Transit should be controlled by transit riders

I was listening to City Council Speaker Corey Johnson on Ben Kabak's new podcast, promoting his proposal to transfer control of the New York City subways from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is controlled by the Governor, to a new board controlled by the Mayor (a post that Johnson plans to run for in 2021). Johnson's thoughtfulness and his desire for real solutions were refreshing in our political scene, and I appreciated his request for feedback on his proposal. And I have some!

In particular I was struck by Johnson's claim that a board that represents the diversity of the transit riding public would do a better job of serving that public. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm definitely not going to repeat the bullshit that a board needs people with technical or business expertise; that's what staff is for. The subways and buses should be managed in a way that benefits their riders, and riders deserve a say in how they're managed.

The thing is that the system doesn't just serve riders; it serves everyone who lives and works anywhere in the whole metro area. A bank executive who is driven to work isn't going to perform well if their employees can't get in on the train. An antiques merchant in Great Barrington is going to sell less if the weekend visitors from the city have less disposable income. Taxpayers need to know that our money is being spent well. Bondholders won't lend the MTA money unless they can make sure it won't default.

I wouldn't want the Kosciuszko or Tappan Zee bridge replacement projects to be managed by and for the exclusive benefit of drivers. In fact, the problem with these projects is that they actually are being managed by and for drivers. And you know, the problem with the MTA is that it is also being managed largely for drivers.

Johnson is right that the MTA is controlled by a group of people who don't ride transit, but he fingered the wrong group. The Governor clearly doesn't ride transit, but a lot of transit policy is not set by him, but by the State Legislature. As I've written in numerous posts, the State Assembly and Senate are almost completely dominated by drivers and people who are driven everywhere.

Under Johnson's proposal the State Legislature would have almost as much control as they do now, because under our constitution they are the only entity in the state with the power to tax. State laws also have the power to overrule city laws. Even if Johnson can persuade them to implement his plan, they can change it at any time.

To the extent the city government would have control, the City Council would have more power than this "BAT Board," because they have to pass the budget, and can pass certain laws constraining what the Mayor can do. The Council has gotten much better over just the past twelve years, thanks in part to Johnson's leadership, but as Streetsblog documented recently, they still cannot be counted on to reliably prioritize transit riders.

Today the MTA Board today is at worst a fig leaf covering the Governor's management and the Legislature's budget priorities, and at best an advisory panel. On top of that we have another panel, the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, which is appointed by elected officials based on patronage, and elects representatives to the MTA Board who have no voting rights. Johnson's proposal does not give this "BAT Board" the power to tax, so the real power would remain with the power brokers in the State Legislature.

Having the State Legislature or the City Council control the transit system would not actually be a problem if we had a truly representative system. Even the State Legislature is dominated by representatives of districts with heavy transit ridership. Unfortunately, the system is corrupt and favors elite homeowners who drive. They also subscribe to an ideology of driving as emancipation, and make deals to favor "upstate" that ignore the sizable population of current and potential transit riders outside of New York City.

The focus some advocates place on the non-representativeness of the MTA Board, in particular on the predominance of white men, winds up distracting us from the non-representativeness of the State Legislature, where some of the loudest opposition to transit funding and fair pricing for road use comes from nonwhite and female legislators like Charles Barron, Kevin Parker, Toby Stavisky and Deborah Glick. Last week when first term Senator Jessica Ramos said not only that she doesn't have a driver's license but that "car culture is something that we need to start rethinking as a society as a whole," that statement was notable for how unusual and brave it was.

So yes, we should transfer control of New York City Transit's subways and buses back to the City government. But no, we should not create a whole new authority to run them, or a "mobility czar" to oversee buses, trains, ferries, bridges and streets. We should just make them all part of the Department of Transportation. If we need to borrow money for them, we should use the City's bonding ability.

And no, we should not create a whole new board with no real power. If people want to transfer the New York City Transit Riders Council from the MTA to the city, fine. We don't need another one.

Similarly, if for some reason the City can't borrow enough money using its own bonds, I could see us setting up a temporary authority to issue bonds. Those of you who have read The Power Broker know that the authorities that issued bonds to build projects like the Manhattan Bridge were set up to dissolve once they paid off the bonds. The genius idea that allowed Bob Moses to wield power for decades without ever winning an election was to insert a clause in the law that created the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority allowing it to issue new bonds. Removing that unjustified power from the Transit Authority is an essential step in restoring democratic control to our subway system.

The bottom line: municipal control is a good idea, but a new authority is not the way to do it. It should be done by direct executive power. Representation is a good idea, but an unelected board is not the way to do it. It should be done through our elected representatives to the City Council and State Legislature.

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.

Better subway station names

Back in October, City Council Transportation chair Ydanis Rodriguez argued that some of our identically-named subway stations really are confusing and should be changed (see the full report in PDF. In general I agree; the worst are those that are on the same line in different boroughs; back when there was a 23rd Street-Ely Avenue stop in Queens, I helped a poor recent arrival on the V train who got it confused with 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.

I like how in Paris every station has a unique name, and that's part of the navigation system for the city: directions regularly include the name of the nearest Metro station. Of course that's because Paris has no grid, and grids actually make subway station naming kind of boring: do we really want stops called 23rd-Park, 23rd-Broadway, 23rd-Seventh and 23rd-Eighth?

On the other hand, I also agree with Ben Kabak that the names proposed by Rodriguez's staff are not great. They're not as bad as the DC Metro with stations like Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter, but they're still too long. I'm going to take them one at a time:

• 7th Avenue 53rd Street: This can be just plain Seventh Avenue, because we're going to rename the other ones.
• 7th Avenue Prospect Heights: This is in line with the MTA's push to rename stations after the neighborhoods they serve, but it's silly. The next stop on this line is Prospect Park, and there's a 15th Street-Prospect Park stop on the F and Prospect Avenue stops on the R and 2/5 lines. Why not just rename it Carleton Avenue after the street on the other side of Flatbush Avenue?
• 7th Avenue 4th Street: This is a typo, unless Rodriguez is working with the MTA to fund a subway under Fourth Street. I think we should rename it Ninth Street, and then the Smith-9th Street station can just be Smith, and the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street station can just be Fourth Avenue.
• Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall: Take off the "City Hall" part, off of this and the IRT station. There's a City Hall station across the park on the R train.
• Chambers Street-World Trade Center: Since this is part of the same complex as the E train terminal at World Trade Center, why not call the whole thing World Trade Center? Well, even the south end of the A/C platforms are pretty far from the WTC, and we'll have to make sure the #1 train station won't be called World Trade Center when it opens.
• Gun Hill Road - White Plains Road: This can stay as just Gun Hill Road.
• Park Place: Are people really getting this one confused with the Franklin Avenue Shuttle stop? If it's a big deal, call it Park Row instead.
• Gun Hill Road - Eastchester Road: As Larry Velázquez pointed out on Twitter, it's not even very close to Eastchester Road. We could name it after Seymour Avenue or Hammersley Avenue, both of which are closer.
• Pelham Parkway - White Plains Road: This is probably the best we can do. We don't want it to get confused with the other Pelham Parkway stop, but there are nine other stops along White Plains Road. so it looks like we're stuck with both of them.
• Pelham Parkway - Williamsbridge Road: First, spell "Williamsbridge" right. We could just call this "Williamsbridge Road," but then people might think it's close to the "Williams Bridge" station on the Metro-North Harlem Line.
• 36th Street - Sunnyside Yards: The problem with this one is it assumes that Sunnyside Yards is a destination. I mean, sure, I took Alon Levy there, but we're transit geeks. Does it mean someone in Rodriguez's office is expecting this part of the Yards to be developed soon? How about 38th Avenue instead?
• 36th Street - Fourth Avenue: If we rename the LIC station to 38th Avenue, we can keep this as 36th Street.

The Fifth Borough?

On my post about Staten Island, chrismealy commented that we could trade it for Bergen Neck, the peninsula in New Jersey just north of it. This is actually something I've been thinking about for years.

I've called Hudson County "the fifth borough" because Staten Island is so unlike the other boroughs. There's no real good reason why the Arthur Kill is the boundary between New York and New Jersey, rather than the Narrows. It's just a historical accident.

Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken share more history with Manhattan than Staten Island, and better transportation links. Development patterns in Hoboken resemble those in Greenwich Village, and those in North Bergen resemble Astoria. From the map above, it looks like car ownership is higher in Hudson County, but that may be misleading. I can't get census data below the municipality level, and there's probably a big difference between car ownership in Journal Square versus Greenville.

Or we could even just let Staten Island secede without any new territory. You could argue that we should preserve the differences in transportation regulations between New Jersey and New York that have shown us that private transit can work in the US if you regulate it right. That's the kind of argument that Chuck Marohn has been making on StrongTowns, and it makes sense to me. We shouldn't say no to annexing Hudson County, but I don't think we need it.

New York without Staten Island means two or three less car-obsessed City Council members. It means one less car-loving state senator, and four less assemblymembers, and that may be the biggest reason that the legislature voted against it when Staten Island voted to secede in 1993.

Letting Staten Island secede would probably mean transferring the Verrazano Bridge to the Port Authority. That would mean less toll revenue for the subways, but also a lot less of our city and state transportation money going to Staten Island's roads and bridges.

Really, though, it's not worth the effort to kick Staten Island out of the city. If they want to go, we should let them. But if they want to be part of the city, I'm okay with that. I just wish they'd start acting - and voting - like it.

Staten Island and our goals

This summer I went to Staten Island for the first time in several years. There are some things I like about it, but I don't go there very often because it's hard to get there and I don't feel welcome when I do. I feel similarly about North Carolina, but it's harder to ignore Staten Island. With mayoral candidate Joe Lhota floating the idea of moving the Transportation Department headquarters there, the need to say something about the place is even more urgent. Ben Kabak said his piece this morning, and it got me thinking.

…and the trolleys. Map: New York Tribune, July 1912, via Bowery Boys.

I know there are lots of nice people who live on Staten Island, including some regular readers of this blog. There are many who want it to be a place where you can walk, bike and take transit, and some who are even working to make that happen. I'm glad you're out there and I salute you for your work. But your borough is a problem.

Even more than other suburbs, Staten Island affects those of us who live in the rest of the city. Its residents spend a lot of time driving through Brooklyn, Manhattan and even Queens. They constantly feel slighted by Manhattan politicians and demand that the city and state spend money there. They also demand lots of subsidized services, like low tolls on the Verrazano Bridge.

Most dangerously, as a large bloc of middle-class white voters, the South and West Shores of the island wield disproportionate influence, and use that to get some of their demands. They are an indispensable part of any center or right-wing political campaign, proving particularly valuable to Rudy Giuliani and Christine Quinn. Politicians frequently pander to the agenda of the island's car owners, and the island's representatives on the City Council and state legislature frequently work with representatives from the eastern Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens to oppose progressive transportation efforts.

For some perspective, let's imagine that in the twenties, instead of building the Bayonne and Goethals bridges and the Outerbridge Crossing, the Port Authority had put in double-track high-level railroad connections, upgrading the Arthur Kill lift bridge and building a northbound connection to Bayonne and connecting to the Lehigh Valley line at Perth Amboy. Imagine if in the sixties, instead of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority building the Verrazano Bridge, the Board of Transportation had dug tunnels? Not a parochial local tunnel to Bay Ridge, but a connection between the Long Island Railroad and the national network, plus a high-speed tunnel under the harbor directly to Lower Manhattan? Imagine if they had extended the trolley network (see the map above) to cover the whole island?

You'd have a place that was easy to get to by train, but difficult by car. Instead we got the opposite: the most car-dominated of the five boroughs.

That time is past. The question is, what would help us fulfill our goals (see the top of the page)? What should we do about Staten Island?

What I want from a mayor or city council member

After I laid out the ways that Christine Quinn has disappointed me as a transportation and livable streets advocate, I got a couple of emails from 2013 candidates asking for my support for their campaigns. I'm flattered to be asked at all, being some nameless guy who often defies political realities.

As a famous New Yorker once said: well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan. If you've reached out to me, I'll be happy to talk about your plan. But right off the bat I'll tell you and everyone else on the Web that some things are more likely to win me over than others. I've made some specific recommendations in earlier posts, but here I want to talk more in generalities, based on what's disappointed me in previous campaigns.



Now a lot of these have to do with transit, and I know that the Mayor and the City Council don't control the MTA. But they can accomplish some things. The #7 train extension to the Javits Center is a Bloomberg project. When the MTA cut bus routes, it was the City DOT that shut down Joel Azumah's replacement service, the Taxi and Limousine Commission that launched a clueless attempt at legal jitney service, and the NYPD that is keeping dollar vans out of the bus lanes.

• See transit as a system. Having a "transit plan," a "freight plan," a "livable streets plan" and a "transportation plan" - that's a recipe for chaos and cross-purposes. Transit is all about one thing: getting people and stuff from one place to another. During the next administration there will be billions of trips; the goal should be to make them all as safe, healthy and efficient as possible, without regard to mode.
• Get people out of their cars. As I've written before, my goals - that you see at the top of the page - all depend on getting people out of their cars. You can have the best transit plan in the world, but it's worth nothing if your road plan is more effective at encouraging people to drive. If you don't see that improving highways more than transit is regressive, you're not thinking clearly. If you think that you have to have "something for the drivers" in your transportation plan, but you leave no possibility for "the drivers" and their kids to accomplish their goals without driving, you've failed New York.
• Connect transit, walkability and land use. Transit works best when people can walk to it from where they are. Places work best when people can walk to them from transit. That means locating housing, jobs and shopping near transit; locating transit near housing, jobs and shopping; and making sure that the routes between them are safe and pleasant. Not like Edgewater.
• Inspire us. Who the fuck wants to ride an elevated busway over an ugly late-Bob Moses highway? Who wants to climb fifty steps to get into a station with underground platforms? Not me. What inspires me? New lines that actually go someplace I'd want to go. New or reopened stations where I want to go. Improved connections between lines.
• Give us real value. Why would people who happily fork over an extra two dollars care about saving $1.25 on an arbitrary subset of their trips? How many people really care about keeping the subway fare at $2.25, aside from it being a symbol of the government's commitment to transit riders? We'll pay more if we're getting more. That means getting where we want to go faster, more reliably and more comfortably.
• Get it passed and fund it. Yes, we want to be inspired, but we also want to know that at least some of what you promise is going to happen. How are you going to get your partners in city and state government to go along? Most importantly, where is the money going to come from? Anyone who says "the commuter tax" without a feasible plan to get the Legislature to pass a constitutionally valid commuter tax is full of shit.
• Foster innovation and adaptation. Do we really want to live in a city where it takes over a year to get a single bus route that runs every half hour? I don't. I want to live in a city that tries new things and rewards people who try new things on their own.
• Don't be afraid to say no - to unions, politicians, business owners, landowners, or even "the community." You can't give everything to everyone. If you try to, what you'll wind up doing is giving everything to the most threatening people and ignoring the weaker ones. That's no way to run a city. I'm not happy with everything Mike Bloomberg has done, but one of the things I've liked the most about him over the years is that he has a nose for bullshit. But this isn't like Andrew Cuomo or Chris Christie who cry poverty one minute and drop billions on superficial projects the next.
  
  Bloomberg can often tell the difference between someone who wants to make the world a better place and someone who wants to protect their unearned advantage. When he hears a sob story from somebody who was born on third base and thinks they hit a triple, often he'll listen politely, look them in the eye and tell them to take a hike. Having someone in City Hall who isn't constantly pandering is hugely refreshing.
• Do something about the NYPD. There are a lot of good cops out there, but the leadership sucks. As Streetsblog has documented extensively, under Ray Kelly, the department has let killer drivers off the hook, ignored dangerous driving, harassed cyclists, and hogged pedestrian and cyclist space. We need a mayor and a city council who will hold the NYPD accountable for protecting those of us who don't carry expensive multi-ton steel boxes around with us.

I'll support any proposal that fits with these principles. If you have enough proposals like that - or if your competitors are dismal enough - I may endorse you for Mayor, Public Advocate, Comptroller or City Council. I can't promise that it'll get you elected, or that you'll even get one more vote. At best, I hope you were leaning in this direction, and that this post helped to bring you clarity. It'd be even better if we had more than one candidate making proposals along these lines.

And if you go banging the "two New Yorks" drum, well don't you know that you can count me out.

Christine Quinn's disappointing record on transportation

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is running for mayor of New York. In theory I like the idea of the city's first lesbian mayor, and she seems like a nice person. She did get the council to pass congestion pricing in 2008. But overall her record on transportation has been negative, and there is no indication that she has any interest in taking a more progressive stand on the issue.

Photo: Steven Hirsch / Streetsblog

In addition to the contempt she has shown in writing, here are several actions Quinn has taken that show how low issues like pedestrian safety, fair access to jobs, clean air and water, resource conservation and protection, and prevention of global warming rank among her priorities. Thanks to Streetsblog for keeping an eye on her.

• Jimmy Vacca's Kvetch Committee. When Transportation Committee chair John Liu was elected comptroller in 2009, Quinn appointed Jimmy Vacca to chair the committee. Vacca represents a conservative part of the southeast Bronx where 62% of households have at least one car, and the neighborhood elite simply ignore the other 38%.
  
  Over the past three years Vacca has continued Liu's pattern of pandering to the city's wealthy car-drivers, flattering their fantasies that they're a disadvantaged, oppressed class and attacking anyone who gets in their way. When he has shown interest in pedestrian deaths, it has been temporary and fleeting, but he always seems to have time to dream up new giveaways to drivers. All this time, Quinn has stood with Vacca and even reiterated some of his kvetches.
  
  In part, this is clearly a political calculation. Quinn has seen transportation as an issue where there is no strong case for progressive action. With that gone, it is simply a political bargaining chip, to be traded to outer-borough power-brokers in exchange for their support.
• Four more years of Ray Kelly. Back in January the Post reported that Quinn is planning to reappoint Ray Kelly as Police Commissioner. Under Kelly's leadership, the NYPD has actively obstructed enforcement of laws protecting pedestrian safety, while harassing cyclists in Central Park.
• No taxi reform. Mayor Bloomberg made a heroic, if flawed, effort to increase the supply of taxis, especially in the "inner boroughs." He tried to get a bill passed in Albany because people seem to agree that the taxi lobby has bought the City Council, and thus it will never pass a bill that the medallion owners don't want.
• Limiting pedicabs. In 2007, Quinn shepherded a law through the City Council, over Bloomberg's veto, to drastically reduce the number of pedicabs in the city and their ability to cross bridges. It was widely speculated at the time that she did this as a favor for her friend and neighbor Emily Giske, who introduced Quinn to her future wife Kim Catullo. Giske is a registered lobbyist who was working for motor taxi companies at the time.
• No increase in transit funding. When the MTA was first established, the city and state governments both contributed to the subway and bus budget. Rudy Giuliani cut the city's contribution in the 1990s, as George Pataki was cutting the state's share. Bloomberg hasn't cut the city contribution as much as Giuliani did, but it has gone down. Yes, that's something to critique him for, but the City Council has never challenged him on it.

Remember these things when people ask you to support Quinn. I think we can do better.

The Great Curbside Land Grab of 1947-1952

In previous posts I've talked about how it was illegal to park your car overnight in New York City in the 1940s, how car ownership got out of the NYPD's control, how the car owners developed a sense of entitlement, and how the media and politicians sympathized more with car owners than with anyone else.

Man in rain, 1952. Photo: Ruth Orkin.

On Tuesday I described how in 1952 Mayor Vincent Impellitteri proposed an overnight parking tax of $5 per month, an "automobile use tax" of $5 per month and a city gas tax of 2¢ per gallon. This was in response to a budget crisis - you thought there were no budget crises before the 1970s? - that may well have been brought on by the city building so many new roads without any new money to pay for them.

As I wrote on Tuesday, it's generally a bad idea to let someone use your stuff for free if you plan on charging them for it in the future. If you set expectations well - in other words, make it clear that you're doing them a favor and tell them exactly when you want them to start paying - it may work out just fine. The worst thing you can do is just kind of let them grab your stuff and then appeal to their sense of charity. That implies that they have a right to your stuff, and you'd let them have it for free indefinitely if you had enough money.

The worst thing is exactly what Mayor Impellitteri did, and it turned out as bad as you'd expect. From what I can tell, the State Legislature did not give the city the right to levy an "automobile use tax"; otherwise Bloomberg would have just done it. They also did not allow the city to charge a per-gallon gas tax, although the city does charge a 4.375% sales tax on gasoline. However, they had already given the city the right to charge for overnight parking in 1947.

On February 22, the City Council passed a home rule measure assenting to the change. And then the backlash began in earnest. On March 12, Acting Traffic Commissioner T.T. Wiley went to the Times to complain about how much of an administrative "headache" the $60 overnight parking fee would create, and on March 18, the president of the Automobile Club threatened "serious trouble" if the city went ahead with the fee. On April 4, a group of seven City Council members announced their opposition to the automobile use tax and the overnight parking fee. On April 14 it was the turn of the City Comptroller, Lazarus Joseph.

Critically, the Council and Joseph ignored the entire possibility that drivers might have some obligation to pay even a part of the upkeep of the roads that they used. The Pigovian, and now Shoupian, idea that free parking can cause people to drive more, making the city a worse place, was not even considered. The entire focus was on finding "alternative sources of revenue" - anything besides car use to tax, or even short-term gimmicks.

In the end, the Board of Estimate vetoed the overnight parking fee. For those who don't know, the Board of Estimate was a crazy, undemocratic institution that ruled the city for ninety years. It was an executive council consisting of the Presidents of each of the five boroughs with one vote each, plus the Mayor, the Comptroller and the City Council President who had two votes each.

The Board of Estimate was deposed in 1989 when the United States Supreme Court ruled that its power violated the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection, because Brooklyn's 2.3 million inhabitants had the same vote as Staten Island's 378,977. Imagine if the city today were controlled by a group consisting of a few mostly reasonable people like Mike Bloomberg, Scott Stringer and Ruben Diaz Jr. paired with faux-populist panderers like Christine Quinn, John Liu, Marty Markowitz, James Molinaro and Helen Marshall.

Back in 1952 the Board still had all its power, and on April 21, in the words of Times reporter Charles G. Bennett, it "informally decided to leave it to Controller Lazarus Joseph and his aides to turn up sufficient alternative sources of city revenue to justify dropping further consideration of what promised to be the most controversial and most sharply attacked item of Mayor Impellitteri's tax program." And that was it. The drivers had been squatting on city streets for free for five years, and they have continued for another sixty.

Another interesting angle to the story was that in all the New York Times articles I could find about the issue, the only people in favor of the overnight parking fee were members of the Impellitteri administration, and their arguments were couched entirely in terms of fiscal need. No citizens groups were quoted on the pro side of the issue to balance out the Automobile Club and their members. It is not clear if there was anyone.

It's a striking contrast with the city's installation of bicycle facilities, where every new project is challenged with a statement along the lines of "Cyclists need to start obeying the law and respecting pedestrians before they get any more lanes." If motorists had been held to that standard in 1952, they'd all still be parking in garages.

Gridlock Sam's plan is not fair or equitable

I've got objections to "Gridlock Sam" Schwartz's plan to toll the East River Bridges and use some of the money to reduce tolls on the MTA bridges that don't go to Manhattan. I've talked about how Schwartz goes out of his way to provide "something for the drivers," but fails to give them what they really want: validation of the status that they sought by becoming drivers in the first place. I've talked about how this "something for the drivers" is not about compensating the current drivers, but sinking money into durable infrastructure for anyone who will drive in New York City in the next thirty to fifty years. This is not a vision of a sustainable future.

Now let's move on to the next big one: it's not fair. Schwartz actually calls his plan "the Fair Plan." This is reiterated by Charlie Komanoff and Brian Lehrer who call it "fair" and "equitable." The problem is that it's only fair if you take a very limited view of the system.

"A More Equitable Transportation Formula For NY Metro Area," slide 14

You've probably all heard the story about the two women who went to King Solomon, both claiming to be the mother of a single baby. Solomon, in his wisdom, offered to split the baby and give each woman half. One of the women, realizing that half a baby was worse than none, told Solomon to give the baby to the other woman. Solomon replied that she must be the real mother because she was willing to part with the baby rather than see it killed.

Schwartz and his friends spent time talking to people who had opposed the Mayor's congestion pricing plan and came up with something that at least some of them felt would be fair. To me it seems like a classic case of splitting the baby. It will not satisfy the drivers and will prevent transit from successfully expanding into the outer boroughs and suburbs. We have enough money to maintain one transportation system for the area, but we can't afford to properly maintain two - or at least, there are very few New Yorkers who want to pay high enough taxes, gas prices and transit fares to maintain both.

Worst of all, it's an example of a special crazy kind of "fairness" that completely ignores history. It was apparently football coach Barry Switzer who said, "Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple." That's the mindset of New York drivers, who benefit from the billions of dollars poured into the region's highway system over the past fifty years, and zoning codes that require every builder to supply parking, outside of Manhattan and Long Island City. They can't even wrap their minds around the idea that New Jersey drivers already pay tolls to enter Manhattan.

This kind of bizarro "fairness" that ignores history and splits babies is not too surprising coming from Shelly Silver and Peter Vallone, Jr. It's sad to see it coming from Melissa Mark-Viverito and David Yassky. It's downright depressing to see it coming from people like Sam Schwartz, Charlie Komanoff and Brian Lehrer, all of whom really ought to know better.

Expanding the constituency for transit and livable streets

I've talked before about why we need walkable, transit-oriented suburbs. One of the big reasons is the cycle: the easier it is to take transit throughout the region, the bigger the coalition for transit:



Right now there are relatively few solid transit advocates in the City Council and even fewer in the State Legislature. We definitely need to work to make them more representative, but we can also work to increase the number of people in each district that get around without cars.

I realized that my earlier map of City Council districts by car ownership is not well-suited to this task. I divided it up by quintiles, so that there were roughly ten of every color. But no matter how many people in a district get rid of their cars, as long as that district remains in the same position relative to the other districts, its color will not change.

I wanted a system where we could see how a district is doing on an absolute scale. So here are the city council districts in terms of percentage of households without a car. I added the boroughs, townships and cities of Hudson County (which is like a fifth borough) for your edification:

Color	Range
Green	80-100%
Yellow	60-79%
Orange	40-59%
Red	20-39%
Purple	0-19%

You can see that the districts represented by Melissa Mark-Viverito, Rosie Mendez, Ydanis Rodriguez and Christine Quinn are the only ones with more than 80% of households car-free, and with the exception of Quinn, they have all fought hard for transit and livable streets.

The yellow districts cover the rest of Manhattan, the South Bronx and Brownstone Brooklyn. They have a range of representatives, from transit advocates like Letitia James to AWOL reps like Helen Foster, but none of them are anti-transit.

The orange districts cover Western Queens, the north Bronx and the denser parts of southern Brooklyn. Their Council representatives range from my own rep, Jimmy Van Bramer, who fights hard for transit, to the indifferent James Barron, to David "Kvetch" Greenfield who only cares about the car-driving half of his constituents. Union City, New Jersey is 40% carfree.

The red districts cover Southeast Queens, West New York, Guttenberg and Jersey City, Transportation Chair Jimmy Vacca's East Bronx district, Peter Koo's district in Flushing, Donna Rose's district on the North Shore of Staten Island, Elizabeth Crowley's Central Queens district, and Lew Fidler's southeast Brooklyn district. We have some big car kvetchers here.

The four purple districts are represented by two of the most anti-transit members of the Council: Dan Halloran and James Oddo. Mark Weprin is nowhere near as bad as his brother David, but he's not a big fighter for transit either.

This is why I want to get people in these districts to get rid of their cars. If the 36th District in Brooklyn were green (80% and up) it might be represented by a Quinn, but it's more likely to be represented by a Mark-Viverito. If the 44th in Brooklyn were yellow it might be represented by a James. It might also be represented by a Foster, but at least it would be less likely to elect Greenfield. If the 30th were orange it might still get a Greenfield, but it might also get a Van Bramer. If the 19th were red it might get a Gennaro or a Crowley.

So what would it take to move the 16th District from 71% to 80%? To move the 44th from 49% to 60%? To move the 30th from 319% to 40%? To move the 19th from 15% to 20%?

The Port Authority's toll hike is blatantly unfair

The big news the past few days has been the Port Authority's fare and toll hike plan. Many people are upset about it, but for me the PATH fare increase seems doable. It's higher than the NYC Transit fare, but don't worry, we'll catch up soon. The toll increase - well, I'm in favor of anything that brings the cost of driving up closer to the actual amount of resources used.

Lots of people were upset about the proposal. New York State Senator Charles Fuschillo of Merrick is against the Port Authority increases, the MTA fare hikes and the MTA payroll tax, apparently believing that nobody should ever have to pay anything for a government service. In a hilarious development, Governors Cuomo and Christie expect us to believe that they had no idea the Port Authority would propose such a steep hike. They only signed off on its capital plan, they didn't expect anyone would have to pay for it! A bit closer to reality, there were various complaints against the plan, but the Bergen Record actually found a guy who reasoned that it would discourage single-occupant driving.

Tri-State and Streetsblog pointed out that for several years people have been noticing that the Port Authority had lots of cash on hand, and saying, "Well, let's get the Port Authority to chip in on this." In this way, the few billion dollars in question has probably been spent at least five times over. And this is the answer to my question from 2009 about why governments borrow to finance capital projects: if they try to save the money ahead of time, someone will take it.

One of the reasons the Port Authority is raising fares and tolls is that Governor Cuomo expects it to contribute $380 million a year to the MTA capital plan. This makes sense in a way, because people from New Jersey commute to Manhattan by train, bus and car, and benefit from having people ride the NYC Transit subways and buses. Some people have noted that the $380 million probably wouldn't be necessary if we were bringing in $500 million a year through congestion pricing on the East River bridges and tunnels. In essence, New Jersey drivers will be paying what the drivers from Westchester, Long Island, Connecticut and the outer boroughs refused to pay.

But even Streetsblog though didn't pick up on one of the grand ironies involved in having New Jersey drivers subsidizing sprawl in Bayside and Mamaroneck. Back in March 2008, in one of the craziest episodes of the whole crazy congestion pricing debate, twenty New York City Council members signed a letter complaining that the proposed congestion charge would be deducted from any bridge and tunnel tolls paid the same day. This, they wrote, was "blatantly unfair." They even demanded exactly what Cuomo is asking from the Port Authority this year: that it contribute to the MTA capital plan. Of course it was a total lie: the proposed congestion charge would have remedied numerous unfair situations, not created one.

And now, over three years later, it looks like this will happen without congestion pricing. Now, if there's a remedy for a situation that is blatantly unfair, and you apply that remedy in a situation that isn't blatantly unfair, that would be blatantly unfair, right? And yet - I have not heard a peep from David Yassky, Jimmy Vacca, John Liu or anyone else who signed that letter. They only care about fairness when they think their constituents are the ones being treated unfairly.

But that's not all. The supreme irony in the whole situation is the source of the Port Authority's money: congestion pricing. The Port Authority can charge such high tolls because it operates a secure cordon. You can't drive from New Jersey to New York City without paying a Port Authority toll unless you drive up to the Tappan Zee Bridge or beyond.

If we charged tolls on the East River bridges we'd have plenty of money for transit projects - and reduced congestion, and well-funded buses. But none of our state legislators want to stick their necks out for it, and neither does Andrew Cuomo. They'd rather just let New Jersey pay, and take the money. Excelsior!

You can't not have minimum parking requirements

I've been against minimum parking requirements for a long time. These requirements, embedded in the zoning code, have a host of problems (PDF): they drive up the cost of housing, keeping down density and decreasing efficiency. They encourage people to drive, going against all our goals listed above.

For these reasons, some have proposed a cap on minimum parking requirements within walking distance of transit. Libertarians like Stephen Smith, and liberals like Matt Yglesias, would prefer to see parking completely deregulated citywide, if not nationwide. This may be the right way after all, and I'd be open to trying it, but I think it would be a tremendous political lift unless you could manage to build a grand coalition of libertarians and radical environmentalists strong enough to overcome the entrenched alliance between short-sighted conservatives and Subaru-wagon liberal NIMBYs.

In the meantime, here in New York at least, I would like to see the ability to change things at a lower level than the city. In a city where every Democratic candidate in the past three elections has pandered to the driving minority and the media is pervaded by the windshield perspective, it may be more feasible to get a single neighborhood like Sunnyside, Park Slope or Tremont to abolish its minimum parking requirements.

There's some precedent to this. Manhattan below 110th Street on the West side and 96th Street on the East Side have maximum parking limits, as does part of Long Island City. But that's it. Outside of these areas, as Angus found out here in Sunnyside and Woodside, there is no possible zone that comes without minimum parking requirements. The normal rezoning procedure does not include a way to remove parking requirements.

Short of rewriting the zoning code the only option is to have the City Council combine the neighborhood with Manhattan and the "Long Island City Subject Area." This can add to the difficulty: there may be people in the neighborhood who are indifferent to parking requirements, but afraid of "turning the neighborhood into Manhattan."

Quantitative bike lane evaluation

As I've made clear, I am very much in favor of the Prospect Park West bike lane. In my view, the city has demonstrated that it has improved safety tremendously. The opponents do have a minor safety issue: the increased density of the cars on Prospect Park West means that people boarding, exiting or unloading cars on the avenue are more likely to be "buzzed" by cars. This may feel less safe, but it may be compensated for by the fact that the cars are going slower. In any case, the reduced speeding has made the avenue safer for pedestrians, cyclists and car occupants, so there is an overall increase in safety.

Unfortunately, there's a problem with the data demonstrating this, and the bike lane opponents have seized on it in their SLAPP lawsuit, which you can read in this PDF helpfully hosted by Streetsblog. The number of crashes resulting in injuries on the avenue have actually increased by twenty percent since the lane was installed, according to the Department of Transportation's data. Rather than acknowledging that, the DOT has preferred to compare last year's data with an average of the three previous years. The bike lane opponents argue that the decline in injuries was actually due to retiming of the traffic lights, and that the bike lane increased injuries.

The bike lane opponents are wrong, for three reasons. The first has to do with measurement. Some injuries are not reported to the police, and it's possible that there were more injuries in 2009, but they weren't all reported.

The second reason has to do with outside factors. The opponents do not mention that the twenty percent increase was from four injuries in a six-month period to five, a total increase of one injury. Things like injury rates always fluctuate over time due to any number of factors. That additional injury could have been due to the fact that a particularly reckless driver moved to Windsor Terrace that year, for example. It could be due to almost anything, which is why the ideal is to have a multi-year average before and after. It is even possible that the injury rates went down, but that last year there just happen to have been two or three more crashes resulting in injury.

There is also the effect of popularity to consider. When I lived in Park Slope, I avoided crossing Prospect Park West whenever I could. I spent somewhat less time in the park than I would otherwise have, and once I got in the park I stayed there until it was time to go home. It may very well be that more people are feeling safer crossing Prospect Park West, and are thus crossing it more. There is more safety per crossing, and more safety per person, but we aren't measuring those, we're only measuring overall safety per half year.

Now watch Councilmember Lander debate Jim Walden on New York 1. Lander is a charismatic young politician going up against a lawyer who looks like Agent Smith, so he's got an advantage already. But he squanders that advantage, because he will not acknowledge that injuries went up from 2009 to 2010. Walden picks up on that - and so does Errol Lewis, although he was pretty fair - and they both try to pin Lander down on it. Lander avoids the issue, and it makes him look like a shifty politician, hiding Things the DOT Doesn't Want You To Know.

There is no way to avoid that issue. The only thing to do is acknowledge it, respond to it and move on. Yes, unfortunately there was one more injury, and our sympathies are with the victim. It may be caused by the bike lane, but it's much more likely to be a reporting error, normal fluctuation, or increased use of the street by pedestrians. We won't know for sure until we've got a couple more years to measure. There's nothing to hide, we just don't have enough information at this time to say whether there's a real increase in danger due to the bike lane.

Sometimes the data says things you don't like. You have to own it. You can't look like you're fudging it or ignoring it. We need to maintain our integrity - and our appearance of integrity - in this fight.

Our next big goal

You might have any number of goals for New York City's transportation policy in the near future. Let's say you want to cut something in half. It could be our greenhouse gas emissions, or the amount of gasoline burned in the city, or the number of people killed in road crashes, or the childhood obesity rate. In order to do any of these things, let me repeat, it's not enough to get people to take transit. You need to get people out of their cars. If you're genuinely fighting for "balance" or "choice," you won't accomplish your goals.



Remember that if transit is more efficient at providing access for subsidies than roads are, if people patronize systems depending on the access that they provide, and if subsidies are distributed based on usage, then transit will grow by itself, and we don't have to do anything. But if we're concerned that corruption may be skewing the distribution of subsidies, or if we just want to help the process along, then we can apply pressure. Pressure in one direction moves the cycle towards car dependence (and thus towards carnage, pollution, obesity and inefficiency), and pressure in the other direction moves it towards transit use (and thus towards health, safety, efficiency and clean air).

So here's my question: at what point will we have a solid majority of the City Council in favor of prioritizing transit over cars? At what point will we have a solid majority of the city's Assembly delegation, Senate, Congress?

Right now, as we know, 55% of New Yorkers take transit to work. You would think that there would be a solid majority in the City Council supporting transit. But car ownership (and transit use) is spread unevenly across the city, leading to the possibility of a Council dominated by powerful blocs of members from Eastern Queens, for example.

Still, that doesn't explain it all. It doesn't explain why even Bill Perkins and Tom Duane were wishy-washy on bridge tolls. It doesn't explain why Dan Garodnick thinks that the primary concern of "the community" is curbside car access rather than faster buses. In these three districts, less than 30% of households have a car.

I'm beginning to think that changing the perceptions and priorities of our elected officials is more important than changing the composition of their voters.

Snow, politics and the media

So there's been a lot of snow lately. There was one big blizzard that started on Boxing Day and dumped more than a foot of snow on the city. From what I heard on the news and read in the papers, it was a complete disaster. Some streets were unplowed for days, nobody could get anywhere, and several people died. Then there was another storm last week, but that was smaller and the city cleared it up much quicker. This past Wednesday night there was another foot of snow, and so far everyone seems pretty happy with it.

Reading this kind of bullshit makes me feel like I'm living in an alternate universe. I had no real trouble with the first snowfall, because I didn't really go out much. It was the week after Christmas, I was on vacation! Where did I need to go? I went to the supermarket around the corner, and they had plenty of food. I went to the cafe a few blocks away and had a nice panini.

Sure there were huge mounds of snow everywhere, but I've got good boots. There was a dump truck stuck in the middle of my street for several hours, and it took three front-end loaders to pull it free, but people drove on the other streets. The street next to my kid's school was completely blocked with a big snowbank, but that made it a lot safer for the kids to cross. After a day or two, the sidewalks and crosswalks were shoveled, the trains and buses were running, and we could all get around the city.

Okay, so I was on vacation, but a guy I know in the neighborhood had no trouble either. He had one customer across the street, another two blocks away, and a third around the corner. That's the value of working locally. Some other neighbors worked from home via the internet, and others just got the day off. Nobody had to go into Manhattan, or anywhere else, on December 27, and not too many people really had to go in on the 28th either.

Now obviously some people needed to go to the hospital, couldn't get help and died. That's a real shame and a problem, and we shouldn't minimize it. People were stranded for hours on subway trains, really locked in without a chance to get off and walk somewhere, and that's not good at all. As far as I'm concerned, those were the only two serious problems that resulted from the government's handling of the snow situation, and what we needed to do was focus on how to avoid those problems in the future. But that wasn't the focus in the City Council or in the media.

I was mildly amused at first to see reporters like Greg Mocker wailing about the streets that weren't plowed, and it was kind of fun to listen to that amateur cameraman hyperventilating as he watched a City tractor demolish a City-owned SUV that some bureaucrat had unnecessarily left parked on a Brooklyn Heights side street. But all that got old really quick, and I started feeling pretty annoyed hearing City Council members like David "Kvetch" Greenfield working themselves into a lather over which side street got plowed when.

Still, I was only annoyed. But then I started to get angry, and now I'm seriously pissed. I'll tell you why in my next post, but some of you may already know, because you're feeling the same way.

Why 181st Street matters

I've long argued that the concept of "BRT" attempting to mimic subway lines is an inefficient and counterproductive strategy. When you've got a lot of people who think they're too good to ride the bus, it's flashy and can get people to try it, but when you've got lots of bus riders already, what you need is just an improvement in value. 181st Street in Upper Manhattan is an example of this.

On Friday, Streetsblog reported on a presentation by the Department of Transportation about alternatives for the 181st Street corridor in Washington Heights. "Alternative 2 would create a two-way, protected transit mall along this stretch, with raised medians serving as bus stops," writes Noah Kazis. Why does that matter? Check out the Bronx bus map (PDF):

There are five bus routes that start at the Port Authority's uptown bus terminal, cross Manhattan along 181st Street, go across the Washington Bridge to the Bronx, and fan out to cover most of the western Bronx. The Bx3 goes north past Bronx Community College, Lehman College and the VA Hospital to Kingsbridge. The Bx36 goes clear across the borough, past West Farms and Parkchester to Castle Hill. The Bx11 and Bx35 cover Morrisania and the Bx13 goes south to Yankee Stadium and the courts. They have high ridership, which keeps costs down; none of them require heavy subsidies:

Route	Average weekday ridership	Operating farebox recovery ratio
Bx3	17,840	105 %
Bx11	14,860	93 %
Bx13	10,700	94 %
Bx35	15,860	109 %
Bx36	32,710	95 %
Total	91,970

The Bx36 is a long route, but I would guess that more than half the ridership crosses the bridge to Manhattan, and even more for the other routes. Many of the people who live in this part of the Bronx are Dominican, and they use these buses to connect with friends, relatives and jobs in the Dominican neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Inwood. Others use these buses to connect with the A and 1 trains in Manhattan, which provide a more direct route to many destinations than the 4 and D trains.

Significantly, these buses also allow Bronx residents to reach the George Washington Bridge bus terminal, where they can take buses run by New Jersey Transit and Red and Tan Lines to various locations in New Jersey and Rockland County. There are also private van services that run from the GWB terminal across the bridge and west to Paterson and south along Bergenline Avenue to Hudson County. These buses form a vital east-west link between communities in an area where all the train lines run north-south.

If you actually go to check out these routes sometime, well, it can try the patience of Job. Double-parking is rampant along 181st Street, and all it takes is one double-parked car to hold up three buses. It's common for a bus to take as long to get from Broadway to Amsterdam as from Amsterdam to the Grand Concourse. These delays cause bunching, which has repercussions down all five lines.

Alternative 2 could actually work as a kind of "bus network acupuncture," relieving a pressure point and thereby improving flow on a large section of the network. Putting in bus lanes on three blocks of one street could improve the commutes of 50,000 people, and through speedier and more reliable trips, attract more people to the bus who might otherwise have taken car services. Compare that to the hundred-plus blocks of the First and Second Avenue Select Bus Service (M15 average weekday ridership: 53,510), and you get a huge bang for the buck.

And this is why it was so disheartening to me to read these words from Manhattan Transportation Commissioner Forgione: "We will not proceed with anything without community support."

I know what "community support" refers to, and it has precious little to do with actual community support. We're talking about a community board that's dominated by drivers in a neighborhood where 80% of households don't own a single car. These are people who are much more likely to double-park than ride the bus, even though the real community is much more likely to be riding the bus. We're talking about a lot of self-important "community leaders" who are convinced that their small circle of friends constitutes the community. These are the people who Commissioner Sadik-Khan stood up to, and got blasted for it. These are the people that John Liu, Bill Thompson and Jimmy Vacca repeatedly insist should have veto power over any transportation project. And it looks like in this case Forgione may defer to them.

Forgione is also talking about deferring to the "community" in Washington Heights, but what about the communities across the river in Tremont, Morrisania, Morris Heights, University Heights and High Bridge? Will their support matter?

I definitely believe that people should have some say over what transportation facilities are built in their districts. It would have been nice if Vacca and Liu had been around when people's homes were being bulldozed for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Members of every affected community should be given the opportunity to raise their concerns, and those concerns should be taken seriously. But I don't think they should have veto power.

Alternative 2 would not tear down any buildings, and it will not blight the neighborhood. It would not flood parallel streets with displaced traffic. It would make these three blocks of 181st Street more like the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, which would be an improvement.

Fortunately, Councilmember Rodgriguez seems to get this. His comments as reported by Noah were heartening. I hope he will talk to Councilmembers Cabrera, Foster and Arroyo and get their support on this. Transit advocates in that area should reach out to community leaders in the western Bronx and get them to the meetings where this project will be discussed. But the bottom line is that DOT cannot just listen to Washington Heights on this issue. They should conduct outreach along the five bus lines, and find out how much support there is there.

The next City Council transportation chair

The News reports (thanks, Streetsblog!) that the New York City Council will be voting on its leadership positions by the end of January. For the past eight years, the Transportation Committee has been chaired by John Liu of Flushing, who has now been elected as City Comptroller. This is a critical moment for advocates of transit and sustainable transportation, and it's important for us to make our priorities known.

Liu has had a mixed record on these issues. He has supported congestion pricing and the bikes in buildings bill, but in a pretty lukewarm way. More importantly, he has an annoying way of treating transit riders like we didn't exist. Many times when the subject of bridge tolls came up, he acted as though everyone drove everywhere.



I got the feeling that some of this was political calculation. Liu represented a red district, where only 38% of households were car-free in 2000 (PDF). Sometimes when the subject of bridge tolls came up, his reaction seemed mostly to be frustration that the Mayor and the Governor were pushing something that he felt was politically impossible for him to get behind. In fact, I would say that he adopted pro-transit, pro-livable streets positions about 38% of the time.

The News says that the top contender to chair the Transportation Committee is James Vacca of the Bronx. Vacca comes from the reddest district in the Bronx (PDF), with only 39% of households car-free. He represents the most sprawling, suburban part of the borough: Throgs Neck, City Island, Morris Park, Pelham Bay and Pelham Parkway. He sees transportation mostly through a car windshield. He voted for congestion pricing, but he was also a major sponsor of the idiotic, pandering five-minute grace period bill. He has protested the proposed elimination of the Bx14 bus, but his counter-proposal would do nothing to solve the problem long-term, and did not place the blame where it belonged: on the state legislature.

According to Streetsblog, there is an alternative to Vacca: Dan Garodnick of the Upper East Side has expressed interest in the chairmanship. He represents a yellow district: 70% of households are car-free (PDF). Garodnick is not perfect: he signed David Yassky's moronic letter that claimed it was "blatantly unfair" for people from Brooklyn or the Bronx to pay as much as people from New Jersey to get into Manhattan.

Garodnick has a lot to recommend him, though. He was one of only two Councilmembers who refused to vote for the parking grace period. He recently helped corral a number of his fellow Councilmembers into coming out in support of physically separated bus and bike lanes on First and Second Avenue, which is a big deal. He gets good marks from Glenn McAnanama of the organization Upper Green Side, which is a very good testimonial. Unlike Vacca, he has actually served on the Transportation Committee. He is probably the most progressive member of the Council on transportation issues, and would be the ideal candidate.

Streetsblog commenter "Niccolo Machiavelli" speculated that Quinn may want to give the committee chairmanship to someone from the Bronx, to secure their loyalty. If so, Vacca is really one of the worst possibilities. The Bronx councilmember who's most progressive on transportation is probably Joel Rivera, but he'll probably be re-elected Majority Leader, which is more senior than Transportation. Oliver Koppell voted for congestion pricing and sponsored the bikes in garages bill, and has been a member of the Committee, so he would probably be better than Vacca. Please let me know if you're aware of any indications to the contrary.

Larry Seabrook voted for congestion pricing, is a member of the Committee and has come out in favor of legislation to crack down on unlicensed drivers.

Maria del Carmen Arroyo and Annabel Palma voted for congestion pricing, but otherwise they seem to have no interest in transportation at all. Helen Foster famously skipped the congestion pricing vote. The useless Maria Baez has been replaced by unknown quantity Fernando Cabrera, who until 2008 was a registered Republican living in the suburb of Pelham (a fifteen-minute walk from the train station), and like most Bronx Latino politicians campaigned using a truck with loudspeakers.

The next Transportation Chair should be Dan Garodnick. If it has to be someone from the Bronx, and can't be Rivera, then it should be Koppell or Seabrook. The next choices would be Arroyo and Palma, in roughly descending order by car ownership in their districts. Vacca would actually be my fifth choice.

This decision will affect how transportation policy is framed in the city for the next four to eight years, possibly longer. It's too important to be left to power politics and back-room deals. I encourage you to contact your councilmember and Speaker Quinn. Tell them that the next Transportation Committee Chair should be Garodnick, Koppell or Seabrook.

Update: Frank Lombardi of the News is now reporting that "the powers that be are pushing" for Vacca to be Transportation Chair. Time to do some pushing back, if you want to see a committee chair who supports transit and livable streets.

Teachers Take Over Maria Baez's District

The Bronx district of Councilmember Maria Baez is pretty poor, with 72% of households earning less than $40,000 a year. Most of it is well-served by transit: the number 4 and letter D trains run through it, and it also has the University Heights Metro-North station and the BxM3 and 4 express buses. Not surprising, then, that it's in the green quintile, with 75.8% of all households being car-free and less than 30% of workers commuting in carrs.

What is surprising is that Councilmember Baez is sponsoring a bill to provide parking permits to all teachers employed by the Department of Education. A recent Gotham Gazette article notes that this comes at a time when advocates for fairness and sustainable transportation are succeeding in reducing the number of parking permits issued to government employees. If her bill passes, it's likely that the police, firemen and every other category of government employee will want their entitlements entrenched in law.

I'm sure there are plenty of teachers living in Baez's district, but most of them probably take the excellent public transit to work. On the other hand, I'm guessing that most of the teachers who work in Baez's district are convinced that the streets and subway platforms are crawling with thugs ready to pounce on any unsuspecting middle-class person who dares show their face outside of a school or a car. And it seems that Baez herself is ready to identify with these teachers - she told the Daily News that she drove to the Congestion Pricing hearing in July, even though it's a one-seat, 40-minute ride to City Hall on the 4 train.

Sadly, parking permits for teachers would be a very bad thing for the residents of Baez's district. The streets are already crowded with too many cars, because even though it has one of the lowest car-ownership rates in the country, available parking is also low. It has one of the highest asthma rates, due mostly to its proximity to two of the busiest highways in the country, but the teachers' cars don't help anything. City resources are wasted serving the driving minority while the walking majority puts up with crumbling sidewalks and rat-infested empty lots.

The worst part about Baez's bill is that it would enshrine in law the idea that being middle-class means that you drive everywhere, that it's not safe for teachers to walk the streets of the Bronx, and that some people are too good to take the subway. It would reinforce the separation between teachers and taught instead of breaking it down by having them share the sidewalks and subways.

Maria Baez should be ashamed of herself for sponsoring a bill that would benefit hardly any of her constituents, and penalize the vast majority of them. So should Alan Gerson for being a co-sponsor.

Who Will Save the Z?

Our friends at the Empire State Transportation Alliance have conducted another action protesting the planned MTA cuts: a mock funeral for the Z train. I think we can safely assume that similar actions are in store for the W, and probably for the truncated M and G lines and the bus lines that are also targeted.

I'm puzzled as to why the Alliance, Gene Russianoff in particular, agreed to share a lectern with Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who has publicly opposed the idea of tolling the East River bridges. Markowitz's suggested alternatives may have merit, but unless he can persuade someone to implement them, his opposition to bridge tolls is working against any solution to the budget cuts, and anything he says in support of the J train is just hot air.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer hasn't opposed the toll proposal, and last year supported congestion pricing, but he's still shown a disappointing lack of leadership on this issue, preferring to criticize the MTA for where they chose to place the cuts instead of taking a strong stand in favor of bridge tolls and thereby heading off the need for any cuts.

No sign of Queens Borough President Helen Marshall at the event. She was quick to condemn the Ravitch Commission proposals. Maybe she doesn't care about Z train riders.

Tuesday we saw one of Assembly Speaker Silver's famous maddening moments: after stalling and ultimately killing congestion pricing last summer, he blithely told NY1's Bobby Cuza that the city could transfer the bridges to the MTA with "no legislation required." Well, why didn't he say that in July? Sadly, there are probably lots of people out there who would just assume that these are completely unrelated issues. In any case, this statement from Silver is a big deal (as noted by Second Avenue Sagas), and it seems to have been completely forgotten since then.

So if Silver is right and "the city" can just go ahead and sell or lease the bridges to the MTA, is this something the Mayor can do, or does the City Council have to act? It'd be nice if someone (like Cuza) had asked a lawyer about it. Whether or not it requires Council approval, certainly a little pressure from various city council members would help to push it along.

Getting back to the Z train, it's nice that the two borough presidents showed up, but it'd be nice if some of the city council members whose districts the line goes through were there too, and it'd be nicer if the ESTA were willing to put them on the line for this. As far as I can tell, none of them were at the event. Some have decried the MTA cuts in general and particular bus lines, but not so much the Z train. None of them have taken a public position on the Ravitch Commission recommendations. Here, for your reading pleasure, are the City Council members in order by number of Z train stops in or near their districts.

Councilmember	Stops	Notes
Gerson	6
Dilan	5
White	4	Who?
Reyna	3
Mealy	2
Crowley	2
Comrie	2
Addabbo	2	Addabbo is now in State Senate; seat vacant
Yassky	1
Vann	1
Gennaro	1	May be elected to State Senate
Barron	1	This firebrand has been conspicuously silent on the whole issue.

Finally, third track, anyone?

Gioia Calls for Midtown Tunnel Bus

A tipster pointed me to an email from City Council Member Eric Gioia, who represents western Queens, including Long Island City. Gioia called a rally today to protest the planned closure of the #7 train for the next nine weeks between Queensboro Plaza and Times Square. Residents and businesses in southern Long Island City, which are normally just 10-15 minutes from Midtown, will have no direct subway service, instead being forced to take a shuttle bus to Queensboro Plaza and transfer to the N or Q trains. Gioia proposes several steps to mitigate the closure, similar to what the MTA did a year ago when they replaced switches in Woodside. But here's the most interesting part:

The MTA should have shuttle bus service from Grand Central
Station through the Midtown Tunnel to key #7 train stops in Queens.

It's a big deal to have a political leader talk about tunnel buses. Back in December 2007, there was talk of a Red Hook bus through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Last March, in her testimony to the City Council, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said that if congestion pricing passed, the MTA would run a new bus route "from Jackson Heights to Penn Station." She didn't give any further details, and congestion pricing was never passed, so there was no bus.

In May I discussed possible Bus Rapid Transit through the tunnel, feeding into the new 34th Street Transitway (PDF). I know that Gioia is suggesting that the tunnel bus go to Grand Central, and only while #7 service is suspended. But if we had buses running through the tunnel all the time, then suspending the #7 train wouldn't be such a big deal. We'd have an alternative that everyone would know about.

It's called redundancy, and it's practiced by smart businesses all over. And in other neighborhoods there is redundancy: in Sunnyside the #7 is complemented by the Q32 and Q60 buses, in Woodside by the Long Island Railroad, and in Jackson Heights by the Queens Boulevard subway. In Hunters Point there used to be fairly decent ferry service, but nowadays it's very infrequent and doesn't come at all in the wintertime.

Running buses through the tunnel is really a no-brainer. Especially with the 34th Street transitway to speed the buses across Manhattan, and on the weekend when congestion is light, you could really get people to Penn Station pretty quickly, not to mention the other subway stops along 34th Street.

I put together the following map (based on maps from Openstreetmap.org) to show possible bus routes to places that Google Maps indicates are ten minutes from Penn Station.



Clockwise from the top, they are: Broadway and 21st Street in Astoria, the 39th Avenue N/W station in Dutch Kills, 46th and Greenpoint in Sunnyside, and Greenpoint and Manhattan Avenues in Greenpoint. Google Maps says that it could take up to 30 minutes with traffic, but again this is on the weekend and along the transitway. Obviously, if the buses make several stops it will slow things down, but I'd venture to say that you could still get from one end to the other in half an hour.

You could have other routes that don't go as far, like a bus up Fifth Street or Center Boulevard in Hunters Point to serve all the new development, and another up Vernon Boulevard to serve the commercial strip - or even a loop serving both.

If you wanted to go farther afield, here are destinations that Google Maps says will take fifteen minutes, or up to 40 minutes with traffic:



They are Astoria Park, Junction Boulevard in Elmhurst, 69th and Metropolitan in Middle Village, Bushwick Terminal, and Bedford and Metropolitan in Williamsburg.

These bus routes would provide robust redundancy during subway outages, add more travel options, and potentially serve areas that don't have very good transit right now. Following Gioia's request, the MTA should at least implement a Hunters Point loop that would connect Vernon and Center boulevards to 34th Street, and another one connecting Greenpoint with Penn Station.

Long term, the MTA should look into implementing some of these as new routes on a daily basis. They may not have the money, in which case I say: look to the Ravitch plan!