A New Stop in the South Bronx
At press time, MTR learned that Governor Pataki will
today announce the addition of a Metro-North station
to the controversial Yankee Stadium plan.
CT Looks to Toll Conversions of HOV Lanes
The
Connecticut DOT has sent a letter of interest to the
Federal Highway Administration "value pricing" program
that may herald an application for funds to study the
conversion of carpool lanes on I-84, I-91 and I-384
around Hartford to "high-occupancy toll" (HOT)
lanes.
SF to Gauge Pricing's Benefits
The Preservation League of NY State has listed Williamsburg,
Brooklyn in its annual list of the Empire State's most
threatened historic resources.
City's Credibility on Transport Ebbs
Last week, NYC assistant transportation commissioner
Michael Primeggia told a City Council panel and a huge
crowd assembled for a hearing on the Yankee Stadium
redevelopment that availability of parking is a very
minor factor in individual decisions to drive in NYC.
More Growth for Transit-Poor East Side
Elected officials and community groups are opposing
a 6.3M square feet mixed use development on the East
River, between 35th and 42st Streets on the 8.7 acres
of the former Con Edison site.
NJDOT's Plan for Warren County Provides Blueprint
for Highlands
Last week, NJDOT unveiled its corridor plan for Route
57 in front of an audience of 30 municipal leaders
and leaders of local conservation activists.
Hudson River: NY's Capital of New Housing
Residential
development along the Hudson is booming, projected
to add 15,000 "cookie-cutter" homes
to the river banks, with associated traffic impacts.
Newark Debates Roadway's Future
The
Port Authority has talked for years about developing
a "port inland distribution network" of rail
and water shuttles to quickly clear large numbers of
freight containers out of NJ/NY port terminals.
NY Public Employees Rap Road
Privatization
The NY State Public Employees Federation
ran a half-page ad denouncing the possible privatization
of transportation infrastructure in the NY Times
metro section Friday.
A New Stop in the South Bronx
At press time, MTR learned that Governor Pataki will
today announce the addition of a Metro-North station
to the controversial Yankee Stadium plan.
Though the addition of a train station at the site
is certainly welcome news, the plan still calls for
huge increase in parking supply, with garages displacing
parkland. Even with commuter rail access, the parking
increase will cause more to drive to games. worsening
already bad congestion and pollution in the area.
The Tri-State Campaign, environmental, good government
and planning groups asked elected leaders for months
to reduce the amount of new parking and direct subsidies
to the Metro-North station rather than new parking.
A big question is who will pay for the new station.
The state, city and Yankees should pick up the tab
with new transit money, rather than loading the project
on the already cash-strapped MTA.
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CT Looks to Toll Conversion of HOV Lanes
The Connecticut DOT has sent a letter of interest
to the Federal Highway Administration “value
pricing” program that may herald an application
for funds to study the conversion of carpool lanes
on I-84, I-91 and I-384 around Hartford to “high-occupancy
toll” (HOT) lanes. HOT lanes remain open to carpools
but also allow single-occupant vehicles whose drivers
are willing to pay a toll.
A ConnDOT evaluation of HOV lanes cited in the New
Haven Register found that the special lanes around
Hartford are being used at half capacity, though congestion
in general lanes is growing.
A November 2002 Courant opinion piece by CT Fund
for the Environment’s Don Strait and the Tri-State
Campaign’s Jon Orcutt urged the step, arguing “These
[HOV] lanes are now underused. We could allow single-occupant
drivers with an E-ZPass-type account to pay to use
the lanes. Carpoolers would continue to use the lanes
for free. Single drivers during peak hours could avoid
congestion around Hartford by paying a toll. If such
a test works, the concept could be broadened to areas
of the state equally (or more) in need of them. Why
not make the Merritt Parkway the tolled, congestion-free
alternative to I-95, with the revenue devoted to adding
train service on the New Haven line and other measures
to reduce congestion in Connecticut’s southwest
corridor?” (MTR #392).
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SF to Gauge Pricing's Benefits
San Francisco has received a funding commitment of
$1.04 million from the FHWA value pricing program to
examine road pricing options for San Francisco County.
The San Francisco County transportation authority recently
said it hopes to use road pricing to cut congestion,
increase bus and light rail speeds and funding and
reduce air pollution, according to the San Francisco
Chronicle. Officials said the study would consider
a downtown charging zone as well as new tolls or toll
schedules on approaches to congested areas, such as
the Bay Bridge. The politics of any implementation
will inevitably be complex, but San Francisco’s
willingness to confront and discuss congestion and
the appropriate direction for transportation policy
puts it squarely ahead of New York.
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City's Credibility on Transport Ebbs
Last week, NYC assistant transportation commissioner
Michael Primeggia told a City Council panel and a huge
crowd assembled for a hearing on the Yankee Stadium
redevelopment that availability of parking is a very
minor factor in individual decisions to drive in New
York City. The statement contradicts almost all research
and common sense about urban transportation, but Primeggia
had to say it in order to support the Yankee stadium
environmental impact statement, which claims the huge
increase in parking the plan calls for will not create
a single new car trip to baseball games. Primeggia
also dismissed the idea of game-day resident-only parking
permits for the stadium area, claiming they “don’t
work,” but offering no reason why motoring fans
who seek on-street parking today will gravitate to
paid garages in the future.
The prior weekend, responding to Transportation Alternatives’ rally
that presented 100,000 petition signatures in favor
of a ban on cars from Central Park’s loop drive,
city transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall told
the Daily News that the park drive is a “critical
transportation link for commuters.” That is patently
not the case. The number of cars using the park drive
is a miniscule fraction of total vehicles moving north
or south in Manhattan on all avenue and highway lane
during commuter hours. According to Transportation
Alternatives, only one-half of one percent of the people
entering New York’s Central Business District
on an average workday rely on the park drives.
In the one case, the NYC DOT is making false global
policy claims to defend a private developer’s
irrational insistence on building thousands of parking
spaces it doesn’t need, and in the other, the
agency is making up reasons to defend the turf of a
park roadway the DOT doesn’t want to have to
remove from its automobile flow schemes.
As commentator Aaron Naparstek has written, “The
most disappointing thing about Weinshall’s public
statement on Central Park is that it backs her into
a corner. To make the park car-free, the mayor will
now have to contradict her and set policy that goes
against this idea that the Central Park Drives are
a vital commuter link. Through misinformation, Weinshall
has made it that much harder for a car-free park to
happen during the Bloomberg Administration.”
The city DOT is free to make such pronouncements
largely because the city has no operative transportation
policy or goals. Unlike San Francisco’s “transit
first” agenda or European cities’ even
more aggressive steps to reduce driving, New York’s
approach is to muddle through and prevent dramatic
crises even while trends like mushrooming truck traffic
in neighborhoods overtake it.
In an era when urban shrinkage has given way to booming
growth, that’s no longer acceptable or workable
for the city. The city needs policies that make traffic
calming the rule, not the exception, for its streetscapes,
that prioritizes bus travel on avenues, that considers
the transportation consequences of huge development
complexes at the beginning of the siting process, not
as something to be explained away in environmental
documents, and it needs to become more closely involved
in setting priorities for MTA capital projects as growth
strains the transit system’s capacity and alters
travel patterns.
It’s not clear the city’s transportation
institutions are up to these tasks. NYC DOT in particular
has shown great difficulty in delivering policy initiatives — faltering
or taking forever just with the study stages of truck
route enforcement, traffic calming in Brooklyn, safe
routes to schools, bus rapid transit and downtown Brooklyn
transportation capacity projects. Whether the urgency
to innovate and policy purview of the DOT can be modernized
through a top-to-bottom reconstruction of the agency,
or whether it should be consigned to a pot-holes and
traffic signals department with a new, robust urban “smart
growth” and transportation planning located elsewhere
is a debate New York needs to begin.
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More Growth for Transit-Poor East Side
Elected officials and community groups are opposing
a 6.3 million square feel mixed use development on
the East River, between 35th and 41st street on the
8.7 acres of the former Con Edison site. The project
would add hundreds of residential units, 1.1 million
square feet of commercial space, and 40,000 square
feet of retail space (for comparison, a standard Home
Depot is about 125,000 sq. ft, an average city storefront
is 1-2,000 sq. ft). It would include 1,559 new parking
spaces — 1,183 new public spaces and 376 accessory
(residential) spaces. An EIS found the project would
cause crowding at #7 and Lexington Line platforms in
Grand Central, and along bus lines. The plan resembles
the obsolete “tower in a park” format where
large buildings are surrounded by lifeless, non-urban
open areas.
East Siders want a smaller project that includes
affordable housing, a waterfront esplanade and street-level
retail. A scoping hearing was held last week – comments
are due in May.
Nearby, between 28th and 29th Streets along 1st Avenue,
Mayor Bloomberg has announced plans for the $700 million
East River Science Park. He said he hopes to lure biotech
and other research firms. The first phase will house
540,000 square feet of office space, a second phase
an additional 300,000. Construction is slated to begin
this year with occupancy in 2008.
Farther uptown, a 3 million square-foot project is
proposed from East 125th to East 127th Streets between
2nd and 3rd Avenues. It would include 1,500 residential
units, 700,000 square feet of commercial space, and
1,000 parking spaces. In a recent newsletter, the civic
group Civitas notes that the project should encourage
transit use rather than driving, and be consistent
with recent plans to only allow contextual development
in the area.
Together, the projects demand an expansion of mass
transit capacity on the East Side. Elected officials
and other involved in approvals for them should urge
that transportation impacts be examined in light of
the possibility of bus rapid transit service along
1st and/or 2nd Avenues, and perhaps insist that the
transit improvement be implemented in tandem with the
developments. The corridor is likely one of the five
pilots that NYC DOT and NYC Transit are considering
for BRT service, but the effort is proceeding at the
pace of an M34 bus.
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NJDOT's Plan for Warren County Provides Blueprint for
Highlands
Last week, NJDOT unveiled its corridor plan for Route
57 in front of an audience of 30 municipal leaders and
leaders of local conservation activists. The highway
runs southwest-northeast in a scenic, rural corridor
of Warren County roughly bounded by the Delaware and
Musconetcon Rivers. State officials laboriously refer
to it as “one of the few remaining rural state
highways not yet overtaken by the sprawling development
patterns so common in the rest of the state.” Most
of the Route 57 corridor is within the Highlands Planning
Area, a northwestern area of the state that has been
designated for special environmental protection under
legislation approved in Trenton last year.
The Route 57 plan seeks to avoid widening the highway
by encouraging smart growth, fixing intersections and
other small problems to improve mobility and creating
connections between other local roads to provide options
for some local traffic. Included in the handouts were
a tool-kit for municipalities that explained smart growth
concepts and planning techniques like transit-oriented
development, scenic corridor zoning, conservation zoning
and historic preservation.
Local officials expressed support for the plan and
pledged to work with the DOT to protect the corridor
for traffic-attracting sprawl development.
Also last week, advisory groups to the New Jersey Highlands
Council met to give input for a Highlands master plan,
due out in May and supposed to develop details for implementing
the protections signed into law last year. Suggestions
given by the transportation committee were similar to
the strategies expressed in the Route 57 plan. So far,
no one has expressed strenuous objection to this approach,
but the actual thinking of Council members is not well
known. The Tri-State Campaign has urged them to follow
NJ DOT’s lead and use transportation investments
to guide development and preserve western New Jersey
from haphazard sprawl.
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Hudson River: NY's Capital of New Housing
Residential development along the Hudson is booming,
projected to add 15,000 “cookie-cutter” homes
to the river banks, with associated traffic impacts.
In response, Scenic Hudson has created a virtual aerial
tour of new developments in 18 communities, from Yonkers
to Kingston. On-line, a tour-taker can “fly over” completed
and proposed developments, with commentary labeling them
good, bad and ugly.
The development ranges from the completed award-winning
Hudson Park at Yonkers, a mixed used, recreational development
with waterfront access next to the Yonkers train station,
to sterile “mcmansions” in Hyde Park, Upper
Nyack and Fort Montgomery that are far from transit and
block public access to the waterfront.
For the full Scenic Hudson “Riversprawl” aerial
tour, as the New York Times described it, visit www.scenichudson.org.
Here are some examples of objectionable projects it surveys:
Yonkers: following successful development of Hudson
Park at Yonkers, developers now want 6,000 new residential
units near the waterfront.
Sleepy Hollow: Ichabod’s Landing, a residential
compound, is under construction. Next door, developer
Roseland has proposed a 1,500 residential unit development.
Kendall-on-Hudson, a large assisted living facility that
overwhelms nearby parks. No transit is nearby.
Croton: New “Discovery Cove” condos along
the waterfront offer little public access.
Upper Nyack: Forests are being cut down for new waterfront
mcmansions.
Fort Montgomery: Forest cleared for new car-dependent
family homes.
Kingston: Two developers have proposed 2,500 residential
units far from any transit service.
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Newark Debates Roadway's Future
The New Jersey Department of Transportation is giving
residents a chance to weigh in on two options for Route
21, also known in Newark as the McCarter Highway. The
public sessions are to unveil the plans and gauge support
for different options. The project area is a one mile
stretch of the highway running south of Penn Station
and the planned NJ Devils hockey arena.
One of the plans would widen the road from four to
six lanes, effectively dividing the community by making
the road even more daunting to pedestrians and requiring
destruction of housing and small businesses along the
corridor. While this option is has been supported by
Newark city government, commuters and the trucking industry
(Route 21 is a North-South alternative to the New Jersey
Turnpike and its tolls) it would cost $80 million dollars
and would not be completed for at least a decade, according
to DOT planners.
The second plan has far more local support, even by
the local McDonalds restaurant, because it would not
widen the road. Instead, it proposes a series of intersection
and pedestrian improvements and spares businesses the
problems of state/city buy-outs and large-scale construction
disruptions. DOT says it can move traffic at an acceptable
rate at volumes forecast for the next two decades. It
would cost $20 million.
With Mayor Sharpe James’ recent decision not
to seek re-election this spring, the politics of the
project are likely to change. The local city councilmember
Augusto Amador has adamantly opposed the widening. Neither
of the major candidates to replace James, Cory Booker
or Senator Ronald Rice, have shown much awareness of
the issue and are probably less likely to rile local
constituents in favor of suburban commuters or hockey
fans.
The DOT is expected to make a decision on the two main
options in June, after two more rounds of meetings with
stakeholders. How the Department rules will be closely
watched by community and transportation activists who
are keenly interested in whether the new state administration
places the concerns of local communities and the mission
of urban revitalization over those of motorists and truckers
looking to use Newark as a bypass.
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NY Public Employees Rap Road Privatization
The New York State Public Employees Federation ran a
half-page ad denouncing the possible privatization of
transportation infrastructure in the NY Times metro section
Friday. The ad’s “Don’t Go There” message
was directed at state lawmakers considering a measure
in budget legislation authorizing “public private
partnerships.”
The public-private partnership section in Governor
Pataki’s budget bill authorizes the NY State DOT,
Thruway and MTA to enter into “transportation development
partnerships” with private companies.
These would allow private companies to “acquire,
design, finance, construct, improve, operate and maintain
transportation facilities, provide transportation services,
and impose user fees for the use of the facilities or
services.” User fees – tolls or fares – would
only be permitted on facilities that already charge them,
or are altogether new roads or transit lines or represent
new capacity (MTR #519)
The agencies recently awarded a consulting contract
for research on such a partnership for the Tappan Zee
Bridge, but that will only result in a study with recommendations
for funding a replacement bridge and possible transit
line in the Tappan Zee corridor.
The labor federation says the “public-private” arrangements “reduce
government transparency, invite fraud, increase the state’s
reliance on costly consultants, limit public oversight
and cost taxpayers more.” It also points to the
lengthy duration of most major leases – “if
a deal is bad, it’s bad for a long time.”
The federation also attacks design-build contracting,
saying only the largest companies are able to bid on
such work.
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