With the news late yesterday that Ronald Lauder, the champion of New York City term limits, now supports Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts at overturning the term limits, four more years of a Mayor Bloomberg seems almost inevitable. While my mom, among others, is rather outraged as this news from a populist perspective, the transit buff in me is thrilled with the idea that Janette Sadik-Khan could be around for a few more years.
Sadik-Khan is the current head of the city’s Department of Transportation. The department has long been car-friendly and seemingly anti-transit in its policies. With Sadik-Khan behind the helm, NYCDOT has vastly increased the bike lane mileage in the city and has ushered in an unprecedented era of cooperation between DOT and the MTA.
Last week, when I spoke with New York City Transit President Howard Roberts, he praised Sadik-Khan for her approach to transit. While in the post, the two agencies worked together in an atmosphere of what Roberts called “grudging cooperation,” under Sadik-Khan, the partnership between DOT and the MTA has been “extraordinary,” he said.
Tops on that list of course is the debut of bus rapid transit — or as the MTA calls it, Select Bus Service — in New York City. With preboarding measures and dedicated lanes, DOT and New York City Transit are trying their hardest to speed up notoriously slow bus service in New York City. It is, as Roberts said, “the real future on the bus side.”
It hasn’t all been wine and roses though for Select Bus Service. When David Gantt killed a potential home-rule BRT enforcement measure, the MTA and DOT had start from scratch and figure out how to initiate effective lane enforcement. “That hurt a lot,” Roberts said.
But over the next few years — and even longer if Bloomberg pulls off another reelection — DOT and the MTA are aiming to expand this bus service. The two agencies have their eyes on the East Side. As Roberts related, they would like to give two lanes to buses along 5th Ave., and in fact, studies have found that car traffic flows better if buses have their own lanes along the avenue as well. With less interference from buses that are unwieldy and slow to accelerate, cars can move uninterrupted.
In the end, I’m on the fence with regards to this term limit issue. The term-limit foes should put this vote to a referendum, but at the same time, the last vote on term limit was skewed by the fact that term-limit proponents outspent and had the resources to outcampaign the term-limit foes by a significant amount. On another level, I would welcome four more years of pro-mass transit policies from the Bloomberg Administration, and we’ll probably get just that.
2 comments
Ben,
No guarantee that JSK will stick around if we throw term limits out and re-elect Emperor Bloomberg. There’s a strong possibility that she could be tapped for a Fed position in the Obama administration. And the country would benefit form that, for sure.
I follow your logic in the last paragraph, but I oppose this move. To me this is all in the service of Bloomberg’s ego, and despite the things he has accomplished, I don’t think he deserves half the good press he gets.
That $1 billion discretionary tax rebate last year should put the lie to any claims that Bloomberg is (a) truly fiscally responsible or (b) committed to transit.
Even if Bloomberg were the ultimate transit geek, it wouldn’t help the city to give him undue power. There haven’t been too many cities in the world where the Moses-style dictators were pro-transit, but there is one very high-profile case: Curitiba, under Jaime Lerner.
In some sense, Lerner’s BRT craze, knack for getting things done cheaply and quickly, and opposition to cars and industrial pollution worked: Curitiba proper is a very clean city, and its BRT system is efficient and cheap, albeit extremely slow. At the same time, car ownership there is the highest in Brazil and approaching American levels, and the toxic waste and polluting industries just moved from the city to the suburbs, from which they belch smoke onto the entire metro area. At the end, he was waging war on his city no less than Moses did.
And Bloomberg isn’t even Jaime Lerner. He’s just a CEO who thinks he has a God-given right to run a big city.