Summer Streets: What else you got?

In August of 2011 I wrote a series of posts about Summer Streets. The first one focused on how the program just left me wanting more, and made requests that were mostly about expanding it. The second focused more on "small things" that affect my enjoyment of the program.

Thirteen years later, there's a lot of good news! A lot of other people made the same requests, and the City government has actually addressed a lot of them. There are a few remaining, and I have one more to add. First, the scorecard:

From my August 10 post:

1. Extend the reach. ✔ 2022
2. Widen bottlenecks ❌
3. Extend the hours ✔ 2024
4. Extend the days 🤷🏼‍♀️ 2023
5. Cater to people-watchers ✔ 2020

From my August 23 post:

1. Framing ("open") ❌
2. Practice what you preach ✔
3. Be flexible with space ✔
4. The Park Avenue Tunnel ✔ 2024
5. Brooklyn Bridge conflicts ✔ 2021

A lot of these requests have been fulfilled! In 2020, the City drastically expanded sidewalk and roadway dining. They've cut it back this year, but there are still a lot more places to sit and watch people. In recent years, volunteers seem to be a bit less strict about where in the roadway people are cycling, as long as they're not crowding walkers and runners. I've noticed that recently there seem to be less of the golf carts and full-size cars that invaded the space in past years.

In 2021 the City opened a two-way year-round bike lane on the Brooklyn that allows cyclists to continue over the Brooklyn Bridge without conflicts with crowds of tourists on foot. In 2022 they extended Summer Streets to 109th Street, and in 2023 to 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. This year they extended the end time from 1pm to 3pm, and opened the Park Avenue Tunnel to northbound cyclists!

I didn't ask for this at the time, but Citibike has worked really well with Summer Streets. Last year there were a couple of malfunctioning docks that led to shortages, but overall there have been plenty of bikes and plenty of docks.

And there's still more we could do! Here are three things I still want from Summer Streets, plus two new ones:

1. Really extend the days. It's nice that the City has added two days where there are car-free streets outside Manhattan, but it's hard enough to do one of them in a day. Each borough should have its Summer Streets on its own day.
2. Don't use avenues with bike lanes. I get why they put Summer Streets on the Grand Concourse and Eastern Parkway, but it's kind of a cheat to put them on boulevards that already have bike lanes. One of the things that makes Summer Streets in Manhattan so special is that Park Avenue is such a miserable, dangerous experience any other day of the year. How about Westchester Avenue in the Bronx, Yellowstone Boulevard in Queens, Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn and Victory Boulevard in Staten Island?
3. Widen the bottlenecks. Summer Streets is always crowded between Petrosino Square and Union Square. It should be split between Spring and Fourteenth Streets, with either southbound people on Broadway or northbound people on the Bowery and Third Avenue.
4. Framing. Stop telling me you're going to "open" the streets when it means you're going to allow people to speed through with multi-ton vehicles and make it unsafe for me to be there. Just say, "Cars will be allowed from 3pm on."
5. Train the cops. Cyclists are allowed on every part of the Manhattan route 365 days a year, except the Park Avenue Tunnel and the Grand Central Viaduct. But when the staff is getting ready to allow cars back on the route, the NYPD officers routinely tell cyclists to get off the roads, and even, and I quote, "on the sidewalk." Last week I was walking on Central Park North and had to dodge cyclists directed there by the cops. All they have to say is "We're letting cars back in, be careful!"

The symbolism of congestion pricing

Since Governor Hochul announced her "indefinite pause" on congestion pricing on June 7, I've been one of several people who pointed out that it would have improved almost everyone's lives. The people who currently walk, bike or ride transit would have a lot less cars to deal with, and a lot more funding for the transportation modes they use. The people who would pay the toll would spend a lot less time stuck in traffic than they do now. The people who wouldn't pay the toll would have a better commute by transit than their crappy current driving commute. And people who don't commute would benefit from cleaner air, less noise, less carnage and less wasted space.

So it's kind of puzzling why there's a group of people who really hate the idea of congestion pricing. And they're not all just upset about losing their discounted trip at taxpayer expense. Some of them are intensely, viscerally offended by the very idea, and desperate to stop it at almost any cost.

The people who are intensely offended are completely immune to reason on this. You and I may know that their business would save money by not having its workers stuck in traffic. We may know that the subway is way less violent than the highways. We may know that everyone's long term prosperity will be much greater if we're not wasting money, space and fossil fuels transporting three-ton easy chairs around with every individual. But they won't hear it.

They are intensely offended by the idea that they should pay extra every time they want to bring a large, heavy piece of machinery with them into Manhattan, just as they are offended by the idea that they should pay to leave that vehicle on the street overnight, that they should not be allowed to leave the vehicle in the middle of the street blocking a bus, or on the sidewalk, that sometimes a bus full of people or a person on a bicycle might be moving faster than them.

Why are they so offended? Because they were taught for years that cars are a mechanism for prosperity. Not only that by buying a car they raised themselves up in the social hierarchy, but that our government, and in fact all of our society, is aimed at helping them to prosper through their cars.

For these drivers, the government raises them up through free parking, or at least cheap parking. Powerful government figures give them free parking on holidays, free parking on residential streets, in the suburbs, at their country houses. These patrons do what they can to keep the tolls cheap, gas prices cheap, and parking cheap when it isn't free. They provide parking placards to hardworking civil servants and to people who do favors for them. And they look the other way when drivers double park, park on the sidewalk, go faster than the speed limit, and maybe even kill somebody once in a while. Because these drivers were just trying to take care of themselves and their families.

This free parking, cheap parking, cheap gas, cheap tolls, free sidewalk parking, and the occasional free killing are all aimed at lifting people up. Not lifting everyone up, but just the people who deserve it. And they know who deserves it because those people have bought into the system by buying a car and busting their asses to make the car payments, insurance payments, repair bills, gas, tolls, tickets.

Of course that's all bullshit. Of all the possible ways you could lift people up and generate prosperity, subsidizing driving is one of the most dangerous and destructive, and in a lot of ways it's just fucking mean. The fact that someone owns a car doesn't make them any more deserving of anything. The way cars enable people to bully other people is hugely problematic. See the entire rest of this blog for details.

And this is why a certain group of people is so deeply offended by congestion pricing. It calls them on this bullshit. Like bus lanes, bike lanes, open streets and pedestrian plazas, congestion pricing says that there is nothing about owning and using a car that makes a person any more deserving; in fact, they're causing damage, destruction and death everywhere they pilot the thing. And so many of them have built their lives around owning a car as their ticket to prosperity.

Congestion pricing offends drivers the same way that tearing down Confederate statues offends my cousins in Texas. The same way that providing decent housing and food for people who just got here from South America offends some people. Congestion pricing is an official recognition by the government of the State of New York that driving is an antisocial activity. And that's why it would be such a victory for humanity, decency and compassion if it happens, and such a setback if it doesn't.

Can we make the Central Park "drives" two way again now?

They say Central Park is now car-free. The other day I passed five construction trucks, three random cars and four golf carts, one of which was completely empty, with a guy in shirtsleeves standing next to it looking at his phone. Of course it's all relative, and this is a definite improvement over the line of cars pushing their way through the East Drive just a couple months ago.

Photo: The Drive. Percy Loomis Sperr, May 25, 1928.

I also passed several people going the other way - riding bikes, running, walking, even on scooters. They didn't really bother me, because they're narrow and lightweight, and traveling at relatively low speeds. If anything concerned me at all, it was that they sometimes passed me on the right - their left. I could see this potentially causing problems in really crowded situations.

That got me thinking about something I've written about before: a hundred years ago New York's streets were almost all two-way, even narrow ones. One-way traffic was at first almost entirely a response to the explosion of curbside parking. Later it was extended to avenues without parking, and curbside parking was banned in some areas, in response to a massive surge in car commuting and truck freight.

I looked up some old photos of Central Park, and the drives are two-way as late as 1928. According to the New York Times, the drives were made one way on November 29, 1929. There were two stories: a front page story on November 23 quoting Police Commissioner Grover Whalen, and a November 27 story quoting Deputy Police Commissioner Philip D. Hoyt.

Photo: The West Drive, near 90th Street. Ewing Galloway, around 1892.

Interestingly, the earlier story quoting Whalen doesn't mention safety at all, focusing entirely on the need to "relieve congestion" - without providing any specifics on how bad the congestion was. This must have gotten a reaction from the public, because in the November 27 story Hoyt made it clear there was "No Intention to Make Express Motor Highways of the Drives." Well, that's reassuring!

There's the usual assertion that "those who visit Central Park on foot will find it safer to cross the drives than in the past with two-way traffic," with no explanation of how this would improve safety. Hoyt then supplies the Times reporter with a series of truly horrific stats about car crashes in the park. There were eight people killed in the park during just the first ten months of 1929, and 249 people injured!

It's abundantly clear that the primary source of danger on the Central Park loop roads, in 1929 as in 2017, was people driving cars. It's not that people never die in the Park without a car present, but the danger is not from two-way traffic flow. In fact, the one-way rules probably encourage cyclists to speed, as they did with drivers.

People already use the drives safely in both directions on foot, bike and skate. Let's make it legal!

Photo: Columbus Circle. Ewing Galloway, 1928.

Oh yeah, and now that the cars are truly gone, let's reopen Columbus Circle to bicycles!

Do we need the Port Authority Bus Terminal?

In 2015 I talked about the proposal to build a new bus terminal in downtown Flushing, and came up with the following list of six features. The current Port Authority terminal on 41st Street provides some of these some of the time:

1. One-stop shopping for buses.
2. Easy transfer between buses, and from buses to trains.
3. Short-term bus layovers.
4. Long-term bus layovers.
5. Avoiding street congestion. There are ramps for the upper level, and an outbound tunnel under Ninth Avenue. This leaves many buses stuck in traffic, particularly those heading north and east.
6. Ticketing, shelter, bathrooms, food and shopping for people waiting for buses.

Any transit system is easier and more attractive with one-stop shopping, short-term bus layovers and easy transfers. But long-term bus layovers, avoiding congestion and passenger facilities are more important for long distance trips than short ones.

If I’m taking the bus to Binghamton, I might have to wait an hour or more, so it’s really important for me to have shelter, bathrooms, tickets and food. (It would be nice to have seating and a place to store my bag, but that’s a whole other post.)

Cheaper services with higher frequency, like the New Jersey Transit 166 bus, don’t need a terminal, any more than the M5 does. Of course we all need safe places to pee and grab a snack, but people waiting fifteen minutes for a half hour New Jersey Transit bus ride don’t have any more need than people waiting fifteen minutes for a half hour New York City Transit bus ride.

All movement is quicker if you don’t have a lot of people or vehicles in your way. But for someone who’s getting off right on the other end of the Lincoln Tunnel, going up three flights of stairs cuts out most of that time savings. Trips with more than a mile between stops benefit more from grade separation, because they have the time for a bus to get up to speed.

As I pointed out in my post on the proposed Flushing bus terminal, there are actually advantages to having buses pick up and drop off on the street. It allows for through-running, so that passengers whose destination is beyond the terminus can just stay on the bus, which then heads out to a layover point in a less congested area. Street pickups can also make transfers more efficient and robust by spreading them out across multiple stops.

Street-level transfers are better for the local economy. Bathrooms and shelter are public goods that need to be provided by the government, but food and shopping? That’s what downtown streets are for, in a very real sense. In Flushing the streets do an excellent job of providing snacks, drinks and banking for bus and train passengers. A government-owned building filled with corporate concessions is necessarily less dynamic and less friendly to small businesses.

The Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown provides all these services for long-distance bus lines like Greyhound, Peter Pan and Adirondack Trailways, but it claims to have no room for other long-distance carriers like Megabus, Fung Wah, Vamoose and Hampton Jitney. Some of these companies claim they save passengers money by not paying gate fees to the Port Authority, which is another way of saying that the City doesn’t charge enough for what is essentially a rental of valuable commercial real estate.

Other bus companies say that they offer more convenient pickups in Chinatown and the Upper East Side. But that just begs the question: if bus terminals are so great, why we don’t have them for every direction that buses go? Someone decided it was better to have apartment buildings at the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel, and office buildings near the Holland Tunnel. Were they wrong?

The other claim, that there is no room in the Port Authority terminal for Bolt and LimoLiner, is also questionable. Why do Red and Tan, Academy and Suburban load all their buses in the terminal, when most of them leave frequently for short runs? Why is New Jersey Transit, a government-owned provider of short-haul services, the biggest carrier in the terminal?

Imagine if New Jersey Transit shifted just half of their bus pickups to the street. First of all, I’ve been told that there are more jobs in East Midtown than near the Port Authority. Some of the buses could pick people up and drop them off closer to their jobs. Second, the buses could provide transfers to other trains beside the Seventh and Eighth Avenue, Broadway and 41st Street lines. That would all take a load off the E, 7 and Shuttle trains.

Moving some local NJ Transit buses to the street would free up space in the terminal. I’ve heard that the tight schedules are a source of delays, so just having more wiggle room would improve reliability on the remaining routes. This would still leave room to bring in some long distance services off the street. If it turns out we still need room for long distance services, we can move more NJ Transit buses to the street, as well as some of the shorter, more frequent runs by private carriers.

Some people might complain that the buses would just get stuck in Midtown traffic. This is why it is essential to give them, and the jitney vans, full access to the dedicated bus lanes on 34th, 42nd and 57th Streets, and to make those lanes real busways instead of the half-assed arrangement we’ve had since the DOT botched the process on 34th Street. It would also help to make them true through-running routes, going through the Midtown Tunnel or over the Queensboro Bridge.

You may have heard that the Port Authority board has declared its bus terminal to be at the end of its life, and said that it wants to use eminent domain to acquire a new property somewhere west of the current terminal, build a new terminal there at a cost of billions of dollars, and sell the current terminal to developers. The main thing wrong with this is that it would be horrible for subway transfers.

It’s bad enough to have a terminal where only the east end touches Eighth Avenue, meaning that some passengers have to walk more than two avenue blocks to get to their trains. The Port Authority Board wants to add at least another full avenue block. From what I’ve heard, most of these people have chauffeurs and all of them have free parking, and they’re baby boomers who equate driving with success, so none of them ever make this transfer.

Stephen Smith has argued that any amount in the billions should be spent building enough train tunnels under the Hudson to accommodate all the bus passengers, so that bus transfers can be made in New Jersey, and the terminal can be torn down and not replaced.

I agree with Stephen’s vision as the ultimate goal, but in the medium term there will be short trips that are best made by bus through the Lincoln Tunnel, and those trips should have access to our streets for pickup and dropoff. There will also be long distance bus trips that will be more convenient if they connect to the subway than to a commuter train, and we should have a terminal for them in Manhattan.

The good news is that a terminal serving a few long-distance routes can be much smaller than the current one. It could fit on the site of the South Wing of the current terminal, and probably doesn’t need as many levels - or the parking garage. If that wing really needs to be rebuilt, some of the buses could be relocated temporarily to the lower level of the North Wing - or the Farley Post Office.

The bottom line is that we don’t need a huge bus terminal if we have trains. If we want to spend billions improving our transit system, rail is a much more efficient, sustainable and wise place to spend it.

The Via experience

Here in New York when people talk about "microtransit," they usually mean Uberpool or Lyftline, and those are the services I've been focusing on. Some have mentioned a third service, Via, that works a bit differently. Via is all shared; there is no service where it's just you and the driver, like a traditional taxi. The prices are fixed: currently five dollars per trip on weekdays if you buy credit ahead of time, and up to just under ten dollars for a pay-per-ride weeknight.

Photo: Via publicity photo

I've tried Via several times over the past year. The only real complaint I have is that they don't go to Queens: the service is restricted to Manhattan. I have hope, though, because when I started it was only available from Fourteenth to Fifty-Ninth Streets, and it's now available from the Battery to 110th Street. The next expansion will probably be Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope, but I don't think they'll ignore western Queens for long.

The first couple of times I took Via I had to wait a while, and it was just me and the driver, but the service seems to have caught on quickly. Every time since then, there has been at least one other passenger and the wait time has been minimal. If I've had to wait more than five minutes it was because my "Via-cle" (har) was stuck in traffic less than two blocks away.

Via is much more like a bus than a taxi. Twice I've gotten sedans, but the Via-cles are usually SUVs. I've had at least one trip with three other people, meaning I had to sit in the third row of one of those Suburbans or Navigators or Explorers. Since those aren't really made for people getting in and out frequently, I'm wondering how soon Via is going to start running vans big enough to stand up in.

A number of people have objected to Uber and Lyft because of the “gig economy” arrangements they have with their drivers. Of course, they’re not much worse than the taxi medallion owners in that regard. But on one recent Via trip the driver was chatting with us, and he said that Via drivers are all paid by the hour, possibly even full time. If that is correct, it sounds like a much better deal for them than just about any other taxi arrangement.

As I’ve said before, Uber and Lyft are a huge improvement over the way we did taxis up to a few years ago, but in their current incarnations they won’t do much to help the transit capacity crunch we’re feeling in cities like New York. The Via model is much more promising, and the more Uber and Lyft act on those lines, like with Uberhop, the more helpful they will be in relieving our capacity constraints.

There was another fascinating aspect of my experience with Via, and to some degree with Lyftline and Uberpool, that deserves its own post. I'll write about it soon!

Next stop: 34th Street-Hudson River Greenway

I rode the 7 train to the new 34th Street stop for the first time today. Too late? Well, I figured you all had the opening covered. I want to talk about the new connections that this station makes possible. The Times has mentioned that it's right across the street from the High Line, but I'm one of the few who have pointed out that the massive Megabus stop complex is right there too, and BoltBus is a block away. But also across the street is a Citibike dock, and a block away is the Hudson River Greenway.

This makes 34th Street-Hudson Yards the closest subway station to the river in Midtown. Only a handful of other stations come that close: Bowling Green and World Trade Center downtown, 79th and 96th on the Upper West Side, 145th in Harlem, 157th in Washington Heights, and Dyckman Street in Inwood. None of the ones above 79th currently have Citibike docks.

Thanks to the new station, a Citibike transfer to the Hudson River Greenway is now available. I've done similar connections before, but mostly the other way: riding a Citibike up the Eighth Avenue bike lane to 40th Street. Even then, that one long block on unprotected Midtown streets ends the bike ride on a sour note.

I once tried going the other way, riding a Citibike from Times Square across 41st Street to Ninth Avenue, but those two blocks were worse than one, and the abuse of the bike lane at the back of the Farley Post Office was depressing. I've ridden all the way across 42nd from Times Square to the Hudson River Greenway, once in each direction, and neither is an experience I want to repeat.

So today I took the 7 to 34th Street, rode the slow-ass funicular to the surface, hopped on a Citibike and only had to deal with one, relatively low-traffic, block of 34th Street. Then I was flying south on the Greenway, mostly protected from cars for a nice long way.

I really had only one worry: when I pulled up the Spotcycle app, it only showed me one free bike at the station. There was a second bike, but it was unavailable. I'm glad nobody took that bike before I got to it. I hope Citibike adds more docks or schedules it for more rebalancing, because it looks pretty popular.

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 cargo cult of railyard decks

I recently wrote about a proposal to build a deck over the Sunnyside Yards. This got me thinking about these projects in general. I'm afraid that railyard decks have become part of what Ryan McGreal called "cargo cult urbanism," along with convention centers, casinos, "bus rapid transit" and a "High Line": things that have high-profile associations with rapid increases in prosperity, things that people latch onto when they're desperate for improvement but unable to think clearly about what will actually improve things, or unwilling to admit that they don't know.

There is always a high-profile example that does plausibly bring prosperity: the original High Line, the Transmilenio, Foxwoods and McCormick Place may well have done so. But in practice when people try to replicate its success, the promised prosperity often does not materialize. In hindsight, it turns out that the actual generator of prosperity was something else, like upzoning, or that there are diminishing returns as the desire for gambling or conventions or office space is satisfied.

Construction beginning on the site of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 1929. Photo from Waldorf Archive.

Did you bring enough housing for everybody?

When I was a kid, one of the things the teachers told us was that if you bring snacks or candy, you have to bring enough for everyone. If you don't, it winds up going mostly to your friends and excluding a lot of kids, which isn't fair.

I realized recently that this also applies to people who want to keep rents down through rent controls, not increasing the supply, like Tom Angotti:

At bottom, developers typically argue, the housing problem is all about supply and demand. Let us increase the supply, they say, and there will be more housing to go around for all. This, not rent regulation, will keep rents from rising. That’s good old trickle-down economics, which never works. Indeed, we’ve just come through a couple of decades in which the total housing supply has grown dramatically, and so have rents, but there was also a huge loss of low-rent housing. Over the last 20 years almost 250,000 units of rental housing were deregulated.

I want to give Angotti props for two things: unlike many rent control advocates, Angotti actually listens to people who advocate increasing the supply, and he takes the time to write an articulate response. So even though I'm criticizing his arguments, the same criticism is even more true of other people's arguments.

First of all, one sorta-valid question that Angotti raises: if total housing supply has increased (I don’t have the figures, but I’ll assume that it’s true), and rents have also increased, doesn’t that falsify the supply-side argument?

Well, no, because Angotti’s representation of "what developers typically argue" is inaccurate. I honestly don’t know what developers typically argue, because I’m not one and I don’t spend much time listening to them. But if the problem is all about supply and demand, then Angotti left out the demand side. A fairer statement of the argument would be "Let us increase the supply to match the demand, and there will be enough housing to go around for all."

If we phrase the proposal this way, we have to look at demand, and all signs point to a huge increase in the demand for New York’s walkable urban spaces and its well-paying jobs. But Angotti does not want to look at demand. Instead, he shrugs it off as a “speculative real estate fever.” He acknowledges that “the plan claims the city’s population is bound to increase in the next decade,” but argues, bizarrely, that the projected increase is not based on evidence of real demand but of demand induced by “the development of smaller housing units.” That is all he says about the demand side.

To people who currently rent in the city, Angotti’s blustering about "gentrification" and displacement may be comforting, but for me it rings hollow. I’m a fourth-generation New Yorker, but after college (two decades ago, which is as far back as Angotti goes in his piece), I couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood I knew best, the Upper West Side. Even now, with a solidly middle-class family income, four of the neighborhoods that my family has called home are now out of my range.

Things might have been different if my parents had not done the back-to-the-land thing in the seventies. They might have been different if, when I spent a few years to go to school in another state, I had played the illegal sublet game instead of giving up my rent-stabilized apartment. They might have been different if one of my family members had gotten a bigger apartment for me to illegally inherit when he died. But as it is, my family has given up several rent-regulated apartments, and I am displaced, one of the victims that Angotti and his fellow rent-regulation advocates cry for, and the Upper West Side community is poorer because the studio I inherited there was too small for my family.

Except that I’m not one of the victims that Angotti cries for. My family didn’t live in any of these places for "decades and generations," but instead migrated around the metropolitan area, chasing dreams of suburban comfort, rustic peace and creative success across the generations. Because we left our rent-regulated apartments semi-voluntarily, I don’t count as one of Angotti's displaced. I have no right of return.

You know who else doesn’t matter in the world of the rent-regulation advocates? Immigrants from other countries, looking for cheap places to settle in the U.S. The talented and ambitious from other parts of the country, looking to make it in New York. The queer and the weird and the non-conforming, chased out of their tight-knit communities in small towns and suburbs. Anyone who wants to live without a car and not be part of a small, oppressed minority.

There is no housing for us, because the rent-regulation advocates didn’t bring enough for everybody. They only brought enough for their friends, those fortunate enough to be currently benefiting from rent regulation and subsidized housing. If I were their kindergarten teacher I would have a quiet talk with their parents after school.

Honestly, I’m fine: I have a nice co-op in Queens. But it’s the thought that counts, and the thought that we don’t count is pretty damn offensive. It leaves this old lefty fuming at the cozy club mentality that Angotti tries to dress up as justice.

The return of the mixed-traffic streetcar

I wrote before that mixed-traffic streetcars no longer make sense in this country, because whenever a corridor has enough walkable destinations to support the service, it attracts too many private cars. Those cars slow down the streetcar so much that it no longer provides enough value to draw passengers. There is a way to make them work, however: drive the cars away.

Trolleys in Times Square, 1920s. AP via NPR.

Drivers are currently drawn to Manhattan under today's heavy subsidy levels, but if the subsidies are decreased it will attract less drivers. Cordon pricing is the most obvious way to do this, but it could also be accomplished with high enough prices on parking or fuel.

Imagine Manhattan one day in the Future. As it did a century ago, a streetcar again connects Greenwich Village with Soho, Chinatown, Tribeca and the Financial District along Wooster Street and University Place. It runs smoothly and quickly, even at the height of rush hour or the hottest club time on Saturday night. The reason is that, thanks a combination of bridge tolls, parking pricing and ten dollar a gallon gas, nobody wants to be driving. There are cars on the streets, but never enough to slow down the trolley.

That's the kind of environment where a mixed-traffic streetcar can work. Without something to keep private cars out of the way, streetcars are just buses with a smoother ride.

Our overloaded subways

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, there are times when building new transit is not warranted. In particular, it is a waste of resources to build new radial capacity on the outskirts if it connects to a trunk line that can't absorb that capacity. I looked at the train crossings into Manhattan to see which could add trains in the peak. That information can suggest where to add branch lines. But what about extending existing lines or encouraging infill development?

The NYMTC's Hub Bound Travel Study has some useful data, but first it's important to give some context. They have an estimate for space per passenger, but it's only broken down by sector, not by line. They do have counts of train cars and passengers by line, so we can get passengers per car. The problem with that is that the cars are different sizes, so there is a lot more free space in an R train car with 341 people than a car with 308 people on the #4 train.

I don't know exactly which equipment was used on which lines in 2012, so I used the most recent train models I knew of. I couldn't find floor area figures, so I used the listed capacities. Please feel free to consult the spreadsheet and suggest revisions. (Edit, April 27: this chart is in fact inaccurate. Please see the comments below for threestationsquare's helpful observations.)

Here is an updated chart based on Table 20:

There are some additional questions that come to mind looking at the chart. If the demand for a line is low, is that always because it doesn't serve enough homes on the outskirts? Maybe, like the J train, it doesn't serve enough jobs. Maybe, like the R train, it's much slower than the alternative. Would extending these lines really get people out of their cars?

There is another question: yeah, an A train car with 713 people on it is really uncomfortable, but isn't a B train car with 429 people pretty uncomfortable too? This is why we need to continue to think about how we can offer comfortable alternatives to wasteful, dangerous individual car trips.

Getting into Manhattan

I've got a whole bunch of ideas for subway and bus expansions in the boroughs, commuter rail and bus expansions in the suburbs, and even intercity rail and bus connections. They all wash up against one big problem: the capacity of crossings into and out of Manhattan is almost maxed out at peak commuting times, the few big expansions in the works are proceeding slowly, and there doesn't seem to be political will to do much more.

Passenger capacity estimates on the East River Bridges. US DOT, updated by threestationsquare.

Of the subways that cross the East River and the PATH trains that cross the Hudson, almost all the bridges and tunnels are packed with trains at rush hour, and those trains packed with passengers. The one exception is the Williamsburg Bridge, which is constrained by technical challenges, by the depopulation of South Side Williamsburg, Bushwick and East New York, by zoning restrictions on building, and by the fact that the J and Z trains only go to lower Manhattan. Since the MTA rerouted the M train to Midtown, ridership has gone up, and so have rents in Ridgewood, but that is the only line that is not at full capacity.

The only new subway crossing that has been given serious consideration recently, the Subway to Secaucus, has been stuck on a shelf somewhere.

MTA Capital Construction has installed an improved signalling system (CBTC) on the L line, which has allowed them to run more trains through the Fourteenth Street Tunnel. This capacity has been rapidly filled by an increase in ridership. They are rolling out CBTC to other lines, as the Port Authority is doing with the PATH trains, but funding limitations have stretched the rollout over years. As with the L train, the increased capacity is not expected to be enough to handle an additional branch on any line, only to allow neighborhoods near the existing branches to add population and to give some breathing room to passengers.

With commuter rail, the constraints are the platforms at Penn Station and the Park Avenue Tunnel. Alon Levy pointed out years ago that the constraints at Penn Station are not technical, but due to the three government-run commuter rail agencies' insistence on terminating all trains there, and our politicians' inability to force them to implement through-running arrangements.

For years the MTA has been pouring billions of dollars into East Side Access, but that will not be finished until 2023 at the earliest. The ARC Tunnel from New Jersey and its successor, the Gateway Tunnel, are being blocked by Governor Christie, who has used ARC funding to pay for road expansions.

Bus capacity into Manhattan is similarly constrained. Buses crossing from New Jersey through the Lincoln Tunnel can terminate at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but that is also full. Proposals to build garages with public funds have faltered, and no private company seems interested in building a garage or terminal. The Port Authority is renovating the George Washington Bridge terminal, but that is too far north, and connects to a downtown A train that is also very crowded.

Any buses that can't fit into the Port Authority use city streets to pick up and drop off, as do buses from the other crossings. A backlash from NIMBYs, mostly drivers and business owners but aided by misguided pedestrian advocates, has put a lid on any expansion of curbside bus access.

As with commuter trains, there is a potential for through-running with buses along 34th or 42nd streets or Church Street that could relieve some of these constraints, but the bus operators have shown little interest, and political leaders have been too busy pandering to the backlash.

One reason bus operators may be uninterested in through-running or building terminals or garages is that there are also capacity constraints for buses on the bridges and tunnels. Anyone who's tried to take the Q32 into Manhattan in the morning knows what happens to bus travel times when a bridge is free for any vehicle. Passengers on the inbound QM5 express bus know that things run a little smoother when there is a toll and a bus lane, and people who have ridden the Red and Tan number 20 know that congestion pricing makes it even better. But even those passengers say that the bus lanes are too short, and those crossings with lanes and tolls are at capacity as well.

So that's the dismal state of getting commuters to Manhattan. What should we do about it? I'll talk about that in future posts.

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?

Stuck on the subway

Today the Times published a good article by Kimberly Matus telling the story of how she was groped on a crowded subway train. In that particular case there were undercover police officers who noticed her facial expression and arrested her attacker, but the experience was upsetting nonetheless.

Photo: Tasayu Tasnaphun / Flickr.

What I found striking is how limited Matus's choices were in the whole situation. As she wrote, "I tried to evade him but couldn’t move an inch in any direction." What a horrible feeling. Even when I was a young man I never had an experience like that, but what little hassle I've had is bad enough. I've been yelled at, pushed, and even sent flying into another passenger by some prejudiced jerk. And that's not counting the normal crush conditions, sermons and bad music.

After this incident, Matus recognized that her only choice was simply not to participate. She says she told her husband that "I wasn't planning on taking the subway anymore, at least during peak hours." I've done the same thing. I choose hours that give me a more comfortable commute. I also live a bit further out and take jobs even further in Queens. Of course I'm fortunate that we have these options. There are many New Yorkers, especially in this economy, who consider themselves lucky to have a job at all, and if that job means they squeeze onto a number 2 train at 8:15, that's what they do. And whatever happens, they put up with it.

Matus also has a couple of alternatives. She could ride a bike, which means dealing with a lot of the same jerks, but instead of squeezing on the train in sweat pants they're in control of deadly machines (barely in control). She could take the M57 bus to the Q60, but that would take a long time, and many of those buses get packed too. Since she works for her family's taxi business, maybe they just send a taxi to pick her up. (But I do appreciate the irony of even a taxi family seeing the value in traveling by subway.) That would cost her family money, just as it costs me money to take lower paying positions to avoid the Manhattan rush hour.

What I would like, and I bet Matus would like it too, is another option. An option where we get a seat, but we don't have to pay for a whole taxi for ourselves. I'm willing to pay more for a slower ride, if I knew I would be a little more comfortable.

What I'm talking about is the Death Valley of Commute Options. You're sick of squeezing into the subway, and you might be willing to pay more for a more comfortable ride. But you can't afford to buy and keep a car (assuming you even want to put people's lives at risk and heat up the planet). So you're stuck on the IRT with the sexual predators.

I'll talk about some solutions in a future post.

"Why would they take the glass encasing off of a bus stop?"

I've written before about the Republican mayoral candidates' responses to a debate question about bus frequency, and their notions of accountability for transit. The Democratic candidates got their own bus question, too, which you can see at 1:50 on the video:

I want to know why the MTA, who's always crying for money, is putting all these steel benches by the bus stops, and taking out the glass encasing from the bus stop. If they have no money and they're constantly doing fare hikes, why would they take the glass encasing off of a bus stop where people can get wet, and invest money in new benches? It seems just a misuse of the money, and I want to know what mayor is going to take care of that.

Both the Republican and Democratic candidates seemed really amused by questions about transit. I'm not sure what they thought was so funny. It's possible that they might have been equally amused by a question about parking, but I wonder if there isn't something patronizing there. Maybe it's because the questions are so narrowly focused on parochial issues - and that in turn is probably because our elites have given up on meaningful subway expansion.

The candidates each followed a basic pattern: praise (perhaps patronizingly) the questioner, maybe make a joke, and then pivot to a topic that they had prepared for: control of the transit system. Ben Kabak has addressed this issue in response to proposals by Joe Lhota and Chris Quinn, but you know what's really funny? This is one part of transit that is in fact controlled by the City government.

Bus companies in the city, including the MTA and intercity buses under the State's crazy new rules, get to post a destination sign and a schedule if they want, and that's about it. The bus stops themselves are controlled by the City Department of Transportation, directly under the Mayor.

The bus shelters are "street furniture," covered under a contract with Cemusa along with newsstands, bike shelters and those automatic toilets that are always a few years in the future. Cemusa pays for all the "furniture" and gets to keep the money from selling ads on it. (Incidentally, this Cemusa contract is why the City couldn't use ad revenue to fund bike share the way Paris did.)

The benches are part of the DOT's CityBench program, separate from the Cemusa contract, to install a thousand benches around the city. It was proposed in Planyc 2.0, as a service to pedestrians and to give people more chances to socialize.

Chris Quinn promised to "go and find out why the MTA has seemingly moved away from the concept of keeping people dry." I can't find her report anywhere, but maybe she's still researching it. My guess is that the bus shelter was taken out because it didn't fit the "siting requirements," but there was still room for a bench. The removal of the shelter and the installation of the bench may have been coordinated, or they may not; the DOT is still a pretty opaque bureaucracy, and it's hard to tell how organized it is.

I don't expect mayoral candidates to know everything about city government, but I think it's kind of sad that you have three long-term members of the City Council and one former member of the Board of Estimate, including two people who have been elected to citywide office, and none of them had any clue that the office they're running for does have control over bus stops. (How do I know? I read Streetsblog.)

And that in turn makes me wonder: if any of them did have control over the entire public bus system, would they know what to do with it?

When is the MTA going to stop sending limiteds all day long?

Last night the 92nd Street Y hosted a debate for candidates for the Republican nomination for Mayor of New York. Members of the Y submitted questions to a camera crew on the sidewalk in front of the building, and the questions were then projected onto a screen behind the candidates. A lot of people seemed to be amused by a question posed by an Upper East Side resident, which you can see at 39:10 on the video.

My name is Selig Alpern. I've been living in Manhattan all my life. I am 89 years old. We have 4 to 5 limiteds flying down Lexington Avenue, and we have to wait 20 minutes for a local. From 10 o'clock in the morning to 4 o'clock in the afternoon there should be no limiteds. There should only be limiteds from 4 to 7 and 7 to 10 in the morning. When is the MTA going to stop sending limiteds all day long? They are not necessary from 10 in the morning to 4pm. It's a pet peeve of mine, and I wish it would be corrected.

Alpern was described as "ranting," "railing," "ornery," "upset," and "angry," but I think a lot of it was just him speaking loudly and clearly in order to be heard over the noise of Lexington Avenue. I thought his concern was valid, but his prescription was wrong, and then he undermined the whole thing and set himself up to be taken as a crank by calling it a "pet peeve." Transit frequency is not a pet peeve.

First of all, what does the MTA intend to do, as documented by the bus schedules? Looking at the noon hour, the M101 Limited is scheduled to pass Bloomingdale's at 12:08, 12:16, 12:24, 12:26, 12:32, 12:37, 12:47, 12:51 and 12:55 - nine buses an hour. The frequency is uneven, but the average headway is six minutes.

For the local buses, the M102 comes at 12:11, 12:31 and 12:51, and the M103 comes at 12:06, 12:21, 12:36 and 12:51. If you're not going below Eighth Street you can take either one, so I'll treat them as equivalent. That makes seven buses an hour, for an average frequency of eight minutes. One problem is that the headways are uneven, ranging from zero to fifteen minutes. If one of those buses is even a little bit late, it could lead to exactly the situation that Alpern complained about: being stuck for twenty minutes at a local stop watching one limited after another fly by.

We should definitely not eliminate midday limited service. How does it look for a Jewish guy from East 68th Street to tell the MTA to add ten minutes to every limited bus trip going from Harlem downtown? But it would be appropriate to tweak the schedule and run one or two buses on the local route instead of the limited route.

Better yet, who's to say that we have to get rid of buses on one route in order to add buses to another? Why not add more M102 and M103 buses without getting rid of M101s?

Some of this depends on the "loading guidelines." You don't want to run too many empty buses. That said, you could run regular buses instead of articulated ("bendy") buses if you want higher frequency.

Steve "BicyclesOnly" Vaccaro tweeted that he cared about, "What are candidate's position on BRT?" And that's an excellent question. Why aren't there bus lanes on Lexington Avenue?

Alpern's question highlighted a major problem in New York today: the despondent tone of so much of transit advocacy. Why do so many people think it's a zero-sum game, where we've given over Lexington Avenue to the cars, and Jews and Puerto Ricans have to fight each other over the scraps of bus service that crawl along wherever they can fit in?

The candidates' responses to that question, and the Democrats' responses to another transit question, were revealing. None of them mentioned "BRT," or even buzzwordless bus improvements. But George McDonald did say he looks forward to the Second Avenue Subway opening, and predicted that it would relieve crowding on the Lexington Avenue buses. No word if he would do anything as mayor to help get the rest of the line built, or even finish Phase 1, but at least it was hopeful and forward-looking.

The MTA's $27 million consumer surplus

One of the often repeated fears about dollar vans and other privately operated transit options is that they will "poach" customers from a public transit operator on the route, which may have a legal monopoly, and that by doing so they will "skim" profits from that route, reducing the revenue that public operator gets and increasing the burden on the taxpayers, or reducing the "coverage" that the public operator can cross-subsidize. This is a legitimate concern, but in most cases it is completely unfounded.

The M86 earned an operating surplus of about five million dollars in 2009. Photo: bijoubaby / Flickr.

To begin with, the agency has to make a profit on the route. Even if private operators believe they can make money, it is not always profitable for public operators. Sometimes this is for legitimate reasons: if the private operators can only make a profit through exploitative wages or hours, or by not offering a reasonable set of benefits, we don't want to encourage that exploitation. But if the profits earned by the private operators come from reducing costs in other ways, from offering a better value, or even from being able to raise fares on people who can afford it, the only objection is the skimming one.

How many routes make any operating profit, let alone an overall profit? I'll look at the New York MTA because it's my hometown transit monopoly, but I'm interested to hear about other systems. In early 2010 the MTA released ridership and cost figures for each of its bus routes, based on data from Labor Day through the end of November 2009. There were 22 routes that brought in more in fares than they cost to run.

If we extrapolate those figures to the whole year, these 22 routes combined brought in $27,400,000. Of that, most came from just five bus routes that netted over $2 million apiece: the Bx12, the M86, the Bx19, the M23 and the M79. The remaining 166 routes lost a combined $276 million, more than ten times as much as the 22 top routes brought in.

To put this in perspective, that $27 million surplus was 3.3% of the total $823 million grossed by New York City Transit buses. It's 0.87% of NYC Transit's overall $3.1 billion in farebox revenue, and 0.33% of the total $8.3 billion operating expenses for 2009. In other words, it's a drop in the bucket. Nobody at NYC Transit or the State Legislature would miss it.

There may be good reasons not to allow private buses to run on New York City streets, but skimming the consumer surplus is not one of them.

Tweaking congestion by time of day

Last week I observed that we have a degree of control over the speed of cars and the level of congestion on streets. We can design streets to encourage or discourage speeding. In between, we can adjust the capacity of the street by making it one-way or two-way, and adding or removing parking. There are a host of other traffic speeding/calming strategies like signal timing, lane width changes and sidewalk extensions. But I closed by observing that congestion varies with time of day, and even with time of year (Gridlock Alert Day?).

A street that has stop-and-go traffic during the rush hour may have smooth-flowing cars in the middle of the day, and wide open spaces at 1:00 AM. This daily variation can cause huge problems. Many years ago I had the frustrating experience of renting a moving van on Tenth Avenue at 3:00 PM, and getting to Third Avenue around 3:30. Much worse, of course, is the carnage caused by cars speeding through deserted streets late at night and on weekends.

Traffic engineers know all about the daily variation, of course. Their solution is simply to design a road big enough to keep cars flowing during the peak demand, and if people can go even faster on the off-peak they consider that a bonus. Of course, those of us who have to cross the street with those fast cars don't consider it a bonus.

Traffic calming advocates might say that the observed traffic speed should never rise above 20 MPH between 6AM and midnight. On high-demand streets this will lead to gridlock during rush hours, and probably slow traffic during middays and "shoulder" times. If I had to choose, I would choose slower traffic over death, but some of the most vocal, powerful people in the city would rather go fast. Fortunately, there are other ways.

The way that's currently employed by the New York City Department of Transportation is rush-hour parking restrictions on avenues and boulevards across the city. This is a relatively blunt instrument and the city wields it clumsily, with long periods of No Standing on places like Queens Boulevard and Flatbush Avenue. These are much longer than the actual rush hours, leading to speeding and dangerous conditions.

This is where congestion pricing comes in. By congestion pricing I don't just mean a cordon toll to keep traffic low. I mean a charge that varies by time of day: higher when there's more demand, lower when demand drops. The idea is to keep cars moving at roughly the same speed all day. Because the charge can be set by computer, there is much more flexibility than with rush-hour parking restrictions.

What I found on my visit to London was that the congestion charge worked well to keep cars moving all day. The problem was that they were moving too fast. That's a problem that congestion pricing advocates in other cities would do well to keep in mind.

Some day I hope we have congestion pricing here in New York City to flatten out that daily variation in driving. But I hope that we take advantage of that flattening to restore two-way traffic flow (yes, even on Manhattan avenues) and on-street parking, to keep speeds down below 20 MPH. Eventually we can widen sidewalks and add more bike lanes as necessary to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians, and tweak the parking, lane configuration and congestion charge to keep cars moving, but at relatively safe speeds.

What you need for a good bus bridge

It's my hope that New Yorkers will remember three events from the recovery from Hurricane Sandy. The first is the gridlock and chaos that Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens experienced on Wednesday, October 31, the day after the storm. The second is the difficult but functioning system in place on November 1 and 2. The third is the hours-long waits in commutes to and from New Jersey the following Monday and Tuesday, November 5 and 6.

The differences between the three events tell us the importance of three factors to good bus service: (1) having enough buses and drivers, (2) having enough street space and (3) managing how and where people will board the buses.

On Halloween in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, the first two factors were absent. The MTA was running most of its regular bus routes, but did not add any buses to accommodate increased demand from people who couldn't use the subways. Lots of people drove.

On the next day, the City instituted the HOV-3 rule, which drastically cut the number of cars on the streets. The DOT and the MTA instituted the "bus bridge" from Brooklyn to Midtown, putting hundreds of additional buses to use. They planned to keep a lane on Third and Lexington Avenues clear for the buses, but it turns out that the HOV-3 restriction took care of that. They had factors 1 and 2, but not 3. There were gigantic mobs waiting for buses at Jay Street and Atlantic Terminal, but in general people were understanding.

Photo: MartyJGardner / Twitter

On Monday, New Jersey Transit sent hundreds of buses to it eight park-and-rides to pick people up and bring them to the ferries. A lot of people couldn't or didn't want to drive to the park-and-rides, so they formed long lines at train stations and bus stops. The situation going home from the Port Authority Bus Terminal was worse: commuters tweeted picture after picture of Port Authority corridors filled with passengers waiting on line. A gasoline shortage kept some people off the road, and the Holland Tunnel was only open to buses, but there were no HOV restrictions on or near the Lincoln Tunnel, and the only dedicated street space is the morning rush XBL. That meant that NJ Transit didn't have factor 1 (buses) or 3 (terminal management), and very little of factor 2 (street space).

On Tuesday, NJ Transit shut down four of the eight park-and-rides and used the buses to supplement existing routes that were overloaded. Over the past few days, New Jersey has gotten loans of hundreds of buses, and deployed them on these routes. Tomorrow it will start additional service from train stations to the ferries. By using more ferries, it shifts passengers from the overloaded Port Authority terminal to the relatively uncrowded (I hope) ferry docks. So now it has factor 1 (buses) and 3 (terminal management) but not factor 2 (street space). Already people are tweeting that there's improvement; we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

There are a few lessons we can take away from these three incidents. First of all, private cars can't provide anything remotely approaching the capacity of a good subway or commuter rail system. I hope I don't hear the words "surface subway" out of anyone's mouth for a long time.

Second, at this point it seems clear that in order to run a bus system at anywhere near the capacity of a train, you need all three factors: (1) buses, (2) street space and (3) terminal management. You might be able to get away with two out of the three factors if passengers are patient, but not indefinitely.

Chasing New York's Phantom Inequality

In the wake of the destruction left by Hurricane Sandy, a number of narratives have emerged. One is the Triumph of the Bicycles - the bicycles are always triumphing, I'm happy to see, and one day maybe they'll even move the needle on mode share. Another is the Need for Resilience - I'm all in favor of resilience, but we need to be careful about it. I'm going to focus on one narrative in particular that's been bugging me. This one, I believe, is false, and it's dangerous.

I'm talking about how Sandy Laid Bare our Underlying Class Struggle. On Tuesday as the storm surge receded, Yves Smith warned of "Some Hidden Casualties of Hurricane Sandy." The next day David Rohde of Reuters wrote that Sandy "humbled some more than others in an increasingly economically divided city." Jonathan Maimon took a long bike ride across the city and wrote to Gothamist describing the "powerless zone" in a tone of outrage. Those two pieces were picked up by Alternet's Sarah Seltzer. On Thursday, Michelle Chen of In These Times wrote of "New York's Landscape of Inequality Revealed."

In the three days since those articles were written, they've been retweeted and reblogged numerous times, and I've kept my eye out for evidence of this predicted woe. I had actually written half this blog post and was about to talk about how it never materialized, when across my twitter feed came this pathetic screed by Sarah Maslin Nir.

That byline should tell you right away that something's up. The name of Sarah Maslin Nir strikes contempt in the heart of New York City urbanists. Back in March, this former nightlife reporter packaged the grudges and hidden business agendas of some Jackson Heights business owners into a hopelessly biased piece about the new pedestrian plaza that had been installed by the Department of Transportation, running with a misleading early-morning photo of the plaza by Librado Romero. In June, Nir ran another attack on the plaza masquerading as a story about a purse-snatcher foiled by Christian missionaries from North Carolina.

Nir's whole carefully constructed "two New Yorks" narrative about the bureaucrats from 40 Worth putting one over on the honest working people of Queens collapsed when the business owners formed a group to maintain the plaza and held a successful Eid al-Fitr celebration. In the most dramatic demonstration of the value of the plaza, a few weeks ago a group of young Bengali-Americans chose it as the location for a large flash-mob dance to the Korean hit "Gangnam Style."

After failing to stir up outrage over the pedestrian plaza, Nir is now trying the schtick out in the Rockaways, Red Hook, Gerritsen Beach and Belmar, which are apparently seething with resentment at those champagne-swilling, electrically-lit Manhattan elites. Yes, the same people who live in what Jonathan Maimon called "the powerless zone." They can't both be right, I don't think.

Paul Krugman provides some much-needed context by comparing the aftermath of this storm to that of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans seven years ago. Now that was real inequality and oppression, where white residents fled by car but black and Vietnamese residents were menaced with guns and kept in squalor in the Superdome arena.

I get the feeling that Nir and Maimon, and maybe others, really want to be the ones to find the same kind of institutionalized hatred that we saw in New Orleans. But it just doesn't fit reality. Here are some of the ways that this narrative falls short.

• Some of the hardest-hit areas were wealthy. The blacked-out parts of Manhattan included some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. One resident of Staten Island's South Shore calmly told a reporter, I believe for Channel 7, that they weren't in such bad shape compared to others. I appreciated the refreshing honesty. It's true that Atlantic City has a lot of poverty, and there are tons of low-income housing projects in Red Hook, Coney Island and the Rockaways. But Nir really wants us to get worked up about the struggling masses in Belmar? Is she going to uncover seething resentment in Cape May next? Hoboken hasn't been a working class town since Hudson Hawk got sent up the river.
• Some of the "working class" areas were doing pretty well. Rohde writes that "the city’s heroes were the tens of thousands of policemen, firefighters, utility workers and paramedics who labored all night for $40,000 to $90,000 a year." Those salaries aren't too shabby at all, especially towards the high end. Those are the people who live in Seagate, Breezy Point and Belle Harbor - all neighborhoods that were carefully configured to keep nonwhite strivers from moving in. The towns in Long Island and New Jersey where people complain about being lorded over by Manhattanites are the same ones that in the 1970s were openly contemptuous of the same (white) Manhattanites for being stuck living in highrises and taking the subway with their black and Puerto Rican neighbors.
• Some of the policies favor the lower-income. The HOV restrictions and "bus bridge" put in place by the City and the MTA, and the City's decision not to go after dollar vans picking up people on the street, prioritized transit riders over drivers in ways that haven't been done in this city in a hundred years. Bloomberg refused to take any car kvetching from CBS2's Marcia Kramer. Cuomo kind of spoiled it with all the talk of free gas, but it was nice while it lasted.
• People are getting what they need. One of Nir's interviewees, Orlando Vogler, refuses to complain. "It’s finally starting to come together," he said. "Now you see hundreds of volunteers coming down the street." Another report, by Annie Correal, also collapses in a sea of hope and appreciation. In Coney Island, "volunteers came four times," Mr. Kharak said. Just about everywhere that reporters and activists go looking for neglect and oppression, they find people who have gotten help from both the government and private volunteers.
• The worst conditions are in the evacuation zone. Jacob Riis Houses. Red Hook. Coney Island. Gerritsen Beach. Far Rockaway. All in Zone A. All places where the Mayor told residents to leave and go to shelters, because he couldn't guarantee their safety if they stayed put. He told them that well before the elevators and trains stopped running. He made arrangements for pets and wheelchairs. I heard him. So did all the people interviewed. If they were in the shelters they'd all be warm and well-fed. They chose to stay. Maybe they had good reasons - I really wouldn't want to camp out in some high school for weeks. But you can't really blame the city for not doing more for them. They're not where they're supposed to be, but the city and volunteers are finding them anyway.

I don't think inequality is a good thing, and we definitely have too much inequality in this city. But New York is not New Orleans. We don't have that kind of inequality and oppression, and we take care of everybody when there's a disaster. Hopefully, the honest people will give up after searching for oppression and not finding much, and the dishonest people like Nir will fade away. Then we can get down to rebuilding the city in a fair and sustainable way.