We still need more car-free weekenders

Some years ago, I wound up arguing about congestion pricing in my local cafe with a woman I’d never met before. I said that as someone who didn’t own a car I didn’t want to pay to maintain infrastructure for people who did. She responded with the usual, “Well, some of us have to have cars,” and then put a new spin on it. “I need one to get to my farm upstate.”

Photo: Daniel Case / Wikimedia

She clearly felt she had won the argument with that one, and I let her think that, because it was clear there was no getting through to her that evening. I grew up surrounded by farms, summer houses and weekend houses, and I can tell the difference between them. If you’re spending Sunday night in your apartment in Sunnyside, either you have a weekend house with a garden, or you own a farm but you’re paying other people to milk the cows and collect the eggs. Either way, you can leave your poseur pickup truck at the New Paltz park-and ride, and you are not entitled to my tax money subsidizing a free ride for you across the Queensboro Bridge.

Since then I’ve had similar encounters with other people, and read about many more, where someone who identified as a city resident argued in favor of maintaining free bridges, free parking, wide streets or minimum parking requirements, or opposing bus lanes or bike lanes, because they also identified as a driver. This person usually complained about owning a car in the city, either having to pay for parking or to move their car twice a week for alternate side sweeping. It seemed like they hated everything about car ownership.

The people in question didn’t use the car to commute to work, and rarely used it for shopping or to go out at night. So why did they have a car? To go to their country house (or sometimes “farm”) in the Catskills, in Vermont, in Connecticut. Sometimes they didn’t even own a country house, and just used the car to drive to short-term rentals or hotels.

It made me wonder, what if they didn’t need a car to have a weekend away from the city? What if, like me and my family, they took trains and buses to get to hotels? They could even own a house in a small town, walking distance from a bus stop or a train station.

I wrote about this back in 2009, and Alon thought we should concentrate our attention instead on getting suburbanites to move to the city. We see how well that worked out! But the reason I think it would be effective to provide more alternatives for car-free weekends is not based on absolute numbers. It’s based on the fact that so many people who are obstacles in the fight for safe streets, efficient movement, reducing pollution, bringing us closer together and providing access for everyone are people who own cars primarily to get to their country houses and weekend hotels.

If we can give those people an alternative to parking their cars in Manhattan, would they stop identifying as drivers and be more supportive of transit and walking? We can’t know until we try it. And as Bruce pointed out in the comments to my old post, the worst is that we can make it easier for a bunch of non-drivers to have a relaxing weekend away from the city. I’ll talk about some specific idea in future posts.

New traffic patterns, new driving habits

I'm not a traffic engineer, but I know that old habits die hard. I also know that it's possible to create new habits, and once those habits are in place it's hard to get rid of them. Whenever you institute a new traffic pattern, it's an opportunity to teach new good habits, but also to inadvertently teach bad habits. And I know that here in New York we can't trust the NYPD to consistently enforce protections for pedestrians, so habits and barriers are our main lines of defense.

Because I know this, today it was frustrating for me to see the current state of the eastern end of the Queens Boulevard median expansion at 57th Avenue. It looks like the DOT plan involves four colors of paint (white, yellow green and beige), flexible bollards, stop signs and concrete islands. I only saw bollards at the slip lane just west of the Port Washington LIRR viaduct, and a stop sign in front of the Elks Lodge east of 51st Avenue. They have not laid down any beige paint yet, and green paint stops at Broadway. But the white paint continues east almost to the end of the project.

This is not so bad going eastward. The problem is that going westward, the first thing drivers encounter is a few lines of white and yellow paint. There is no beige paint to indicate that this is now pedestrian space, and no green paint to indicate that there is now a bike lane. There are no bollards, or even temporary orange barrels.

Some of these drivers have just come off of the express lanes, some off of Woodhaven Boulevard, some off the LIE. They are in four lanes of traffic being squeezed down to one, and many of them did not know there would be only one lane. They did not have any warning, so they did not know to slip over to the express lanes.

The result I saw today was people driving right over the yellow and white paint, as though it wasn't there and they had two driving lanes the way they've had since the sixties. Private cars, taxis, Access-A-Ride vans, even the Q53 bus drove over the lines. How long have they been doing that? How long will they be allowed to continue? What kind of precedent does that set?

Like I said, I'm not a traffic engineer. Maybe I'm worrying too much about this. Maybe once the green and beige paint get laid down, and the bollards put in, the drivers will all learn to slip into the express lanes, or even to take the train or the bus instead. But it just seems to me that we should have a hard barrier at the place where the median begins, to keep people from driving on it. And this is not an academic concern; the DOT's stats show that 87 people were injured at the 57th Avenue intersection between 2010 and 2015, two of them severely.

You may know that a 22-year-old cyclist, Asif Rahman, was killed on this stretch of Queens Boulevard in 2008. Since then his mother has fought hard to make the road safer for people who travel it in the future. As I was passing Rahman's ghost bike a cyclist overtook me, using the new lane marked only by white and yellow paint. It felt a bit safer already. We're all hoping the DOT does it right and makes it stay.

How carfree is your City Council district?

One of the most eye-opening things I saw during the 2007-2008 congestion pricing debate was a series of fact sheets produced by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and the Pratt Center for Community development for each City Council and state legislative district. Each sheet gave two figures in particular, tabulated from census results: the percentage of working adults in the district who commuted to work primarily by transit, and the percentage of households that had no cars.

I've made maps for the percentage of carfree households for the City Council and State Senate districts, based on the Tri-State/Pratt Center fact sheets. The figures are interesting in two ways: in general, these elected officials tend to promote transit or driving depending on how prevalent car ownership is in their districts, but some are particularly out of touch with the majority of their constituents. These are relevant to a wide range of transportation issues, beyond the question of whether to toll the East River bridges.

These maps were based on data from the 2000 census, and as the years go by they get less and less relevant to contemporary debates. I find myself wondering what effect recent trends have had on car ownership and commuting, but Tri-State has not released updated fact sheets.

The Census website does tabulate data based on state legislative districts. Charles Komanoff analyzed the data for Streetsblog in 2010, and he recently used it to call out Councilmember Daneek Miller for opposing bridge tolls. But because Komanoff didn't have data for City Council districts he used the figures for the 32nd Assembly District, which turns out to be a bad match.

In November, Tri-State criticized Senator Tony Avella for his part in the coalition. They also challenged Miller based on a "special tabulation" - but in both cases this was based on journey to work data, not car ownership.

To make this easier for anyone who is interested, I have written a small Python script that takes GeoJSON files created by the Department of City Planning, and produces a JSON file mapping census tracts to City Council districts. It uses the Shapely library to check whether a census tract is contained inside a council district. It works for either the 2000 or 2010 boundaries. For census tracts that overlap more than one council district, the script gives the proportion of the land area of the tract that overlaps with each district.

I also created two scripts that transform census tables using these tract2census files, one for table HCT 32 from the 2000 decennial census and the other for table B08141 produced by the American Community Survey since 2005. These scripts produce tables showing the total number of households in a district, the number with zero cars available, and the carfree households as a proportion of the total.

It is important to note that this algorithm introduces a potential source of inaccuracy by assigning the households to split census tracts on the basis of area. This assumes that the households are evenly distributed within each census tract, but that is not always the case. For example, a tract with 75% of its area in City Council District A and 25% in District B would have 75% of its households assigned to District A, but if there is a large apartment building in the District B part of the tract, it could contain over 50% of the households.

Interestingly, my results for the 2000 census seem a bit lower than Tri-State's for some districts, but about the same citywide. It's probably due to different assumptions about the data; if anyone has details about the methods they used, please let me know!

Neil Freeman suggested using QGIS for the visualization, and it made a nice pretty map. I've got more to say about these figures and their implications, and maybe get to work on Neil other suggestions, and add a legend to the map, but this is a good place to stop. I've posted the tables in a Google Sheet here.

We need to stop converting streets to one-way

New York is famous for its livable streets revolution, where Janette Sadik-Khan, with the backing of Mayor Bloomberg, turned the city Department of Transportation from an agency focused on moving traffic and placating angry drivers into one that prioritized the safety and movement of pedestrians, cyclists and bus riders. Under Sadik-Khan the DOT took away some car lanes and narrowed others to install pedestrian plazas, protected bike lanes and bus lanes.

Under Mayor de Blasio and his transportation commissioner Polly Trottenberg, the DOT has shown more timidity and more deference to unelected "community leaders," but it has continued to install safety measures and bus lanes, sometimes taking space from cars to do it. Where neither administration has been very good is on one-way streets. It's pretty uncontroversial that one-way streets have less head-on collisions. It used to also be the consensus that they are safer for pedestrians. Instead of looking for cars from two or even four directions, people crossing a one-way street only have to look in one or two (or maybe three, but who's counting?).

More recently, people have come to realize that the old consensus was too simple. Removing most of the danger of head-on collisions only encouraged people to drive faster, increasing the danger of other collisions. Drivers have to drive further to get to their destinations, adding to congestion and turning moves.

One-way streets have also had a negative effect on street life. The difficulty of navigation, and the difficulty of parking next to speeding cars, have discouraged drivers from patronizing businesses on one-way streets. The danger, noise and unpleasantness of speeding cars have discouraged walking. Stores and restaurants have closed, giving people less reason to walk. This is a vicious cycle, because just the absence of other people drives pedestrians away.
New York was an early leader in the movement against converting streets to one way. In fact, it was a plan by the City Department of Transportation to funnel cars into the Barclays Center that demonstrated the livable streets movement's growing power. Stirred by a series of Streetsblog posts, 650 people came out to speak against the DOT's proposal to convert Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Park Slope to one way.

Since then, other cities across the country have converted one-way streets back to two way. The size of the crowd was probably a factor in Mayor Bloomberg's decision to appoint a reformer like Janette Sadik-Khan as Transportation Commissioner. With the support of Streetsblog and Transportation Alternatives, and against the opposition of community boards dominated by local driving elites, the DOT rolled out bike lanes, pedestrian plazas and intersection redesigns to make streets safer.

The odd thing is that as far as I know New York has not converted any one-way streets back to two-way, either before or since 2007. I haven't heard anything about the issue from Sadik-Khan, Streetsblog or TA. The architect John Massengale wrote about street safety last month and even spent a paragraph talking about the dangers of one way streets, but for some reason did not explicitly include returning the streets to two-way in his list of recommendations.

What is even more surprising is that since 2007 the DOT has continued to convert streets from two-way to one-way. For example, under Sadik-Khan they converted 49th Avenue in Long Island City and 58th Street and Maurice Avenue in Maspeth to one-way. Under Commissioner Trottenberg, they have converted Fifth Street in LIC, and have proposed converting 77th Street in Jackson Heights (PDF).

To be fair, these streets are not like Sixth and Seventh Avenues. 58th Street and Maurice Avenue are industrial truck routes, and 49th Avenue and Fifth Street are primarily residential. Both are in areas with higher car ownership rates. These factors can explain why livable streets advocates didn't notice or draw attention to the conversions.
But those factors don't mean that we shouldn't try to stop these one-way conversions, and they don't mean we shouldn't talk about them. People need to be safe where they live and work, not just where they shop. These neighborhoods have a lot of pedestrians, and we need to protect them from the demands of the driving elites who dominate their institutions.

By the way, this applies to narrower streets too.

Knowing you killed someone is not punishment

Advocates for safer streets have been pushing back against the use of "accident" to absolve drivers of responsibility for not killing or injuring other people. When drivers engage in behavior that demonstrates a callous indifference to human life - or even an unjustified faith in their own ability to avoid killing people - death is no accident, but a predictable consequence.

Photo: WPIX via Streetsblog

The next line of defense is commonly that the driver "has suffered enough," sometimes simply by witnessing a horrific death that (by implication) they were powerless to stop, or even by being forced to consider the possibility that their behavior or choices may have been connected to this death.

In circumstances where there is really no denying that the driver acted recklessly or irresponsibly, the claim is that this knowledge serves as a lesson. The driver now knows the consequences of reckless behavior or irresponsible choices, and will never do it again.

Many drivers flee the scene of the crash, because they believe they will be held responsible for it and do not want to face the consequences. (Some do it for a chance to sober up.) Reckless killer drivers who do this have compounded their crime of reckless driving with another, leaving the scene.

Unfortunately, some people are so upset by this effort to evade responsibility that if the driver is caught they treat that as the major crime. Conversely, they may be so relieved that a killer driver turns themself in, or chooses not to leave the scene, that they praise that and forget any reckless behavior.

This is all bullshit. We have laws specifying the penalties for killing someone with a car. They could use a little more tightening up in the evidence department, but they're pretty clear on the consequences.

To the best of my knowledge we do not say that reckless knife-wavers have "suffered enough" or that negligent builders have "learned their lesson." We do not praise incompetent gun handlers for not running away. We should not treat drivers any differently.

Actually, we also treat some incompetent gun handlers differently - we sometimes say they've "suffered enough" if they negligently kill their own children. In a post about this craziness, some guy named Greg Laden made an astute point:

Suggesting that the decision to hold someone responsible for an irresponsible act that has damaged another should be based on how the perpetrator of that act feels post hoc, extended more generally, means that the standard for punishment under the law is inverse to the severity of the crime. It is suggesting that the severity of the possible punishment be inverse to the seriousness of the crime because how bad one feels is proportionate to the severity of the crime.

Knowing you killed someone is not punishment. Realizing that they might still be alive if you had made different choices is not punishment. Staying at the scene is not accepting responsibility. Turning yourself in is not penance. As long as we continue to treat them as such, people will continue to die.

Our stratified transportation system

A lot of people are nervous about the possibility that privately-run electronic taxi-hailing systems like Uber and Lyft could take over functions that have recently been filled by government-run transit services. Others are disturbed by the sight of privately-run companies like Leap and Bridj marketing local bus services as luxury products. I share some of these concerns, and I've addressed them in previous posts.

What I don't share is the idea that any of these services will create a "two tier" or "stratified" system with one service for the rich and one for the poor. There's a simple reason for this: we already have one.

If you go to a small city like, say, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you'll see our stratified system in action: the people on the buses are mostly poor and nonwhite, and everyone else is driving. Ride the bus in a city like Kingston, New York, where the received wisdom is that "everyone drives because you need a car to get around," and you'll see that there are still people who don't drive: the extremely poor and the mentally and physically disabled. Here in New York the majority rides the subways, but there is a stratum that drives everywhere, and pretty much runs the city.

The bus and rail strata are largely run by the government and paid with tax money, but some of the money comes from fares paid by passengers. In the strata where people drive, passengers often contribute the labor of driving themselves, and pay a lot of money for the vehicles, fuel, insurance and other costs, and also contribute to the construction and maintenance of road, bridge and parking infrastructure through taxes. But as has been shown time and again, they do not pay the entire cost of the system; a much larger share of general tax revenue goes to driving than to transit.

This stratified system can be very cruel to those in the bottom strata, and it generally gets worse the smaller the share of the population that takes transit. The poorer the average transit user is, the slower, dirtier, more crowded, less frequent and less reliable the transit.

Even here in New York, the driving classes are constantly blocking improvements to transit, whether it's another commuter rail track, extension of an el train, allowing bus pickups or dedicating a bus lane. So yes, I know firsthand how bad it is to have a stratified system with minimal investment in the lowest strata. And I can't see how Uber, Lyft, Chariot and Bridj could possibly make things any worse.

In fact, I see it the opposite way: that people who take these taxi and premium bus services are less likely to identify as drivers and more likely to take transit and support transit expansion. If they don't have cars to park, they're much less likely to go crazy over reallocating street space from parking to transit.

As I've written before, I'm not a libertarian, and I'm not even much of a capitalist. One of my goals is access for all to jobs, housing, shopping and services. I would be open to a state solution, a government monopoly on transportation with a single level of service. But to impose a government monopoly on transportation would require drastic state action. Use your transit quota well, comrade! The government would most definitely be coming for your cars. Who would be first up against the wall - Rory Lancman?

In any case, I'm trying to think of an area where our government provides a monopoly with a single level of service, and coming up blank. Housing, food, energy, school - there is usually some government service, but it always has substantial competition from the private sector. Even services that are nominally single-tier like identification, permitting and licensing have inequalities. If you can afford to pay a rush fee or an expediter, or if you just live in a wealthier area, your interactions with the government will be quicker and smoother.

It's not just our government, either. The most revolutionary, egalitarian governments ever have failed pathetically at imposing transportation equality, when they've even tried it. Even the Soviet Union had its Ladas for the Party officials.

Sadly, these people who bleat about "stratification" don't even have the vision to realize the amount of stratification between cars and transit or the guts to mention it, much less address it. They would never think about taking away cars or parking, or defunding roads. They'd rather make a big show of opposing inequality that doesn't exist than address inequality that exists.

Could Lyft and Uber reduce congestion?

Charles Komanoff has created an open-source multimodal transportation model for New York City, available for free download as an Excel spreadsheet. In July, after learning that there were almost two thousand Uber cars on the streets of Manhattan every weekday, Komanoff used his Balanced Transportation Analyzer to estimate that these cars had slowed traffic by seven percent.

Photo: Jeffrey Zeldman / Flickr

A month later, some new information came out: taxis were sitting idle on the streets of Greenpoint. Drivers had found that they could make more money with Uber and Lyft than with the medallion giving them the right to pick up street-hailing passengers in Manhattan.

This suggests that instead of adding to the cabs in Manhattan, many of the Uber and Lyft cars have been replacing them. This is confirmed by an analysis conducted by Reuben Fischer-Baum and Carl Bialik for Five Thirty Eight. The net increase in congestion may be a lot lower than Komanoff estimated, especially since, as he mentioned, cabs hailed with apps don't have to cruise the streets.

I emailed Komanoff, and he was aware of this new data. "I revised my approach in mid-summer. I think the main change was a higher assumed displacement of yellows, which resulted in a lower impact of Ubers. The impact of 20,000 Ubers (not all of which are in the CBD all the time, obviously) is now a 4.3% slowdown in CBD speeds," he wrote.

To me this suggests that there is a limit to the number of taxis that we can add in Manhattan's Central Business District ("the CBD"). If vehicle speeds slow below a certain point, some passengers will decide that it's not worth their time and money, and either take the subway, go at a different time, or go somewhere else. The "surge pricing" (in fact, a form of congestion pricing, which Komanoff has advocated for all vehicles for decades) practiced by Uber and Lyft probably also serves as an extra disincentive.

If enough passengers make this decision, the driver doesn't get the hail. Because the fare they get for sitting in traffic is different from what they get while moving, they may decide that even if they pick someone up it won't be worth their time. And in fact, electronic hailing and traffic monitoring allows drivers to read and respond to these signals more quickly. A driver can now get a sense of the number of hails before they even enter Manhattan, and choose to go elsewhere.

The Economist's analysis of trip data suggests that these services are not adding very much to congestion: "During the two years to June 2015, Uber’s pickups in the CBD rose from an estimated 175,000 to 1.8m [per month], while yellow cabs’ hails in the area fell by around 1.4m. This implies that where Uber and yellow cabs compete most directly, just 13% of the growth in Uber rides has added to prior demand. The remaining 87% has replaced trips that would otherwise have gone to taxis."

It's even possible that electronically hailed cars could eventually help reduce congestion, and provide an alternative to subways and buses. Of course, not if they're single-passenger taxi trips: as I said recently, if Uber and Lyft simply take a vehicle with one person who's both driver and passenger and replaces it with a vehicle with one driver and one passenger, it may lead to a reduction in carnage and an improvement in the way people relate to each other, but there would be no net change in the number of passengers per car, and thus no practical change in efficiency or pollution.

There is one major difference in shifting from single-occupant vehicles to taxis: ownership of the vehicle passes from the individual (usually the driver/passenger), to the taxi driver or fleet owner. This means that control of the other passenger seats passes from the driver/passenger to the taxi service. As many people have observed, when combined with real-time schedule coordination, this makes it much easier to add passengers.

Uber offers an electronic carpooling service called Uberpool, and Lyft offers one called Lyftline. With these services, instead of carrying a single passenger, a Prius sedan can carry up to three comfortably, and an Escalade can carry five. The companies claim that they are very popular: Uber said that "almost 50,000 New Yorkers" used Uberpool in the last week of October. In April, Lyft said that Lyftlines made up thirty percent of its rides in New York. Unfortunately, both of those numbers are fairly useless for our purposes because they don't say how many of those rides were in Manhattan during business hours.

Still, each of those shared trips represents one of several possibilities. One is that the person took Uberpool or Lyftline instead of driving their own car or taking a separate cab. If these services do take, say, a thousand cars off the streets of Manhattan every rush hour this way - cars that are not replaced by other taxis, personal cars, or even trucks - that's a very good thing. Komanoff's model indicates that if we could get 32,000 less cars going into Manhattan every day, it would increase speeds by 3.2%.

It may be that the possible congestion limit I mentioned above is actually an optimal congestion point, and every car taken off the road by these carpool services will be replaced with another car, taxi or truck until it reaches that point. In that case, the only way to free up space on the roads would be to increase the price - tolls on the bridges, raise on-street parking rates, reduce government employee parking placards or implement a taxi congestion fee. In the meantime, at least this means more people that will be able to get into Manhattan.

Another possibility is that the person took Uberpool or Lyftline instead of taking the subway or bus, leaving space for someone else. A number of transit advocates have gotten all doom and gloom about this, saying that these services will "poach riders" from the public transit agencies, depriving them of fare revenue, but here in New York today the system is at capacity. All rush hour, people are watching full buses and subways pass them by. Poaching is simply not an issue, and will not be for the foreseeable future.

As I've written before, I do not believe that electronically hailed taxis can be a satisfactory replacement for fixed-route transit. I do believe that they can help us deal with our current capacity crunch, and potentially ease the way to eliminating personal cars. I've got more to say about this in the future.

Which should we fight harder, job sprawl or housing sprawl?

Eric Jaffe had a good review of a University of Denver study about job sprawl. The study shows, basically, that if you make transit more convenient to people's jobs (or vice versa), they're less likely to drive to work than if you make it more convenient to their homes.

Not much to walk to right near the current Clifton, NJ station.

Thinking about it, that makes sense. If you own a car, you're much more likely to want to keep it at your end of the transit line than at the work end. Is there even anyone who lives in the city, keeps a car overnight in, say, North White Plains, and drives it to work in the sprawl every morning? I tried to think of actual economic or legal disincentives to this, but the real answer seems to be more primal: a car is a big expensive thing that you paid for, and you want it at the home end of the train line.

What I'm a bit less sold on is where the study authors, Gregory Kwoka, Eric Boschmann and Andrew Goetz, go from here. As Sandy Johnston highlights in a blog post, they also look at "non-work related personal trips" and conclude that working near a transit station is a bigger factor for determining whether you drive for those trips than living near a transit station is.

I can kind of see it. If you work in Manhattan, or even in downtown Denver, you're more likely to walk over to Walgreens or the Gap to pick up some necessities before you hop on the train home. You might meet friends or a date in the city after work. You might even buy groceries. On the weekend you might take the train into the city to go to a museum.

On the other hand, if you take transit out to the sprawl, you're probably just going to take transit right back rather than trying to walk around. But what I have a hard time with is the idea that when you get off the train from the sprawl and walk to your house, then you're going to get right in your car and drive to the supermarket or your kid's school or your AA meeting. I can't really see any of the New York drivers I know doing this. I know some who live in walkable communities, take the train to work in Manhattan, and then drive around on the weekends, but any car owners who live someplace walkable and work someplace not so walkable pretty much drive to work.

My guess is that this part of the study is a quirk of Denver geography. When I was last in Denver, they had only built part of the first light rail line, and there were some stations that didn't have much around them besides housing. Maybe there are a lot of stations where there isn't a supermarket or even a deli on the walk home from the train. Maybe these people live a short walk from the station but drive there anyway because there's a huge "free" park-and-ride.

I'm also not sure how this affects the land use and public investment cycles. In my experience, transit riders who don't own cars tend to be relatively strong advocates for dense development patterns as well as investment in transit and pedestrian infrastructure. People who take the train to work but drive evenings and weekends tend to identify as drivers and support sprawl zoning and investments in highways and parking lots. And sadly, even people who take transit or walk most of the time, but keep a car in the garage to drive to their country house in Vermont every few weeks, tend to identify as drivers and vote like drivers.

I think the best conclusion is that job sprawl is a slightly bigger problem than housing sprawl, but housing sprawl matters too. And even vacation sprawl matters.

Transit vs. e-hailing and transit vs. cars

Recently I wrote about some discussion from Timothy B. Lee and Chris Plano about the possibility that "ride-hailing could actually be stealing riders from transit." Building on Plano's musings and some data released by Uber, in April Eric Jaffe envisioned an "integrated system," with larger vehicles, and some challenges:

In an ideal world, microtransit providers would become the feeders to public transportation's core routes. They'd address what experts call the "first-mile, last-mile" problem—that gap at the start and end of every trip that's difficult for traditional transit operators to serve in a cost-effective way. Coverage to low-density corridors or remote neighborhoods becomes very doable. A car-free lifestyle becomes that much more viable.

[...]

An integrated transit system with public agencies as a core and microtransit as a feeder might be the urban ideal, but whether profit-minded private companies would submit to such an arrangement is another question. One reason public transit agencies can't reliably serve feeder routes in the first place is they tend to lose money. Asking microtransit companies to take that role might not harmonize with their business mission.

If an integrated scenario doesn't pan out, the flipside might be an ugly competitive one—with microtransit providers trying to poach bus and rail riders in key high-density corridors. That outcome would create a two-front fight for transit agencies. On one side they'd be battling for riders against private services with potentially greater resources. On the other, as fare revenue eroded, they'd be battling public officials for more funding to stay afloat.

As with the earlier discussion, an important angle that is being missed is pricing. Jaffe talked to David King for his post, and King should have told him that such an integrated system was already tried here in New York back in 2010 and the plan failed miserably, in part because it didn't give the operators the freedom to set their prices. If the "microtransit" providers can charge what the market will bear for feeder services, they might be able to make a profit.

Note that Jaffe is actually claiming that e-hail carpooling and jitneys compete with public transit for two distinct resources: riders, who bring in fares, and political support, which brings in subsidies in the form of cash and land (street space). These are not necessarily the same at all, and the claims should be evaluated separately.

I've talked about this before and I've got more to say about it in a future post, but right now I just want to reiterate that in the big coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles - basically, the cities where Uberpool and Lyftline either currently operate or are likely to be successful - the game has changed, and transit agencies are no longer hurting for riders. Any passengers attracted by these services will simply make room for more passengers on the public trains and buses.

Jaffe's second concern, that electronic carpooling services will take political support from public transit, reminds me of the old joke by Apocryphal Winston Churchill: we've already established that competition can affect the level of political support for transit, we're just debating how much - and where it comes from.



Jaffe's concern about political competition is part of what I call the Cycle, and have been discussing for years. Yes, the level of political support for transit subsidies is affected not only by the number of riders, but by their aggregate political power. But that's far from the only factor, even when the government is not as corrupt as New York State.

For decades, transit was losing riders to government-subsidized systems of highways, parking and cheap gas, but for some reason people tend to not want to think about that. Jaffe has occasionally written about it, but think about most of the people who wring their hands over the plight of the poor bus. Remember them talking about how massive subsidies to roads in the State budget, or the Tappan Zee Bridge, will drive public transit out of business? Me neither.

It's always been a bit of a weird argument that we should not allow private services that compete with government services. In the Soviet Union, maybe, where you had a carefully planned economy, you might not want anyone disrupting that. But this isn't the Soviet Union. We don't complain, as far as I know, about private universities putting public universities out of business, or for-profit cheese companies competing with government cheese. And yet somehow transit is a great opportunity for people to rail against those nasty big businesses - as long as you don't mention the competition from massive government subsidies to private cars.

Do New York's "manufacturing zones" promote driving?

I read on YIMBY that some people who live or work in the Jerome Avenue corridor in the Bronx are concerned that rezoning the area to allow residential development could price out many of the auto body shops and other car-related businesses that operate in the area. I sympathize with the concerns, but I think things have to change. And the more I think about it, the more important it seems to me.

A walkthrough of the Jerome Avenue area conducted by the Department of City Planning, January 2013. Photo: Gerard Flynn.

It seems pretty clear that allowing residential uses will price out auto-related businesses. There is a tremendous demand for housing, and housing is displacing auto services wherever they are allowed to compete, from the gas stations of the East Village to the garages of the Upper West Side to the used car lots of Woodside. I am not including Willets Point in this: there is no competition there, only government fiat.

As a business owner, I am not exactly happy about small businesses being unable to survive. My brother-in-law is an auto body mechanic, so I also appreciate the value of good technical jobs that do not require a college degree. And yet, there is such a thing as a job that costs too much. I have argued that the costs of each Tappan Zee Bridge construction job, in terms of sprawl, pollution and yes, death and destruction, are too high. I would say the same thing is true for auto related jobs along Jerome Avenue, and elsewhere in the city.

We have driven away many of the port jobs and the manufacturing jobs, and auto related jobs are a good chunk of what is left. As my friend Stephen Smith, who used to write for YIMBY, has observed on Twitter, the vast majority of businesses in M zones around the city are not involved in manufacturing anything.

Every time I have heard about a gas station closing or a parking garage converted to apartments, I have smiled inside. I smiled because I remembered the difficulty of crossing in front of these gas stations and garages. "Difficulty" is too nice a word: I remembered the dread I felt trying to walk in front of the gas stations as drivers cruised in and out across the sidewalk at high speeds. I remembered the humiliation I felt when garage customers parked across the sidewalk, forcing me out into traffic. I smiled at the thought that nobody else would feel that dread and humiliation again.

I and many other pedestrians have been similarly threatened and humiliated in front of car dealerships and repair shops in "industrial zones" across the city. Some have been killed. You will forgive me if I am not horrified at the prospect of losing an industry with such little regard for safety.

But we still have millions of cars stored in our city, and millions more that come in for the day. Where will their owners buy and sell them, and bring them to be serviced, if not on Jerome Avenue, Northern Boulevard, Jamaica Avenue or Atlantic Avenue?

Well, if they had to they would go to Hempstead Turnpike, or Kennedy Boulevard, or Boston Post Road. But that makes me think: if these businesses can't survive on Jerome Avenue or 21st Street without being protected from competition from housing, that means that we are essentially subsidizing the cheap rent, and thus the cheap repair jobs, with our expensive apartments. My mom is paying more every month so that the guy who cuts her off in the crosswalk can pay less to have his oil changed.

And that makes me wonder: what if we didn't have these bogus "Manufacturing" zones? What if we allowed people to build apartments wherever they thought they could rent them? Would the rents continue to rise? Would there be the same pressure to waste public money on railyard decks? Would we still have as many cars clogging Queens Boulevard every day? Would we still have Levels of Service that make our traffic engineers loath to build real crosswalks? Would we still have community boards packed with parking-obsessed NIMBYs?

Please, let's find some jobs for these people so that we can shut down the M zones.

Autonomous cars in the advanced city

Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar, said this to Yonah Freemark last month:

Would you prefer what we have today, [where] only poor people use [most transit service] and it sucks, or would you rather that poor people use the exact same thing that everyone else is using?

This brought to mind a quote that Chase has no doubt heard from Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá:

An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.

Peñalosa's quote highlights the false dichotomy that Chase has set up: there are other ways to provide access for poor people besides (a) sucky transit and (b) the exact same thing that everyone else is using. (And really, Chase ought to know that everyone else won't use "the exact same thing." How long did Zipcar offer a single model of vehicle?) As Yonah points out, there are also other options for the non-poor besides autonomous cars that only hold a few people at a time.

Both Chase and Peñalosa make other good points, and both are wrong on other points, but on this point the Strong Towns movement has gathered abundant evidence to back Peñalosa's position. We simply cannot afford to have an advanced city, let alone an advanced society, if we are spending our resources moving so many single individuals long distances at high speeds.

Who's getting out of the way of the buses?

The Transit Workers' Union Local 100 has been campaigning against New York's recently enacted Right of Way law, which gives the police and courts more power to punish drivers who injure or kill people in the crosswalk. Essentially, it established the rule of law where previously the right of a person to pass, to take up public space, and to threaten and even kill others was granted based on the size and power of that person's vehicle, or the extent to which a police officer sympathized with that person. Or the extent to which that person was dead.

The TWU bus drivers see this as a problem because the previous state of anarchy favored them. They're union members piloting some of the largest vehicles on the road. There are many times when I've been crossing the street and had to wait because a driver swung his bus out in front of me. I had to get out of the way. Most people did. Some of them didn't, and some died. Too many.

But there have also been times when I've benefited from that anarchy. I've seen sedans, SUVs and sports cars come to a halt at a green light, as my bus driver takes a left right in front of them. If the driver had followed the rules, we might have sat for a while waiting to make that left turn.

Yesterday, a Local 100 spokesperson tweeted a picture of a bus waiting to turn off of 181st Street while an "oblivious pedestrian" crossed Wadsworth Avenue with the light. Several times in recent months the TWU has threatened to take extreme care to avoid violating the right-of-way of pedestrians, to which pedestrian advocates have replied, "No, please don't fling me in that briar patch!"

When pedestrian advocate Robert Wright observed that the pedestrian crossing Wadsworth had the right of way, a Local 100 spokesperson tweeted, "The point is that there should be a turn signal so that peds can be safe when buses have to turn." And yes, this is one way that the problem could be solved, but having lots of turn phases can cause more problems.

Even before that tweet, the picture had gotten me thinking: what if we wanted to give bus drivers the priority they used to have, but enshrine it into law? We give police cars, fire trucks and ambulances the right to take street space; if we think buses should have more priority, why not give a similar right to them? What if all in-service buses were allowed to turn whenever they wanted, and all other traffic had to yield?

Then it got me thinking that if they had this priority, we would need some kind of signal to tell pedestrians and other drivers to get out of the way. Police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, they all have sirens and flashing lights. Sirens on every bus would be overkill. Flashing lights?

Photo: New York City Climate

Hey wait a minute! Didn't there used to be lights on some of the buses? Yes, when the first Select Bus line debuted on Fordham Road it had flashing blue lights on the front. The idea was partly to distinguish Select Buses from the local buses operating on the same route, but also to notify drivers that the bus had priority.

You may also remember what happened to the flashing lights. After four successful years of Select Bus Service, when it was rolled out on the S79, Staten Island politicians complained that the lights were "distracting to drivers," and pressured the MTA to shut them off.

Where was the Transit Workers' Union in this? I haven't found any mention of them. If they tweeted or sent out a press release, it wasn't picked up. But they did endorse State Senator Bill Perkins for re-election, after he repeatedly opposed plans to extend the M60 select bus lanes to West 125th Street.

Local 100's choice of 181st Street for this action is telling. 181st is a critical bus corridor connecting the A and #1 subway lines with transit-poor neighborhoods in the western Bronx. The buses are constantly getting stuck behind double-parked cars. The Department of Transportation tried hard to speed them up, but local politicians watered the plan down to nothing. Where was the TWU?

These issues - stiffer penalties for hurting pedestrians with the right of way, dedicated lanes for buses, and lights to reinforce the priority of buses in those lanes - are all issues about who's getting out of the way. In that sense, they're like the bus bays in Tenafly, or pedestrian overpasses: an indication of the priorities of the government. The right-of-way law says that pedestrians are as important as bus drivers and riders, and the TWU has fought that tooth and nail. The dedicated lanes and flashing blue lights said that private motorists were less important than bus riders, and the TWU didn't lift a finger for it.

The new short game in transit advocacy

In my last post I focused on the difference between playing a long game in transit advocacy, which requires thinking strategically about what government priorities will encourage people to choose car-free lifestyles, and a short game, where the focus is on getting more people to take transit and making it easier for them.  But even the short game changes over time.  It has changed dramatically, just over the past year, and as Josh Barro's column shows, many advocates have not caught up.

For decades, the main challenge for transit providers was that their trains and buses were running without enough riders.  For for-profit providers that means that there weren't enough riders to cover costs.  For subsidized providers it means that there weren't enough riders to justify the subsidies.  Governments were pouring so much money into roads, bridges and parking that if the transit providers raised prices, they risked falling into a death spiral.

This was even true here in New York City, which has consistently led the country in transit ridership.  In the seventies and eighties, crime and unreliable service drove people away from the subway, away from the city, and away from the region, while heavy subsidies lured them into cars and out to the suburbs and exurbs.  Transit advocates, with Simpson curtains over their eyes, ignored the sprawl subsidies, fought for scraps from the government, and focused on "marketing" to build ridership.  Transit was so obviously the moral choice; if people weren't using it, they must not be getting the message!

As the country cuts back on sprawl subsidies, and Baby Boomers and Millenials move back to big, walkable cities like New York, ridership is no longer the main challenge, no marketing required.  In 2015 at rush hours, every subway (with the possible exception of the G train) is overloaded, and so are many bus routes.  The old short game was getting riders, so what's the new short game?  Let's go back to our goals.

In order to achieve most of these goals (reducing carnage and pollution, and increasing efficiency and social cohesion), we need to get people out of their cars.  That's happening, but our progress is limited because the alternatives are getting less reliable and less comfortable.  Why would you sell your car just to get stuck on a packed train?  These problems with crowding and reliability are also limiting our ability to provide adequate access to jobs, shopping and services for all.  This means that in these cities our new priority should be improving capacity.

In future posts I'm going to talk about a range of possibilities to increase capacity while minimizing pollution and carnage and maximizing efficiency and social benefits.  I will discuss the pros and cons of each one, and recommend strategies that have the most potential.

Crossing the Yards

One of the arguments given by proponents of decking the Sunnyside Yards is that Sunnyside is cut off from Astoria and Long Island City by the Yards to the north and west.  These rail yards break up the street grid, leaving about nine ways to walk across them.

Photo: Nick Normal / Flickr

All but one of the current routes across the Yards involve walking through industrial areas, which can have low foot traffic, especially on nights and weekends.  This can discourage many people, especially vulnerable populations like women, children and elderly people, from walking.  During working hours people tend to park on the sidewalks, contributing to a different hazard.

Four of the routes involve crossing long bridges over the Sunnyside Yards.  The bridges are all pretty boring, especially the ones that have high barriers blocking the view.  They are all noisy because they have heavy car traffic and wide, flat concrete surfaces to reflect the noise back on travelers.  The Queens Boulevard Bridge is particularly noisy because the overhead #7 train viaduct produces its own noise as well as reflecting noise from the cars.

The one crossing without a bridge or much industrial activity, 48th Street, has heavy foot traffic, and that brings its own problems.  The sidewalks can get congested during peak times, and the foot traffic draws sidewalk vendors, who further add to the congestion.

North of the Yards, the routes east of Queens Boulevard all have to cross Northern Boulevard, a notoriously dangerous stroad, due in part to the historic preponderance of auto-oriented businesses but also to a longstanding culture of permissiveness promoted by policies at the Department of Transportation and the NYPD that put the movement of cars ahead of the safety of everyone.

The proposals for the Sunnyside Yards echo current and planned developments in Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards that include platforms that would support buildings alongside the streets for a better pedestrian experience, cross streets between the buildings to calm the traffic, and new parallel streets crossing the yards for additional connections.

Assuming that the developments get built as advertised, the added buildings and cross streets would definitely improve the experience of walking over the yards.  But they would do nothing by themselves to make the rest of the walk safer or more comfortable.

A walk from Sunnyside to Court Square across the Thomson Avenue Bridge might be a better experience on the bridge itself, but it would still pass through the industrial areas along Queens Boulevard or Skillman Avenue, and across the path of reckless drivers on Van Dam Street and Thomson Avenue itself. A person walking across the 39th Street Bridge would similarly have to deal with dangerous behavior and humiliating treatment on Northern Boulevard and in the industrial areas before and after the bridge.

This is actually not unique to Sunnyside.  It's a widespread problem that affects bridges over rail yards throughout the metro area, and around the world.  We should find ways to deal with it, but a multi-million dollar real estate deal is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Ferguson, Missouri is not a Strong Town

A lot of people have had a lot of insights about the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri. I want to highlight a few that I think are particularly important, and add a few thoughts that I hope will help focus them on our goals.

Last week, Doug Henwood had a great interview with political scientist and former Missouri state senator Jeff Smith, who expanded on his op-ed about how economically bankrupt the entire Saint Louis area, and in particular suburbs like Ferguson, have become. Combine that with municipal fragmentation and the mismatch between the city’s majority black population and its mostly white government, and you get a heavy dose of "for-profit policing," where the town relies on traffic stops for a large chunk of its revenue. It’s not hard to see how that in turn leads to the kind of anger that erupted after Darren Wilson, a white police officer, shot and killed Michael Brown, a black resident.

First a word about "revenue generation" through traffic enforcement and other police actions. It’s gotta stop, period. Giving government officials a financial incentive to ticket and arrest people is a recipe for disaster – the kind of disaster we’ve been hearing about for days. Obviously, even if Michael Brown stole a few cigarillos (and it’s not at all clear he did), the police response was nuts and completely out of control.

That said, many politicians go too far in reacting to this abuse of the system. Many of our city council members here in New York act as though no tickets are ever warranted, even if the driver is putting lives at risk by blocking a hydrant, speeding or running a red light. The response to overzealous policing is not to make our streets a free-for-all for reckless drivers. People who want to stop "revenue generation" need an alternative way to keep us safe, whether it’s a cap on fines or replacing them with jail time.

Second, I have to point out how this shows up the "Chocolate City" triumphalism of the 1970s. Much as I love George Clinton, much as I support true local control and self-determination and Black Power, and much as I have sympathy for any separatist movement that just wants to get away from the oppressors, at this point it’s clear that when black people gained control of the governments of major cities it was at best a short-lived victory.

Cities are not self-contained little systems. They are porous regions of much larger systems, connected and interdependent with other cities, with their hinterlands and with their suburbs. When we integrated the buses, white people shifted to private cars. When we integrated the schools, white people moved their kids to "Christian Academies" and suburban districts. When black people took control of the cities, white people moved their wealth to the suburbs. Now black people are finding themselves pushed out of the Chocolate City into suburbs controlled by white people. It’s likely that one day Ferguson and other majority-black suburbs will elect black mayors, but what is really important is for everyone to have a fair say in the government of the entire region.

Chuck Marohn took this screen capture of the Google Street View of the Ferguson Market and Liquor Store.

Listening to Smith I couldn’t help thinking, as I had several times in the past week, "Ferguson isn’t a Strong Town." No, it is not. Chuck Marohn has the numbers, and you have to wonder: if the town had retained its walkable and transit infrastructure and built on it over the past sixty years instead of sprawling, how much less desperate would it be? What if the entire Saint Louis region had bucked the trend and stayed dense, walkable and transit-oriented? What would it take to make it strong again?

Finally, as Megan McArdle noted, this is part of the "Great Inversion" or the "suburbanization of poverty," the final step in the growth ponzi scheme where those of us who are aware and affluent enough move to walkable urban neighborhoods. Because we refuse to build more walkable urban neighborhoods, that displaces the poor and powerless to the inefficient, isolated, dangerous, rotting suburbs. What can those of us who care about our fellow humans do about this?

I’m guessing that as more and more people come to grips with the idea that poor black and Hispanic people are living in the suburbs now, some short-sighted person will propose an aid program where we dump massive amounts of money into the suburbs with the goal of bringing their standard of living up to the level of the wealthy inner cities, but with no attempt to make them more efficient. At that point some wiser person should point out that that’s exactly what we did for the past sixty years, and that that’s why the white people left the suburbs in the first place.

The defeat of the power broker

Robert Caro’s The Power Broker is one of the all-time classics of urbanism, assigned in many courses and read even by casual students of history. Caro intended his biography of Robert Moses to be an examination of the nature of political power, and how powerful people rise and fall, as evidenced by the title and by his follow-up multi-volume study of Lyndon Johnson.

What is surprising to me is how often people pair Moses with Jane Jacobs and talk about their conflicts over Washington Square Park and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. You could even get the impression, from the way that some people tell it, that it was Jacobs who brought Moses down. It’s true that Moses and Jacobs showed a striking clash of ideologies and worldviews, but Caro spends very little time on Jacobs, focusing instead on the conflicts that Moses had with the mayors (LaGuardia, Wagner) and governors (Smith, Roosevelt) that he nominally served.

Chase Manhattan Plaza. Photo: Ken Lund / Flickr

I am also surprised by how few people got through The Power Broker with any understanding of how Moses was eventually overthrown. I found that to be one of the most captivating parts of the book, like the way the Ring of Power met its fate in Mount Doom. I was in awe once when I got to visit the Chase Bondholder Services Office (not in the same location, but still). And yet I have not heard anyone else mention that part of the story.

I think the main reason nobody talks about how Moses fell from power is that nobody wants to think about it, and that’s because it’s not fair. Moses was not brought down by Jane Jacobs – although she may have helped to finish him off. He was not destroyed by a hobbit, or even a Gollum.

The people who were finally able to take away Moses’s source of power – his Ring, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority – were two of the most powerful people in the country. Heirs to a multi-million dollar oil fortune, David and Nelson Rockefeller controlled, respectively, one of the largest banks in the country and one of the wealthiest states. Nelson would go on to be Vice President a few years later. And yet, neither brother could have defeated Moses by himself: it was only by combining their powers and working together that they were able to create the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and swallow Moses’s TBTA.

On the face of it, this is not a very inspiring story. Want to defeat a despotic, unelected, arrogant man who is destroying your cities? Sorry, you can’t do it yourself. You have to trust in two plutocrats, one elected, one not, each responsible for his own Corbusian excesses (Chase Manhattan Plaza and Empire State Plaza, respectively). You have to trust them to be strong enough to make it really work (instead of, say, leaving a bunch of free alternatives to the bridges and tunnels funding the subway system), and not to fuck it up (by, say, leaving its funding at the mercy of the notoriously corrupt and undemocratic New York State Legislature). It’s less like Frodo and Gollum, and more like Eärendil calling in the Valar, if the Valar were a bunch of Republican bankers.

But as I think about it, it's not like there was even an Eärendil. From what I can tell, the Rockefellers never talked to a single subway rider, or anyone whose home or business was displaced by their projects or those of Moses. As Bob Fitch explains it in The Assassination of New York (which everyone should read; you can get a taste from this Doug Henwood tribute), the Rockefellers were mainly motivated by their failing real estate investments in the West Side (particularly Rockefeller Center). Getting the Chrystie Street Connection and the Sixth Avenue express tunnels built was a priority, at least for David, so he needed to see the subway capital plan funded for a few years minimum.

I think that’s the true lesson of The Power Broker: sometimes the thing that gets rid of one tyrant is just another tyrant. Sometimes the interests of the new tyrant align with your own enough that you can get something decent going. Sometimes the new power is not a single tyrant but a junta, and its power is diluted by that fact, making it slightly less dangerous. This leaves an opening for smaller powers to come in and get a piece of the action, further diluting the power. It ain't democracy and it ain't fair, but it's better than having Bob Moses screwing everything up.

Any way you slice it, it's not very inspiring for those of us who aren't Rockefellers. And that's why people prefer to talk about Jane Jacobs's minor victory over Moses.

The McCarter Highway, freeway without a future

Back in March I was honored to nominate Newark (together with Michael Klatsky) for Streetsblog's coveted Parking Crater award. I'm also pleased that Newark's nomination helped inspire Sharon Adarlo to write about how the obsession with driving and parking among Newark's elites "skewers [any] chance at revitalizing the struggling city." And I'm encouraged by the quote from Newark's new mayor, Ras Baraka, that "We are going to build up and not across. We are going to look at stormwater runoff."

Now I want to mention another aspect of that obsession that's holding the city back: its roads and streets that are designed to prioritize drivers over pedestrians.

The Congress for the New Urbanism regularly puts out a list of "Freeways Without Futures." These are usually "urban" highways that not only blight neighborhoods with noise, pollution and ugly elevated structures, but cut off neighborhoods from each other and from jobs, shopping and amenities like parks. I've suggested that the designation be extended to include highways like the Pulaski Skyway that aim a "firehose of cars" into walkable dense urban areas that are well-served by transit. That said, here's a highway that fits the current CNU criteria quite well: the McCarter Highway that leads north from Newark to Paterson, New Jersey.

Cutting off the waterfront in Passaic

The McCarter Highway was once a boulevard along the Passaic River, and still is a boulevard through most of Newark. As Steve Anderson describes, the section from northern Newark through Passaic to Paterson was "upgraded" to a limited-access highway in sections from the 1950s through the 1990s. To make room for the highway in Passaic, the old Erie Main Line was abandoned between the Passaic River and the Paterson station.

When it was being planned and built, I'm sure a lot of people saw the McCarter Highway as evidence of progress. The waterfront was either industrial, blighted or both, so most people didn't care that they were cut off from it, just as they didn't care about the West Side Highway in Manhattan or the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco.

But as with the West Side Highway and the Embarcadero, I think people didn't realize how a limited-access highway could be much more destructive than a factory or a slum. From its fifteen exits (depending on how you count them), the McCarter Highway spews cars into Newark, Belleville, Nutley, Passaic, Clifton and Paterson. It takes up some of the most valuable land in these towns and pays no rent or taxes. It spreads noise, gas and particulate pollution. Oh, and it's impervious to stormwater, Mr. Mayor.

The Passaic River may not look like much in this area, but without the McCarter Highway it could have a riverside park with a promenade and bike path. The highway not only cuts Newark and Passaic off from the river, but from towns across the river like Arlington, East Rutherford, Lyndhurst, Wallington, Garfield and Elmwood Park.

With rents rising in Brooklyn, Harlem and Jersey City, many residents find themselves having to move, and many of them are moving to Newark, Passaic and Paterson. They deserve the same amenities in their new homes that they left behind: good urban parks and good walking connections to the surrounding areas. They don't deserve to breathe carbon monoxide and listen to speeding cars, and they don't deserve to see those cars speeding off the highway into their neighborhoods.

This is why New Jersey should tear down the McCarter Highway and replace it with a calm, low-traffic boulevard, an extension of the Newark City Subway, a riverwalk and bike path, and some flood-proof apartments.

(Oh yeah, and the oppressive pedestrian environment in Branch Brook Park is a whole other post.)

Carmageddon vs. Bridgegate

The New Jersey Department of Transportation will shut down two lanes of the Pulaski Skyway on Saturday, and recently Sarah Gonzalez was on WNYC with dire predictions of carmageddon.

My prediction is that these predictions, like most predictions of carmageddon, will not come true. There will hardly be any additional congestion. There is a simple reason: drivers are being warned in advance. In the recent Carmageddon episodes in Los Angeles and Seattle, not only were there dire warnings well in advance of the impending doom, but they were broadcast far and wide. When the time came, drivers took alternate routes or stayed at home, and the congestion failed to materialize.

Photo: Amy Newman / NorthJersey

The contrast with "Bridgegate" just a few miles up the river is particularly revealing. In Bridgegate, as with the Pulaski, there were two approach lanes taken out of service, but with Bridgegate there was absolutely no notice given. Drivers didn't know that the George Washington Bridge toll booths were closed until they got there, and many of them didn't even know then, until they got close enough to see. The element of surprise makes a huge difference.

There are other factors, in particular the availability of alternate routes, but that factor favors the Pulaski. As Larry Higgs tells us, there are many ways to get across the Meadowlands or the bay, and several of them don't even require driving.

The best outcome, in fact, would be for habitual drivers to take a transit option, realize that transit isn't so bad, and shift to transit permanently, as they seem to have done in Seattle. The bridge is a major contributor to crashes and pollution in Lower Manhattan. The best way to encourage transit use would be to turn the two remaining lanes of the Skyway into exclusive busways, but charging a well-advertised market-clearing price on the Holland Tunnel would work too. Unfortunately, nobody took up my suggestions, and drivers will have a nicely renovated bridge when it's all finished, making permanent shifts that much less likely. Thanks, Chris Christie!

How safe is your hundred foot avenue?

The stretch of Northern Boulevard where Noshat Nahian was killed last month has always felt dangerous to me, and not just because of its "safety culture" that places little value on the lives of pedestrians, even children. Not just because of the widespread practice of turning drivers cutting pedestrians off at intersections. It's partly the width, also: it feels like a dangerous stroad, not a comfortable street.

Image created on Streetmix.net.

The funny thing is that Northern Boulevard is not actually that wide. It’s a hundred feet from one building to the other. By comparison, Queens Boulevard at 61st street is 195 feet wide, 32th Avenue at 61st Street is 70 feet wide, 61st Street itself is 55 feet wide, and a Really Narrow Street like New Street Manhattan is only fifteen feet wide.

We have a lot of these hundred foot avenues in New York. Main Street and Little Neck Parkway here in Queens are the same width. Atlantic and Vanderbilt Avenues in Brooklyn, Third and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan, Bedford Park Boulevard and Gun Hill Road in the Bronx, Hylan Boulevard and Richmond Terrace in Staten Island, all are a hundred feet wide. I was surprised when I first realized that Northern Boulevard itself is a hundred feet wide from the city line in Little Neck to its western end in Long Island City, which kept the old name of Jackson Avenue.

Image created on Streetmix.net.

Many of our neighbors are killed on these hundred foot avenues. Recent deadly stroads in the news are West End Avenue, where Cooper Stock, age 9, was killed on January 10; East Tremont Avenue, where Nydja Herring was killed the next day; 65th Street in Brooklyn, where Xiaoci Hu was killed on January 2.

Despite the danger we feel on Northern Boulevard and East Tremont Avenue, other hundred foot avenues feel much safer. The difference is that within those hundred feet there are different ways of allocating the space. Some designs encourage speeding and reckless driving, others encourage safe driving, and even walking. These differences can be made with signs, paint or concrete.

Concrete is the hardest to change. One of the biggest difference between Northern Boulevard and safer-feeling streets like Jackson Avenue and Seventh Avenue is that it has fifteen-foot-wide sidewalks, five feet narrower than the others. Those ten feet are taken out of the width of every lane on Seventh Avenue. The drivers have less space to maneuver, and go slower as a result. In the past ten years, the DOT has also installed a planted median strip in the middle of Jackson Avenue, removing an additional lane of traffic.

Paint is easier, but still has its difficulties. Seventh Avenue is one-way, while the Bowery is two-way. It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison, but the overall effect of one-way traffic is to decrease safety; the deaths on Northern Boulevard are in spite of its two-way configuration, not because of it. The DOT has proposed reconfiguring the lanes of hundred-foot Morningside Avenue with paint, but the local Community Board wants safety to remain a low priority.

The easiest change to make is to the signs, and here’s one that could pay off big. There are stretches of Northern that feel slightly safer, in Jackson Heights, Bayside and Douglaston for example. The difference is simply that people are allowed to park on both sides of the road. On the block where Nahian was killed, there is no standing during rush hours. In other parts, there is no standing at all, ever, with three lanes available in each direction for driving. That is where it feels the most like a speedway.

The reason for these narrow sidewalks and parking restrictions, as on Queens Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue, is that the DOT engineers have sought to preserve and encourage access from central and eastern Queens to the “free” bridges to Manhattan (paid for by your tax dollars). Drivers coming from the east on the Grand Central Parkway could pay a toll to cross the Triboro Bridge, but many of them would rather sit in traffic on Northern Boulevard. The traffic engineers were told not to let anyone sit in traffic, so they narrowed the sidewalks and banned parking from long stretches of the boulevard.

To implement Mayor de Blasio’s Vision Zero of eliminating pedestrian deaths, spelled out at the site of Nahian's death, we need to reverse that priority. We need to tolerate drivers sitting in traffic, because that saves lives. The first step should be eliminating the parking restrictions the entire length of Northern Boulevard, and in fact throughout the city. When money is available, the sidewalks on Northern Boulevard should be widened again to twenty feet.

These changes will take courage. They will slow drivers down, and that’s one thing traffic engineers are taught to avoid at all costs. Drivers in the neighborhood will complain at community board meetings and in letters to the editor. The very day that Nahian was killed, some drivers tried to blame him for his own death, and they will try again. They will try to hide behind weasel words, but their point will be that deaths like Nahian’s are necessary sacrifices for mobility and commerce, and politicians will be tempted to give in.

One possible concern is that Northern Boulevard is designated as a New York State highway. If history is any guide, the drivers who want to put their convenience over children’s lives will have allies at the State Department of Transportation. We should bring in Governor Cuomo and Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald and make sure that they are just as committed to safety on Northern Boulevard as we are.

Do you know another dangerous hundred-foot stroad like Northern Boulevard? Do you know a hundred-foot street that’s a good example for how Northern could be? How safe are the hundred-foot avenues where you live and work and shop?