Walking Is Transportation

Blog On

Late afternoon on St. Marks Place near Westervelt Avenue, St. George, Staten Island, January 31, 2007

NEW YEAR, NEW DIRECTION

Today--the first day of Bushyear the Last--begins the re-launch of WALKING IS TRANSPORTATION.com. As regular readers know, I've felt hemmed in by the narrow scope of the subject--the way I always had to ask myself, as I started to write, "What does this have to do with walking or transportation?" The blog began to feel like an impediment rather than a pathway.

But what really prompted the decision to re-launch this blog was your enthusiastic responses to my series, "The Vertical Life," which profiled in words and digital photos the lives we lead on the mostly-walker-friendly hills of Stapleton, Tompkinsville, St. George and New Brighton in the New York City borough of Staten Island. Some of you wrote from places as nearby as Vermont and as far away as Washington State.

So, very generally, my plan is to observe in words and images the life lived in these neighborhoods--a (comparatively) dense and diverse urban sector of New York City's most suburban borough. I hope you'll be pleased enough with the results to keep on reading.

The main thing I wanted to say is that WALKING IS TRANSPORTATION.com is back.

Thanks for checking in.--Dan Icolari

Facing Fact

Uh-oh. It's that walking shoe image again, and you know what that means. (If you don't know what that means, see my post of November 4, 2007.)

EVEN SWEAT-WICKING GARMENTS AREN'T ENOUGH

I'm a fair weather walker. That's the fact I have to face.

I thought this year might be different. That maybe resolve and sweat-wicking polyester garments would make me more willing, even enthusiastic about stepping out of doors.

Well, winter hasn't even officially happened. The weather's been nippy, but hardly bone-chilling. Yet last night, walking the half mile or so between the ETG Book Cafe in Tompkinsville, Staten Island and my house in St. George, I realized how tense my body was. Not even below freezing, and already I'm steeling myself against the wind and the cold.

Call it a seasonal adjustment

The fundamentals haven't changed. I still walk everywhere, except when the time's too short, the distance is too great, or the weather's too bad. I'm what has changed.

In late spring, summer and early fall, I do two types of walks; those of necessity and those of discovery. On longer walks of necessity--the exciting, surprising ones--the distinction melts away and an errand becomes an adventure.

But when the weather gets below 40 degrees, as it's been on and off for the last few days, the prospect of a walk loses nearly all its appeal. Yes, the cold can be invigorating; and yes, trees in a winter landscape have a singular beauty--for somebody else.

No hibernating here

That doesn't mean Walking is Transportation.com is going into hibernation. Instead it'll cover transportation issues more generally--issues like Congestion Pricing, Bus Rapid Transit, Light vs. Heavy Rail.

It may be too early in the process to expect noticeable changes in the culture--as drivers s-l-o-w-l-y begin to realize they have to rethink their choices and their behavior--but I'll be looking for that, too.

I hope you'll stick around.

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.

The blog and I

When you see these walking shoes at the top of a post, it means the text concerns the blog, the blogger, or both.

IT WASN'T MY IDEA

Last February, when I was working on a Staten Island transportation story for STREETSBLOG (http://www.streetsblog.org), Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naperstek suggested I write a blog on Staten Island transportation issues, sort of a Son of Streetsblog, in content if not in name.

I pooh-poohed the idea at the time. But obviously Aaron's idea, or some variant of it, stayed with me. Walking is Transportation.com (WIT.com) began appearing online this past August, about six months later.

At first, WIT was very clearly focused, arguing for the idea behind its own name. And nary a visual image in sight. Soon enough, though, that focus began to feel like a limitation, and I admitted as much in a post dated September 30, declaring my need to widen WIT's focus a bit.

ENTER CAMERA

That was about the time I got a digital camera, enabling me to make WIT's format more airy and open, less text-heavy. The camera also allowed me to take the picture of clay and fiber artist Steve Nutt's walking shoes, shown above. [From now on, that image at the top of a post tells you that the text concerns the blog, the blogger, or both.]

But more important, what the camera did was encourage me to look at my neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods more closely, hungrily even, searching for images either as literal illustration or as symbol. I felt freed, letting the camera tell the story with minimal text. The stories were still about walking, still about transportation, but more and more, Staten Island was the setting and, in part, the subject.

NOT VERBOTEN

Up to that point, I had considered Staten Island as a subject or setting if not verboten, then certainly something to be avoided. No one was going to accuse me of being parochial, by God. But the more I thought about it, the more I became persuaded that a focus on Staten Island transportation issues might be helpful in promoting not just walking, but the whole progressive transportation agenda, on Staten Island and elsewhere in the city. And besides, the north shore of the borough, where I live, is very photogenic.

So . . . WIT.com readers can expect the same transportation focus in future, with more photos and more about my part of what St. George visual artist Cynthia von Buhler calls The Prodigal Borough (http:/www.prodigalborough.com).

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.

More on pedestrian access to Staten Island's Greenbelt

Sculpture: Victoria Bellinger, Silver Lake, S.I. ( victoriabellinger.com/index/html )

Unfit for pedestrians

Last August, I walked from home to the perimeter of Staten Island's Greenbelt, whereupon all pedestrian amenities vanished and I was forced to continue my walk in a gully at the side of the road, along with the beer cans, bottles and other assorted trash thrown there. Drivers whizzed by, leaving only a very few feet between me and them. It was scary and I was mad.

Here's some of what I wrote about that incident in a post dated August 27:

"Walkers have right of safe access to the Greenbelt, just as those who arrive in cars do. We represent a fraction of the footprint of a car, in terms of the space we occupy and the impact we have on the environment. Yet cars, often with only one occupant, are provided roads that are built and maintained by the tax dollars of walkers as well as drivers. For our tax dollars, we get a narrow, dangerous strip of deteriorated macadam.

"Sidewalks should be installed bordering every main road, street or avenue in the Greenbelt. I understand the legitimate concern of those who see only another encroachment on the Greenbelt's 'Forever Wild' mandate. But providing a means of access for those who walk rather than ride is a matter of fairness and equity--a pretty fundamental ideal."

A meeting with the Greenbelt's administrator

I learned later from fellow blogger Steve Patterson of Urban Review STL.com that there is a national organization called Complete the Street which is promoting precisely this idea--but a better one than mine because it provides for cyclists as well as pedestrians.

I intend to state the No Safe Access for Pedestrians problem and suggest the Complete the Street solution at a meeting tomorrow evening of Staten Island's premier environmental organization, Protectors of Pine Oak Woods, of which I'm a member. The Greenbelt's administrator is scheduled as guest speaker, so I'll be directing my questions and comments to her.

I'll report on the meeting in a day or two.

Everything Staten Island at Everything Goes Book Café, Saturday, 11/3, 8 p.m.

Detail, mezzanine wall decoration, Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum station (#2 and #3 trains), Brooklyn, N.Y.

UPCOMING BOOK EVENT WITH A STATEN ISLAND SLANT

Staten Islanders aren't used to media attention, particularly positive media attention, that doesn't start and end with The Staten Island Advance.So if you're a Staten Islander, I think you'll be interested to read the generally positive (meaning--surprise!--not negative) coverage Staten Island's getting on Brian Berger's blog, Who Walk in Brooklyn ( http://www.whowalkinbrooklyn.com ).

Berger will be appearing this Saturday night at the ETG Book Café--along with Staten Island essayist Steve Maluk and Village Voice food writer Robert Sietsema--in connection with Berger's just-published book, co-edited with Marshall Berman, New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (University of Chicago Press). As one reviewer observed about the book, "For once, all five boroughs are represented," an assessment that has special meaning here in The Forgotten Borough.

Berger, Maluk and Sietsema promise an evening of words, photos and discussion, all of it focused on the place we call home.

BRIAN BERGER, STEVE MALUK and ROBERT SIETSEMA
Saturday, November 3, 2007, 8 p.m.
EVERYTHING GOES BOOK CAFE and NEIGHBORHOOD STAGE
208 Bay Street (between Victory Boulevard and Hannah Street)
718-447-8256

The vertical life: An afterword

Exterior section of east wall, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Tysen Street at Fillmore Street, New Brighton, Staten Island

PRESERVE THE PEDESTRIAN INFRASTRUCTURE

I've just finished the The Vertical Life, a four-part entry that appears in the four posts immediately preceding this one. Originally, I planned an idiosyncratic profile of the five hilly neighborhoods at the northeastern tip of Staten Island, the fifth and oft' forgotten New York City borough.

What I wanted was to celebrate a life spent marching up and down hills and the sometimes amazing accommodations people have made in order to be able to live that life. What I've come away with is the conviction that these accommodations to hillside living--steps, stairways and paths--are much more than quaint throwbacks to a time when we walked rather than drove up hills.

Our history and our future

Hillside stairways aren't rarities. In upper Manhattan and the west Bronx, these vertical pathways are often massive feats of engineering, overlooked by equally massive apartment blocks of the 1920s and '30s.

In the hilly, close-to-the-ferry neighborhoods of Staten Island's north shore, the scale of hillside stairways is smaller, simpler, more intimate. Paths are bordered by trees, shrubs and grasses, sometimes overgrown by them. These vertical connecting links are, no less than some of the century-old buildings that surround them, a part of Staten Island and New York City history that deserves preservation and restoration.

Whether in upper Manhattan, the west Bronx, or the north shore of Staten Island--and even in their sometimes derelict state--these stairways are part of our city's pedestrian infrastructure. People use them. More would use them if they were in better physical condition and better maintained. Now that serious and ongoing health and environmental degradation is finally acknowledged even at the federal level, state and local policy-makers are actively seeking ways to reduce our dependence on private transportation. These and other forms of pedestrian infrastructure are a perfect fit.

As support systems for walking--an activity promoted by the N.Y.C. Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Department for the Aging--these steps, stairs and walkways deserve substantial upgrading, with new concrete, railings, signage, lighting and drought-resistant, low-maintenance landscaping. Like the reopened walkways on the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, these hillside amenities are part of New York City and Staten Island history. If we're serious about encouraging alternative forms of transportation, we'll make these steps, stairways and paths part of our future too.

The vertical life, or Hill-walking on Staten Island, Part 4

Adobe Blues mural, south side of Lafayette Avenue near Fillmore Street, New Brighton, Staten Island.

IN NEW BRIGHTON, HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

There was no way I could survey hill-walking in Staten Island's close-to-the-ferry neighborhoods and not include New Brighton, one of New York's earliest suburban developments, organized in 1839.

But I'll admit I wasn't expecting much.

Like a lot of locals, but not many others, I knew all about the one derelict but still functioning stairway between the corner of York Terrace and East Buchanan Street at the top, and York Avenue, just up the hill from Fillmore Street, at the bottom.

Seen from a passing car––like so many other experiences walkers have and drivers don't––it would appear to be just another concrete stairway leading who-knows-where and not worth a second glance or thought.

East Buchanan Street from the bottom of the hill at Franklin Avenue--the starting-off point.

Sure enough, a few yards past the top of the hill, just as I remembered, the narrow path leading to the stairs begins, then continues down the hill to York Avenue.

NEW BRIGHTON CLIFF-DWELLINGS: A DIFFERENT ANGLE

Turning right and continuing up York Avenue, I wasn't surprised to see more cliff-dwellings; I remembered them from past treks, but not in detail. I'd never noticed how far back from the street these hilltop houses were sited--especially as compared to those on Corson Avenue in Tompkinsville (Part 1) and St. Pauls Avenue in Stapleton (Part 2).

Because the grade here is less steep than on other nearby streets with hillside houses, there's less need for buttresses, terraces, retaining walls and the like. In several cases, a single continuous stair runs from the sidewalk to the front door.

A little farther up York Avenue near Carlyle Street, I half-saw this stairway as I passed it. But that glance was enough to make me turn back and take a second look. Even in its deteriorated condition, the stairway's proportions told me this was either a public amenity or the entry to a substantial residential property. There was no sign, no marker, nothing.

For a while there, going up the steps and continuing up an overgrown path, I worried that I might be trespassing.

But soon enough, I saw a familiar street sign ahead: Highview Avenue. I knew exactly where I was. I turned right and walked back to East Buchanan Street, the starting point.

* * *

HAVE I MISSED SOMETHING? If you notice I've left out a stairway, path or walkway in one of the neighborhoods mentioned in this four-part entry, please let me know: [email protected] And thanks.

The vertical life, or Hill-walking on Staten Island, Part 3

Detail, ironwork gate, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2007

A LITTLE UNFINISHED BUSINESS

If you're looking for stairs, paths, walkways and myriad other weight-bearing toeholds that people have cobbled together to help them get up and down hills, this is the place. Stapleton, Staten Island.

We'll get there shortly. But first, there's a little unfinished business on Ward Hill to take care of. [For more on Ward Hill, see Part 2.]

URBAN ARCHAEOLOGY: THE HIDDEN PATHS OF NIXON AVENUE

Walking along Nixon, a U-shaped block with great views of the Narrows, there's no reason you'd notice this rusting iron stair-rail sticking out of a blanket of leaf-cover. It's the only clue that an old stairway leading to the Ward mansion, at the very top of Ward Hill, began here.

If you lift the leaves that cover it, you can see the foundation stones that support the stair-rail's bottom step.

The story goes that the father of a little girl who lived on Nixon Avenue at least a decade ago created a path for her to use on her way to and from Trinity Lutheran School. The path began here (see that concrete ledge on the right?) . . .

. . . and ended here, in what is now a lot-size forest at the bottom of the hill on St. Pauls Avenue near Cebra Avenue, Stapleton. Trinity Lutheran is right across the street. Only the barest trace of the path survives, and only where it began, up on Nixon.

UP ST. PAULS, INTO THE HILLS

Our walk up St. Pauls Avenue starts in Tompkinsville, where St. Pauls and Van Duzer street begin their parallel routes. They start from a single point--Van Duzer below, St. Pauls above--then fan out into a wider and wider V.

The long, slow rise of St. Pauls Avenue begins to pick up here, at Paxton Street.

Almost immediately on the right--and up!--are cliff houses rivaling those on Corson Avenue in Tompkinsville for dizzying height and complex stair arrangements.

A PEDESTRIAN INFRASTRUCTURE

Staten Island's close-to-the-ferry neighborhoods were developed at a time when many, perhaps most, people walked. An old pedestrian infrastructure survives.

These stone steps up from the roadway at the corner of Beach Street and St. Pauls Avenue in Stapleton are an example.

There are steps up from the St. Pauls Avenue roadway at the entrance to each house as well.

There's even sidewalk seating.

WELCOME TO STONE STREET, UNLESS YOU'RE A CAR

Located opposite Trossach Road off St. Pauls Avenue in Stapleton, Stone Street is probably more accurately described as a hilly alley than a street. It's a slice of old Staten Island the home improvers haven't caught up with yet.

Stone Street is only one block long––from St. Pauls to Van Duzer. Too narrow for cars, the street has only one house on it, a modest cottage.

Walking up Stone Street from Van Duzer to St. Pauls. Handrails run almost the entire length of the street. There's not a car in sight. Bliss.

Glimpsed on a porch on St. Pauls Avenue near Cebra Avenue, Stapleton.