Brooklyn Coalition Calls for Big Changes to Atlantic Yards
Several major Brooklyn civic associations and city-wide groups such as the Municipal Art Society have included a strong platform of transportation changes they say are necessary to make large-scale development at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues work. The Tri-State Campaign contributed to the platform and has joined the groups, which have coalesced around the advocacy web-site www.brooklynspeaks.com.
Corzine Launches Pedestrian Safety Effort
Starting in 2003, the NJDOT has undergone a planning revolution. The agency that, in the mid nineties, spent 50% of its capital budget on new road capacity is now leading the state’s smart growth effort.
City Rolls Out Plan for 200 Miles of Bike Lanes
In September, New York City announced a new initiative to install 200 miles of new bike lanes (and 40 miles of new off-street paths) over the next three years, to start a program distributing free bike helmets, ramp up enforcement of traffic laws, particularly those aimed at keeping bike lanes free of cars and trucks, improve crash recording, enact tougher legislation to protect cyclists and launch a public awareness campaign aimed at drivers and cyclists.
New Yorkers on Bicycling Conditions
Survey: “Do you consider unsafe conditions for people on bicycles a major, moderate, or minor problem, or not a problem?”
Rell Breathes Life into Long-Discussed Bus-way
Governor Jodi Rell announced $4.6 million in state funding for the Hartford-New Britain bus rapid transit project late last month.
NJ DOT's Wittpenn Bridge Plan Could Sever Greenway
Planners of the East Coast Greenway, the giant bikeway initiative that aims to span 2,950 miles from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida, have long considered the replacement of the Wittpenn Bridge over the Hackensack River as a key component.
The Dukes of Suffolk
The September 11 crash of a car and driver into a second-floor apartment, apparently after a high-speed Dukes-of-Hazard type jump over a berm at the end of a Coram street, made headlines around the world. But unfortunately, it’s not really news that drivers in Suffolk County are out of control.
Brooklyn Coalition Calls for Big Transportation Changes to Atlantic Yards
Several major Brooklyn civic associations and city-wide groups such as the Municipal Art Society have included a strong platform of transportation changes they say are necessary to make large-scale development at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues work. The Tri-State Campaign contributed to the platform and has joined the groups, which have coalesced around the advocacy website www.brooklynspeaks.com.
The coalition’s transportation position calls for project plans that:
- Minimize creation of new parking.
- Eliminate the giant surface parking lot that is now part of “Phase I.”
- Residential parking permits to protect nearby areas from arena-going motorists.
- Zoning to eliminate the development of a secondary parking industry around the arena.
- Stronger incentives for mass transit use.
- Traffic calming to protect residential streets.
- Bus lanes to keep transit riders from getting bogged down in worsening traffic.
- Advances a plan for additional subway capacity into the next MTA capital program.
- Uses roadway pricing to reduce through-traffic in downtown Brooklyn and adjacent areas.
The brooklynspeaks.com site has generated over 500 letters to elected officials on the issue. Here are excerpts from a few:
Development is not bad, but development can be done badly. As currently constituted, the Atlantic Yards plan is too large and does not include the transit, traffic, environmental and community planning necessary to make it a good project. The project should be reduced 30-40% in size and the State, City and MTA should work together with FCRC to plan and build the infrastructure necessary... – TS
The incredible lack of urban planning in this project should not be allowed to block the main artery connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan due to inattention on the part of some of our city officials. Wake up! – GY
The Straphangers Campaign and Tri-State Transportation Campaign submitted joint comments on transportation problems with the Atlantic Yards draft environmental impact statement at last week’s deadline — see MTR# 538 and www.tstc.org.
[Back to Top]
Corzine Launches Pedestrian Safety Effort
Governor Corzine, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey’s transportation commissioner, attorney general and motor vehicles commissioner announced a new state-wide initiative to improve pedestrian safety in mid-September.
“We need to do a better job of protecting those who walk our streets. This is one of those things that doesn’t make the headlines in the newspapers until there’s a tragic accident,” said the governor.
The officials said the program will consist of programs to fund intersection and street reconstruction to improve pedestrian environments, up to date state police tracking of areas where pedestrians are hit by cars, stronger enforcement of traffic laws and public education of both drivers and pedestrians.
Some elements of the initiative are reorganized aspects of existing programs, but with a significant addition of new funding. Also new is the emphasis on multi-agency integration and targeting of areas, such as Newark, based on data and need via the collection of real-time information on dangers faced by pedestrians. Also critical and laudable is Governor Corzine’s willingness to identify his leadership and accountability to the effort.
State Transportation Comissioner Kris Kolluri said he hoped New Jersey would become a national leader on pedestrian safety, but noted that retrofitting the built environment was a long-term effort.
The infrastructure funding aspect of the program will spend about $15 million a year for five years on traffic calming and other built safety projects. Some of that will be for targeted problem corridors, like Newark’s Ferry and Market streets area near Penn Station, where the governor, mayor and commissioners held their press conference. Some will also be for “safe routes to schools” and “safe routes to transit” efforts. It is possible that NJ Transit may make additional contributions toward the latter, a new program designed to improve foot and bicycle access to mass transit stations that was first announced by Kolluri at last spring’s state-wide TransAction conference.
NJ DOT spokespeople said the funding was over and above spending the state already makes available through state programs like the bike/pedestrian component of aid to counties and municipalities, and federal programs like Transportation Enhancements. The new package does appear to encompass funding from the federal Safe Routes to School program, enacted last year.
The Tri-State Transportation Campaign had identified $33 million in bicycle and pedestrian project funding in the NJ DOT fiscal 2007 capital program, exclusive of federal “transportation enhancements” funding.
Acting Attorney General Anne Milgram described the launch of a “traffic-stat” program, probably similar to that employed by the NYPD, to allow state police and other law enforcement agencies to target intersections or stretches of road that prove particularly dangerous, and said traffic law enforcement would receive more attention. We hope traffic-stat produces publicly available information and releases overall progress reports on the pedestrian safety initiative’s progress.
The agencies will set up a statewide traffic safety task force to coordinate policies and actions. The Dept. of Motor Vehicles will contribute an educational component to the program, including more share-the-road emphasis in basic driver instruction.
Announcement of the program comes none too soon – in 2006, NJ is on track to see its worst pedestrian death toll in several years—possibly the second-worst year in the past decade.
[Back to Top]
City Rolls Out Plan for 200 Miles of Bike Lanes
In September, New York City announced a new initiative to install 200 miles of new bike lanes (and 40 miles of new off-street paths) over the next three years, to start a program distributing free bike helmets, ramp up enforcement of traffic laws, particularly those aimed at keeping bike lanes free of cars and trucks, improve crash recording, enact tougher legislation to protect cyclists and launch a public awareness campaign aimed at drivers and cyclists . The city said it would also explore the viability of requiring adult cyclists to wear helmets.
NYC Health Commissioner Tom Frieden remarked at the press conference that “All [cyclist] deaths are preventable, and each one is a tragedy.” He continued, “Engineering solutions are more likely to be effective [at improving safety] than urging people to change their behavior.”
The announcement was occasioned by the release of a new official study, Bicyclist Fatalities and Serious Injuries in New York City 1996-2005. The city has also been under pressure to deliver some transportation improvements. Following a string of high-profile bicyclist deaths, groups from Transportation Alternatives to racing cyclists have called on the city to make the streets safer for bicyclists, and there are growing voices around town for stronger traffic calming and gridlock relief policies.
The study, released by four city agencies – DOT, Parks, the Police Dept., and Health – analyzed 10 years of bicyclist fatalities, examining a range of issues including causes of crashes, helmet use, and the presence of absence of bicycle lanes.
225 bicyclists died in crashes during the study period of 1996 to 2005, and nearly 3,500 suffered serious injuries from 1996 through 2003. The number of fatalities has held relatively steady during this period, while serious injuries have fallen significantly (46 percent). New York City’s bicycling death rate per capita is on par with both statewide and national rates, though cycling rates in the city far exceed the national average. A recent survey of New York City residents by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign found that 40 percent of people rate unsafe conditions for bicyclists as a major problem, with an additional 24 percent saying bicycle safety is somewhat of a problem.
Among the more interesting, if unsurprising findings is that cyclist deaths occur most often on larger arterials like Manhattan avenues and major cross-town streets and that trucks and other large vehicles are disproportionately involved in fatal bicycling crashes. The study also found that very few fatalities occur in bike lanes, and that a majority of cyclists who died in crashes were not wearing a helmet. These numbers may indicate broad probabilities, but are not accompanied by detailed analysis that establishes causality of death (not all un-helmeted cyclists are killed by head injuries, for example).
The expansion of the city’s bicycle lane network is a welcome prospect. However, unless bike lane designs change to create physical separation from motor vehicles, the action or lack thereof by the Police Dept. is probably what will make or break the overall effort. Existing bicycle lanes in the city are continually driven and parked in by cars and trucks that suffer no legal penalty, and indeed police vehicles appear to disproportionately violate the lanes (visit http://nyc.mybikelane.com to witness numerous examples) . Since the September announcement, this situation has not changed in the slightest. More un-enforced and easily violated bike lanes will probably create only marginal increases in the incidence and safety of NYC cycling.
The prospect of helmet laws is also worrisome. Some helmet mandates have reduced cycling rates and statistics show that cycling crashes are proportionately fewer where high bicycle use is a significant and regular feature on streets. Transportation Alternatives notes that annual cyclist fatalities in New York have indeed declined as cycling rates have climbed. Recent studies have also found that drivers show less caution around helmeted cyclists than those without the headgear.
[Back to Top]
New Yorkers on Bicycling Conditions
"Do you consider unsafe conditions for people on bicycles a major, moderate, or minor problem, or not a problem?”
Tri-State Transportation Campaign opinion poll of 800 New Yorkers on traffic and transportation issues (conducted by Michaels Opinion Research), May-June 2006. Margin of error ± 3.5 percentage points.
[Back to Top]
Rell Breathes New Life into Long-Discussed Bus-way
Governor Jodi Rell announced $4.6 million in state funding for the Hartford-New Britain bus rapid transit project late last month. The funds complement a $7.4 million grant for the project from the U.S. DOT. The state funding is expected to be approved by the State Bond Commission this week.
Connecticut says the money will be used to complete the project’s final design, with construction anticipated to start in 2008, and service up and running by 2012. This time-frame seems ridiculous for a relatively modest project. Hopefully the governor can light a fire under her transportation agency and get the project up and running within her next term of office, if she is re-elected next month. It is not a major subway line, after all.
The total cost of the project, which will create a dedicated bus-way serving 11 stations along both abandoned and active segments of railroad corridors, is $450 million. Governor Rell’s strong support for it will certainly help its chances of obtaining competitive funding from the federal government. In 2005, the project was ranked poorly by the Federal Transit Administration because it viewed state support for the bus-way as thin.
The bus-way will be nearly 10 miles long. It is unclear whether another previously stalled transit-oriented development initiative known as the “New Britain-Hartford Station Area Planning Project” will accompany the now-funded work.
[Back to Top]
NJ DOT's Wittpen Bridge Plan Could Sever Greenway
Planners of the East Coast Greenway, the giant bikeway initiative that aims to span 2,950 miles from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida, have long considered the replacement of the Wittpenn Bridge over the Hackensack River as a key component. However, East Coast Greenway Association (ECGA) members are concerned that NJDOT’s most recent plans for replacing the aging span include only one skinny, six-foot wide shared lane for cyclists and pedestrians.
More immediately for northern NJ cyclists and walkers, the bridge is the only bikeable crossing of the Hackensack in Hudson County — the other local (non-highway) causeway that crosses the river is the Route 1&9 truck route. However, the Wittpenn replacement proposal now downgrades originally planned sidepaths by almost two-thirds, from two eight-foot wide paths. The aim of the revisions appears to be to simply shave construction costs.
But given the bridge’s long life span and the route’s project’s local importance and role in the greenway plan, one six-foot path for cycle and foot traffic is short-sighted and a throwback to 20th Century ghettoization of non-auto travel. Reducing the bicycle/pedestrian component, the DOT will save just $5 million — a pittance relative to the $340 million total cost of the project.
Local mayors, other elected officials, and community activists have joined with ECGA to ask the DOT to move forward with the more generous original plan for the bridge replacement. NJ DOT officials claim they are working to address the issue, but have not officially responded with a formal project revision.
[Back to Top]
Dukes of Suffolk
The September 11 crash of a car and driver into a second-floor apartment, apparently after a high-speed Dukes-of-Hazzard type jump over a berm at the end of a Coram street, made headlines around the world. But unfortunately, it’s not really news that drivers in Suffolk County are out of control.
Every year with grim consistency, Suffolk leads all counties in New York State in traffic-related deaths. In 2005, 164 people died on Suffolk roads.
But it gets worse, comparatively. Suffolk has in fact the deadliest roads not only in New York, but in the entire northeastern United States. To find U.S. counties with more traffic deaths, one has to venture out to areas with extreme car cultures like the Los Angeles, Dallas and Phoenix areas. In per capita terms, Suffolk is the 11th traffic-deadliest large county (over 1 million people) in the country.
The Tri-State Transportation Campaign wrote to Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy in February 2006 to spotlight the problem and to urge him to unite law enforcement agencies across the county to reimpose order on the county’s roads. We received no reply.
[Back to Top]
