Five reasons why the Tappan Zee sprawl should be stopped

As I've discussed before, the Tappan Zee Bridge is a sprawl-generating machine. The sprawl created by this bridge in Orange, Rockland, Bergen and Westchester counties is bad for everyone in the area. Here are five reasons why:

1. Sprawl puts teens, seniors, the poor and the disabled at a disadvantage.
2. Sprawl increases the pressure for hydrofracking.
3. Sprawl keeps Nyack, Suffern and the other towns from being Strong Towns with sustainable budgets.
4. Sprawl adds to pollution
   
5. Sprawl kills.
   

And if you think it's bad now, it will be hell when oil (and shale gas, and electricity) becomes really expensive. Please don't use this post to support an argument for "a new bridge with transit." The bridge we have keeps generating sprawl. Any replacement would generate at least as much sprawl, with or without "transit."

Five things we can do without rebuilding the Tappan Zee Bridge

A lot of the arguments given for replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge present something that we want, or maybe even need, and then offer the bridge as a way of getting that. The dishonesty is that the bridge isn't the only way of getting these things. Here are five examples.

1. We don't need a new bridge to create jobs. Almost any increase in government spending will put more people to work. Transit projects put more people to work than road projects, so let's spend all the money on transit.
2. We don't need a new bridge to improve mobility in the region. A wider bridge may help people to move at first, but it will soon be full of cars, and then when the tolls and the price of gas rise, no one will be able to afford to drive across it.
3. We don't need a new bridge to reduce crashes. The Governor could reduce the crashes tomorrow by getting rid of the seventh lane on the existing bridge. He hasn't, because the politicians have all decided that squeezing a few thousand more cars in is worth the deaths and injuries, and the people don't seem to care.
4. We don't need a new bridge to accommodate an increase in population. The population is not going to increase according to the moronic linear projections put out by the State DOT. Any added population can be served by more train and bus service.
5. We don't need a new bridge to build a new linear park. We could build a linear park tomorrow by getting rid of a few lanes on the existing bridge, but the politicians have all decided that squeezing a few thousand more cars in is more important than a park, and the people don't seem to care.

The Tappan Zee Bridge and Transit: A look back

This December 15 will be the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the first Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955. In honor of that occasion, we've collected some highlights of the history of the original bridge and its current replacement.

The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Bridge today. Photo: Wikipedia.

1953: The first concrete caisson is floated into place.

1955: Governor Averell Harriman opens the bridge to traffic.

1970: The Thruway Authority repays the last of its $80 million debt to New York State.

1993: A movable barrier system allows four lanes of traffic to flow in the peak direction.

1999: The I-287 Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2011: President Barack Obama announces that the replacement of the bridge will be expedited.

2012: Governor Andrew Cuomo announces a deal to include "full corridor Bus Rapid Transit" on the bridge instead of an "emergency access lane."

2017: Governor Richard Brodsky opens the new north span of the bridge to traffic.

2023: Tappan Zee, Inc., raises car tolls from $10 to $15 round trip to make payments on the bridge construction bonds. Gasoline-powered cars are charged $20, but most people drive electric cars using cheap electricity from shale gas.

2027: Governor Eric Ulrich opens the new south span of the bridge to traffic.

2028: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Ulrich opens the "BRT lane" to all cars.

2032: The Historic Tarrytown Village is moved to a parking pedestal in Elmsford to make room for the Tarrytown Water Filtration Plant and the Residences at Sleepye Hollowe.

2038: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Cara Cuomo-Espada opens the bridge shoulders to all cars.

2040: Tappan Zee Shale Gas, Inc. assumes control of New York State for nonpayment of obligations. Car tolls are raised to $25 round trip.

2048: Bowing to political pressure, TZSG President Theodore Gillibrand converts the "little used bicycle/pedestrian path" to a reversible lane. The bridge has to have seven lanes in the peak direction, he argues, because the Thruway is that wide.

2049: The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2054: The Historic Village of Nyack is moved to a parking pedestal in Nanuet to make room for the Nyack Biomass Plant and the Residences at Nyacke.

Note: the previous post envisioned a Tappan Zee without transit, as currently planned.

100 Years of the Tappan Zee Bridge: A Look Back

This December 15 will be the hundredth anniversary of the completion of the first Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955. In honor of that occasion, we've collected some highlights of the history of the original bridge and its current replacement.

The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Bridge today. Photo: Wikipedia.

1953: The first concrete caisson is floated into place.

1955: Governor Averell Harriman opens the bridge to traffic.

1970: The Thruway Authority repays the last of its $80 million debt to New York State.

1993: A movable barrier system allows four lanes of traffic to flow in the peak direction.

1999: The I-287 Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2011: President Barack Obama announces that the replacement of the bridge will be expedited.

2017: Governor Richard Brodsky opens the new north span of the bridge to traffic.

2023: Tappan Zee, Inc., raises car tolls from $10 to $15 round trip to make payments on the bridge construction bonds. Gasoline-powered cars are charged $20, but most people drive electric cars using cheap electricity from shale gas.

2027: Governor Eric Ulrich opens the new south span of the bridge to traffic.

2028: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Ulrich opens the "emergency access lane" to all cars.

2032: The Historic Tarrytown Village is moved to a parking pedestal in Elmsford to make room for the Tarrytown Water Filtration Plant and the Residences at Sleepye Hollowe.

2038: Bowing to political pressure, Governor Cara Cuomo-Espada opens the bridge shoulders to all cars.

2040: Tappan Zee Shale Gas, Inc. assumes control of New York State for nonpayment of obligations. Car tolls are raised to $25 round trip.

2048: Bowing to political pressure, TZSG President Theodore Gillibrand converts the "little used bicycle/pedestrian path" to a reversible lane. The bridge has to have seven lanes in the peak direction, he argues, because the Thruway is that wide.

2049: The Andrew Cuomo Tappan Zee Task Force is formed to explore options to rehabilitate or replace the bridge.

2054: The Historic Village of Nyack is moved to a parking pedestal in Nanuet to make room for the Nyack Biomass Plant and the Residences at Nyacke.

Will the Applied Sciences campus be car-free?

One of the biggest stories in the news this week is the announcement that the City of New York will give a hundred million dollars and a chunk of Roosevelt Island to a consortium of Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build an Applied Sciences campus. The establishment of a new technical institute in the heart of the city can be thought of as another victory in the resurgence of urbanism over job sprawl. But how urban will it be?

University study has traditionally been an urban practice, whether at Bologna, Paris, Harvard or Chicago. There has been another educational tradition of rural cloistering leading in the U.S. to the college town, a small town dominated by one college or several. Ithaca, the home of Cornell's main campus as well as Ithaca College, is one such college town. In the second half of the twentieth century, many small-town and suburban campuses sprawled, inviting students, faculty and staff to drive in and turning most of the space between buildings into parking lots. Even in those campuses, most of the students and significant numbers of faculty arrive on foot, by bike or by transit, leading to very high transit mode shares, but often a small minority of administrators, faculty and staff insist on driving and on having their parking dominate the campus.

This college sprawl has been one part of the general sprawling of America, along with job sprawl, housing sprawl and shopping sprawl. This trend is not sustainable, and there are signs it is losing steam. Sarah Goodyear has chronicled attempts by corporations like Facebook and Apple to make their campuses more urban, but they remain isolated along their suburban collector roads, and Sarah concludes, "Maybe they will be happy in their custom-made, self-contained bubbles. Or maybe down the road, they'll be like one-time innovative giants such as Sears -- looking longingly toward downtown."

The Applied Sciences campus is part of Mayor Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Steel's strategy to make New York the downtown competitor, the target of those longing gazes, and it just may work. Roosevelt Island seems isolated, and Eric Jaffe thinks that it will need transportation upgrades, but I can't really see what needs upgrading.

With no improvements the entire campus will already be within a ten minute walk of the aerial tram and F subway line to Manhattan. Like the R train, which the Daily News dubbed the "Silicon Subway," the F runs through Midtown, Soho and Downtown Brooklyn, connecting a number of start-up companies. An Applied Sciences student or faculty member could be at the Housing Works Bookstore for coffee with a corporate researcher in half an hour, door to door, and a staff member from MakerBot Industries in Brooklyn could take the D to the F and be at a seminar on Roosevelt Island in 45 minutes. With the city's planned bike share, Court Square in Long Island City is only twenty minutes away.

The proposed bike/pedestrian bridge to Manhattan could be cool. The old way to get to the island was by trolley to an elevator on the middle of the Queensboro Bridge, and rebuilding that would be nice as well. But neither of those are urgent.

Stephen Smith points out that the city could probably get people to build a tech campus for free just by raising height limits and removing minimum parking requirements in transit-connected areas. On Twitter, he also opined that "Cornell's Roosevelt Island plan is basically a few bldgs hidden beneath solar panels in a quasi-Corbusian urban form." It's a very appropriate criticism. The oldest residential buildings on Roosevelt Island are at least clustered around Main Street, which feels very urban, but the newer buildings built in the past twenty years break the grid and force pedestrians to make odd detours. Why did the designers of the Cornell-Technion plan feel the need to propose something even less urban?

My main concern is for Roosevelt Island to remain as car-free as it has been, and maybe even become more so. The original plan for the island's current developments was to have all the cars parked at the Motorgate garage, and the rest of the island be nearly car-free - they don't even have garbage trucks. Sadly, over the years, everyone with a little bit of power has decided that they're too good, or maybe too disabled, to park at the Motorgate and take the bus. The space around Goldwater Hospital, which now occupies the land that will be given to the Applied Sciences campus, is filled with cars. When an old insane asylum on the north end of the island was redeveloped into condos, the developers were able to get permission to build a 148-space underground garage.

Let's hope that the Cornell and Technion designers have more vision than they showed in that lame fly-through, and that they build something urban and scholarly, with really narrow streets, like in Paris's Latin Quarter. Let's hope that they don't think they're too good to take the train to work, or at least to park at the Motorgate and take the bus. But if they do, let's hope that Bloomberg, Steel and the RIOC will make them do the right thing.

Why not a longer "Tappan Zee High Line"?

Everyone knows I've got serious misgivings about the rails-to-trails movement, especially when people pull the rails out of perfectly functional, useful railroad infrastructure. I feel a lot better about roads-to-trails, and there are several good ones. The best is the section of the Long Island Motor Parkway that's been preserved here in Queens. There are other trails that use land taken for roads that were never built. I've walked on the Nassau-Suffolk Greenbelt, which follows an unbuilt section of the Bethpage Parkway. The Briarcliff-Peekskill Trailway in Westchester also uses an old parkway right-of-way.

Back in October when the Governor began his push for the Bridge Reconstruction merit badge, Paul Feiner, Supervisor of the Town of Greenburgh (which includes Tarrytown and Elmsford) suggested leaving the existing bridge standing for use by cyclists and pedestrians. This had been considered in earlier bridge replacement plans, but ultimately rejected in favor of a bike/pedestrian path on one of the two replacement spans. But if, as I've argued, the Tappan Zee Bridge should not be replaced, then Feiner's plan has a shot.

Instead of tearing the existing bridge down, we could keep two lanes for buses and use the rest of the width for a mixed-use path.

My question is, why stop there? The bridge itself is three miles long, but if we're not replacing it then we don't need the loud, polluting highway approaches. They'd just dump cars onto Routes 9 and 9W anyway.

Where the Thruway (Interstate 87) and the Cross-Westchester Expressway (I-287) split in Elmsford is right over the missing link between the two rail-trails that run in the right-of-way of the Old Putnam Line. If we reconfigured the highways so that northbound Thruway traffic turns east on the Cross-Westchester, then we can have the Tappan Zee High Line connect to the South County Trailway (PDF) there. It will also pass right under the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail.

On the Rockland County side, if we terminate the Thruway at the Palisades Parkway, we can extend the Tappan Zee High Line west for a total length of nine miles. It can connect to the Esposito Memorial Trail and the Long Path in Nyack. If we stop the Thruway at the Garden State Parkway, that makes twelve miles. Think of the recreational possibilities!

Of course, those connections assume that we don't reactivate the old Erie Main Line and the Putnam Line, but it might be worth it even so.

To be perfectly honest, with the length and the grades on the current bridge, I'm not sure it would be a pleasant trip - unless maybe we could have a concession for a bus stop, cafe and refreshment stand at the highest point. But it makes a lot more sense than some of the other recent proposals "high lines."

Getting Cuomo to do the right thing

Transit and livable streets advocates are rightly frustrated with the way Andrew Cuomo has dealt with our issues as governor. He has not been an anti-transit ideologue like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and he has not championed drivers above everyone else like Bill Thompson or Carl Paladino. He is simply uninterested in transit. He has no personal use for it, and he does not see transit victories as particularly helpful or necessary in his career.

As a result, Cuomo has abandoned transit issues like the budget lockbox and the Tappan Zee BRT when it seemed they would get in the way of another goal like passing a popular revenue plan or reconstructing an aging bridge. He has prevaricated on issues like congestion pricing and the borough taxi bill when he feared they would anger an important constituency. He has failed to take the initiative on issues like Chris Christie's reallocation of Port Authority funds from transit to roads. And he has neglected transit champions like Chris Ward and Jay Walder, driving them out and replacing them with managers chosen for their loyalty to him rather than their commitment to making transit work.

This is incredibly frustrating, especially because we do not have very much of the kind of power that can command Cuomo's respect. The Occupy movement aroused so much sympathy among the mainstream media that Cuomo felt comfortable defying the New York Post editorial board and abandoning their absurd construal of "no new taxes." The Occupiers created space for Cuomo to advance his career by doing the right thing. They did this by camping out for months, playing drums and having lots of really long meetings, but the effect of all that was to get out the message about income inequality and taxation.

Let's look at another example of inequality. There's an argument to be made that it's unfair to maintain the "free" bridges with sales and income tax dollars while transit riders have to pay more and more for crappier service. Tolling the bridges would remedy some of that inequality (and bring in riders for the transit services). It's the right thing to do.

If Cuomo wanted to take a stand on bridge tolls, he would have to face the angry right-wing Democrats from the outer outer boroughs and the suburbs, and maybe even a few myopic liberals who are swayed by bogus arguments about regressive taxes and totalitarianism. He won't do the right thing without the kind of political cover that the Occupiers provided.

Are transit advocates capable of harnessing that kind of power? And if we're not, maybe we should be using a different strategy?