Benjamin Kabak

DOT’s new parking signs clean up a confusing and cluttered presentation of information.

When it comes to transportation planning, signage is both vital to the way we get around and often simply taken for granted. We are willing to accept sub-par signage, but we’re also willing to argue over what information should be presented on signs and how. While the Vignelli-designed underground signs do a reasonably good enough job informing straphangers of their directions, New York’s parking signs have often led to questions of interpretation that stump even the most veteran of the city’s drivers.

Yesterday, though, New York City officials unveiled a new sign that has been designed to solve that problem. Created by Pentagram Design, the new signs feature a font change and streamlined information. “You shouldn’t need a Ph.D in parking signage to understand where you are allowed to leave your car in New York,” City Council Member Dan Garodnick, a self-professed supporter of syntactic clarity, said. “The days of puzzled parkers trying to make sense of our midtown signs are over. I was pleased to work directly with DOT, removing unnecessary words in these signs, cleaning up their appearance, and the result is a simple, clear product that people will understand.”

According to DOT, Garodnick has been pushing the agency to simplify parking regulation signs for nearly two years, and the new effort features standardized colors, typefaces and font sizes. For the typographically inclined among us, the font Interface takes center stage here. As far as spacing goes, the new signs seem ideal for the Twitter era as DOT has reduced the number of characters used to explain parking regs from 250 to around 140. The signs are also a foot shorter with the day of the regulation preceding the hours. There are no more abbreviations either.

The new signs are going up throughout Manhattan’s paid parking areas in Midtown, and the initial build-out includes 3300 commercial parking signs and 3000 other signs for nighttime and weekend parking, hotel and taxi stands, street cleaning and the always-confusing “no standing” areas. “New York City’s parking signs can sometimes be a five-foot-high totem pole of confusing information,” DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. “Parking signs play an important role in setting the rules at the curbside and these changes will make regulations easier to read and take the stress out of figuring out where and when you can legally park.”

The H train is a symbol of the challenges facing the New York City transit system as superstorms become a greater threat to the region. (Photo via Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Amy Hausmann)

When Superstorm Sandy swept through the New York City area, it left a wide swath of transit destruction in its path. New York City Transit’s subway tunnels connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens were flooded out while some parts of the system suffered further destruction. New Jersey Transit rather foolishly left its rolling stock in vulnerable areas. The Port Authority’s PATH trains still aren’t operating 24-7. It was the closest to a transit armageddon the region had seen in over a decade.

In the aftermath of the storm, Gov. Andrew Cuomo commissioned a few panels to ascertain the region’s next steps, and one of them — NYS2100 — released its preliminary report this week. We can’t wait until 2100 to implement these suggestions, and they’re worth assessing now. None of the panel’s transportation suggestions are all that groundbreaking, but with a state-commissioned body putting forward these ideas, hopefully acting and, more importantly, funding can come sooner rather than later.

NYS2100 featured some transit luminaries, including current RPA head Robert Yaro and former MTA chief Joe Lhota, and their suggestions seem to reflect such influence. At a high level, the panel has recommended a rapid CBTC implementation, action on the Gateway Tunnel and Metro-North Access plans and a faster and broader bus rapid transit network for the city. On a more philosophical level, the panel has urged the city to reconsider its transportation priorities.

“Even now,” the report says, “the state’s transportation network is being stressed to the limits of its capacity. For this reason, the recommendations in this chapter — building redundancies that enhance the overall transportation network — focus strongly on ways that enhance the resilience of the New York of tomorrow. The infrastructure we invest in today will serve generations of New Yorkers.”

First up is the subway system’s signaling. The panel suggests a rapid CBTC implementation because of the flexibility and increased capacity such a system provides. How this ties into a response from a major storm is a good guess. As far as I can see, CBTC would allow any non-flooded routes to run more trains. Otherwise, it’s an upgrade that shouldn’t require a massive weather event to see the light of day.

Next up comes the recommendation making headlines: The NYS2100 panel urges a crazy bus rapid transit network. “A world class BRT network would enhance the resilience and redundancy of the overall transit system by expanding and supplementing surface transit options,” the draft report says. SBS, says the panel, could be a foundation for a true bus rapid transit network, but all I see is the potential for four or five years of endless public studies with no actual progress made. Let’s reform the process before things get out of hand.

Furthermore, the panel urges New York to push forward on both Amtrak’s Gateway Tunnel and the Penn Station Access project. The former requires a significant federal contribution and the latter the completion of the East Side Access project. Neither are expected to be ready before 2019 at the earliest. Looking to the future, the report also calls upon the state to “encourage alternate modes of transportation.” It is truly compelling language.

In terms of proactive protection, the NYS2100 panel put forward some recommendations that don’t need nearly as much snark as their forward-looking affirmations of projects currently in progress. The report urges the MTA to retrofit subway stations with waterproof roll-down doors; install below-grade vent closures to seal ventilation shafts; and to use inflatable plugs to seal tunnels. Of those three recommendations, the third is most controversial. It’s likely easier to recover from a tunnel flood than it is, as South Ferry has shown, from a station flood, and we should figure out a way to deliver more floodwater into the tunnels while better draining that piece of the infrastructure puzzle. I can’t argue with the doors and vent closures though as keeping water out in the first place should become a priority.

So what do we make of this panel and its suggestions? As my tone may indicate, I’m not too impressed. Most of these projects are in progress, and they hardly solve major problems. They don’t represent a major expansion of the rail network — with a corresponding decrease in car travel — and they seem to respond to problems we witnessed two months ago. They don’t address potential future problems different storms or steadily rising sea levels may pose to the city and its transportation network, and they don’t address funding sources. None of these ideas, obviously, are cheap.

In the end, we’re left at the beginning: With ideas that have long been discussed and no way to pay for the necessary upgrades. This is but a draft report. Hopefully, the final version can deliver on specifics, but I’m not too optimistic. Without the dollars and a funding source, the waters will rise, and the floods will come.

Please don’t relieve yourself in this former subway restroom. (Photo by flickr user theratrace)

A few years ago, I had the admittedly terrible idea of documenting the New York City subway system’s public restrooms. I thought I would maybe make a day of checking out the bathrooms, snapping some photographs and writing up a witty overview of what I would find. Eventually, amNew York beat me to it, and I’m glad they did. I’ve used a subway restroom only once in my life (8th Ave./42nd St.), and it wasn’t a terrible experience. It was just one I’d rather not repeat.

Now and then, though, my curiosity still gets the best of me, and if I’m walking past a subway bathroom, I’m often tempted to duck in. Usually, though, I can’t. Despite signs promising open hours of 5 a.m. to midnight, I’ve found subway restrooms locked more often than not. Those on the mezzanine at West 4th St. are never open, and only once or twice have I seen straphangers duck into the bathrooms off the passageway between the Atlantic Ave. and Pacific St. sides of that complex. I can’t imagine what the ones on the F platform at Delancey St. look like, but those too are often locked.

This past week, Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities tackled a different element of the Great Subway Bathroom Conundrum. Why, he asked, are America’s public transit systems generally without restrooms? By and large, cost seems to be the dominant factor as transit agencies that have restrooms have shut them because no one wants to pay to keep them clean. New York seems to be the exception. Jaffe writes:

Back in 1940, with Fiorello LaGuardia running the city, there were 1,676 functioning toilets in subway stations throughout the system — and all of them received weekly inspections. That figure has since dwindled significantly. Most reports now believe that 77 stations citywide have working public bathrooms (28 in Manhattan), mostly at major transfers or at the end of the line. A survey of the Manhattan facilities conducted by New York magazine in 2006 found most of them either impossible to locate or closed for “construction.” (The rest were just gross.) A citywide survey, done by AM New York in 2010, found that 60 of the 129 total restrooms were locked or being used for another purpose, such as storage. (The rest were still pretty gross.) The MTA cited “criminal activity” as the main reason for the closures.

So there you have it: We don’t have restrooms underground because of the unscrupulous activities they seem to foster. That doesn’t stop many people from simply using the subway system itself as a restroom, and therein lies the problem.

As word of ZipCar’s impending $500 million merger with the Avis Budget Group spread throughout the Internet on Wednesday morning, few knew what to make of the deal. Mike Lydon, Principal of The Street Plans Collaborative, wondered why more urbanists weren’t discussing the deal, and I spent a lot of the day wondering why so many Zipcar users were upset by the pending merger. If anything, the deal should help ZipCar, and for city-dwellers living their lives without owning cars, that’s a positive.

I’ve been a Zipcar member for two and a half years now. It is, as my girlfriend called it yesterday, a necessary evil. We don’t own a car for various reasons: We have access to my parents’ car for long trips; it’s expensive to own, register, insure, maintain and park in Brooklyn; and we just flat-out do not need one regularly. We go months without a car with no problems, and when we do need our own vehicle, we can use ZipCar. Among our cohorts, this model is becoming standard, and car ownership rates are dropping precipitously, especially in cities.

Yet, despite the need and convenience of Zipcar my 30 months as a member have brought nearly as many problems as smooth rentals. I’ve had cars with expired registrations, cars with physical damage, cars with dirty interiors, cars with no gas and cars with broken headlights. The kicker came when the battery in the ZipCar we had rented for my grandmother’s funeral earlier this fall died during the ceremony, stranding us in the rain in Yonkers for 90 minutes and then fighting with us on the phone over refunding the ride for another 20 minutes the next day.

So when Avis and Zipcar announced the deal, I figured it would be a win-win. Zipcar gets some financial backing and access to more car stock and a better distribution network while Avis gets streamlined rental technology and a rising brand. As Ronald Nelson, Avis’ CEO, said in a statement, “We see car sharing as highly complementary to traditional car rental, with rapid growth potential and representing a scalable opportunity for us as a combined company. We expect to apply Avis Budget’s experience and efficiencies of fleet management with Zipcar’s proven, customer-friendly technology to accelerate the growth of the Zipcar brand and to provide more options for Zipsters in more places. We also expect to leverage Zipcar’s technology to expand mobility solutions under the Avis and Budget brands.”

In other words, procurement, operations, maintenance and, most importantly, weekend availability will improve. Yet, so many Zipcar riders expressed concern, and when I asked my Twitter followers why they felt that way, I received a diverse range of answers. Some people have had bad experiences with Avis while others have pointed out that Zipcar’s marketing has been very effective in creating brand loyalty. As one long-time SAS reader said, the response seems to be a “reflexive dislike of a very corporate-feeling entity taking over a ‘fun,’ quirky-feeling one” which can “feel like losing a friend.” As Felix Salmon wrote, “People actually like Zipcar, which is more than can be said for any of the big rental companies.”

On a more practical level, Zipcar is easy. It’s a website with a very graphical interface that makes renting a car as simple as a few mouse clicks. On the other hand, while I’ve had good experiences with Budget, an Avis subsidiary, renting from them is never easy. Drivers never really know exactly what kind of car will be handed to them in the lot; website prices never reflect the actual total; and car rental agents try to upsell everyone. It’s not a particularly clean business, and it’s one that leads to a lot of user frustration and distrust. For those of us who would prefer to see cities with fewer car owners and more car sharing, the prospects of a rental car company taking over Zipcar should be worrying, if not alarming.

Yet, I find myself seeing the good in this deal. Maybe it stems from my overall annoyance at Zipcar and my slate of negative experiences. Maybe it stems from the hope that the car rental company will integrate Zipcar’s back-end platform and offer up its technical expertise, as they claim they will. Either way, this deal could be a game-changer for car-sharing or it could be the beginning of the end for Zipcar. Here’s to hoping for the former.