Walking Is Transportation

HOW TO TAKE THE BUS

     Recessionary wheels:
The bike and the bus on Richmond Terrace
St. George, Staten Island

January, 2009

'TAKING THE BUS,'
IT TURNS OUT,
IS A METAPHOR

This is not a post about taking the bus. That's the post I meant to write all right--full of helpful stuff about Google maps, schedules, trip-planning and fares.

But the more I wrote of that post, the more it had the sound of whistling in the dark, or the sound of a fiddle being played as Rome burns--'Rome' in this case being our planet, of course. All at once, 'taking the bus' seemed to be about something much larger than mass transit.

So then, switching to a more earnest tone, I started to write about taking the bus (or the train, ferry or other public conveyance) as a plea for improved air quality, public health and citizen access to publicly owned streets and roadways.

TOO NICE

But that approach seemed too nice, not urgent enough for a time of accelerating environmental degradation (as well as accelerating degradation of the economy, of the infrastructure, and of the social safety net).

My final effort, a commentary on Public Transportation and Socioeconomic Class, stated some obvious truths about middle-class resistance to using mass transit. But it was too dark and too critical in tone to be particularly helpful.

What I haven't done so far--and will try to do now--is to say what I mean: We have to change the way we live.

EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE

That old R&B song title has a very contemporary ring.

But the change we most need isn't the easy stuff, like recycling or installing energy-efficient lightbulbs or buying only local produce and so eating only what's in season.

The 'everything' that must change is harder and more fundamental. It's in how we think, which influences our choices, our decisions, our actions. It's way too late to indulge what I consider unsustainable thinking. Here's a three-part example of the kind of thinking I'm talking about:

•The assumption that, by definition, all growth is good.
•The conviction that freedom is the ultimate social and economic principle.
•Rejection of the notion of shared or social responsibility.

I'll have more to say on this topic in a forthcoming post, possibly the next one.

Sign of the Times in The Times

Wall of masks in the hallway outside my office.

HIGH GAS PRICES SPUR CHANGES IN DRIVER BEHAVIOR

Weird weather couldn't make drivers cut down on their gas consumption. Nor could stern lectures or hand-wringing or despairing newspaper editorials. And unbelievably, only weeks ago, the New York State Assembly turned its back on $354 million in mass transit (congestion pricing pilot program) funding because it couldn't face the hard work of legislative negotiation and compromise required to secure the funding from the Feds.

But all that seems to have changed, and overnight. In front page stories dated May 10, both the New York Times and the Staten Island Advance reported that drivers they'd interviewed said high prices--low, $3.81; high $3.93 on Staten Island--were forcing them to change their driving patterns and behavior, including the choice of nearby vacation destinations over those farther away.

Some said they were doing more walking. Some described buying just enough gas to get them over the bridge to New Jersey, where prices at the pump are lower. Others reported they now thought twice about making even relatively short local trips because of the need to conserve fuel. And some were even taking the bus.

The problem is that these changes in behavior are driven by market forces, not policy or legislation. So that if oil prices were suddenly to moderate their seemingly inexorable rise or even decline, there's little reason to believe that drivers wouldn't revert to their old profligate ways.

I was pleased to see that, after Hillary Clinton jumped on John McCain's gas tax holiday bandwagon, Barack Obama rightly called the proposal a gimmick and a distraction from the need to craft an energy policy that works.

NYSDOT Public Forum: Beating the Drums for Funds

TOO MUCH SUNSHINE?

Maybe we've taken the Sunshine Law a little too much to heart. Perhaps there are meetings of various agencies of government that it's pointless for someone outside of government to attend. The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) public forum held Wednesday, March 5 at the College of Staten Island was that kind of assembly.

The topical, uh, springboard for the forum--which included a roundtable discussion among a panel of government officials, transportation professionals, and civic leaders--was a presentation entitled "Multimodal Investment Needs & Goals for the Future" in print and Power Point formats.

Basically, the presentation is a pitch for additional transportation funding from the Feds. The goals are to accommodate significant projected local population growth, and to respond more aggressively to seriously deteriorated infrastructure and inadequate public transit services statewide.

PA? MTA?––NOT!

The presentation, delivered by NYSDOT commissioner Astrid C. Glynn and New York Metropolitan Transportation Council Executive Director Joel Ettinger, included the rather startling announcement that the presentation did not include consideration of the services, facilities or operations of either the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Huh? Why invite the public, when the transportation services we use most are outside the bounds of consideration and, thus, discussion?

Following the presentation there was a completely unfocused and inconclusive roundtable which kept returning to the possible impacts, pro and con, of Congestion Pricing; and the public health disaster that is the Cross Bronx Expressway. If not for the commentary of Jonathan Peters, College of Staten Island Associate Professor of Finance--probably the most informed spokesperson for progressive transportation policy in the borough--the forum could as easily have been held in Far Rockaway or Spuyten Duyvil.

ABSTRACTIONS PREFERRED

And when it came time for the public to speak at this public forum, we were instructed not to address specific projects or policy matters but to speak only in the sort of broad, abstract terms--think 'multi-modal,' 'regional' and 'statewide'--NYSDOT used in its presentation. I spoke of the need for a truly functional Staten Island transportation system--adding that such a system can come about only if we stop thinking of Staten Island mass transit as a commuter service.

One panelist checked her watch. Another barely stifled a yawn. I know there's a lesson here, somewhere . . .

State DOT Public Forum on Staten Island Transportation Needs Tomorrow (Wednesday) Night

DON'T BLAME ME

If you're exasperated, as I am, at having to scramble your schedule, with one day's notice, in order to attend what could be an important public hearing, let me assure you, I know the feeling well. Happens all the time.

It's 6:10 p.m. as I write this; the announcement e-mail was received here only hours earlier, at 3:15 p.m. I'm grateful to the Campaign for New York for informing me; I would have heard nothing otherwise.

Here's the e-mail message in its entirety. I will attend and hope as many Staten Islanders as possible will join me.

------------------------------------

NYSDOT TO HOLD PUBLIC FORUM
ON TRANSPORTATION NEEDS IN NEW YORK CITY

Public Meeting and Roundtable Discussion to Focus on Traffic Congestion

New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) Commissioner Astrid C. Glynn will host a forum Wednesday, March 5, in [sic] Staten Island to focus attention on transportation needs in New York City over the next 20 years.

The forum will bve held in the Williamson Theatre at the Center for the Arts, College of Staten Island, 2800 Victory Boulevard. The public meeting will be from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The forum will focus attention on the next authorization of Federal Transportation programs that fund almost half of New York's transportation investments in highways and transit. Commissioner Glynn will oen the public session with a presentation on NYSDOT's 20-Year Needs Assessment and 5-Year Capital Program.

New York Metropolitan Transportation Council Executive Director Joel Ettinger will then follow with an assessment of local impacts. A roundtable discussion by New York transportation experts will then expand on these issues, with a spotlight on the subject of traffic congestion. The panel will be moderated by NYSDOT Chief Engineer Robert Dennison.

Participants include:

•Daniel Albert, President, Queens Independent Living Center; •Linda Baran, President and CEO, Staten Island Chamber of Commerce; •Majora Carter, Executive Director, Sustainable South Bronx; •Cate Contino, Campaign Coordinator, NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign; •Allison de Cerreno, Director, NYU-Wagner Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management; •David Ewing, Eastern Regional Conference, Council of State Governments; •John Galgano, President, CommuterLink ride-matching service; •Josephine Infante, Executive Director, Hunts Point Economic Development Corporation; •Gary LaBarbara, President, Teamsters Joint Council 16; •James McGowan, Honorary Director, New York State division, Automobile Association of America; •Jonathan Peters, Associate Professor of Finance, College of Staten Island; •Sam Schwartz, NY Daily News columnist and president and CEO, Sam Schwartz PLLC.

The roundtable will be followed by a public comment session, giving attendees an opportunity to have a dialogue with the panlists, have questions answered, and raise locally significant transportation issues.

The campus can be reached via several MTA bus routes, including the S62/S92, S61/S91, S44/S94 and S59.

Congestion Pricing, Take 3

Attic window transoms with stained-glass insets, St. George, Staten Island

LATER TODAY, Thursday, January 24, 2008, the New York City Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission will hold hearings in each of the 'outer' boroughs on five plans designed to reduce vehicular congestion in Manhattan's Central Business District while generating revenue for major mass transit improvements citywide.

I have submitted to the Commission written testimony about the plans, which appears later in this entry.

GO AHEAD, CALL ME A FLIP-FLOPPER

I know; I know.

First I supported Mayor Bloomberg's original Congestion Pricing plan and testified in favor of it at a hearing of the New York City Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission (TCMC) late last fall.

But even as one of the plan's ardent supporters, I had to admit it sounded awfully complicated and seemed pretty expensive just to implement.

Then I thought I liked the sound of tolling the East River bridges--a simpler means of discouraging private car commuting into Manhattan's Central Business District. Not only was the bridge tolling plan projected to yield greater income than the mayor's plan; it was also projected to yield greater reductions in traffic congestion as well.

But like the original, this plan had some serious flaws.

The bridge-tolling plan charges for all trips into and out of Manhattan all the time. So it cannot distinguish between trips when traffic is light from trips that occur when congestion is heaviest. And it fails to charge for trips that start and end within Manhattan, where congestion is greatest. Further, how ever unintentionally, the bridge-tolling plan tends to penalize particular classes of drivers and particular locations, some of them small commercial vehicle operators and many of them low- and moderate-income motorists, disproportionately from Upper Manhattan and the Bronx.

I SUPPORT THE ALTERNATIVE CONGESTION PRICING PLAN

Of the three remaining plans being considered by the Commission, one fails to reduce traffic congestion adequately; the other fails to generate income for mass transit improvements. So neither of these can be considered viable. The remaining proposal, called The Alternative Congestion Pricing Plan, is a streamlining of the mayor's original PlaNYC proposal with significantly lower capital and operating costs. It also satisfies the revenue and traffic reduction mandates upon which funding by the Federal Department of Transportation depends.

Here's a profile of the Alternative Congestion Pricing Plan, taken from an interim report of the TCMC:

"The alternative congestion pricing plan is a modified approach to congestion pricing that eliminates the intra-zonal charge [$4] . . . charges inbound trips only, and moves the northern boundary of the charging zone to 60th Street [NOTE: The original plan's northern boundary was 86th Street.] Cars would be charged an $8 fee to drive into the zone on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Trucks would pay $21, except for low-emission trucks, which would pay $7. Under this fee-based plan, drivers would pay once upon entering the charging zone and would be able to make additional trips in and out of the zone at no additional cost. For E-Z Pass users, the value of all tolls paid on MTA or Port Authority bridges and tunnels would be deducted from the fee up to $8." [The alternative plan includes three additional measures affecting taxi/livery service vehicles, parking rates, and parking tax exemptions.]

MY WRITTEN TESTIMONY TO THE COMMISSION

Greetings to the Commissioners.

I appreciate the opportunity to share my views on this important topic. My name is Dan Icolari. I'm a 30-year resident of Staten Island; the founder of Walking is Transportation.com and a co-founder of the St. George Civic Association and the Preservation League of Staten Island. I've served on Community Board 1 and am a member of numerous Staten Island civic and cultural organizations.

As I did at an earlier hearing, I would like to declare support for the concept of congestion pricing as an approach with many benefits to offer residents of every New York City borough. Chief among these are (1)
Reduction of negative health and conduct-of-business impacts of traffic congestion; (2) Development of a new funding source for mass transit improvements; and (3) Positive impact on climate change--a global
problem with potentially life-threatening consequences for our city.

Of the several plans proposed by the New York City Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission, I support The Alternative Congestion Pricing Plan. I base my support on the alternative plan's reduced complexity
lower cost and greater ease of implementation. I believe these attributes offset the alternative plan's various weaknesses, as enumerated by the Commissioners in their interim report.

Thank you for your consideration.

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.