Leading planning experts say the City Planning Commission and NYC Dept. of City Planning could be serving New Yorkers better.  Amid the Bloomberg administration’s breakneck efforts to spur development around town, city government is doing little to accommodate the needs of a broad spectrum of citizens or consider the effects of development, like traffic and transportation.

   At a recent CUNY/AIA forum on the city’s future, Michael Sorkin, a noted NYC architect, denounced low levels of affordable housing from the proposed Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning and the lack of objective planning consideration in the city’s backing of proposals for new sports arenas in Brooklyn and Manhattan. 

   Robert Yaro, Regional Plan Association president, mentioned the city’s down-zoning around the Forest Hills transit station as an irrational step that removes growth opportunities from the transportation infrastructure best able to support it. 

   Of course, city government’s obsession with a West Side stadium versus its failure to aggressively champion projects essential to the city’s economic future, such as the 2^nd Avenue subway, LIRR East Side Access and an additional NJ Transit tunnel to Manhattan, came up as another sore spot.  

   The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has recently challenged the City Planning Commission’s failure to negotiate better transportation concessions from IKEA in the company’s plan to locate in Red Hook, Brooklyn, has urged the city to undertake a transportation capacity study to examine the traffic and transit implications of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning (see MTR #468) and sued the city over the shoddy transportation analysis in the West Side stadium environmental study. 

Meanwhile, while Borough President James Molinaro told Crains New York Business that transportation must be part of the City Planning Commission’s study to rezone 5,700 acres of industrial land on Staten’s Island’s West Shore, it is likely that this and other projects on the Island will only fuel Staten Island’s legendary traffic jams.

The $150,000 study, to be completed by 2006, is being funded by the NY Metropolitan Transportation Council. 3,200 acres are currently being used for industrial purposes and the other 2,500 acres are vacant. The site could be rezoned for residential and business development.

Staten Islanders may be thinking about smarter transit options as part of new development, but it is hard to imagine more construction on the West Shore being anything but car dependent. The densest parts of Staten Island are only very weakly served by transit, Island officials resist any notion of growth zones that could make more intensive transit investment more viable and even supplementary ferry services along the congested South Shore are routinely shouted down.

Staten Island’s best option for decent transit service is to transform the local and express bus system into a bus rapid transit network. That will require tough choices like reassigning road space, and concerted leadership and vision to achieve.

Last week, Mayor Bloomberg and others broke ground on the Bricktown Centre in Charleston, near the Outerbridge Crossing. The big box development, with 1,700 parking spaces, is on one of the largest city-owned plots of open land. To push it through, the city agreed to preserve half as open space, and provide 20 acres for senior housing, a garden and community center. Yet environmental groups said the project could have been located somewhere else, like the slightly less car-dependent Lucent site in Richmond Valley, and the open space protected.

The same officials who opened Bricktown Centre will undoubtedly be decrying congestion again next week. 

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