A cancelled bike lane, a crowded F Train - and why New York planning has to start muting the noisy

A few times recently, while cycling in Queens I’ve taken routes that carried me across Queens Boulevard – once known as the “Boulevard of Death,” for its dreadful safety record – and seen some of its smart new bike lanes. But I’ve never actually used them, for a simple reason. While Queens Boulevard goes to some useful places, the current, 1.3-mile stretch of bike lane doesn’t link up to anywhere I want to go.

A sign points towards the Queens Boulevard bike lanes -
or, as Community Board 4 would have preferred,
the bike path to practically nowhere.

If Queens’ Community Board 4 had had its way, that arrangement would have continued. In a vote on May 10, members of the board – a strange, officially-sponsored but still only advisory and unelected local planning committee – voted to approve safety improvements for their stretch of the boulevard, the 1.2 miles immediately east of the existing bike lanes. But they voted to remove the bike lanes from the project (cyclists’ safety should be an “afterthought”, one member said). The step prompted bafflement and outrage because it threatened not only the stretch of the road in Community Board 4 but the whole effort to turn the Boulevard of Death into a less forbidding space.

Yet the story of CB 4’s bike lanes stands out in New York City’s transport planning only because of how the story ends. The decision was so obviously contrary to the public interest – and so procedurally flawed - that Bill de Blasio, the mayor, unusually found the courage to overturn the board’s recommendation the next day. He instead ordered the Department of Transportation to continue developing the improvements with the bike lanes intact. Plenty of other changes that would improve the city as a whole get blocked because a noisy handful of people on a community board or  other  group object loudly enough that the greater good doesn’t prevail. Two other bike lane projects have fallen foul of such objections just this month.

 

"What do you mean the city's transport is poorly planned?
"Oh, I see."

The question is whether it’s a bug or a feature of New York’s democracy – and that of many other places around the world – that relatively small, vocal groups can either bring to life or kill projects in a way that damages the wider society. It’s the kind of argument familiar to anyone who’s spent time in India, where desperately-needed infrastructure projects are often held up by scores of pettifogging obstructions. Officials when challenged on this – and the stark contrast with China’s greater effectiveness at getting things done – tend to hold up their hands in defeat and say, “But we’re a democracy”.

True democracy, I think, should be more sophisticated than the crude system often practised in New York, where the noisy enjoy disproportionate influence over the apparent will of the less vocal majority. The current system unsurprisingly suits many of those who have grown up with it, however. After the mayor’s overturning of the CB4 decisions, Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, put herself firmly in the democracy-is-the-right-to-block camp.

“Any action to install bike lanes along this stretch at this time, regardless of merit, would… understandably be perceived as an imposition by the administration, running directly counter to and overriding the Community Board’s explicitly-stated wishes,” Ms Katz said in a statement.

The bizarre case of F Train express subway service in Brooklyn highlights how illogical the effects of this kind of democracy can be.

A F Train leaves Smith-9th St after stopping: David Greenfield
dreams of the coming day when it'll zip past, whisking
his constituents home faster

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state organisation that runs the subway, has been pressured into considering reintroduction of an express F subway service in Brooklyn – skipping all but a handful of stations in the inner parts of the borough – by a campaign by David Greenfield, a member of New York City council representing outer parts of the borough such as Bensonhurst and Borough Park. The idea has generally been regarded as a non-starter for practical reasons. Because capacity in Manhattan is restricted, any introduction of express trains would mean fewer local trains. Since the stations that have only local track platforms – including Smith-9^th St, by my apartment - are mostly busier than those with express platforms, an express service would delay more people than it helped and increase overcrowding.

The MTA has nevertheless caved to David Greenfield’s campaign. On May 17, the subway operator announced its decision to restart service in 2017 alongside publication of a feasibility study that, to the casual reader, seemed stuffed with evidence that that was a terrible idea. While express service users would on average get a journey 3.4 minutes shorter, the study said, local train riders would be suffer an average 1.3 minute delay standing gazing at the new express service zipping by. Since there are more users of the local train stations and some could suffer serious overcrowding, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the new service is a retrograde step being taken solely for political reasons.

 

A sign apologises that some F Trains
are passing stations without stopping -
but today's service disruption could be
next year's service "enhancement"

In both the F Express and Queens Boulevard cases, small, geographically distinct groups have advocated for their needs to dictate how the whole of a particular bit of road or subway track is used. The Bensonhurst would-be express train riders will produce negative knock-on effects all along the line. Similarly, community board members who express horror about potential bike lanes’ effects on “their” parking spaces affect road users all along the corridor.

The current approach virtually ensures the city’s infrastructure works less efficiently, less safely and less fairly than it ideally would do. To become better-functioning, more effective democracies, New York and other big cities need the ability to plan carefully and to push through elements of the plan that will benefit the whole city even if small, vocal groups protest. There is a strong case for introducing a far more comprehensive process of strategic planning for the city to try to cut down on the number of wasteful subway services started and stranded, isolated bike lanes.

Change is particularly urgent because many of the problems facing the city require solutions to problems that affect nearly everyone a little but that a few noisy interest groups oppose. There can be little doubt, for example, that the congestion-charging system proposed under the Move New York plan would be at least as successful as London’s equivalent. But no noisy interest group is as interested in solving the problem as a handful of motorists are in continuing to drive free into Manhattan.

The city’s housing crisis drives up nearly everyone’s rent. But the interests of people who don’t want a new apartment tower next to their brownstone help to ensure it goes unaddressed. It’s no coincidence that road safety – which few people regard as a big problem for them personally – has suffered under the current arrangements. Few people recognise how grave a threat dangerous streets pose to them, while a handful of passionate people are determined to defend their access to free parking from safety improvements.

 

A CB4 member called cyclists "missiles on wheels".
Here, some refuel.

The lack of a strong planning function reflects deliberate choices, rather than mere happenstance. Robert Moses, the bureaucrat who shaped modern, car-dominated New York, carefully demolished efforts to introduce systematic planning in the years between the first and second world wars. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker details how that gave Moses free rein for decades to build in the city more or less whatever  he chose – and to avoid building things he disliked, like new subway lines.

David Greenfield and other loud-mouthed politicians currently operate in that Moses gap, as do community boards. If the city had a comprehensive planning function that measured the city’s needs as a whole, it would probably provide a strong counterbalance to politicians’ efforts to push plans that sacrifice the city’s needs to those of their constituents. If the city had a strong planning function, it would take into account legitimate concerns from people like CB4. But it would surely not stand for the present approach to building bike lanes, where it’s a battle to build each short stretch and the differences between community boards manifest themselves in bike lanes that are high quality for 20 blocks or so before disappearing for the next 20.

 

A picture of Clinton Avenue makes it clear just how
damaging it could have been to make it one-way
and install a two-way bike lane.

The effects of the failure to act are everywhere. On Saturday, I hauled my son on his trailer bike from our home to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. Our route to the Flushing Avenue bike lanes was less safe than if the city had already built the proposed two-way bike lane on Clinton Avenue in Wallabout that was scrapped last week because of residents’ objections. We saw signs to the Queens Boulevard bike lanes. On Sunday, a fellow parishioner at my church talked in really panicky terms about the effects of rent increases. Because I’m going on a trip this week, I used the F Train to get to work this morning, boarding at Carroll St, one of the stations whose users will suffer if the poorly conceived express plan is carried out.

Yet the system’s attractions for politicians and powerful interest groups are obvious. Even in London – a city that’s generally, I think, better governed than New York – Boris Johnson on becoming mayor removed the west London extension of the congestion charging zone. There are persistent rumours that Sadiq Khan, who’s just been elected to replace him, will harm well-thought-out plans to develop a network of protected bike lanes by scrapping some future parts of the programme.

Passengers board an already-crowded F Train at Carroll St:
let's hope the right lessons are learnt when this gets
far worse next year.

In New York, the current arrangements sometimes suit even politicians who disapprove of the system’s outcomes. Mayor de Blasio was able to win far easier, more immediate praise from safe streets activists for overturning the Queens Boulevard decision than if he’d had to work to make sure there was a more rational system in place at the start. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, may one day heroically intervene to cancel the F Express plans - with even more fanfare than he deployed in the first place to announce them.

There remains, nevertheless, the possibility that, as the poor decisions mount up, the public will start to demand serious reform. While I hope that there are no deaths or injuries on Clinton Avenue, if any occur advocates should point out noisy special interests’ responsibility for them. The people with whom I shared the F Train this morning may also prove a powerful constituency in future. The train at Carroll St was packed this morning, as it is nearly every morning. It was bizarre to reflect that the MTA was contemplating measures that would worsen the position still further. If the express plans proceed, I hope the jammed-in commuters will remember to blame not only David Greenfield but the rotten system that allows him to succeed.

Thick bridge cables, police placard abuse - and why you'll get nowhere without corrupting power

Amid the sudden, late onset of a proper winter in New York, I’ve ridden to work far more often than normal in recent weeks via a longer route over the Brooklyn Bridge. The route, as well as being a pleasant change from my normal ride over the Manhattan Bridge, cuts down sharply on the amount of time I spend sharing snow-clogged Manhattan cross streets with irritable, aggressive drivers.

The Brooklyn Bridge, with cables: New York City corruption,
dangling over the East River

Yet the ride also affords me a chance to ponder a deep and sometimes under-recognised truth about New York City. As I cross the bridge, I marvel at the thickness of the bundle of suspension cables that holds the bridge deck in place - and remember the story behind them. The bundle is much bigger than the bridge’s designer, John Roebling, originally intended. Extra, up-to-standard wire had to be added after Washington Roebling, John’s son, discovered that corrupt contractors had sneaked large quantities of sub-standard wire into cables that had already been painstakingly stretched across the East River. Graft is literally woven into this bit of the city’s fabric.

Corruption is far from being a mere historic issue, however. The more one grapples with the challenges facing New York City, the more one comes up against relationships that powerful people’s pursuit of money or power have skewed away from working as intended. These pieces of corruption range from relationships that are straightforwardly crooked, as the relationship between the bridge builders and the wire contractors was, through a series of more or less grubby compromises to relationships that seem like a form of democracy. At that end of the scale there are institutions like the Community Boards that are meant to protect communities’ interests in planning decisions but instead end up as the vehicle of noisy vested interests.

A bike lane built under Janette Sadik-Khan now:
the reversal of progress made visible.

Cyclists are peculiarly aware of this dysfunctionality, I think, because it is a profoundly conservative force. It seeks to entrench privileges and works against change. In a city that’s nominally trying to increase its cycle commuting rate from a modest 1 per cent, that means that many of these forces are aligned against making life easier for cyclists. If one doesn’t take into account how these fundamentally regressive relationships shape life in the city, it’s impossible to understand the near-halting of progress on cycling in the city since Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s one-time transport commissioner, stood down at the end of Michael Bloomberg's time in office in 2013. Without an advocate as forceful and effective as Sadik-Khan, regressive, conservative, corrupt forces have largely overwhelmed the continuing faltering efforts under Bill de Blasio towards change.

The scale of the challenge is clear if one thinks carefully about one of the few pieces of progress to have been made recently – the decision on February 2 by Manhattan’s Community Board 7 to approve installation of a protected bike lane on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side. The decision followed years of study and months of blocking by the co-chairs of the Community Board’s transportation committee. It was passed only after hundreds of advocates turned up at both the February 2 meeting and one in November. If such a vast lobbying effort is required to win approval for a 38-block (less than two miles) project – one that everyone except a handful of angry carowners agrees is sensible and needed - it’s unsurprising that city-wide progress towards building a cycling network looks a distant prospect.

 

Your licence to park anywhere: the NYPD placard on an SUV
parked unnecessarily in the Hoyt St bike lane.

My mind started turning to the ubiquity of corruption in New York the night after the CB7 vote, as I rode home from work through a damp Brooklyn. As I rounded the corner from Schermerhorn Street into Hoyt Street in downtown Brooklyn, I was forced to brake suddenly on finding two big sports utility vehicles blocking the narrow street’s bike lane. Knowing that the area was a popular parking spot for police vehicles from the New York Police Department’s nearby transit bureau, I suspected these were officers’ private vehicles. Sure enough, on inspection the dashboards of both vehicles sported NYPD placards that police officers regard as essentially permission to park illegally wherever they choose. The following night, another private police vehicle was parked in exactly the same place. Tweets to the NYPD Transit Bureau about the issue went unanswered.

Sure, pedestrians and cyclists are having to avoid this
officer's car while legal parking spaces go unused across
the street. But what's the point in joining the NYPD
if you can't break the law with impunity?

The incident reveals a telling type of petty New York City corruption. Every morning as I battle my way down Jay St in Brooklyn to reach the Manhattan Bridge, I encounter scores of illegally-parked vehicles, obstructing turning lanes and other important places on the road. The police leave them untroubled because they bear some kind of official-looking placard – often of dubious provenance - identifying the owner as a police officer, corrections officer or firefighter. The problem illustrates the primacy of organisational culture – in this case, the feeling that emergency personnel should stick together, whatever civilians might say – in many areas of New York public life. Loyalty to the interests of one’s group – whether one’s fellow professionals,  members of the same ethnic group or people who want to defend some other privilege – exerts a far more powerful force in the city than most of the formal rules meant to govern it.

I also sometimes encounter on Jay St a red-light sting for cyclists, at the relatively quiet junction of Jay St and Concord St. The intersection is the only point on Jay St – where there is a daily riot of highly dangerous illegal double-parking, illegal U-Turns and crosswalk blocking – where I regularly see enforcement activity. In a city where motorists are still often portrayed as a proxy for ordinary, working-class New Yorkers, it is far easier for the police to pick on relatively powerless cyclists to make up their monthly ticket totals than to take the rational course of trying to stamp out the behaviour that does most damage. Since the police effectively wield far greater power than the mayor, there is little to stop police officers from engaging in this casual sleight of hand.

 

A scene from a Jay St commute: it's pretty obvious how
serious a problem cyclist behaviour is here.

None of this is to say, of course, that corruption both grave and petty is a uniquely US or New York phenomenon. When I lived in Budapest, I travelled around post-Communist societies far more scarred by corruption than the US. It is also clear that New York is far from being the US’s most corruptly-run city. It would seem almost rude to try to displace either Chicago or New Orleans from their hard-won places at the top of that league table.

Yet there is a peculiarly New York City combination of factors that works to overwhelm many positive initiatives, including efforts to promote more active transport.

Much of the power over the city is exercised by a legislature 150 miles away in Albany that often seems to view the city as little more than a source of funds. It is telling that in the recent corruption trial of Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the state assembly, the defence’s (ultimately unsuccessful) case was essentially that the speaker had acted little differently from other members of the state legislature.

 

Police supervise blocking of the sidewalk and bike lanes
outside Satmar headquarters on a previous occasion, in
June 2014. This is what the privilege of being a powerful
voting bloc in New York City buys you.

New York’s diversity also means the city teems with different ethnic groups whom politicians can court in return for votes and money. This past Wednesday, for example, I noticed a (since-deleted) Tweet from the @HQSatmar account – from the headquarters of the powerful Satmar Hasidic Jewish community – thanking the local 90^th NYPD precinct for allowing them to park their cars across the Kent Avenue two-way bike lane during a community wedding. The apparent official approval for this practice – which forces cyclists and pedestrians out into fast-moving traffic on a blind bend – illustrates how mere convenience for a powerful group can easily trump the law and the lives and health of less powerful groups.

A different version of a similar phenomenon was at work when a series of members of the New York City Council who had previously been supportive of safer streets legislation scurried to support amendments that would effectively have excused bus drivers who killed people. It is no coincidence, I suspect, that Transport Workers’ Union Local 100, the bus drivers’ union, is a significant funder of New York political races.

The presence of this mass of interest groups willing to defy the mayor’s formal authority has long made governing New York City one of the most formidable tasks in US politics. The Brooklyn Bridge corruption was a result, for example, of the presence on the bridge company’s board of directors of William Tweed, the famously corrupt boss of Tammany Hall, the hugely influential Irish-American political club. Vincent Impellitteri famously became leader of New York’s city council – and subsequently, by default, mayor when the incumbent resigned – simply because he was an Italian from Manhattan. He was needed to balance out a Democratic slate for top jobs that already had on it an Irishman from Brooklyn and a Jew from the Bronx.

 

London's cycle facilities can also be imperfect,
but there is a less pervasive sense
of unaccountability

It is far easier, it seems to me, to work the levers of power in London, where identity politics plays a far smaller role, than in New York. It is no coincidence that cities in relatively uncorrupt northern Europe have had far more success in steering through complex transport projects such as cycling networks and high-quality public transit than southern European countries with a longer tradition of corruption.

The flipside of New York City’s ungovernability, meanwhile, is that it has been disproportionately shaped by the handful of people with the mix of skill and ruthlessness needed to get things done. In the 20^th Century, tragically, the most notable such person was Robert Moses, the “master builder,” who, holding an unconstitutional mix of state and city jobs, promoted car-dependence by halting subway building and diverting resources to building a poorly-planned highway network, which wrecked many neighbourhoods.

So far in the 21^st century, Sadik-Khan, who will celebrate her achievements in a new book out on March 8, has proved more adept than most at overcoming the city’s corrupt conservatism. She closed some of the streets through Times Square, put bike lanes down Broadway and many other important streets and forced a badly-needed bike lane down Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. The Prospect Park West project – over which a handful of rich locals continue to sue the city – went in over the noisy objections of, among others, the wife of New York’s senior US senator. Sadik-Khan oversaw huge increases in the numbers of people cycling, even if cycling’s share of trips remains negligible.

Yet it is clear that, while Sadik-Khan did a superb job of forcing through building projects, she was not able to make activists for cycling and walking a group that New York politicians genuinely had to fear. Transportation Alternatives and other lobbyists for a saner, more rational transport system remain supplicants to the city’s power brokers, rather than one of the successful groups that the power brokers have to court.

NYPD vehicles block the Broadway bike lane:
the lack of explanation is as eloquent as any explanation

One evening in early December, I encountered depressing evidence of the fate of groups who fail to get themselves into a sufficiently strong position in the city’s pecking order. I rode down the Broadway bike lanes as far as Herald Square, by Macy’s department store in midtown. But at Herald Square – which Sadik-Khan still holds up as an example of what can be achieved, with effort – I encountered two large police SUVs parked across the bike lane, closing it. I have heard so many reports since from other cyclists that I gather the police have more or less permanently barricaded the route.

There were no explanations, diversion signs or notices to alert cyclists to the change. The closure appeared to be a result of an entirely arbitrary police decision that cyclists could no longer use the route built for them only a few years ago. But, as I gazed at the police vehicles parked sullenly across my path, that almost seemed to be part of the point.

“We can do this to you whenever we want,” they seemed to be saying. “Now what are you going to do about it?”

A changing junction, a political bike ride - and the progressive case for cycling

As I ride home from work in the evenings, an intersection in downtown Brooklyn often prompts me to ponder New York City’s attitude to cycling. The southbound bike lane on Smith St at Fulton St used to move out gracefully round a waiting area for taxis and car-service vehicles. Then, recognising that the lane was constantly blocked by parked vehicles, the city decided to repaint the lane so that the parked taxis would no longer block it – though cyclists would have to perform a dangerous swerve out into traffic to round the parked vehicles. More recently, it’s been repainted yet again – and the lane’s now back to guiding cyclists smoothly through the junction – and once again perpetually blocked.

Smith St at Fulton: as it was before it became a symbol
of the city's vacillation about cyclists.

The intersection is a beautiful concrete – or asphalt – illustration of New York City’s equivocal attitude towards encouraging cycling. The city has been prepared to paint bicycle lanes on streets – although it’s now retreating even from that in favour of the dreadful “extra-wide parking lane”. But the city has been far less ready – particularly since Janette Sadik-Khan left as transport commissioner at the end of 2013 – to recognise that to accommodate cyclists well in a given road space it is also often necessary to inconvenience motorists. There has lately seemed to be a waning of the confidence under Michael Bloomberg, the previous mayor, that by promoting cycling the city was making progress towards being a better city.

A bike ride last Thursday prompted me to ponder further the politics of this change. I rode with members of New York city council’s progressive caucus from Brooklyn Borough Hall across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall to highlight the importance of cycling. A Manhattan delegation, having ridden from Union Square, met us at City Hall. As I rode with Brad Lander, Carlos Menchaca and other left-leaning individuals, I got into discussion about the “progressive” agenda for transport in the city and how intimately cycling is linked to making the city better for all its inhabitants.

 

Brad Lander addresses the bike-to-work ride outside Borough
Hall: a reliable progressive enthusiast for cycling.

I came away convinced that there are many progressive politicians in the city who recognise that the way people get about significantly affects how equitable and safe a city is for all its inhabitants. But I also left worried that some other progressive politicians fail to grasp what a big role changes to those patterns of mobility could play in achieving their wider goals.

Even the term progress is a pretty significant stumbling-block when thinking about these issues. The term implies that humans are learning from previous generations’ mistakes to make the world a steadily better place. It’s a view of the world that sits uncomfortably with the multiple areas where the world appears to be going into reverse. Among those are the rise of vicious Islamist radicals like the Islamic State and the takeover of the US’s Republican Party by groups that appear to reject the reliability of the scientific method for deducing facts about the world. The term also calls into question what “progress” is. Does it entail everyone’s growing steadily richer and buying ever more cars and consumer goods? At its worst, the goal of pushing towards “progress” has justified appalling acts of political repression.

Nevertheless, I’m confident that in most industrialised societies people’s political instincts divide fairly neatly into conservative and progressive camps. Conservatives tend to believe the past was better than the present and that society’s existing power structures are there for fairly good reasons. Progressives tend to think the future can be better than the present and question the power structures currently in place.

 

I don't know the politics of these people waiting to participate
in last week's ride with progressive city council members -
but it's a fair guess many would call themselves progressives.

It’s no surprise that many cycling activists, as I do, place themselves broadly in the progressive political camp. Since cycling currently accounts for only a small proportion of journeys in many rich countries, arguments for cycling are by their nature arguments for building a future that’s better than the present. Conservatives such as Boris Johnson, London’s elected mayor, are rarer – but often seem to value the bicycle as a symbol of how things were done in the past. Far more conservatives - including Jeremy Clarkson, formerly of the BBC’s Top Gear franchise – seem to identify with car culture.

But that point doesn’t fit with recent shifts in attitudes towards cycling in New York. Following the election in late 2013 of Bill de Blasio – a Democratic mayor about as far left as any conceivable mayor of the US’s main financial centre – it’s clear that cycling has moved well down the city’s list of political priorities. Compared with Michael Bloomberg, his far more conservative predecessor, the current mayor seems to see little reason to encourage cycling to work or the completion of the city’s cycling network. In fact, the fading paint on many of the city’s cycle lanes is a neat illustration of how fragile progress in such an area can be. With less active support for cycling promotion, the previous gains are almost literally fading away.

It wouldn’t be surprising, in fact, if the mayor were a little distrustful of those of us who lobby for cycling. The mayor fought the election on the basis that he would campaign for the second New York that had been neglected during the Bloomberg years. From the perspective of poor neighbourhoods far out in Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx, those of us from brownstone Brooklyn and nice parts of Manhattan who lobby for better cycling provision must seem like representatives of the elements in the city that are already well catered-to.

Poverty-stricken Coney Island after Superstorm Sandy:
cycling promotion probably wasn't on many locals' minds after
this catastrophe.

It must also make a great deal of sense looked at from poorer neighbourhoods for the mayor to focus much of his transport energy on the Vision Zero programme of reducing road deaths. A disproportionate number of those who die on the roads are people like Noshat Nahian, an eight-year-old child of Bangladeshi immigrants killed by a turning semi-trailer truck on Northern Boulevard in Queens, or Amar Diarrassouba, the six-year-old son of immigrants from Cote d’Ivoire killed by a truck in February 2013 as he walked to school in East Harlem. There’s no doubt that trucks and cars – which predominantly support the lifestyles of New York’s richer people – exact a disproportionate toll in death and injury on poorer New Yorkers. The mayor is quite right to try to address that.

Yet it’s a significant failure of imagination not to try to do more than that. Because New York state’s gas tax and other fees for driving cover only 56.1 per cent of the cost of providing the state’s road system, poor state taxpayers without cars are forced to pay much of the cost of maintaining the road system. That’s even before considering all the other costs that the road system imposes – the costs of crashes, congestion, atmospheric pollution and noise, all of which are shouldered by ordinary taxpayers. Any effort to make New York City less car-dependent is inevitably a progressive step away from the regressive effects of the current system of funding for roads. It would also make perfect sense for a progressive mayor to support Move New York’s sensible plans to charge all vehicles entering lower Manhattan a fee that would be used to support the city’s subways and other alternative means of transport. The higher charges would fall predominantly on the city’s wealthiest people, while a great many of the benefits would flow to the city’s poor.

The Manhattan Bridge bike lane on bike-to-work day:
I don't want to see more bike traffic jams like this - but there's
a clear progressive case for encouraging these people
to keep riding their bikes.

An increase in the number of people cycling would serve many of the political goals for which the mayor and many other progressives purport to be aiming. It would reduce the cost burden of maintaining the road system, reduce pollution – another ill that disproportionately harms the poor living by arterial roads – and improve New Yorkers’ overall health. Despite some high-profile incidents, it's also far safer for pedestrians to be around people using bicycles than people using cars.

There is no good reason either why, with better cycle provision, people in some of New York’s more central public housing projects should not take to cycling far more than at present.

Yet the scene at the corner of Smith and Fulton illustrates the challenge. The Department of Transportation was prevailed upon to change the bike lane arrangement at the corner in the interests of preserving a single parking space. The city’s willingness to get people cycling has melted in the face of a backlash by those who see parking spaces as their own private property. There could scarcely be a more reactionary force than groups determined to preserve the right to store their private luxury items on-street for free, but their indignation seems for now to have intimidated many progressive forces into leaving parking spaces well alone. Vested interests can also push the apparently progressive side towards reactionary stances. Both Ben Kallos and Robert Cornegy, council members who turned up at last weeks’ cycling event, have backed a bill supported by transport workers exempting them from legal penalties if they hit pedestrians and cyclists who have the right of way.

 

Whatever the precise politics of Jay St's cycle lanes,
they certainly feel regressive

Such equivocation about improving conditions for cycling explains a great deal of what the ride from Brooklyn Borough Hall experienced on the first section of our ride to the Brooklyn Bridge. We left the Borough Hall by way of Jay St and found ourselves jostling among heavy traffic, including at least one double-parked car in the bicycle lane. It wasn’t hard to see, taking in the scene, why only 1 per cent of New Yorkers’ commuting trips are currently by bicycle.

New York and many other cities would be a better, fairer place if more of its citizens were getting about by bicycle. Increasing the share of journeys made by bicycle should, consequently, be part of the progressive agenda alongside more obvious causes such as improving urban education and housing. But, if progressives continue to lack political courage when tackling car-dependency or conservatives stay entrenched in power, it’s hard to imagine conditions improving dramatically in the immediate future.

A new police commissioner, some dodgy statistics - and an open letter from me

William Bratton,

Commissioner,

New York Police Department,

1 Police Plaza,

New York,

NY 10038

January 19, 2014

Dear Commissioner Bratton,

Vision Zero and Statistics

            Congratulations on your appointment as NYPD commissioner. Like many New Yorkers, I feel optimistic based on most of your public statements that you’re determined to build on the progress made on public safety in your previous term at the department. I am particularly optimistic that you are determined, at last, to set about reducing the appalling toll of death and injury that motor vehicles exact from New Yorkers every year.

          I wanted to pick you up, however, on a puzzling statement on January 15 at the launch press conference for the mayor’s Vision Zero initiative. You said pedestrians contributed to causing 73 per cent of pedestrian-motor vehicle collisions last year and that pedestrian actions were directly responsible for 66 per cent of those collisions. It’s a figure that on my reading of the figures is demonstrably incorrect. I fear that, if the NYPD genuinely thinks this figure reflects reality, it could seriously distort the department’s efforts to reduce the grim toll of unnecessary suffering on our city’s streets.

Waiting for a new boss: NYPD officers
outside the new mayor's inauguration

I would be interested to know the basis for your assertion – and grateful if you could put the figure right if, as I am sure it is, it is mistaken.

            Your figure is implausible to start with. It implies that motorists - who stand almost no chance of injury in a collision with a pedestrian, often drive at high speed and are easily distracted – are more solicitous of pedestrians’ safety than the pedestrians themselves. That seems at variance with my experience of human nature as well as with my observation that pedestrians are generally watchful when crossing city streets and motorists often cavalier when driving on them.

            The statistic is also starkly at odds with all the research I’ve read either in New York or elsewhere on the causes of crashes between motor vehicles and vulnerable road users – pedestrians and bicyclists. For example, a study published in 2013 by NYU Langone Medical Center found that 44 per cent of pedestrians treated for injuries after collisions had been hit in a crosswalk while crossing with the light. Another 6 per cent were hit on the sidewalk. Given that some of the other victims will also have been the victims of driver negligence – hit in unsignalised crosswalks, for example – it is clear the majority of studied crashes were mainly drivers’ fault.

Typically dangerous pedestrian behaviour:
midtown Manhattan

            A more comprehensive study, published in 2010 by the city’s own Department of Transportation, attributed blame for 36 per cent of crashes that killed or seriously injured pedestrians to driver inattention. It attributed another 27 per cent to motorists’ failure to yield and said vehicle speed was a major contributor to 21 per cent of crashes. The DoT study reinforces the impression that, while pedestrians undoubtedly cause some crashes, they are probably mainly to blame for only a quarter or so of incidents.

            Around the world, a number of research studies have reached strikingly similar conclusions. Many have attributed blame for crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists to motorists in around 75 per cent of cases. For example, in London, where I lived and cycled for nine years until August 2012, a Transport for London study of every reported motorist-cyclist collision in 2010 attributed blame for around 74 per cent of the crashes to motorists. Motorists’ inattentiveness, excessive speed and impatience are the main killers in every industrialised country of which I’m aware. It's unlikely New York City is a freakish exception.

It might look to you like the outcome of negligent speed:
but there's an NYPD statistician who probably thinks
some pedestrian caused this.

            Your assertion also seems at odds with the evidence of the fatal crashes involving pedestrians so far this year. I’ve been able to glean enough information about four of the fatal pedestrian crashes up until Friday 17 to guess how blame might be allocated. In only one – the death of Xiaoci Hu, killed on January 2 when a car ran into the back of another car that had slowed down to let him cross mid-block – does the pedestrian appear to have carried even a portion of the blame. The driver who struck Mosa Khatun on January 5 in Jamaica was charged with failure to yield; the driver who hit Nydja Herring on January 11 in Parkchester has reportedly been charged with aggravated driving while intoxicated; numerous witnesses attest that the driver who killed Cooper Stock on January 11 hit him and his father in a crosswalk as they crossed with the light.

            Streetsblog, the campaigning website, calculates your department coded only between 7 and 8 per cent of crashes involving pedestrians or cyclists in the first 11 months last year as having resulted from pedestrian or cyclist confusion or error.

            My concern is that a mistaken understanding of the present crisis’ causes could lead the NYPD to pursue mistaken or counterproductive measures to halt it. If pedestrian behaviour were indeed the cause of most pedestrian/car crashes, it would be worthwhile and effective to work harder at changing pedestrian behaviour. I note there are already reports of a police crackdown on “jaywalking” around the area on 96^th street in Manhattan where there has been a cluster of casualties this year. I can imagine it will be tempting for local police precincts to seek in any crackdown to tackle pedestrians and cyclists since they are, by their nature, easier to catch and prosecute than drivers of fast-moving cars.

            If, however, cars cause the majority of crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists, it will make far more sense to work at controlling drivers’ speed and ensuring they yield when required to do so. I am worried that, with the crackdown on the Upper West Side, you are beginning to pursue a pedestrian-focused strategy – one that targets the victims and not the perpetrators.

The new mayor during his campaign: before he had a police
commissioner to explain how pedestrians were
killing themselves

            My personal conviction is that a concerted effort to tackle the traffic crisis’ real causes could yield dramatic results quickly. During my nine years in London, I covered transport issues in the UK and elsewhere for the Financial Times, winning several awards. London, which has a similar population to New York’s and similar traffic volumes, suffers only half the annual traffic fatalities that New York does. Motorists’ adherence to speed limits and other road rules is noticeably more lax in New York City than in London. I see no reason why the introduction to New York of systematic speed enforcement and a general culture of respect for road rules should not quickly bring New York’s fatality levels closer to London’s.

            I look forward to hearing from you about your figure’s origin and how it is affecting your policies. I would of course be delighted to speak with you or your officials about my concerns.

The NYPD and other city agencies have it within their grasp to save hundreds of New Yorkers’ lives every year. It would be a tragedy if apparently mistaken data led you to pass that opportunity up,

Yours Sincerely,

 Invisible

A terrifying avenue, a new mayor - and how leaders should be handling traffic problems

It was one Saturday in November that I happened upon one of South Brooklyn’s most thoroughly dysfunctional streets. Seeking to take the Invisible Visible Boy for a trip to Brooklyn’s shorefront greenway, I naively followed the cycle route signs pointing me down Brooklyn’s 3^rd Avenue towards the waterfront bike path. But, after a little while, as I rode southward with the boy behind me on his trailer bike, we found ourselves grappling with high-speed traffic heading onto and coming off the highways around us.

The sign that tricked me into cycling down
3rd Avenue. To be fair, it doesn't read
Sunset Park (via traffic dystopia).

Then, as we rode into Sunset Park – a stretch of Brooklyn along New York’s harbour front, looking across to Staten Island - 3^rd avenue plunged into the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway. The din of overhead traffic always in our ears, we found ourselves constantly buzzed by high speed vehicles or cut off by cars turning into or out of auto repair shops. The street seemed like as complete an example as one could imagine of a street designed for motor vehicles with no thought for human beings.

Look at this picture, readers. Then remember, with astonishment,
that the man who forced this road down this route died feeling
New York City was insufficiently grateful to him.

So it was a shock when I discovered that, until 1941, 3^rd avenue in Sunset Park was the heart of a thriving community. The street was famous for its restaurants and the food shops that supplied the area’s people – who were mainly immigrants from Norway, Sweden and Finland. According to The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s classic biography of Robert Moses, builder of much of modern New York, it was only in 1941 with the opening of the Gowanus Parkway - since substantially widened and turned into an expressway - that it started the decline into traffic-dominated squalor.

Moses insisted, despite pleas from the residents, on building his parkway above 3^rd Avenue when it would have done far less damage above 2^nd avenue, nearer the already industrialised waterfront. Moses dismissed the poor but proud community in Sunset Park as a slum and consequently not worth saving.

I’ve been pondering the Moses story particularly intensely recently as I've noticed how often powerful individuals shape places’ urban fabric – and particularly people’s ability to get around those places easily and safely. That’s in part because of the end of the term in power of Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York for 12 years until December 31, and the start of the term of Bill de Blasio. Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, pushed strongly for the introduction of new, better bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, chipping away at some of the damage Robert Moses did by making the city so dependent on cars. Bloomberg’s successor has promised to continue making decisive changes on the city’s streets. It was part of his election platform – and critical to winning his endorsement by StreetsPac, the safer streets action group – that he promised to work towards eliminating pedestrian deaths altogether.

The George Washington Bridge over the Hudson:
the world's biggest political plaything?

In London, it’s becoming steadily clearer that the efforts of the mayor, Boris Johnson, to provide both better cycling and walking conditions and faster journeys for motor vehicles are collapsing under the weight of their internal contradictions. In Toronto, it’s one of the emblems of Toronto’s general civic tragedy that its clownish, crack-smoking mayor has ripped out some important cycle lanes. Over the past week, I’ve been watching how political operatives in New Jersey used traffic congestion to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, a small town by the George Washington Bridge, apparently for supporting the wrong candidate in the state’s gubernatorial election.

Taken together, the various cases illuminate some core principles. It’s important that leaders have a clear vision for how they want their cities’ transport systems to work and that they’re prepared to tackle forthrightly the kind of obstructionism that almost any significant change to the urban fabric creates. But it’s also vital that those plans are based in a real, solid understanding of what’s going on at street level, that they’re flexible when there are serious concerns and that the plans are carried out within the rules of the political game. Leaders need to exercise the self-discipline to put long-term policy goals ahead of the need to have concrete successes to show before the next election.

Traffic stuck bumper-to-bumper on the Gowanus Expressway
on a quiet January Sunday: true testament to the success
of Robert Moses' road-building

Moses – who wielded power over aspects of transport and planning in New York State and City in various forms from 1924 to 1968 – provides the most spectacular examples of what can go wrong. In Sunset Park, he pushed the elevated highway down 3^rd avenue because, he claimed, the existence there of structures supporting a recently-demolished elevated rail line would make construction along the avenue cheaper. But that probably wasn’t as decisive as his simple conviction that the people of Sunset Park were dispensable. It’s a principle he followed all over New York City and State when he encountered people or environments for which he didn’t care. The more one knows about Moses, the more one spots around the city problems – whether clogged, disruptive freeways, crumbling subway lines or ugly, unsuitable public housing projects – that could have been avoided if Robert Moses had been made to obey the same rules about planning and due process that others followed.

 

Cyclists pedal on a dedicated lane over Copenhagen's
Dronning Louise Bridge. Key difference between these
lanes and London's Cycle "Superhighways": those in
Copenhagen are good, effective public policy.

On a far smaller scale, Boris Johnson’s initiative in London to build “Cycle Superhighways” along main roads exhibits a Moses-like deafness to criticism. No cyclist shown plans for the “superhighways” – which are mostly simply painted blue strips along frighteningly busy roads – could have avoided concluding that riders using them would be terrifyingly vulnerable to the neighbouring traffic. The desire to have achievements to show in the mayor’s first term and a wish to devise a cycling policy distinctively different from that of Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson’s predecessor, seem to have trumped any urge for mature reflection, however. Livingstone had developed the London Cycle Network of quiet routes along back streets.

The Cycle Superhighways look embarrassingly inadequate when compared with the bike lane that Janette Sadik-Khan championed around a mile away from the worst of 3^rd Avenue, along Prospect Park West in Park Slope. The two-way protected lane illustrates, partly, the value of clear thinking and good planning. The lane wasn’t built by pretending, as Boris Johnson has with the Cycle Superhighways, that bike facilities can be built with no effect on motor cars. It took away a lane of car traffic. Sadik-Khan, who had a strong record of listening to the community boards that provide New York neighbourhoods with a voice on planning issues, defended the decision to build the lane in the face of legal action that has now rumbled on for years but served only to highlight how well worked-out and widely supported the original policy was. Her stance puts Boris Johnson’s insistence on following incompatible goals in his roads policy to shame.

 

The George Washington Bridge's Fort Lee entrance
(albeit the bike, not car lanes). Taken last summer,
before politicians realised the scene's full potential.

Boris Johnson, however, has at least largely avoided the ultimate transport policy error – of taking steps for purely short-term political reasons. Those seem to have been the motives for the closure for four days starting last September 9 of two of the three access lanes from the town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, onto the busy George Washington Bridge to New York City. An official in the office of Chris Christie, New Jersey’s Republican governor, seems to have ordered the closures to choke Fort Lee with traffic after the town’s Democratic mayor endorsed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Barbara Buono. The incident – which held up school buses and emergency vehicles, as well as thousands trying to get to work – was one of the most serious moral failings of transport policy practice I’ve ever come across. New Jersey appointees on the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bridge’s operators, seem entirely to have lost sight of the reason for the bridge’s existence and seen it purely as a political tool.

Bill de Blasio fortunately seems unlikely ever to lapse into such downright political cynicism. It was in a supportive spirit that I and some other people concerned about road safety turned up outside his inauguration ceremony on January 1 to remind him of his commitment to cut road deaths. There’s a clear sense of optimism abroad that Mr de Blasio and Bill Bratton, his new police commissioner, might have the courage to start tackling New York City’s appalling road safety record – at the time of writing, the city has already suffered nine traffic fatalities this year. Polly Trottenberg, Sadik-Khan’s successor, even came out ahead of the inauguration to talk to the Vision Zero activists and to hear the heart-rending stories of some of the bereaved parents who were there.

 

Inwood Hill Park: Robert Moses couldn't really understand
why anyone would think the road hadn't improved
this last patch of primeval forest in Manhattan

But, however optimistic the mood on January 1, I couldn’t help wishing I’d been able to take Mr de Blasio with me on the trip I’d taken the previous day, for a family trip to the New York Botanic Garden. To get to the garden, more than 20 miles from my Brooklyn home, I rode up by Robert Moses’ Hudson River Parkway, taking in how it had cut nearly all western Manhattan off from the city’s stunningly beautiful Hudson River waterfront.

I rode under the George Washington Bridge, glancing up to take in the traffic conditions. Then, towards Manhattan’s northernmost 

Two of the three cars that crashed in northern Manhattan
on Mike Bloomberg's last day as mayor: just another
part of the legacy handed Mayor de Blasio

tip, I encountered one of Moses’ most infamous pieces of civic vandalism – Inwood Hill Park, a stretch of primeval forest that he wrecked by needlessly driving a road right through its middle.

A scene we would have encountered on the way back would have been just as instructive. On Broadway, by the bridge leading from the Bronx – which Moses’ road was meant to free from traffic – I found a long traffic jam. At its head were three cars, crashed into each other.

This, I might have told the soon-to-be-mayor, is the legacy you’ve been handed. It’s a city still reeling from a mad effort to make it almost entirely dependent on the private car - and plagued by regular, serious car crashes as a result.

“Please remember the lessons of all the bad and weak leaders who made it like this,” I’d have begged him. “Please try to make it at least a little better.”