What is the best use for the Flushing River valley?

I've lost count of all the proposals to build things in the Queens Valley. Here's a map from the Wall Street Journal:

In addition to the plans to build on Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, there are also the various proposals for the auto body district in Willets Point, which I covered last year and the year before.

There are several developers and pressure groups (the Mets, Major League Soccer, the United States Tennis Association, the Related Group) in favor of the plan, and a number of groups opposed (Willets Point United, the Fairness Coalition of Queens). Right away, I'm skeptical about the plans, especially the "build lots more parking" parts.

But I'd like to step back a little bit and ask: if we had all the money and power in the world, what would we most like to see there? What use would fit our goals (see up top) best? And what is it already being used for?

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park after Hurricane Sandy. Photo: Will Sweeney / Flickr.

The first thing to think about is the valley's natural role as a swamp in absorbing storm surge. A column by Jim Dwyer in the Times and a thorough op-ed by biologist Jason Munshi-South in the Daily News explaining exactly how this works, and how well it worked during Hurricane Sandy. Most urbanists think of Curitiba as a pioneer in "Bus Rapid Transit," but they also set aside swampland as seasonal parks for flood control.

There is a significant amount of swampland along the Flushing River and its tributaries, including the upper part of the river near Willow Lake and the former Flushing Airport. But north of Meadow Lake the river enters a culvert, emerging on the other side of the Fountain of the Planets into a post-industrial wasteland.

As Scott Fitzgerald famously described it, the "Valley of Ashes" was for many years used as a dump for an on-site garbage incinerator. In 1936 Bob Moses bulldozed the ashes and other trash over to the edges of the valley to form the base of the Grand Central Parkway, and erected viaducts to carry the Whitestone Expressway across from Flushing. In 1961 he built the Van Wyck Expressway on the east side of the valley.

The surrounding neighborhoods rely on Flushing Meadows for recreational space. It also hosts cultural centers for the entire borough: the Queens Museum of Art, the Queens Zoo, the Queens Botanical Garden. And of course there are the sports facilities: Citifield, the tennis complex, the skating rink, the boathouse, the "pitch and putt" golf center, and their attendant parking nastiness.

Then there is the transit infrastructure. E, F and R trains are stored in the Jamaica Yard at the southern end of the valley. The #7 train crosses the valley to the north over Roosevelt Avenue, and these trains are stored in the Corona Yard south of the station. Between the station and the yard is the Corona Bus Depot.

But there's one more issue: pedestrians. During the day, it's a relatively pleasant walk from, say, the Lemon Ice King of Corona to the Flushing Library, if you cross the Grand Central on one of the two mostly-pedestrian bridges and go under the Van Wyck at the Avenue of Discovery. But walking into the park from anywhere else ranges from fairly unpleasant to borderline suicidal, and walking around it takes hours. In contrast, Central Park, Prospect Park and Van Cortlandt Park have edges and crossings that are much more humane and welcoming.

The Bloomberg administration and the developers are right that we need more housing that's conveniently located to jobs in Manhattan, and where else but Queens? Similarly, with all the soccer fans in Queens (when the World Cup was on, no matter who was playing you could find at least one restaurant from that country where the fans were watching, and dozens in the case of Ireland, Colombia and Mexico), it makes a lot of sense to have a soccer stadium. And I'm on record as being in favor of a casino located near the large population of gamblers. On the other hand, I simply haven't looked at the area and said to myself, "You know what we need? Another shopping mall." But in all these cases, why this part of Queens?

Finally, I don't believe we need lots of parking for every possible park use even in Fresno, much less Queens.

All right, well this is a good place to stop. So I'm not going to answer the question in this post. Maybe later I'll work towards an answer. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments and on Twitter.

How not to deal with parking moochers

Let's say that you live by yourself in a two-bedroom apartment. Your friend's brother is coming to town to look for a job, and your friend asks if he can stay with you. Do you (a) say "Fine, and I'll even let you stay rent-free for two months, but then you'll have to start chipping in?" Or do you (b) pay all the rent yourself for two years and then say, "Man, I know you're not making that much, and I love having you around, but the rent just went up and I need some money for these root canals I had"? If you answered (b), congratulations! You're Mayor Vincent Impellitteri.

Mayor Impellitteri wishes he didn't have to ask you for this, man, but Abe Beame is bugging him about it. Photo: La Guardia and Wagner Archives.

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.

When 1952 began, it was still illegal to park overnight in New York City, but I get the impression that the ban wasn't enforced very much. Then Mayor Impellitteri made a dramatic speech to the Chamber of Commerce. He began by saying how proud he was of the city, especially when Winston Churchill "marveled that we could ride along the Belt Parkway without encountering a traffic light for miles," but then turned around and said, "it's lucky we weren't traveling through our business and garment industry districts at that hour." Way to sell your city, Mayor!

Impellitteri went on to propose not just a $5 per month fee ($43.47 in today's dollars) for overnight parking, but a $5 per month "automobile use tax" and a city gas tax of two cents per gallon. (A cigarette tax too.) That's terrific, and it's essentially what Mayor Bloomberg, Lieutenant Governor Ravitch and many others have campaigned for in the past five years. And it was necessary because it costs a lot of money to maintain the roads and bridges that the cars drive on all day and park on all night. Someone has to pay for it, and it was bankrupting the general fund. Did Mayor Impellitteri say that? No, like our wimpy housemate he appealed to the drivers' sense of civic duty.

Yeah. I think you can figure out how that went. But I'll have more details.

When speeding is common, people die

By now you've heard the tragic headlines. A middle-aged woman accidentally drove her van off the side of the Bronx River Parkway yesterday, killing herself and everyone aboard - her parents, her sister, her daughter and two nieces. You may have also read statements by Robert Sinclair, president of the Automobile Club of New York, that the Parkway "lacks modern transportation engineering features" because it was conceived in 1907 and opened in 1925 as "the first limited access multilane highway in the U.S." He went on to complain about the guardrail: "It is very strange that there is a curb there," Sinclair said. "You don't put curbs on high-speed roadways because they can serve as launching pads, which appears to be what happened here. A big Honda Pilot flew over a 4-foot guardrail." The Wall Street Journal found that the State's "Five Percent Report" on the most dangerous roads claimed that the "section needs a 'deceleration lane' and other measures to improve the East 177th Street exit."

The fact that Sinclair finds it "very strange that there is a curb there" gives you a clue that he's talking out his ass, and that's probably where he found the "facts" that he solemnly delivered to the Associated Press. In contrast, Steve Anderson knows his shit, and on his site nycroads.com you can read that the entire Parkway south of the Sprain Brook Parkway was built between 1950 and 1952. While the section between Bronxville and Valhalla may well have "narrow lanes, steep hills, tight turns," the southern part has six lanes and is relatively straight and flat.

Photo: Louis Lanzano / Associated Press

Being somewhat familiar with New York City's parkways, I saw that "curb" on Bing Maps and knew exactly what it was: a divider protecting a long-closed side path. In the early 1950s, Bob Moses was still building sidewalks and side paths along his parkways. It's very similar to the one on the Goethals Bridge, even though that was built much earlier under the Port Authority.

If you're wondering why anyone would walk on a narrow sidewalk separated from six lanes of speeding car traffic by a two-foot-high strip of concrete, you're not alone. That's why it was closed, and it probably wasn't very popular when it was open, even though it's the straightest route to get from Bronx Park to Soundview.

Sinclair doesn't think it's strange that the driver, Maria Gonzalez, was doing 68 in a 50mph zone. Neither does NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. The AP says, "Gonzalez was driving well above the posted 50 mph limit, but speeding is common at that point and she may have been simply keeping up with traffic, said New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne."

Of course, that's the problem. Gonzalez probably wasn't doing anything particularly unusual or reckless - beyond driving in the first place. If speeding is common, it's because the road design encourages it. It's a six-lane limited-access highway, but it has a 50mph speed limit, probably because it has no shoulders. But the drivers see six lanes, so they go fast.

So what do we do when the road gives drivers visual cues to go faster than it's really safe to go? Sinclair and the State DOT - and Borough President Ruben Diaz Junior - have only one answer: spend more money. Spend $232 million dollars to replace the bridge (as a link provided by the Journal News shows), raise the curbs, add shoulders and even a "FULLY ADA COMPLIANT SHARED-USE PATH." But for the section of the Parkway north of Bronxville, even Steve Anderson, who is usually not shy about spending other people's money on roads, actually recommends that the number of lanes be reduced to discourage speeding.

That's what we should do south of Bronxville too. This section of the road is redundant with the Thruway/Major Deegan and the Hutchinson River Parkway, and it doesn't even carry trucks. It does not need to be six lanes wide. If we believe Governor Cuomo that the State needs to rein in spending, we should definitely not waste money replacing and widening this bridge. But we do not have to compromise on safety. We can convert the outer lanes of this road to shoulders. This will add protection and reduce speeding, preventing at least some future deaths.

It might even make the road safe and pleasant enough that we could reopen the pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure and restore a needed link in the Bronx's non-motorized transportation network. We can also open the Parkway to buses, at least south of Pelham Parkway, to give people another alternative to driving.

Low bridge, everybody down!

Last month I talked about how nutty it is to ban buses from a parkway (PDF) in the name of scenic recreational driving, even as you widen that "parkway" to six or eight lanes to accommodate commuter traffic, in the process completely destroying any scenic or recreational character that it ever had. I argued that if the State DOT wants to have parkways they should cut them all back to four lanes maximum, with parallel bike and pedestrian facilities, but if they want to have highways they should allow buses to use them.

Our express and intercity bus networks could really use some limited-access highways where they could cruise. The current schedule for the BxM4B takes 34 minutes to go down Fifth Avenue from the Bronx County Courthouse to Madison Square on a Saturday; Google Maps says that on weekends it should take 24 minutes for a car, but you could shave at least ten minutes off that by taking the FDR Drive. The BxM2 takes 53 minutes to go from 230th and Broadway to Penn Station; Google Maps gives that 33 minutes in a car and 17 if you take the West Side Highway. So we're talking time savings of up to 20 minutes. This can make a difference in ridership, particularly on the intercity bus routes.

Okay, but what about all the low bridges that Bob Moses famously built over his parkways to keep out buses and trucks? Well, the New York City Department of Transportation has a new treat for us: the clearances on all the parkway bridges in the city, either in PDF format or as a KML file. No more squinting at signs in Google Maps!

Here are the heights for typical buses in the current MTA fleet:
MCI D4500: 11' 5" (the big express buses)
Orion V or NovaBus RTS diesel: 9' 10"
Orion V natural gas: 11' 5"
Orion VII: 11' 3" (the new low-floor models)
EcoSaver IV: 10' 1"

This means that they will all fit on the Henry Hudson Parkway up to 232nd Street, the FDR to the Willis Avenue Bridge (with the exception of the Brooklyn Bridge and a couple of on-ramps in Midtown), or the Bronx River Parkway to Gun Hill Road, and the Grand Central Parkway to 60th Road. The old diesels and the brand new EcoSaver IV can go anywhere except for the Jackie Robinson and Cross Island parkways, the northern end of the Henry Hudson Parkway and the section of the Grand Central Parkway along Flushing Meadows.

The most straightforward thing to do is to end the blanket ban on buses on the parkways, and simply restrict them based on their height. The current ban seems to be in the Codes, Rules and Regulations of the State of New York, not laws, which means that the Governor or the next Transportation Commissioner could do away with it by executive order, without having to go through the Legislature.

Speaking of which, does anyone think that Frank McArdle would give a rat's ass about buses? I suppose he could turn out to be a pleasant surprise like Ray LaHood, but I'm not holding my breath.

Parkway or highway? Pick one and stick with it

Bob Moses didn't build the first parkways, but he did create some of the most famous ones. Many started out as quiet, four-lane roads surrounded by trees and grass; some even had parallel bicycle and pedestrian paths. A few of these have been minimally altered; you can get a feel for the original design if you visit the Bronx River, Bethpage, Palisades or Jackie Robinson Parkways. On the other hand, most have been widened to the point where they are unrecognizable as parkways. The most outrageous of these is the Southern State Parkway on Long Island, which is now eight lanes wide, double its original width. The Hutchinson River Parkway is eight lanes for part of its length, as is the Grand Central Parkway. The Belt, Cross Island and Northern State are six lanes for most of their lengths.



The worst part of this is that most of these parkways forbid any kind of buses from traveling on them. In many cases, Moses actually built bridges that were too low for buses or trucks to safely pass under. The result is a highway that is only available for private cars - the least efficient, most polluting form of ground transportation.

Moses's justification for barring buses and trucks was to provide a bucolic, recreational setting for leisurely drives. But the widenings have obliterated this character of the parkways, turning them into commuter highways like the LIE and the Thruway. Trees have been cut down and grass paved over. In some cases, like the Hutch, the bicycle paths were eliminated. In others, the highway swallowed up the entire "park," leaving nothing but asphalt. So we have noisy, smelly, dangerous, expensive highways that don't even help move buses quicker.

The Garden State Parkway is a disaster in many ways, but at least it allows buses for the entire length. Many bus routes would be excruciating - and have very low ridership, if they survived at all - if they couldn't go on the Garden State.

It's time for New York state to get with the program. Return the parkways to their original four-lane configurations - with suitable modifications for safety - and rebuild the parks and greenways that once surrounded them. Or else give up the Jay Gatsby fantasies, face the reality that you're dealing with commuter highways, and allow buses to use them.

It is true that many of the bridges are too low for full-size buses. The State DOT often replaces parkway bridges, and in recent years they've even been trying to match the aesthetics of the originals; they can do this while raising the height to allow buses. In the meantime, there are many cutaway vans that can fit under these bridges with no problem. Allowing cutaway van service on the Grand Central, Interboro and Belt Parkways would be a big improvement for transit in those corridors.

The nutty Long Island Transportation Plan 2000 envisioned putting "Rapid Commute Vehicles" - don't call them buses! - on some of the parkways. But in a classic highway department move, these would be brand new lanes with "RCV priority." I haven't heard much of LITP 2000 since way back when; let's hope that those widening plans died with it.

Last month, in response to my post about improving bus service to Connecticut, Woody left a good suggestion:

Put bus lanes on the West Side Highway or Henry Hudson Parkway, whatever it's called, from the Port Authority Bus Terminal right up to the George Washington Bridge to Jersey and onto the Cross Bronx Expressway heading east.

Some of the parkways were designed to keep the riffraff -- that's us bus riders -- off these carriage ways by making the overpasses too low and the underpassings unpassable. But I don't think the Henry Hudson suffers from that design feature.

I checked, and in fact the first low bridge on the Henry Hudson is not until 232nd Street. Even beyond there, as you can see above, the Google Street View vehicle followed a full-size school bus all the way to Fieldston Road. That means that it's physically possible for buses to go from 57th Street all the way up to the George Washington Bridge without hitting a light. Let's make it legal.

Cut It Loose: the Shore Parkway Reconstruction

You may have heard that we're in a recession. Money is tight for both private and public projects. Many projects may not get built, or may be deferred for a long time.

This is not always a bad thing. The deferment or abandonment of developer-driven projects that would bring little or no benefit to the public at large is good. Your Cap'n, for one, won't miss Atlantic Yards, the JFK-Downtown rail link, the Syosset-Bridgeport tunnel and a host of other misbegotten schemes. It's too bad that the horrible awful Yankee Stadium replacement missed getting sucked into that black hole. There's still hope it could swallow up the Hudson Yards (including the #7 train extension), Moynihan West, Hunters Point South and Sunnyside Yards plans.

Unfortunately, it looks like it's not only the ill-conceived projects that are going down. The Second Avenue Subway is important because it has long been a blockage in the pipeline of new transit projects: as long as it's not built, it's been hard to propose any other new subways. Not only is that project now facing a funding gap, but there are similar ones for the Fulton Street Transit Center, the LIRR East Side Access, the pilot "Select Bus" programs, and the assortment of transit projects that the MTA announced last month. The planned ARC tunnel has shrunk to "THE Tunnel." Key expansions of the rail network in New Jersey - like the restoration of service on the Lackawanna Cut-Off, which could eventually lead to passenger service to Scranton and Binghamton - are unfunded.

In this climate it's important to do what we can to keep the sustainable projects from getting sunk while cutting the unsustainable ones loose. As I wrote a month ago:

Get public funding secured as much as possible for transit and livable streets, and get roads as defunded as possible. Then try to stall parking and associated sprawl projects until they run out of funding. Hopefully by the time anyone can afford to build anything again there'll be more of a public consensus, and more private money, for transit and livable streets.

In this spirit, when I see expensive projects that predominantly benefit drivers and contribute to sprawl, I'm going to point them out. This is money that could go towards better bus service or the Second Avenue Subway.

Today's candidate comes from Streetsblog's morning headlines. According to the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York City DOT is planning to spend $850 million over the next seven years to replace seven bridges on the Belt (a.k.a. Shore) Parkway from Bay Ridge to Canarsie.

For those of you who've never experienced the Belt in all its glory, well, I can't say it's worth much. It was built by Bob Moses as a four-lane parkway like the Bronx River or Meadowbrook, but it's a sad excuse for a parkway now, after having been widened to a six-lane pit of noise and fumes. It has a bike and pedestrian path alongside for much of its length, but the path is very close to the highway and generally not very well maintained. When it's not closed without notice, it's often filled with road debris. Who knows what it's doing to the ecosystem of Jamaica Bay?

As for its current function, it facilitates sprawl in Long Island, Brooklyn and Queens by funneling traffic onto the Gowanus Expressway where it can plague Sunset Park and South Brooklyn. Every time I've seen the highway it's been packed bumper-to-bumper with cars each containing one or two miserable, enraged Brooklynites. I can't see anything of value that it contributes. If you know of anything, please feel free to bring it up in the comments.

Over the years there has been a freeway revolt movement that seeks to tear down - or simply not rebuild - wasteful highways. The most famous successes have been the West Side Highway in Manhattan and the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and a dedicated group in the South Bronx is hoping to add the Sheridan Expressway to that list. Many of them are along rivers or bays, and when they are torn down it restores access to these long-neglected waterfronts.

The Belt Parkway is a similar barrier. In Bay Ridge, where it is redundant with the Gowanus, environmental groups have already asked for it to be removed. It's reasonable to maintain it while it's still in good shape, but spending $900 million to rebuild those bridges is another matter. Tearing it down would end the waste once and for all, but it would also be expensive. A small, two-lane road, or even a four-lane parkway that didn't overwhelm the pedestrian environment, would probably be appropriate for that corridor.

If we replaced the six-lane bridges with two- or four-lane bridges, how much could we save? How much less pollution would there be, how much less gas consumed, how many cars no longer driving through Manhattan and South Brooklyn? How much gentler would it be on the wildlife in Jamaica Bay? How much less impact on the neighborhoods it passes through?

The absolute most critical aspect is that this reconstruction facilitates sprawl. The low-density neighborhoods of southeastern Brooklyn and Queens are not set up as villages, they're set up as endless rows of tract houses where everyone has to drive to the big-box stores, and most people drive to work. The Belt Parkway enables this inefficient, non-human-scale infrastructure. Without it, the residents might support some effort to extend rapid transit to the area. With it keeping the cost of driving low (you can currently drive from Canarsie to Canal Street without paying a toll, all on limited-access highways), their backyards and driveways are heavily subsidized. By who? By you: the New York City taxpayer.

I'm happy to pay my taxes and help keep our city running. But I don't want that $900 million going to subsidize an Oldsmobile and a swimming pool for someone in Mill Basin. I want it going to efficient, sustainable transportation. I'd love for it to go to a big-deal item like the Second Avenue Subway, but you know what? Let's keep the money in that part of Brooklyn. Use it to extend the #2 train south to Kings Plaza, and build a light rail system on Kings Highway, Flatlands Avenue and Linden Boulevard, from Bensonhurst to Valley Stream.

BTW: nycroads.com says that some of these bridge replacements were due to be completed by 2006. I wonder what happened.