on the same structures.

The main argument given by proponents of light rail on these lines is that it is somehow more modern than subways or commuter rail. This is nonsense: many of the tracks of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail saw trains long before subways ran in New York City, and many of the cars in use on the New York subway and the Long Island Railroad are newer than the cars on the HBLR.

Sadly, this seems to be another case of what Ryan McGreal called "cargo cult urbanism": if it works in Jersey City and Phoenix and Seattle, it should be the hot new thing here in New York. (Cyclists who promote "BRT" as a panacea seem to have a similar shallowness of thinking.) In part, it's because many of the most ambitious new train lines are being built as light rail in places like Salt Lake City and Charlotte.

The thing is that those lines are being built as light rail for two reasons: (1) freight railroads have been abandoning their less-used lines all over the country, and (2) any new rail lines have faced such stiff competition from new highways that ridership projections haven't justified grade separation. Neither of those apply here in New York City. There is still a market for freight trains on the Bushwick, Bay Ridge and Montauk Branches and the Oak Point Link in the Bronx. None of these railroads are going to be abandoned any time soon. And there is such demand for transit that we could pack any new light rail trains that are run.

So I've pretty much ruled out mixed-traffic streetcars and legacy-freight light rail here in New York City. The one area where light rail or streetcars would make sense here is if we can dedicate lanes to them. If we can dedicate lanes to buses, we can dedicate them to streetcars or light rail. I looked at this issue almost six years ago, but it might be time for a re-look soon.

Off-peak service frequencies on the Long Island Rail Road

I made this map of off-peak service frequencies on the Long Island Rail Road.

Click through to see it full size.

The difference a lane (or toll) makes

Stephen Smith has a great piece in the Observer showing how the Bloomberg administration has adapted its development strategy to avoid clashing with long-term residents, many of whom live near subway stations. The resulting disconnect between housing capacity and transit has encouraged high-rise towers near the Williamsburg waterfront, far from the overcrowded Bedford Avenue L station and even further from the Marcy Avenue J/M/Z station.

In the long term, NIMBY fears of "overdevelopment" are primarily based on fears of competition for scarce car space. To overcome it, we need to allow developers to build without encouraging people to keep cars, and we need to as convince the long-term residents that parking spillover is not as likely as they think, especially now when everyone is driving less.

In the short term, many of these highrises are already built, and more are in the works, so we need to improve their transit access to keep their residents driving as little as possible. Everyone wants to run ferries because hey, waterfront, but the ferries require large subsidies to compete with free bridges. It's hard to build subway stations right by the waterfront: the fabled South Fourth Street station is still five blocks from the river at Driggs Avenue. You could build an elevated subway or a streetcar, if you could convince people to build something that hasn't been built in this city in at least eighty years. You could also run buses.

Four years ago I mapped out some possible destinations that a Midtown Tunnel bus could get to from Penn Station in ten or fifteen minutes without traffic. The idea was that the tolls keep traffic from getting too congested in the Midtown Tunnel, and the 34th Street bus lane would give the buses priority. The way the 34th Street bus lanes have been executed leaves a lot to be desired, but the principle is sound.



What if we put an Exclusive Bus Lane on the Williamsburg Bridge and down Delancey and Chrystie/Forsyth streets to the Grand Street station? We could run the Nostrand Avenue Select Bus across it, and the Chinatown vans would be significantly faster.

But you could also run buses down Broadway to the waterfront. I agree with Jarrett Walker that loops are generally a bad idea, but Kent Avenue is now one-way, so you could have a South Kent Avenue loop going down to Flushing Avenue, and a North Kent loop going up to Greenpoint. In ten minutes (without traffic) from Grand Street in Manhattan, you could get to Morgan Avenue in East Williamsburg, either along the BQE or along Grand Street. You could go down Broadway to Flushing Avenue, or down Bedford and up Nostrand as far as Myrtle Avenue. And in fifteen minutes you could go further.



This is no longer serving existing high-rises, but rather improving service to long-established neighborhoods. That in turn could lead to people in those neighborhoods no longer thinking that cars are the only route out of poverty. But its usefulness lies in the dedicated lane for buses on the Wiliamsburg Bridge. That's what allows these buses to be competitive with driving.

Priority bus lanes on the Pulaski Skyway

Last month I told you how much the Pulaski Skyway degrades our urban environment just by carrying 30,000 cars into Manhattan, and observed that Chris Christie is planning to rebuild it using $1.8 billion that had been dedicated to building the ARC train tunnel. Now the New Jersey Department of Transportation has announced that for the first two-year stage of the rebuilding they will close the Manhattan-bound half of the highway beginning "after the Super Bowl" in February 2014.

Photo: Dougtone / Flickr.

I'm going to let this comment by Jeff Tittel, longtime director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, pass without comment for now: "There are ways to fix the Pulaski Skyway without creating a traffic nightmare. They should just build a new parallel span to replace the Skyway."

In my opinion it's great that they're shutting down the Skyway; if they would only leave it closed we would be making progress. But what about New Jersey residents who need to get into the city (or into Jersey City)? Janna Chernetz of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign hits it on the head: "To mitigate this transportation nightmare, Port Authority, New Jersey DOT, the Turnpike Authority and NJ Transit will need to work together to minimize the impacts to motorists and transit users," she told the Star-Ledger. "This can be done in the short term by increasing NJ Transit rail and PATH service and expanding bus service — with priority bus lanes — on area roadways."

I expect that we won't see too many people shifting to trains, because the trains are already full during rush hours, but there will probably be a decent increase in ridership on Manhattan-bound express buses. After the highway is reopened we'll probably see most of those people shift right back, depending of course on how long Christie manages to prop up the other components of car dependence like low gas prices and cheap parking.

So where to put those priority bus lanes? Well, we could always use another Lincoln Tunnel Exclusive Bus Lane. Or the shoulder lane that the New Jersey DOT is planning to open on the Newark Bay Bridge could be buses-only. But the best place to put the buses is on the Skyway itself.

If you think about it, there's no real good reason to have the Skyway functioning in only one direction. Instead of using the two north lanes for outbound cars, the New Jersey DOT could make them a two-way exclusive busway. It's true that both buses and trucks are currently banned from the Skyway, but that's not a weight issue, it's because they had too many crashes with cars. If there are only professional bus drivers using the road, the chance of a collision goes way down.

The question remains how best to accommodate all those buses in Manhattan. There's been a lot of criticism of the New Jersey Transit managers who left trains in the flood zone, with good reason, but another spectacular failure of management was the state government's bungling of the emergency bus/ferry system that replaced the disabled commuter rail and PATH lines. It illustrates the importance of terminal management.

The buses could just drop people off at the Liberty State Park ferry docks, like they did during the hurricane. They could go into Manhattan and park, further angering the crazy NIMBYs that have the ear of Daniel Squadron.

The best place to store these buses is in Brooklyn: to have them go right down West Street or Broadway and through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to Red Hook and Spring Creek. They could even make a few stops along the way, adding transit service for people in those areas.

What Not to Rebuild

I'm glad to see that some people have broached the topic of sustainability in the areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and in particular the idea that some uses just aren't a good idea on barrier islands.

I have to say, though, that boardwalks and beaches seem like the easiest things. If the sand gets washed away you can bring more in on barges, and boardwalks are pretty easy to rebuild. Even train trestles - simple ones, across a shallow bay or along a sand bar, away from other structures - are cheap compared to a lot of things. Cheap bungalows, especially the summer-only kind that have no heat or insulation, aren't too bad. Here's a short list of things that were really a bad idea to build in the first place, and shouldn't be rebuilt.

Eric Fischer's map of racial identification in the 2010 census shows the segregation of New York's waterfront communities.

• Racist gated communities. I have sympathy for the people in Breezy Point and Seagate who lost homes and belongings in the floods and fires, and I know it's no fun to be displaced. But we have to acknowledge these places for what they were: segregated enclaves designed to enable white people to live relatively cheaply within the city limits without having black or brown people living next door.
  
  Beyond the sheer repulsiveness of the idea, it corrodes the fabric of the city. I'm not sure these places should be rebuilt at all, but if they're rebuilt with public funds, it should be on the condition that the gates come down and the streets and beaches are open to everyone.
• Housing projects. As the Pratt Center has pointed out, the public housing built on Coney Island and the Rockaways, as well as in Red Hook, is not just vulnerable to storms, it is remote from the city's job center, and a prime cause of the problem of poor people with long commutes. The projects on the Lower East Side are less remote, but still not well-served by transit.
  
  I don't know the current state of the buildings, but we definitely shouldn't put more money into any projects in Zone A. Beyond that, while the Pruitt-Igoe (or Cabrini-Green) treatment is problematic for inner city projects, it makes a lot more sense to dynamite projects on remote barrier islands. Replacing these projects with Section 8 vouchers would probably make the city more sustainable.
• Toxic industrial sites. As the waters of the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek rose, many feared that water seeping through the Superfund sites along its banks would contaminate the rest of the area. There's value to waterfront industry, but we have to be careful about this kind of danger (also highlighted by the Pratt Center).
• Car-dependent sprawl. In my last post, I made a connection between car-dependent sprawl and the climate change that enabled this storm. We shouldn't use rebuilding funds to perpetuate these polluting practices.
  
  According to L Magazine the "walks" on Breezy Point are car-free and safe, but most people get to and from the enclave by car. There's a similar pattern the length of Rockaway and in Gerritsen Beach and Marine Park. Much of the Jersey Shore and the South Shores of Staten Island and Long Island are car-dependent sprawl, especially as you get further away from the train stations.
  
  Some of these areas should be designated as waterfront preserves, with the only construction allowed being cheap summer bungalows and wooden boardwalks. The rest should be zoned for greater density and mixed use.

If the MTA doesn't want to take you to work...

I've got so much to say in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that I'm posting twice in one night. In my last post I didn't include Flushing on the list of places that should have express bus service to Manhattan, because it already has express bus service to Chinatown.

Even if the MTA and the DOT boneheadedly refuse to go along with any of Transportation Alternatives' recommendations, or the two I added, the City still tolerates a small network of van services to cross the river to Chinatown. If you live in Flushing, Elmhurst, Maspeth or Sunset Park and work in Lower Manhattan, you may want to try these vans. I've been thinking about posting a map, similar to the one I made for New Jersey, but I've hesitated because I don't have complete information. In this situation I'll make an exception and put it up there:

These buses all run at least every twenty minutes, and the Flushing-Chinatown and Sunset Park-Chinatown buses run more frequently. Now, the Chinatown buses are express, so you can only catch them at certain points along the line. Here are some locations where I know you can find an express bus to Chinatown:

• 41st Avenue between Main Street and College Point Boulevard, Flushing
• Broadway and Justice Avenue, Elmhurst
• Eighth Avenue and Sixtieth Street, Sunset Park

If you're not Chinese and the drivers don't know what to make of you, just ask, "Chinatown?" That usually clears things up. The Flushing and Sunset Park locations are the best places to get the line that goes from Flushing to Sunset Park as well. The Sunset Park-Chinatown bus goes local up Eighth Avenue until it heads for the Gowanus Expressway, and the Elmhurst-Chinatown bus goes local along roughly the route I've marked on the map until it gets to the BQE, but I don't know exactly where the Elmhurst bus goes east of Broadway (if you know, please tell me). In Chinatown, here are the places to get the buses:

• Flushing: Division Street, just east of the Bowery
• Sunset Park: Forsyth Street and East Broadway
• Elmhurst: Elizabeth Street, just north of Hester Street

Here are some handy Simplified Chinese translations to help you:

English	汉语	Commuter Vans
Chinatown	曼哈頓華埠	To Elmhurst, Flushing and Sunset Park
Elmhurst	艾姆赫斯特	To Chinatown
Flushing	法拉盛	To Chinatown and Sunset Park
Sunset Park	布鲁克林華埠	To Chinatown and Flushing

I've also added the Flatbush Avenue dollar van route to the map, even though it's a local route and doesn't go over the bridge. Some of you may find it useful. If anyone knows the Utica Avenue route, please let me know and I'll add it.

Can we get an Emergency Express Bus network?

We now know that most of the tunnels under the East River were flooded by Hurricane Sandy, including subway tunnels, and that there is flooding in other low-lying parts of the system. Because transit officials moved the trains and buses to high ground, all of the rolling stock is in working order. MTA officials have wisely refused to give a definite timeframe for restoring subway service, but have said that it will be days before there is significant service. In the meantime they have said that the whole bus system should be running tomorrow. That's good.

There are still two problems. First, the bus network is not designed to bring people into and out of Manhattan efficiently. Since the 2010 service cuts, no local buses have traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The only MTA buses that do are the express buses that go to Staten Island, Canarsie and southern Brooklyn. With the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (recently renamed in honor of former Governor Hugh Carey) filled with water, I'm guessing they'll go across the Manhattan Bridge instead. Similarly in Queens, the express buses bypass everything west of the BQE, and a good deal of what's east of it. The express buses from the Bronx go through all of Manhattan without stopping.

Now you want express buses to speed through certain areas. The problem here is that there are no express buses serving the inner neighborhoods that normally have good subway service. People from Woodside (for example) or the Upper West Side could get to Midtown or Lower Manhattan by taking local buses, but it takes a hell of a long time and it's annoying. And it leaves all the people who live in Park Slope or Bed-Stuy or Cobble Hill without a way of getting across the river.

The second problem is that the current bus system doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to handle the numbers that crowd into Manhattan on the subways and commuter trains on a normal weekday. Since most of the southern half of Manhattan is without power, that won't be an issue right away, but the demand for rapid transit into Manhattan will probably grow faster than the supply can be restored.

Now I'm hoping that someone at the MTA will figure this out and set up some kind of express bus system. The staff of Transportation Alternatives has set out some guidelines. They also have points about biking, walking and emergency vehicles, but these three speak specifically to transit:

• Emergency Bus Lanes to allow swift transit throughout the City until subway service is restored.
• High Occupancy Vehicle Requirements on crossings into the most congested areas of the city.
• Carpool Staging Areas offering parking and passenger pick-up locations in support of drivers sharing rides to meet the HOV requirements.

I agree with these, but I don't think they will provide enough capacity. I would add the following two recommendations:

• Temporary Express bus routes from major population centers and transit hubs to Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
• Allow anyone with the proper license, registration and insurance to operate buses.

Off the top of my head, here are five locations that should have express buses running from them: Atlantic Terminal, Jamaica Center, Queens Center Mall, 86th and Lex, and Verdi Square. What are your five?

If the MTA and the DOT don't do any of that, you may want to consider the Chinatown vans.

What is New York's Forest Hill?

As you may remember, Feargus O'Sullivan recently moved within London, from the "urban" neighborhood Shoreditch (I think) to the "suburban" neighborhood of Forest Hill. Many people were struck by his use of the word "suburban" to describe Forest Hill. Some ascribed this difference to British English, which he accepted, but I think that's (as we say) a crock, because even within the US or the UK, we can't keep our own definitions of "suburban" neighborhoods straight. I was also struck by his contention that every "urban" neighborhood in London is gentrifying, unless it was always wealthy. But I'm trying to find neighborhoods here in the New York area that would correspond, even roughly, to the ones he discusses.

The Railway Telegraph pub, Forest Hill, Lewisham. Photo: Ewan-M / Flickr

In the comments, Benjamin Himric pins Feargus down to the following "independent variables" (my terminology) for distinguishing urban and suburban:

URBAN
- relatively high density
- mixed use district (i.e., not overwhelmingly residential)
- close to the city core (presumably this refers particularly to areas that are not themselves mixed use)

SUBURBAN (in the British as opposed to American sense)
- relatively low density
- overwhelmingly residential
- relatively far from urban core

So can we put numbers on these criteria? Let's take a look at the London Borough Profiles, using the boroughs of Hackney and Lewisham as proxies for their neighborhoods of Shoreditch and Forest Hill:

Shoreditch/Hackney:
1.7 miles to London Bridge Station
13 minutes by transit (London Overground)
163 people per non-greenspace hectare (66 per acre)
Jobs density, 2010: 0.66
Median house price, 2010: £292,500 ( $461,857.50; PPP $351,011.70)
Gross annual pay, 2011: £32,000 ( $50,528.00; PPP $38,401.28)

Forest Hill/Lewisham:
5.7 miles to London Bridge Station
30 minutes by transit (Southern Railways)
101 people per non-greenspace hectare (41 per acre)
Jobs density, 2010: 0.39
Median house price, 2010: £235,000 ( $371,065.00; PPP $282,009.40)
Gross annual pay, 2011: £29,000 ( $45,791.00; PPP $34,801.16)

I added in some dependent variables, using the OECD's purchasing power parity multiplier of 0.76 to convert the British prices and wages into something meaningful here. We can get a map of New York neighborhoods and their densities from the Department of City Planning. Quiggyt4 on Flickr has a map of jobs density. The New York Times has a map of income, and Trulia has housing price maps.

Looking at our dependent variables of density, mixed use and distance from the city core, there are only three New York neighborhoods that have 50-74 people per acre and are less than fifteen minutes from one of the two job centers: Fort Greene, Williamsburg and Woodside. Of the three, Fort Greene is the only one that's really mixed use, meaning that they have jobs that aren't just there to serve nearby residents, and that's only if you add in part of Downtown Brooklyn. It also has the right income mix and the projects to be the Shoreditch of New York City.

So what's Forest Hill for New York City? Sadly, it's not Forest Hills, which is much too dense (63 people per acre). More likely, within the half hour limit if you take the railroad, are Greenpoint, South Jamaica, East Flushing and Hollis. They're significantly more residential than Fort Greene or Williamsburg. Greenpoint is probably the best candidate for an analogue to Forest Hill.

Interestingly, of course, Greenpoint is the one New York neighborhood that Feargus mentions, and it's in his list of "currently hip city neighborhoods anywhere." I guess that just shows that "suburbs" - of any kind, really - aren't immune to gentrification. People got priced out of Williamsburg and they went to Greenpoint.

Another thing I noticed is that I couldn't find any neighborhood that had incomes and prices comparable to those in London, at similar densities. As you can see on the New York Times map, income levels in New York form a donut; once you get past the Van Wyck Expressway, or Van Cortlandt Park, or the Watchung Mountains, income levels rise the further you get from the city. There may be some cheap, low-density neighborhoods in New Jersey; I'll check that later.

I have read similar "Why I moved to the suburbs" stories that take place in the New York area, but the commutes tend to be significantly longer and the housing quite a lot more expensive. It's interesting that in London, the suburbs are still a bargain.

From Sheepshead Bay to City Hall

On Saturday I wrote about the abandoned Manhattan Terminal at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, where trolleys used to turn around, allowing their passengers to transfer to the BMT Centre Street trains (now the J/Z) and, after 1936, to the E train (now the F). In addition to the trolley terminal, the Centre Street loop was four tracks, two from the Williamsburg Bridge to Chambers Street and eventually connecting with the Montague Street Tunnel (now used by the R train), and two from the Manhattan Bridge intended to connect with the trains from the Brooklyn Bridge. The tracks across the Brooklyn Bridge were removed and the tracks from the Manhattan Bridge reconfigured to connect to the Sixth Avenue line, and two of the Centre Street tracks have now been abandoned.

As I wrote four years ago, that means that these two tracks are now available for additional service. In general I think we shouldn't give rail infrastructure to buses, and I would ideally like to see the old Tomkins and Nostrand Avenue trolleys rebuilt.

In the meantime, I would be willing to see these relatively short tracks used by buses. In particular, the Nostrand Avenue Select Bus will be running from the Bridge Plaza bus station in Williamsburg south to Sheepshead Bay. It will connect to the 2, A and J trains at all times, the 3, C and M trains during the day and the 5 and Z during rush hours. But the transfer to the J/M/Z at Bridge Plaza is not particularly convenient, involving walking a block and a half, crossing busy streets, and climbing stairs.

What if instead the buses continued across the bridge and into the tunnel, where they could whisk passengers right to existing stations with transfers to the N, Q and R at Canal Street and the 4, 5 and 6 at Chambers Street, and the J and Z at every stop?

What if the Nostrand Avenue Select Bus went across the bridge?

There are similar challenges with ventilation as there are in my proposal for the trolley terminal, but with hybrid or natural gas buses we could keep emissions to a minimum. You might argue that the buses would still get stuck in bridge traffic, but not if we gave them a dedicated lane. We might not be able to allow other buses, like the Chinatown vans and buses, into that tunnel, but we could allow them to use the lane on the bridge if there's room.

This is a G train to Brooklyn Army Terminal...

Last month, Manhattan Borough President and mayoral hopeful Scott Stringer revived hopes for what he called "the X line," also known as the Tribororx. This line was proposed in the Third Regional Plan in 1996. In 2007 Michael Frumin, now an MTA manager, worked with the Regional Plan Association to flesh out the idea. The proposal was to run rapid transit along existing rail rights-of-way from the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Bay Ridge to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

There have been objections about using the right of way for rapid transit. The old New York Central Port Morris Branch in the Bronx is the only portion that is currently unused. The Hell Gate Bridge is used by freight and Amtrak trains. The rest of the way is occupied by the New York Connecting Railroad and the Bay Ridge Branch of the Long Island Railroad, freight railroads that see a significant amount of traffic. If the Cross-Harbor Freight Tunnel is ever built, it will connect to these lines.

From the Brooklyn Army Terminal to New Utrecht Avenue the right-of-way is very wide, with plenty of room for two new subway tracks next to the existing tracks for the N train and the Bay Ridge freight line. The Hell Gate Bridge can fit all the Amtrak and freight traffic onto two tracks, and has a third track and room for a fourth. The crunch would be from New Utrecht Avenue in Brooklyn to 50th Street in Queens, where there is one track in use, but the right of way only has room for one more.

In 2008 I found that the Draft Environmental Impact Statement forecast 24-64 trains per day using these lines, for an average of 1-3 trains per hour. If the line is restored to two-track service, that would allow plenty of time for commuter trains, or even more frequent service if the freight trains are only run late at night.

Another option is to tunnel under the existing right-of-way in the two-track section and run freight trains underground and passenger trains on the upper level. This would be expensive, but not as expensive as building a new subway.

I also suggested that it might be easier to extend existing subway lines along the right-of-way, thus providing a one-seat ride to neighborhoods closer in, than to run a single train the whole way. So for example, you could extend the B train across the Hell Gate Bridge to Woodside; extend the M train, either from Middle Village or from Jackson Heights, north to the Bronx or south to East New York; extend the L train west to Brooklyn College, or extend the G train south and west to the Brooklyn Army Terminal. I created this fantasy map showing the route that the G would take and some possible stations.

I was inspired in part to write this because of the recent post on Scouting NY showing the inside of the Terminal itself. There are offices now where the warehouses used to be, but Building B still has the tracks in the middle, waiting for a G train to glide in.

The G train arrives in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, with a little help from Pro-Zak and bitchcakesny.

You could even use the skycrane to lift commuters up to their offices. Door-to-door service!

Chinese names for New York neighborhoods

Here is a list of New York neighborhoods, streets and suburbs with significant Chinese populations, with their names in Simplfied Chinese writing. I do not read or write Chinese, so please submit additions or corrections.

English	汉语	Commuter Vans
18th Avenue	第十八大道	None known
86th Street	八十六街	None known
Avenue U	U大道	None known
Bensonhurst	本森社区	None known
Chinatown	曼哈頓華埠	To Elmhurst, Flushing and Sunset Park
Edison, NJ	爱迪生	To Chinatown (reported)
Elmhurst	艾姆赫斯特	To Chinatown
Flushing	法拉盛	To Chinatown and Sunset Park
Sheepshead Bay	羊头湾	None known
Sunset Park ("Brooklyn's Chinatown")	布鲁克林華埠	To Chinatown and Flushing

Navy Road and the projects

Ben Fried at Streetsblog said it all in just fifteen words:

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?

Photo: cisc1970 / Flickr

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.

From tragedy to farce in Bushwick

Today Streetsblog had a post about a few blocks immediately to the east of the Knickerbocker Avenue el station in Bushwick, where development is hostile to pedestrians.

Sprawl development in Bushwick. Photo: Christopher Taylor Edwards.

I was curious, so I pulled up the zoning for the area on City Planning's handy new ZOLA map (also on this PDF). The block with the military recruiter is zoned R6 with a C2-3 overlay, and the equally sprawly Burger King across the street is in a C4-3 commercial district. The C4-3 zone allows a floor-area ratio (FAR) of 3.4. The C2-3 overlay only allows a commercial FAR of 2.0. Both allow a residential FAR of up to 2.43, depending on setbacks. The developers could have built taller on both blocks.

These two zoning categories have identical parking requirements, and if the Burger King qualifies as "Refreshment stands, drive-in," it would have to have one parking space for every 400 square feet of floor area, with no waiver (PDF). The Burger King is about 5000 square feet, meaning that it's required to have thirteen spaces. In the parking lot there are about sixteen. The phone store is a bit more of a mystery, because when the amount of parking required is less than 25 spaces per lot, it is waived, but the developer built the parking anyway.

Noah Kazis writes, "Zoning may not be the chief culprit here. Head a block west along Knickerbocker, or follow the elevated subway tracks along Myrtle, and you’ll find vibrant commercial corridors with stores facing the sidewalk, not a parking lot. Even so, this seems like a location crying out for an intervention from New York City’s planners and economic development officials."

So if the zoning created that sprawl to the east of the el, why is there multistory mixed-use urban development under the el and to the west? The key is that the zoning code only covers new development, and all the buildings to the west were built in the 1930s, before the current zoning code was adopted in 1961.

The All Hands Fire. Photo: FDNY.

The next question is, why were the block with the Burger King and the block with the phone store new construction? What happened to the buildings that were there before 1961? To find that out, I found the area on the Digital Tax Map, and plugged the Block Number into ACRIS. There were some records referring to a "Bushwick II Urban Renewal Plan." And that led me to the fire. In 1977 the All Hands Fire was started by three boys playing in an abandoned knitting factory. It destroyed several blocks of stores and apartments. For years, not much was built except the ugly sprawly police station.

I haven't found much about the history of the Burger King block specifically, but the block with the military recruiter and the phone store was sold by the City in 1983 to a guy named Ralph Goffner. The deed contains the interesting clause that "The development and use of the subject property is limited to off-street parking purposes only, and any successor in interest shall not use the premises for any other purpose." Clearly, Goffner is now using the premises for other purposes as well as parking. I'm assuming that the City relaxed that covenant at some point, but I haven't found documentation. If so, they may have required that Goffner continue to use some of it for parking.

The bottom line is that it's not 1961 in Bushwick, and it's not 1983. It's 2011, and we now know that large curbside parking lots are anti-urban and anti-pedestrian. Single-use single-story buildings are pretty out of place next to a train station as well. The City should rezone the area to allow for denser development without required parking - C4-5A or something like the R6N district that I proposed in July with a C2-5 overlay.