Walking Is Transportation

Congestion Pricing, Take 2

Our house at the corner of St. Marks Place and Westervelt Avenue, St. George, Staten Island, N.Y., Thanksgiving Day, 2007

Resurrecting an old idea (and maybe a better one)

[I'm convinced that no matter which form the Feds decide to fund and the city finally adopts, Congestion Pricing will be a major benefit to pedestrians and walkers--and all New Yorkers. Not only because it'll generate the revenues needed to pay for expansion of and improvements to New York City's public transit system, but because it will make our streets safer and more pleasant for all those who use them.]

In a November 12, 2007 editorial in the Daily News, veteran transportation consultant Brian Ketcham proposes to base Mayor Bloomberg's Congestion Pricing (CP) proposal on an idea that planners, politicians and transportation activists have been yakking about for decades.

"Charging cars and trucks to get into the central business district makes perfect sense," Ketcham says, "but the rest of [Mayor Bloomberg's] scheme would be a logistical nightmare," requiring "costly administration and enforcement" and "adding little revenue."

Calling the mayor's existing CP proposal "needlessly complex," Ketcham advises the mayor to "ditch the elaborate detection grid"--"a full-scale network with 340 charging stations on Manhattan streets south of 86th St."--and replace it with a system that would "close the loophole of the four untolled East River bridges in Brooklyn and Queens."

Take 2: An alternate Congestion Pricing plan

Ketcham proposes the city install overhead charging monitors on the six inbound bridge spans and set the congestion fee so that there's no unfair difference between any CP charge and regular MTA tolls.

He would also install 19 toll collection stations that would, he says, eliminate the free ride now enjoyed by those who enter the central business district from starting points north of 60th Street.

And that's not all.

Paying for the right to occupy prime real estate

Ketcham also recommends the city "eliminate all free and long-term street parking and charge hefty garage rates at on-street meters." Such a pricing recommendation brings the cost of street parking into line with what Manhattan parking lots and garages charge and substantially boosts potential revenue.

But market-based pricing offers benefits that may be even more important. This alternate CP proposal sends the message that bringing a private car into one of the most congested sectors in the country isn't a basic human right; that streets are public spaces that must be shared; that automobiles can't continue to dictate who uses the street and how.

All in all, I think Ketcham's proposal makes a lot of sense. It's easier and less costly to implement and maintain; it makes the cost of entering the central business district by car more equitable (drivers pay the same, no matter how they get there). Ketcham's research shows that closing the various loopholes also eliminates more cars and yields more revenue than the mayor's existing CP plan.

I hope Ketcham's proposal gets the serious consideration--by the New York City Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission, among others--that it deserves.

Two trips to the same place--one by bus, one by car

LURE OF THE SHELVES: The fiction section, ETG Book Gallery, Tompkinsville, Staten Island, November, 2007

AN IMPROMPTU TRANSPORTATION-MODE COMPARISON

I've been living car-free for 15 years now. But that doesn't mean I've forgotten what it's like to finance, insure, maintain, repair and drive a car in New York. If I needed a reminder, the week so far has provided the perfect one: two trips to the same place, one by public bus, the other by private car.

Here's the story:

Last night, a friend offered me a ride to the opening of an art show at the College of Staten Island (CSI). The show was hung in a ground-floor gallery in the same building where, two nights earlier, I testified in favor of Congestion Pricing at a hearing called by the NYC Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission. I'd gotten to the hearing, and back, by public transportation. The situation practically demanded a comparison.

From bus . . . to bus . . . to bus

To reach the hearing two nights earlier, on Monday, November 5, I took three buses--two public ones and one operated by CSI. On the main part of the trip--west, I think--on Victory Boulevard, a 4:30 bus was packed, but it moved at a reasonably good clip, and before too long I got a seat. When I got off at the campus stop, I walked to a waiting college-operated bus parked nearby. Soon I was inside the college auditorium, seated and reviewing my notes. The crowded but otherwise uneventful trip had taken me an hour, door to door.

The trip home was the same thing in reverse. The only negative I have to report is that, both coming and going, the wait for the Victory Boulevard bus was longer than I anticipated. I made the other connections fine; still, the 7- to 10-minute wait surprised me. On a bitter cold night, that long a wait could give even the most rabid mass transit advocate second thoughts.

Last night's trip by car was 20 minutes shorter than the trip two nights earlier by bus. But faster isn't always better.

Familiar and surreal

The first part of the car trip, on local streets, was slow but steady. Once my friend turned from local onto the Martin Luther King Expressway (440, I think), everything changed. We had been talking in a pretty animated way about neighborhood stuff and so it took me a minute to realize how dramatically our speed had slowed.

Outside my car window was a scene both familiar and surreal--cars, cars and more cars, ahead, behind, on overhead ramps, on the other side of the median, most inching toward the exit ramp like sand-grains in a funnel, descending in slow motion.

And in an instant, it all came back to me, this tense ballet I used to take part in as a driver, negotiating, maneuvering, alert to opportunity, contesting every inch. My friend, in most circumstances a genial sort, cursed and complained, honked and sighed and continued his rant in the parking lot, where we joined the competition for a parking space, circling the chariots, ready to pounce on any vacancy.

Two nights before, the college bus deposited me just outside the building where the hearing was to be held. Last night, after finally finding a spot in the designated parking lot, we discovered that the designated parking lot was one helluva trek from the same building I had reached so easily by the college-operated bus two nights before.

Better than expected

I experience this sort of thing again and again. Public transportation is almost always better than you expect it to be. It's cleaner, faster and more on-time than widely believed or reported--especially by people who seldom use it. And it's a lot cheaper than anything but your two feet.

Sure there are delays and inconveniences due to new construction. But most of the time the system gets you where you need to go in the amount of time you've allocated. People who would rather plan for delays that can be anticipated than complain about them can sign up on the MTA website and receive an advisory every week, detailing the coming weekend's schedule and the bus and subway lines affected. Similar ferry schedule alerts can be arranged on the DOT website.

Facts to counter the not-quite-lies

Public transit advocates have to be more vocal about the misrepresentations of the system so casually tossed around in conversation. The fact is, that system can compete with private cars not only in terms of cost and environmental impact, but as we approach near total gridlock in parts of Manhattan, perhaps even in terms of time.

If these off-the-cuff misrepresentations go unchallenged, they can be accepted as facts and can actually influence policy. And that's why we have to assert strongly what we know to be the truth. For most New Yorkers, most of the time, public transportation works.

What Congestion Pricing could mean for Staten Island(ers)

Decorative gate at the top of one-block-long Pearl Street, Stapleton

NOT JUST FOR COMMUTERS TO MANHATTAN

I'll be attending tomorrow night's (November 5) Staten Island hearing of the New York City Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission at the Williamson Theatre of the College of Staten Island at 6 p.m. The commission will be taking public testimony on the congestion pricing proposal, one of many in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ambitious and visionary PlaNYC.

The proposal would charge private cars $8 to enter the Central Business District (minus any other tolls they may have paid to get there). The proceeds would be devoted to expanding and upgrading mass transit services throughout the city to accommodate the projected increase in ridership that higher tolls and gas prices--and near-gridlock congestion-- would generate.

Those who've followed the arguments for and against Congestion Pricing probably are already familiar with the major points in contention--most but not all of which, in my view, have been manufactured by opponents to obstruct or derail a program model which has proven its viability elsewhere. One of the most vocal in its opposition, unsurprisingly, is a parking lot owners' group and its seeming mouthpiece, Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat.

Following is the testimony I will present:

More vehicles = more congestion = more pollution = more pulmonary and other diseases

Staten Island is New York City's fastest-growing borough, with a mass transit infrastructure and a dispatching frequency utterly inadequate to the needs of our exploding population--one that does nothing to remedy the island's increasingly limited capacity to operate and store the numbers of vehicles we add to the existing number each year.

Expanded mass transit operations are the only solution, and the only source of funding for those operations is the Federal government--provided the city can come up with a plan that can significantly reduce the number of private vehicles entering the Central Business District each weekday. Only Congestion Pricing, or a plan very much like it, holds the promise of delivering on that requirement.

The transit solutions proposed under Congestion Pricing--like the entire transportation system on Staten Island--focus on the needs of weekday commuters to Manhattan. That's a start, but an expanded, enhanced Staten Island transit system must also respond to the needs of the many Staten Islanders who commute to jobs within the borough, do not drive, and depend exclusively on bus operations whose traditional focus has been coordination with the schedule of the Staten Island Ferry.

How to avoid two, three or more cars in every driveway

Staten Island's notoriously poor bus service practically guarantees that, as soon as they can, islanders abandon the bus, one of the most efficient transport modes, for the private automobile, the least efficient and most polluting. We need service that's so good, and such a good value, that people will want to leave their cars at home and walk to the bus stop or the railway station--whether they're commuting to Manhattan, shopping in New Springville, or visiting family in Grasmere. Congestion Pricing can start to move us toward that goal.

Poor bus transit, more than any other factor, actually promotes two- and three-car households, and the health problems, congestion, pollution, lost time and lost productivity that adding more population and more cars inevitably brings about. Over time, Congestion Pricing can help to bring Staten Island's use of mass transit more in line with that of the other boroughs.

Congestion pricing NOW

This New York City borough is, or soon will be, built out. Building new major roadways is simply not an option. Widening existing roads to accommodate increased traffic, where feasible, is really just a Band-Aid. Only a major investment in our mass transportation infrastructure can help us reduce congestion, improve air quality, better accommodate our current transportation needs and better prepare for the increased demand we all know is coming. That major investment will come only from the Feds and only if the plan submitted can meet their requirements. That plan is Congestion Pricing.

Thank you.

How wide can a Greenway stretch?

Many thanks to Beng, who lives in Manhattan and commutes to work in Brooklyn on foot and on bike, for a recent comment that broadens our discussion about walkway/bikeway congestion and safety, to include the Hudson River Greenway.

How, Beng asks in effect, do we keep Greenways safe for all users as these facilities become more and more crowded? Not only with walkers, cyclists, joggers, skaters and runners, but also with distracted, sometimes clueless tourists, as well as those who use the walkway simply to get somewhere else on the riverfront––to a scheduled event on an adjacent pier, for example?

Beng's in-effect questions beget more questions. Here are a few of mine:

Can an increasing number of uses, and users, be accommodated in such a limited space? Are small fixes like clearer, bigger signage sufficient to create order and prevent accidents? Or is physical separation of walkers, joggers and runners from wheeled transport the only way, as another reader firmly believes?

Your views?

The perils of walking to work via the Brooklyn Bridge

I'm grateful to attorney Ellen Bate, who wrote to me, pointing out that I haven't discussed a major part of many people's walking routines, and that's Walking to Work.

Long working hours and other limitations, Ellen writes, can make walking seem "a lot like a luxury for many working stiffs like me. If one doesn't live close . . . to the workplace or have a . . . flexible schedule, it isn't always possible to . . . walk. I have the advantage of living just over the Brooklyn Bridge from where I work, and I walk home most days with lots of other pedestrian commuters."

But like me, Ellen Bate has been finding the Brooklyn Bridge a less than ideal route of late--at least for someone with a fixed schedule, a fixed destination, and a living to earn.

"[The bridge walkway is often crowded] during the evening rush hour," she writes. "During the tourist season (which seems to be all the time now), it is much worse. I have . . . been injured, trying to avoid people who cannot figure out that there is one lane for bicyclists and one for pedestrians." Another of Ellen's complaints: "people on cell phones (who) cannot walk and talk at the same time." Yea, verily, to both.

Given the growing number of people who are switching to alternative forms of transportation, it's past time for NYC's Department of Transportation to get more aggressive about order and safety on the city's bridges, greenways and walkways.

How about signage that's larger, clearer, and not painted on walking/riding surfaces, where it wears off fast? Why not more clearly defined (and, if necessary, separated) areas for wheeled transport and another for walkers, runners and joggers? And clear guidance as to appropriate behavior:

--Look to see who's coming, before entering another lane
--Look to see who's behind you, before stopping
--Walking two and three abreast on a crowded walkway is inconsiderate; it can even be dangerous

Any others you'd like to add?

Reward those who use low-impact transport; penalize those who don't

Certain parts of Manhattan--Times Square, Herald Square, Broadway south of 23rd Street, and locations in the outer boroughs as well--suffer from sidewalk spillover. That's what happens when sidewalks are too narrow to accommodate everyone who has to use them, forcing pedestrians into the roadway.

On certain streets, sidewalk spillover is inevitable, an everyday occurrence. It's the direct result of policies and planning--long in effect and only now being challenged--that favor the rights of drivers over pedestrians.

But to mount an effective challenge to these policies, we shouldn't just call for greater equity. That would be like saying that all forms of transportation have equivalent impact on the community and should be assigned more equal portions of public street-space.

But the impacts are in no way equivalent. We know that public and alternative forms of transportation like walking, bicycling and skating are healthier, cheaper, more efficient and more business-friendly than private cars. Our transportation policy should reflect that awareness.

We should be rewarding those who use low-impact forms of transportation and penalizing those who insist on using private transit--cars--that foul our air and turn neighborhood streets into highways and parking lots. And those rewards should be made tangible in street design--specifically, in the way space is allocated to various forms of transportation on high-traffic streets.

Where SUVs dare not go

WHERE SUVs DARE NOT GO

It had been a few years since I'd had a business meeting in midtown Manhattan (most clients--ad and corporate ID shops--had long since moved downtown). So I was unprepared for how much worse congestion has gotten in the central business district in a relatively short span of time.

Coming up out of the subway (East Side IRT--#6 train) at 51st and Lexington, I was hit by the predictable wall of noise from air-conditioners, jackhammers, and a thousand cars idling. One block east, at the corner of 50th and Third, all was chaos. Police and ambulance sirens wailing; car, truck and taxi drivers honking incessantly; no movement anywhere, any way. Here was the future: a major metropolitan thoroughfare transformed into a hot, noisy, smelly and decidedly unhealthy parking lot.

Tellingly, only pedestrians were actually getting anywhere in the roadway. But only because, in frustration, we were willing to insert ourselves, David vs. Goliath, in front of red-hot limousine grilles and idling bus exhaust pipes in order to reach the safety of the sidewalk on the other side.

This was a reversal of the terms of the typical driver/pedestrian interaction. Usually, if you fail to defer to the greater heft and horsepower of his machine (versus your pathetic little body), the driver will wait for you to cross the street and then take off in a huff, hitting you with a blast of noxious exhaust as a parting shot.

Despite the scary implications of a traffic dead-stop, it was a delicious experience, being able to go where wannabe Hummer SUVs could not.