ON A CBD PERSONAL CAR BAN: I don't own a car, but I also don't think it's realistic to ban personal cars throughout the entire CBD. The CBD is very large and encompasses many residential neighborhoods. I can conceive of endless special situations where a private car may be nessesary, especially given their necessity outside of city limits. However a personal car ban in the densest business districts, like the financial district or midtown, does make sense. Few actually live there, they are small enough that they can be walked into if one parks outside of the zone, and they are the most likely destination of current personal car commuters. Basically I see a below-60th St car ban as becoming very problematic and contested due to the diverse districts within that large area, while focusing a ban on the commuter districts would be easier to accomplish while achieving the same ends.
ON RECLAIMING PUBLIC RESOURCES: I feel that one of the most obvious and straightforward steps we could take to reduce congestion in the CBD is simply eliminate free on-street parking, as this does nothing but incentivize personal car use while simultaniously wasting public resources and contributing to congestion as drivers circle the block crossing their fingers for a free spot. In fact, I'm of the opinion that ALL business districts in NYC should meter all public parking. I read a study several years back estimating that NYC meters less than 8% of it's on-street parking, and that the city has no official count of on-street parking spots. Let's get an up-to-date census of our 'parking lane' assets and work to meter at least all those spaces outside of residential zones, perhaps keeping them somewhat pricier than commerical parking garages in order to incentivize the use of off-street parking first. Almost every street in the CBD currently loses two lanes of traffic to publicly-subsidized parking, not only is that a counter-productive incentive, it is also an unfair use of public resources. I should add: Google tells me that the average price per square foot of real estate in midtown east is currently $1,367. If the footprint of a 12 ft x 6 ft vehicle is 72 square feet, parking it on the street in midtown makes free, sedentary use $98,424 worth of property.
I don't use cabs to get to and from work in the CBD, although looking out at the street from my office window it's very obvious that many do! In all honesty though, when looking at traffic holistically (Commercial vehicles, personal cars, busses, cabs) I don't consider cabs to be high on the list of egregious contributors to congestion seeing as they can and do absolutely fill in the 'missing links' of our transit system. A lot of UWS and UES residents take taxis to work in midtown to avoid the nightmare of congestion on the 123 / 456 subways at rush hour and because at that brief distance the cost is reasonable. My girlfriend and I take cabs home within Brooklyn whenever we're out late with friends so that we don't have to wait inebriated on a subway platform. The sick and elderly take cabs to their appointments. I feel that with the reality of a congested public transit system, cabs are great at efficiently filling in the 'gaps', without having to worry so much about where they'll be parked when not in use, because the beauty of it is that they're always in use. We have larger offenders to worry about than cabs.
That said, there is room for improvement. 1) The number of cabs should absolutely be capped, not at an arbitrary low number meant to keep taxi medallions valuable, but at a number that ensures all cabbies will always have a hail to pick up, preventing the system from becoming saturated and from cabbies circling the block without a fare. 2) All cabs should be linked into an e-hail system so that cabbies can be aware of nearby fares and not have to hunt for them 3) All cabs should have the ability to enter payment information en-route to avoid delays upon arrival.
Rail freight to Brooklyn / Queens is the obvious long term solution to NYC freight congestion. We're one of the only major cities that doesn't feature rail freight infrastructure and that's why our crossings are crowded with loud, polluting 18-wheelers. We absolutely need a rail route for shipments onto Long Island, and since shipping companies stand to benefit greatly from such an addition I believe that they should be identified and approached to contribute funds to such an endevour, to help defray costs to the public.
But there is still the issue of last-mile delivery, which rail freight does not address. Besides the daily movement of freight trucks through Manhattan, there is also the constant influx of local deliveries that is essentially the life blood of many NYC industries. Some large buildings are lucky enough to have private loading docks for these deliveries, but for the vast majority of businesses there is no accomodation, leading to this forced gray area of double-parking that you see on every Manhattan street at almost all hours. There is a VERY simple solution to this!: Paint a 50-foot stretch of yellow parking lane on every block as a 'loading area'. Ban long-term parking in this zone, be clear that it is only to be used for deliveries, and that deliveries on that block can ONLY be done from that zone. Half hour time limit. Fines for double parking on streets with an available loading zone should themselves be doubled. We have no guidance in place, no infrastructure for local deliveries and that is in my opinion grossly irresponsible. This would be guidance.
I'm going to say something critical and unpopular. Ready? OK: For all their recent self-horn tooting and back-patting, the NYC DOT's creation of new bike infrastructure has overall been disappointingly unenthusiastic, woefully inadequate, and frustratingly incomplete. Previous NYC DOT commissioner Sadik-Khan truly was a champion of cycling and her dedication at least set us on course in the right direction, but the reality is that today our cycling network lags embarrassingly behind many far less capable cities, and to cycle our bike lanes is to experience what it's like to be unwanted or worse, forgotten.
NYC DOT NEEDS TO THINK OF BIKE INFRASTRUCTURE FROM A HOLISTIC 'WHOLE NETWORK' POINT OF VIEW: As a cyclist and cycling advocate the constant, seemingly manufactured controversy around the small amount of space that cyclists have tentatively carved out for themselves on NYC streets irks me to no end. The discussion should not be about how much space cyclists get, or 'picking the right streets', or let alone if it's even worth it to give them anything. The discussion should be about how to achieve cycling parity: 1 to 1 coverage of roads and bike lanes across the city. I do not at all consider it radical that anything less should be seen as a noncommittal half-measure. If we really are serious about congestion, about pollution, and about public health then it should not be unreasonable to assume that if you want to cycle from any point A to any point B within the city that you can, and that the DOT will have your back with the right kind of supportive infrastructure for the entire trip - The same luxury that they give those car owners that we are trying so hard to disincentivize. Network completion is a huge issue for NYC cyclists. We should not be carefully selecting single avenues to potentially grace with a model bike lane, while the surrounding connections remain inaccessible to those concerned about their safety. NYC DOT has been focused on singular, large lanes like the Manhattan avenues, the West Side Highway and the East River crossings. But what happens before and after these stretches? You're often on your own. NYC DOT needs to be just as focused on a holistic, network-based approach to bike infrastructure as it is to their high-profile avenue redesigns, because without the entire network being connected it's, well, not a network. It's a collection of useless straws that fades away into disuse, while motorists look out their window at the grand capital bike lane and complain that the DOT has forgotten about them in favor of this lane that no one's using.
NYC DOT UNDERSTANDS QUANTITY, NOW NEEDS TO FOCUS ON QUALITY: NYC DOT loves to point to their rate of new bike lane creation, currently at 50 miles per year and 200 miles over the past 3 as the brief to the left mentions. That sounds great on it's own, until you consider that this doesn't put them on schedule to get bike infrastructure onto all 6,000+ miles of NYC streets for at least 120 more years, and that they include any and all bike considerations in their mileage counts. So sharrows - Those arrows with a bike above them that you see painted in some car lanes - and on-street painted lanes, are both included in those totals. NYC DOT does not conform to federal recommendations when painting either of these elements (The sharrows are painted on the side of the lane instead of the center, defeating part of their purpose, while on-street lanes are in the potentially lethal 'door zone', are a few feet too narrow and not buffered from motor traffic). These unprotected measures comprise the vast majority of 'new mileage' rolled out recently by the DOT, and the number of sharrows as a percentage of 'new mileage' has been rapidly and worryingly increasing over the past few years. This can perhaps be thought of as actual new milage, but it is not meaningful mileage, since unprotected infrastructure of this sort is not anywhere near as effective at getting new cyclists on the road as protected infrastructure is. A painted bike lane on a 3-lane road is not going to protect a cyclist from being hit by a motor vehicle or an improperly opened car door. Sharrows are not going to stop an inattentive motorist from running a cyclist down in the middle of the lane. These are things that mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, girlfriends, and just about anyone else who isn't a young male vehicular cyclists are worried about when they consider getting on a bike. As a result the bike culture in NYC is still primarily young and male-dominated, is high speed and is associated with sweat and sport. I could not picture my own father or mother riding a bike in New York City, they would die if they didn't simply quit due to the confusion, exhaustion and worry. And that's not OK. NYC DOT needs to re-double their pace on bike lane expansion and get aggressive about real street re-designs that actively protect cyclists from things that cyclists should not have to worry about. Put parking between bike lanes and car lanes. Experiment with bike-only streets. Experiment with new West Side Highway-style routes engineered specifically for bikes and bikes alone! Sharrows are not the answer, and do not solve any problems.
LIFE SAVING MEASURES SHOULD NOT BE AT THE MERCY OF COMMUNITY BOARD ZEALOTRY: NYC DOT is not required to answer to anyone other than the mayor (And perhaps the state?) in their planning and operations. But is has become their tradition, as a courtesy to the communities that they serve, to present street re-design plans to the communities they would affect at community board meetings and take the comments from those meetings into strong consideration before moving forward. This is a good idea overall, as it allows them to discover concerns they may not have previously been privy to, and adjust plans to counter any unexpected blowback. In reality however, this process often halts life-saving redesigns altogether, in particular any plan that includes a bike lane. Community board transportation committees are often composed of two or three appointed (unelected) reps, sitting for life, who have weaseled themselves into their positions specifically to vehemently defend their perceived right to free on-street parking at all costs. These committee members have no power on paper, but in reality they can and repeatedly have nixed bike lane proposals completely. NYC DOT, committed to community engagement, has thus become sheepish and shy about presenting grandiose bike lane plans and in recent years has adopted a strategy of "Roll out underwhelming redesign, unofficially promise to come back and improve it later", which usually translates to doing the first half and then never doing the second due to the staling effects of time. They are afraid to be seen as a sort of ironic Robert Moses, forcing bikes on the unwilling masses. But the masses, it turns out, are clamoring for bike infrastructure and these few stubborn individuals are being allowed to decide the fate of dozens of cyclist who would be alive today had the DOT not been willing to listen to inane demands when lives are at stake. Suggestion: When infrastructure changes are are proposed specifically for safety, they should not be allowed to be compromised by the demands of a few community board members.
TL;DR:- 1:1 motor:bike lane parity city-wide!- Real infrastructure, not painted infrastructure.- Re-evaluate community board planning policies
Here's something to consider. Ticketing cyclists who go through red lights and pedestrians who jaywalk: What would this do to improve gridlock? If you ask me, nothing. How much does jaywalking actually slow down cars that are going the speed limit? How does preventing cyclists from running red lights speed up traffic, realistically if at all? Jaywalking and Idaho stopping (The practice of treating a red light like a stop sign on a bike) don't seem like actual crimes to me, they seem like inevitable symptoms / behaviors of an urban infrastructure that prioritizes modes of travel in the wrong order. Pedestrians take up the least room, pollute the least and are the squishiest, therefore they should be king. Cyclists are a close second. Cars are very large, pollute a lot and for legal purposes are considered to be weapons. The modes should be prioritized in this order, but our infrastructure prioritizes them in the other direction, and a lack of enforcement leads to an anarchist power hierarchy - Everybody is forced to yield to the car doing whatever it wants because it will kill you otherwise, and the cars generally DO do what they want because they know they can get away with it. I cannot blame pedestrians for crossing whenever they see the road is clear (And no that no one will ignore their right of way and mow them down with a right hook) or cyclists for blowing a light rather than wait to start at the same time as all the motorists who would just as soon see them dead. I think that jaywalking and cyclists running reds should be a very, VERY low priority for traffic enforcement, so much so that I consider almost any ticketing of these two groups to be an egregious theft of resources from an effort to ticket motor vehicles.
ON A CBD PERSONAL CAR BAN: I don't own a car, but I also don't think it's realistic to ban personal cars throughout the entire CBD. The CBD is very large and encompasses many residential neighborhoods. I can conceive of endless special situations where a private car may be nessesary, especially given their necessity outside of city limits. However a personal car ban in the densest business districts, like the financial district or midtown, does make sense. Few actually live there, they are small enough that they can be walked into if one parks outside of the zone, and they are the most likely destination of current personal car commuters. Basically I see a below-60th St car ban as becoming very problematic and contested due to the diverse districts within that large area, while focusing a ban on the commuter districts would be easier to accomplish while achieving the same ends.
ON RECLAIMING PUBLIC RESOURCES: I feel that one of the most obvious and straightforward steps we could take to reduce congestion in the CBD is simply eliminate free on-street parking, as this does nothing but incentivize personal car use while simultaniously wasting public resources and contributing to congestion as drivers circle the block crossing their fingers for a free spot. In fact, I'm of the opinion that ALL business districts in NYC should meter all public parking. I read a study several years back estimating that NYC meters less than 8% of it's on-street parking, and that the city has no official count of on-street parking spots. Let's get an up-to-date census of our 'parking lane' assets and work to meter at least all those spaces outside of residential zones, perhaps keeping them somewhat pricier than commerical parking garages in order to incentivize the use of off-street parking first. Almost every street in the CBD currently loses two lanes of traffic to publicly-subsidized parking, not only is that a counter-productive incentive, it is also an unfair use of public resources. I should add: Google tells me that the average price per square foot of real estate in midtown east is currently $1,367. If the footprint of a 12 ft x 6 ft vehicle is 72 square feet, parking it on the street in midtown makes free, sedentary use $98,424 worth of property.
View this comment in the discussion thread
I don't use cabs to get to and from work in the CBD, although looking out at the street from my office window it's very obvious that many do! In all honesty though, when looking at traffic holistically (Commercial vehicles, personal cars, busses, cabs) I don't consider cabs to be high on the list of egregious contributors to congestion seeing as they can and do absolutely fill in the 'missing links' of our transit system. A lot of UWS and UES residents take taxis to work in midtown to avoid the nightmare of congestion on the 123 / 456 subways at rush hour and because at that brief distance the cost is reasonable. My girlfriend and I take cabs home within Brooklyn whenever we're out late with friends so that we don't have to wait inebriated on a subway platform. The sick and elderly take cabs to their appointments. I feel that with the reality of a congested public transit system, cabs are great at efficiently filling in the 'gaps', without having to worry so much about where they'll be parked when not in use, because the beauty of it is that they're always in use. We have larger offenders to worry about than cabs.
That said, there is room for improvement. 1) The number of cabs should absolutely be capped, not at an arbitrary low number meant to keep taxi medallions valuable, but at a number that ensures all cabbies will always have a hail to pick up, preventing the system from becoming saturated and from cabbies circling the block without a fare. 2) All cabs should be linked into an e-hail system so that cabbies can be aware of nearby fares and not have to hunt for them 3) All cabs should have the ability to enter payment information en-route to avoid delays upon arrival.
View this comment in the discussion thread
Rail freight to Brooklyn / Queens is the obvious long term solution to NYC freight congestion. We're one of the only major cities that doesn't feature rail freight infrastructure and that's why our crossings are crowded with loud, polluting 18-wheelers. We absolutely need a rail route for shipments onto Long Island, and since shipping companies stand to benefit greatly from such an addition I believe that they should be identified and approached to contribute funds to such an endevour, to help defray costs to the public.
But there is still the issue of last-mile delivery, which rail freight does not address. Besides the daily movement of freight trucks through Manhattan, there is also the constant influx of local deliveries that is essentially the life blood of many NYC industries. Some large buildings are lucky enough to have private loading docks for these deliveries, but for the vast majority of businesses there is no accomodation, leading to this forced gray area of double-parking that you see on every Manhattan street at almost all hours. There is a VERY simple solution to this!: Paint a 50-foot stretch of yellow parking lane on every block as a 'loading area'. Ban long-term parking in this zone, be clear that it is only to be used for deliveries, and that deliveries on that block can ONLY be done from that zone. Half hour time limit. Fines for double parking on streets with an available loading zone should themselves be doubled. We have no guidance in place, no infrastructure for local deliveries and that is in my opinion grossly irresponsible. This would be guidance.
View this comment in the discussion thread
I'm going to say something critical and unpopular. Ready? OK: For all their recent self-horn tooting and back-patting, the NYC DOT's creation of new bike infrastructure has overall been disappointingly unenthusiastic, woefully inadequate, and frustratingly incomplete. Previous NYC DOT commissioner Sadik-Khan truly was a champion of cycling and her dedication at least set us on course in the right direction, but the reality is that today our cycling network lags embarrassingly behind many far less capable cities, and to cycle our bike lanes is to experience what it's like to be unwanted or worse, forgotten.
NYC DOT NEEDS TO THINK OF BIKE INFRASTRUCTURE FROM A HOLISTIC 'WHOLE NETWORK' POINT OF VIEW: As a cyclist and cycling advocate the constant, seemingly manufactured controversy around the small amount of space that cyclists have tentatively carved out for themselves on NYC streets irks me to no end. The discussion should not be about how much space cyclists get, or 'picking the right streets', or let alone if it's even worth it to give them anything. The discussion should be about how to achieve cycling parity: 1 to 1 coverage of roads and bike lanes across the city. I do not at all consider it radical that anything less should be seen as a noncommittal half-measure. If we really are serious about congestion, about pollution, and about public health then it should not be unreasonable to assume that if you want to cycle from any point A to any point B within the city that you can, and that the DOT will have your back with the right kind of supportive infrastructure for the entire trip - The same luxury that they give those car owners that we are trying so hard to disincentivize. Network completion is a huge issue for NYC cyclists. We should not be carefully selecting single avenues to potentially grace with a model bike lane, while the surrounding connections remain inaccessible to those concerned about their safety. NYC DOT has been focused on singular, large lanes like the Manhattan avenues, the West Side Highway and the East River crossings. But what happens before and after these stretches? You're often on your own. NYC DOT needs to be just as focused on a holistic, network-based approach to bike infrastructure as it is to their high-profile avenue redesigns, because without the entire network being connected it's, well, not a network. It's a collection of useless straws that fades away into disuse, while motorists look out their window at the grand capital bike lane and complain that the DOT has forgotten about them in favor of this lane that no one's using.
NYC DOT UNDERSTANDS QUANTITY, NOW NEEDS TO FOCUS ON QUALITY: NYC DOT loves to point to their rate of new bike lane creation, currently at 50 miles per year and 200 miles over the past 3 as the brief to the left mentions. That sounds great on it's own, until you consider that this doesn't put them on schedule to get bike infrastructure onto all 6,000+ miles of NYC streets for at least 120 more years, and that they include any and all bike considerations in their mileage counts. So sharrows - Those arrows with a bike above them that you see painted in some car lanes - and on-street painted lanes, are both included in those totals. NYC DOT does not conform to federal recommendations when painting either of these elements (The sharrows are painted on the side of the lane instead of the center, defeating part of their purpose, while on-street lanes are in the potentially lethal 'door zone', are a few feet too narrow and not buffered from motor traffic). These unprotected measures comprise the vast majority of 'new mileage' rolled out recently by the DOT, and the number of sharrows as a percentage of 'new mileage' has been rapidly and worryingly increasing over the past few years. This can perhaps be thought of as actual new milage, but it is not meaningful mileage, since unprotected infrastructure of this sort is not anywhere near as effective at getting new cyclists on the road as protected infrastructure is. A painted bike lane on a 3-lane road is not going to protect a cyclist from being hit by a motor vehicle or an improperly opened car door. Sharrows are not going to stop an inattentive motorist from running a cyclist down in the middle of the lane. These are things that mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, girlfriends, and just about anyone else who isn't a young male vehicular cyclists are worried about when they consider getting on a bike. As a result the bike culture in NYC is still primarily young and male-dominated, is high speed and is associated with sweat and sport. I could not picture my own father or mother riding a bike in New York City, they would die if they didn't simply quit due to the confusion, exhaustion and worry. And that's not OK. NYC DOT needs to re-double their pace on bike lane expansion and get aggressive about real street re-designs that actively protect cyclists from things that cyclists should not have to worry about. Put parking between bike lanes and car lanes. Experiment with bike-only streets. Experiment with new West Side Highway-style routes engineered specifically for bikes and bikes alone! Sharrows are not the answer, and do not solve any problems.
LIFE SAVING MEASURES SHOULD NOT BE AT THE MERCY OF COMMUNITY BOARD ZEALOTRY: NYC DOT is not required to answer to anyone other than the mayor (And perhaps the state?) in their planning and operations. But is has become their tradition, as a courtesy to the communities that they serve, to present street re-design plans to the communities they would affect at community board meetings and take the comments from those meetings into strong consideration before moving forward. This is a good idea overall, as it allows them to discover concerns they may not have previously been privy to, and adjust plans to counter any unexpected blowback. In reality however, this process often halts life-saving redesigns altogether, in particular any plan that includes a bike lane. Community board transportation committees are often composed of two or three appointed (unelected) reps, sitting for life, who have weaseled themselves into their positions specifically to vehemently defend their perceived right to free on-street parking at all costs. These committee members have no power on paper, but in reality they can and repeatedly have nixed bike lane proposals completely. NYC DOT, committed to community engagement, has thus become sheepish and shy about presenting grandiose bike lane plans and in recent years has adopted a strategy of "Roll out underwhelming redesign, unofficially promise to come back and improve it later", which usually translates to doing the first half and then never doing the second due to the staling effects of time. They are afraid to be seen as a sort of ironic Robert Moses, forcing bikes on the unwilling masses. But the masses, it turns out, are clamoring for bike infrastructure and these few stubborn individuals are being allowed to decide the fate of dozens of cyclist who would be alive today had the DOT not been willing to listen to inane demands when lives are at stake. Suggestion: When infrastructure changes are are proposed specifically for safety, they should not be allowed to be compromised by the demands of a few community board members.
TL;DR:- 1:1 motor:bike lane parity city-wide!- Real infrastructure, not painted infrastructure.- Re-evaluate community board planning policies
View this comment in the discussion thread
Here's something to consider. Ticketing cyclists who go through red lights and pedestrians who jaywalk: What would this do to improve gridlock? If you ask me, nothing. How much does jaywalking actually slow down cars that are going the speed limit? How does preventing cyclists from running red lights speed up traffic, realistically if at all? Jaywalking and Idaho stopping (The practice of treating a red light like a stop sign on a bike) don't seem like actual crimes to me, they seem like inevitable symptoms / behaviors of an urban infrastructure that prioritizes modes of travel in the wrong order. Pedestrians take up the least room, pollute the least and are the squishiest, therefore they should be king. Cyclists are a close second. Cars are very large, pollute a lot and for legal purposes are considered to be weapons. The modes should be prioritized in this order, but our infrastructure prioritizes them in the other direction, and a lack of enforcement leads to an anarchist power hierarchy - Everybody is forced to yield to the car doing whatever it wants because it will kill you otherwise, and the cars generally DO do what they want because they know they can get away with it. I cannot blame pedestrians for crossing whenever they see the road is clear (And no that no one will ignore their right of way and mow them down with a right hook) or cyclists for blowing a light rather than wait to start at the same time as all the motorists who would just as soon see them dead. I think that jaywalking and cyclists running reds should be a very, VERY low priority for traffic enforcement, so much so that I consider almost any ticketing of these two groups to be an egregious theft of resources from an effort to ticket motor vehicles.
View this comment in the discussion thread