Sitting in Times Square

From the New York Times:

Add this to the weird reasons to love New York City: Less than a week after Times Square became an outdoor lounge, it’s already hard to find a seat in the crossroads of the world. Mayor Michael Bloomberg closed large swaths of Broadway to traffic and filled Times Square with plastic lawn chairs in gaudy pink, blue and green as one of his experiments in making the city more livable. The question of whether New Yorkers would like the innovation is already answered. As anyone with a sandwich and a yen to watch the neon lights at lunch can attest, the big problem is finding a free chair.

“Today is the first day I’ve found a place to sit,” Rachelle Bulgin, a 19-year-old college student who works nearby, said on Thursday afternoon. “It’s kinda cool.”

The chair scene has quickly become another New York phenomenon, providing the tourists that fill the area with another reason to gape at the locals. Soon after the chairs were introduced last month, one man created an outdoor living room with a rug, lamp and three plastic seats. It had to go at midnight, when workers lock the chairs up for the night.

New Yorkers are taking their work to Broadway’s outdoor salons between 42nd and 47th Streets and across from Macy’s on 34th Street. There are laptops galore, and one executive pulled a few of the chairs in a circle this week for a business meeting, his wisdom further illuminated by the neon lights flashing overhead.
Mostly, however, people simply sit. They rest their feet and unload their parcels. “There are not many places like this to stop and catch your breath,” explained Debbie Adams, a tourist from South Africa.

Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, said little explanation was needed when the chairs were put in place. “We hadn’t even gotten the tags off when people had settled into them. It was like this had been there for the last 40 years,” he said.

Actually, these particular chairs are temporary. Purchased for $10.74 each at a local hardware store, many of the original 350 are already starting to sag and show signs of overuse. But before anybody invests in more durable or attractive seats, the city’s traffic experts want to make sure the idea works. Even the joys of a large sitting area in Times Square are not an adequate trade-off for permanent gridlock.

If traffic is merely bad, as usual, the next step is to make the area a little more glamorous. By August, the seating areas are scheduled to be resurfaced. There are plans for sturdier chairs and planters are expected to replace the orange plastic barrels now being used to warn cars away. Times Square’s experimental park is primitive, but for anyone who loves the lights of Broadway, it is the new best view in town.

40 mile bike commute

Via Bike Blog NYC

New York, New York

Ben Alder over at Next American City has this good piece about why NYC is getting so much attention these days, but do they really need all the help?

Going After Cars Where it Really Matters

Did you ever think that there would such a thing as a celebrity transportation commissioner? Neither did I. But New York City’s Janette Sadik-Khan has become not just a heroine to transit activists since she began in 2007, she has been the subject of multiple profiles in glossy magazines. First The American Prospect and now New York magazine have sung her praises at great length. Sadik-Khan has been making headlines by trying to build “complete streets” that no longer favor cars over bicyclists and pedestrians. Since her efforts are taking place in the most high-profile of locations—along 9th Avenue and Broadway in midtown Manhattan—they are getting a lot of media attention.

That is all well and good. But as I noted in my own Prospect feature on urban and regional planning, New York is already light years ahead of the rest of the country in being free of auto dependence. The real challenge we face as a country is not perfecting New York but improving the suburbs and newer cities, where the overwhelming majority of population growth has occurred in recent years. As I demonstrate in my piece, by visiting Leesburg, Virginia, a typical American exurb, without a car, local and regional planning has made most exurbs entirely dependent on cars. But it does not need to be that way. Looking at the town of Kentlands, Maryland, I saw that new urbanist communities in the suburbs could be pedestrian-friendly and transit-accessible. In fact, in Germany, there is a new suburb that has banned cars entirely.

Of course, we should also focus on reducing the inequality between inner-city public schools and suburban schools so as to encourage the re-population of American cities that have been decimated by white flight. But there will always be bedroom communities. The nation’s first suburbs, such as Brooklyn Heights, are now considered models of urban living. New York may benefit from Janette Sadik-Khan but the suburbs need her, or people like her, much more.

Proactive Transportation Planning

Alex Marshall from the Regional Plan Association argues why transportation planning needs to look at area of least congestion, as oppose to the more obvious destinations. While this might seem counter intuitive to most, it seems to make sense if you want to direct people to a geographic area not serves by transit. He explains how it worked in Spain:

But you don’t have to go back two centuries to find projects that anticipate demand and make it work. Spain, eyeing the fast trains in France in the early 1990s, opted to build its first high-speed rail line from Madrid to Seville, a beautiful city of Moorish architecture and Flamenco dancers, but not an economic dynamo.

Many thought a better choice would have been to build it between Madrid and the thriving city of Barcelona. Many businessmen already made that journey, and many wanted to do so more quickly and easily.

I rode the new Seville line in 1994, shortly after it opened. I made the 300-mile trip from Madrid to Seville in less than two hours, visiting the Seville World’s Fair and returning to Madrid in time for dinner. Even so, I wondered at the wisdom of making Madrid-Seville the first line in the system.

Americans seem to recognize that infrastructure investment can jump-start an economy. But as states and localities decide where to put their money, they shouldn’t simply generate studies to show where the traffic is. They should ask how transportation can expand commerce and trade, and make better places to live.

Planning for connections for major destinations makes sense, but should we be looking at a future where sprawl and development can be controlled through transportation planning?

Bike Lanes

Ian Sacs over at Planetizen explains why bike lanes are important:

A friend introduced me yesterday to rambunctious bicycling advocate Fred Oswald via a recent article out of Cleveland’s press. Much debate swirls around his not-so-uncommon opinions. Mr. Oswald’s argument can be boiled down to two points: supporting a critical need for much more bicycling education on sharing public roadways with other vehicles, and fighting an industry-borne fallacy that breaking up streets with allocated spaces, such as bike lanes, is good for the biking community. The former is, of course, not contestable. We all agree that safety and training are absolutely critical to developing a strong and healthy bicycling community. The latter, however, is a serious point of contention in the transportation profession, and deserves discussion. Categorically declaring bike lanes counter-productive is lacking nuance and myopically idealistic; it simply does not reflect where we are as a nation of people on the move. When it comes to the idea of bicycles and automobiles co-existing, that is, equally sharing a common public space, we Americans are but toddlers learning to get our balance; therefore, we still need training wheels. And training wheels in this metaphor take the form of two parallel stripes called bike lanes.

As a fellow engineer, I am compelled to say that I totally empathize with the argument. Indeed, in an ideal world where everyone acknowledges that bicyclists deserve the same access to, and use of, public rights-of-way as motorists, we would not need to reapportion pavement into exclusive modal fragments. But in typical engineer fashion, this narrow focus on ideal conditions fails to consider the current status of bicyclist/driver relations. Drivers are confused, at best, with bicyclists on “their” streets (angry at their interference, at worst), and bicyclists are summarily fearful of drivers. The result is many would-be daily bicyclists overlook that excellent means of commuting for another mode of transport, most often the car.

Status-quo geometric design is not going to get more bikes on the road than there are brave messenger jobs and aggressive enthusiasts. The average person is just not that daring. After decades of our industry designing roadways for the efficient throughput of cars, bicycling has been all but marginalized. Without words, we have sent a message that streets are for cars, fast and plentiful. Efforts to try to communicate something different can not effectively be done with “Share the Road” signage and billboards alone. To overcome the conditioning of decades, we must send a message loud and clear, in the most direct way possible. Rather than creating a safe space on the street for bicyclists – which is not the function of bike lanes and should not be promoted as such – bike lanes vividly transmit a message to both drivers and potential bicyclists that “Hey, this street is for both cars and bikes; bikes have a right to be here just as much as cars do!”

After years of posting “Bike Route” signage throughout New York City boroughs with little to no impact on ridership, look to that city’s recent surge in bicycling volumes as bike lanes are striped at an astonishing pace for evidence of the overwhelmingly effective message sent by bike lanes. In my hometown of Hoboken, the recent addition of bike lanes on two streets instantaneously resulted in slower speeds on those streets (full disclosure: this is based on residents’ anecdotes, not a speed study). Following the industry’s accepted prescription, narrower lanes in the form of an added bike lane increase the so-called “perceived risk” of drivers, along with their awareness of other uses on the street, and therefore vehicle speeds inversely decrease.

Finally, with the installation of bike lanes, it is true as Mr. Oswald says, that “Fools rush in!”. But I contend that fools are exactly what we want: people new to biking, choosing that mode over a car, and learning how to share the road as bicyclists rather than drivers. Yes, a strong education and safety program is equally important, but welcoming new bicyclists to the street is most desirable because, as concluded in study after study, the most powerful way to reduce bicycle/vehicle fatalities and increase driver awareness of bicycles is by getting more bikes on the road, commonly referred to as the "Safety in Numbers" effect.

Bike lanes are not a safety device, they are a bullhorn. In a future where the message is implicit, bike lanes may be unnecessary. But for now, despite not being a perfect solution, they are an effective and important tool in the engineer’s toolbox, and should be used as such.

The Uncreative Class

Josh Leon over at Next American City challenges Richard Florida's theory about mobility and the creative class. A lot of hoopla has been made about his artice in The Atlantic, but I still don't by his argument. So many advantages and good things can take place from people staying put and investing in their communities. A population that is constantly on the move and ready to leave at a moments notice is not a stable community. Here is Leon's take on Floridas Arguement:

Should We Abandon the “Uncreative Class”?

What would you do if you were the mayor of Detroit? Right now entrepreneurial urbanists in Detroit and other rust belt cities are by necessity re-envisioning their urban milieus, trying to make them greener, more creative, more prosperous places. There are pockets of success here and there, but the scary part is that all of this
re-imagining might not matter. Given the rate of industrial decline, it would seem that distant global forces are shaping urban landscapes in ways that are as stoppable for urban planners as the weather.

The late management expert Peter F. Drucker wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs called “The Changed World Economy” in 1986 that accurately foresaw the problems that cities are dealing with today. The manufacturing sector, he said, was becoming decoupled from blue collar employment. America may produce just as much, but it’s doing so with fewer workers. At the same time, he saw flows of global capital—investment money moving from one place to another—as replacing in importance the actual physical trade in goods. Put together, this means that job opportunities come and go, moving around the country (and globe) at unprecedented speed. I’m worried that this accelerated mobility of opportunity might be too much for most people to
keep up with.

The real problem in the ever-mercurial global economy is how to manage cities whose roles in it could become unmarketable by next week. The urban theorist Richard Florida argued in the March Atlantic that the answer was to redesign our urban geography for increased mobility. That way people can keep up with changing job markets and members of Florida’s lionized “creative class” of white-collarprofessionals can find one another. The old system that encouraged home ownership should be jettisoned in favor of renting, which makes it easier for people to pick up and move without the time consuming agony of home selling. Cities should be more concentrated, less suburban, and more connected by public transit. I’m generally fine with those propositions, as are most urban planners. However, there are bigger issues at hand when we talk about enhancing mobility to accommodate the volatility of unleashed markets.

The inefficient suburban-centric development model of the past few decades isn’t the only reason why migration is so hard. When people migrate nationally or internationally for the (potentially false) promise of a better life, they leave behind important familial and communitarian networks of social support. Permanent communities become temporary residences of job seekers en route from one place to the next, and any sense of connection to place is lost. Relationships fall under strain as families separate out of necessity. So the system of creative capitalism can be painfully atomizing.

There are also brutal legal barriers that prevent mobility. While goods and capital can move between cities freely (and job opportunities with them), millions of people around the world have to keep their very presence a secret in order to avoid deportation or Byzantine detention. It’s ironic that, in the age of NAFTA, the governments of the U.S., Mexico and Canada are spending billions on high-tech surveillance to regulate who travels among them. In China’s coastal cities—the geographic centers of the country’s economic activity—rural migrants are a legally
mandated underclass.

Finally, not everyone can afford to move and the poorest are left behind amidst urban blight and neglect. What do we do about the immobile? What do we do with cities that are net losers of the “creative class”? For this so-called creative brand of capitalism, the uncreative are someone else’s problem. As Florida says, “We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try.” I would say that this is not at all clear. There is an inherent inhumanity in leaving people and their cities in the dust. Besides, the cost of finding ways to get so-called obsolete classes of workers gainfully employed where they live is looking preferable to the social costs of managing huge ghost cities and permanent spatial inequality.

Auto sales down, car sharing on the rise

What should the auto industry fear? Not high speed rail or more money to mass transit. They should be worried about all the different car sharing programs popping up all over cities across America. Here in the Twin Cities we have a non-profit run Hour Car with its fleet of hybrid cars. Yes, it costs about $8 an hour to use and the insurance and gas is already paid for. It is the perfect deal for someone like myself who rarely needs a car, but does take advantage when I need one.

This NY Times article covers what is taking place:

In recent years Americans appeared to be hooked on it and took advantage of home equity loans, easy credit and cheap short-term lease deals to send new-car sales to levels of more than 17 million a year.

Now the market has collapsed by 46 percent to below 10 million, as people are making do with the cars they have, leaving the industry to debate — and worry — about what the new normal will be once the recession ends.

Now Toyota and other carmakers must wait to see if Americans will return to their old car-buying habits — people like Jay S. Allen, owner of a San Francisco consulting firm, and his wife, Jennifer Nicoloff, a product manager at Gap. Over the years, they have owned eight cars between them.

But now they are carless, with no plans to buy. When he needs transportation, Mr. Allen either rides his scooter or borrows a car for a few hours from a local car-sharing service.

“Too many people are looking at alternatives,” said Scott Griffith, chief executive of Zipcar, the national car-sharing company that has more than 300,000 members, up from about 200,000 a year ago. Mr. Griffith estimates that for every three members, a new car probably goes unsold.

Trading in your car and not getting a new one might just be the new trend in America. It might also just be the trend we have been waiting for to change and get away from our auto centric culture and lifestyle.