Second Ave. Sagas

Category: Brooklyn

  • Balancing parking, driving and bus lanes along the B44

    Plans for the B44 SBS include bus bulbs.

    Over the past few years, the battle for street space has become a headline-grabber in New York City. On the one hand are folks who support vibrant street life. These folks argue for dedicated bus lanes, bike lanes and policies that promote pedestrian safety and mass transit over parking. On the other are those who believe that taking away a lane for driving or parked cars is an affront to liberty and freedom and that bike lanes are a part of the tenth circle of hell. Clearly, you know which side I’m on.

    While the bike lane battles have been brewing in Park Slope and Williamsburg, the MTA and New York City DOT have been S-L-O-W-L-Y laying out plans for Brooklyn’s first Select Bus Service route. The new service will follow the path of the B44 along Nostrand and Rogers Avenues from Williamsburg to Sheepshead Bay, and throughout the planning process, it has received the usual array of windshield criticism. Community Board 15 voted it down due to its potential impact on parking while drivers complained that pedestrian-oriented improvements would take away space for their cars.

    The MTA and DOT have been listening though, and now they’re making a case for their plan. Last week, they unveiled the latest iteration of the B44 SBS service, and while it still takes away some space for parking and auto lanes, businesses are rallying behind it because DOT has preserved capacity. In other words, by reallocating space from parked cars to vehicles in motion, the street will be more active. The latest presentation is available here as a PDF, and Streetsblog’s Noah Kazis offers up a thorough summary of the plans. He writes:

    Nostrand Avenue SBS will, as in the Bronx and Manhattan, create dedicated bus lanes enforced by automated cameras and use high-capacity buses and off-board fare payment. With fewer stops, the bus will also spend more time in motion and less time starting and stopping. The Nostrand project will add another new feature: bus bulbs. By extending the sidewalk out to the street, bus bulbs mean that drivers don’t have to pull to the curb and back into the lane, resulting in a smoother and speedier ride. A raised curb means more level boarding onto the bus, advantageous for the elderly and the mobility-impaired. The extra space also means that the bus stop won’t crowd the sidewalk…

    In order to preserve the same number of motor vehicle lanes during rush hour, where a bus lane is being installed DOT proposes turning the left parking lane into a through lane during the morning and evening peaks. This shouldn’t have too much of an impact on local merchants. At Nostrand and Empire Boulevard, only 14 percent of shoppers had driven to the area (and not all had parked on Nostrand). Further south, at Glenwood Road, only 13 percent of shoppers had arrived in a car.

    Moreover, there’s a lot of room to add parking in other ways. On much of Nostrand and its cross streets, parking is currently free. The installation of meters will encourage drivers to move on once done shopping, freeing up space for others. The use of Muni-Meters will also allow more vehicles to park in the same area. Finally, loading zones and delivery windows will ensure that trucks have space at the curb rather than being forced to resort to double-parking.

    This is transportation planning as it should be. In total, the amount of space constantly available for parked cars will dwindle, but what good are parked cars? They may provide transportation, but once idle, they sit lifeless in vibrant urban shopping areas. Muni meters will encourage turnover of parking spaces while buses, a major mode of transportation, will move more freely up and down the avenues. Cars won’t lose lanes, and businesses will gain loading zones. It’s a close to a win-win-win as one will find on the city streets these days.

    Ultimately, though, this Select Bus Service suffers from the same problems that most of the MTA’s bus offerings do: While the route ends at the edge of the borough, most riders want to continue beyond that arbitrary border. The B44 SBS service would be far more useful if it crossed the Williamsburg Bridge and provided a direct connection with the M15 SBS as well as the F train at Delancey St. That’s a dream for another day though. Next fall, Brooklyn will finally get its first faster bus route.

  • With Brighton work over, B express returns

    With the station rehab work along the Brighton Line wrapped up, Brooklyn B and Q train riders are in for a treat. For the first time in three years, B express service will return to the trench on October 3. The sign from Transit says it all.

  • Under the El: Thoughts on urban development

    One Brooklyn native has proposed building a pedestrian space underneath the Culver Viaduct. Rendering by John McGill.

    Thanks to a confluence of history and economics, many of New York City’s streets outside of Manhattan’s Central Business District are lined with elevated train tracks. From Astoria to Woodlawn, from Coney Island to Williamsburg and even through Morningside Heights, elevated train lines soar over city streets. How to incorporate these structures into the urban landscape has long proven to be problematic for New York City planners.

    In certain parts of the city, the elevated trains are less intrusive than in others. The 7, as it travels above Queens Boulevard, occupies an elegant structure away from pedestrians and the flow of traffic, but the N and Q tracks through Astoria darken the streets below while impeding the flow of both people and traffic. One area in Brooklyn — the space under the Culver Viaduct — is a particular wasteland of former and current industrial usages mixed with an urban void.

    A walk or a drive past the Viaduct on the border between Park Slope, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook isn’t very scenic. The trip passes through row houses overshadowed by the looming structure, a Lowes warehouse store and some industrial spaces that look abandoned. Until the train goes back underground at 4th Ave. and just south of 2nd Place and Smith Street, the area is an odd nothingness of quasi-development. It doesn’t have to be this way.

    While digging through some old emails this week, I came across a post from the Architectural League of New York’s Urban Omnibus blog. Written by Brooklyn native John McGill, it explores possible development schemes for the area underneath the Viaduct. While the city has turned a former rail line into a popular public space and burgeoning tourist attraction, they could do something similar to the space under a current rail line.

    McGill seems to call his proposal the anti-High Line as it doesn’t rely on deactivating a rail line. Rather, it is, he says, “an opportunistic repurposing of existing, functioning infrastructure to address the need for a vibrant and coherent public realm.” The proposal itself enters into some architecturally technical areas. After all, you can’t redevelop the space in and around the Viaduct in such a way that would threaten the structural integrity of the active train tracks above.

    The plan itself would incorporate access to and views of the Gowanus Canal — a Superfund site that will eventually be cleaned — and relies upon the shuttering of a concrete plant, the only active business in the area. With some modifications to the Viaduct itself, McGill then proposes a variety of uses:

    Four types of “preservation” emerged as essential to the architectural strategy: preservation of sunlight, of structural stability, of limited footprint at ground level, and of existing (historic) character. Informed by these criteria, Underline offers four potential modes of intervention: the creation of flexible space for public assembly; precast concrete decking hung from above on steel rods as a public landscape “ribbon;” pure infill at ground level; and adaptive reuse of, or interface with, existing adjacent structures…

    Preserving this set of desirable existing conditions results in a series of distributed spaces connected by a linear public park. This establishes a sequence of unique visual experiences as one moves along, offering glimpses of unexpected adjacent activities, the regular appearance of moving trains overhead, and the rhythmic discharge and departure of passengers to and from the stations at either end of the project site — not to mention views of the city currently reserved for F and G subway riders.

    Despite being distributed, however, the program is arranged in discernible clusters so that points of access to each component of the project are clearly legible from the street. Starting from the south, the first of these might contain an EPA monitoring station and public exhibition space, a café, public outdoor amphitheater, rock-climbing wall, and classrooms. The next section consists of covered outdoor basketball courts and a small public fitness center and lap pool, and in the final group retail and production spaces. Because each element is knit into the whole by the landscape ribbon, a loose affiliation emerges between both related and unrelated events in time and space.

    It’s a fascinating plan really and one that New Yorkers do not see too frequently. It takes an underused urban space at the confluence of numerous neighborhoods that also supports key infrastructure and turns it into a potentially popular urban destination. Eleven months after McGill first published the proposal, we can also say that it’s not going to happen, and Brooklyn is worse off for it.

    One of the major reasons why subway construction has stalled over the past 60 years is a public aversion to elevated lines. With the noise and dirt and debris that an above-ground subway causes, residents do not want to see these structures — which are much cheaper than a bored tunnel — dominate the landscape any more than they already do. But just maybe it’s possible to develop an elevated train with the neighborhood in mind.

  • Map of the Day: Smith/9th closed until 2012

    In the grand scheme of New York City’s subway system, the Smith/9th Sts. station along the IND Culver line isn’t a very popular one. Averaging just under 4000 passengers a day in 2010, it was only the 287th most popular stop around. Despite its low ridership, it is both one of the most picaresque and precarious in the city. The highest station in the system with views of the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyline, the viaduct on which it sits has been draped in a protective sheathing for years, and the station has been badly in need of a rehab.

    Since late 2007, the MTA had been planning a full station overhaul for the Smith/9th Sts. stop, and for the past few years, they have warned community boards and neighborhood groups of a looming 2011 full station closure. When the service cuts came last year, the authority warned that it would not be able to provide additional shuttle bus service, but when zero hour arrived yesterday and the MTA shuttered the station until next March, people were still upset.

    Both Carroll Gardens’ Patch site and NY1 covered frustrated commuters, and the two resulting stories are among my favorites in local outrage. Red Hook residents, who clearly drew the short straw here, will have to take a bus ride either into Park Slope or Downtown Brooklyn to reach their trains, and while these folks complained the most about the state of the station and the safety concerns of the Culver Viaduct, they now are going to complain about the MTA’s fixing up the station as well.

    My favorite quotes came from Henry Ramos who spoke to a Patch author. “I am pissed,” he said. “I’m like ‘What am I gonna do now?’” Ramos comes from Williamsburg regularly, and despite a partial platform closure for three months, numerous signs and years of outrage, he wanted even more signs that he probably wouldn’t have read anyway at the station.

    Furthermore, he’s bemoaning the fact that the bus isn’t a free shuttle. “If you don’t got a MetroCard for the bus, you gotta walk,” he said. Does that mean he was hopping the turnstile to board the subway? If he has a MetroCard for the bus, he has a free transfer for the ride to Red Hook. But then again, it’s far easier to complain about something long expected than it is to plan ahead.

    Once the work on the viaduct that doesn’t require trains to be re-routed is finished, the station will reopen. For those in Red Hook and the southern ends of Carroll Gardens, it’s going to be a long nine months.

  • Streetcars, like the Dodgers, won’t return to Brooklyn

    DOT has determined that this streetcar route is simply too expensive for the city right now.

    Once upon a time, the New York City Department of Transportation viewed streetcars as the next great thing for Brooklyn. “We’re looking back to the future,” Janette Sadik-Khan said a few months ago. “Streetcars remain part of the transportation mix in cities from Toronto to Melbourne, and we need to consider all options to improve transit access in underserved neighborhoods like Red Hook.”

    Now, though, DOT is singing a different tune. With advocates howling, the Department of Transportation has wrapped up a six-month study by determining that streetcars are too expensive and won’t deliver benefits to Red Hook without major changes in the city’s development policies.

    The topline determinations are clear: The ideal route would cost $176 million to build and would set back the city $7 million a year to operate. Even worse, the line would increase transit use from Red Hook by only 12 percent — or 1822 daily riders — over the current bus routing as DOT determined that most denizens of the area do not own cars and already rely on the bus for subway access. More problematic though are DOT’s determinations that the area simply isn’t planned properly for streetcar transportation. As Red Hook isn’t zoned of high-density, mixed-use areas, streetcars do not make fiscal sense right now.

    The feasibility report – a 73-page PDF available here — drills down in depth on the city’s study. And yet, over and over again, DOT comes back to the issue of cost. “The estimated cost based on the conceptual design of the preferred alignment amounts to approximately $176 million in 2011 dollars,” the report says. “Given the current economic environment, it is questionable whether the City could raise the funds for this substantial capital investment. Moreover, in light of the unfavorable feasibility considerations related to the actual operation of such a system, it is uncertain that a streetcar, while technically feasible, is the most efficient option for meeting Red Hook’s transit goals today.”

    Opponents have risen a stink about this study. In numerous emails to me, Bob Diamond of the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association claims DOT’s figures are misleading. He claims DOT’s capital cost estimates at $26 million per mile are far too high and cites a 2001 effort by Portland which cost the Oregon city just $13 million per mile. DOT too cites to that effort and claims that construction costs in Portland have risen to $22 million per mile today. It also claims, not incorrectly, that construction costs in New York City are significantly higher than they are on the West Coast.

    Meanwhile, as Streetsblog noted, other concerns dominated the report as well. Despite low car ownership rates in Red Hook, DOT did not feel comfortable with removing parking spots, and many alignments seemed to require significant curb cuts and some use of eminent domain in order to ensure adequate turning radii for the streetcars. The most damning critique though, as Noah Kazis writes, concerns cooperation amongst city agencies. He says:

    A final objection, though, seems to reveal either a lack of coordination between city agencies or a study designed to reject the streetcar in advance. Having looked at streetcar projects in other cities, DOT found that installing the transit line would only promote economic development if it was paired with changes to the area’s land use planning. Noting that the Department of City Planning doesn’t have any plans to upzone Red Hook’s residential areas or otherwise plan for growth, the DOT study concludes that the “current City development/land use policy is not complementary to streetcar as an economic development driver.”

    So while Diamond says that he’ll continue to fight for streetcars in Brooklyn, DOT has other ideas in mind. They want to instead improve sidewalks, bike lanes and bus service into and out of Red Hook and will attempt to better integrate the neighborhood into subway access plans. Yet until they actually follow through with these plans, Red Hook will remain an isolated area with sub-par bus service and subway access. Streetcars could have been a panacea for the area, but like the bankrupt Dodgers, they won’t be making a return to Brooklyn any time soon.

  • Brooklyn express buses restored amidst political pressure

    The X27 and X28 express buses from, respectively, Bay Ridge and Bensonhurts to Midtown will be revived following a deal with the MTA struck by State Senator Marty Golden and Councilmember Vincent Gentile, the Brooklyn Eagle reported this week. The two buses had been eliminated due to low ridership last summer amidst the MTA’s service cuts, but Golden and Gentile, who helped file a lawsuit challenging the cuts, claimed that seniors and the handicapped needed this express routes. “The new routes were not working for the people of my district,” Golden said. “On a regular basis, I received emails and phone calls from people waiting at bus stops. The commute, based on the new routes and schedules, was almost double for many, and people were selling their homes, changing their hours at work, hiring second babysitters, and the list goes on.”

    I’m happy for these neighborhoods that are getting their bus service back, and the politicians are too. “By restoring service on the X37,” Gentile said, “the MTA has acknowledged that south Brooklyn commuters have been shortchanged when it comes to transportation.” But while terms of the revival were not announced and cost figures are unclear, I have to wonder why these politicians wait until after the fact to act and why their actions are simply knee-jerk ones designed to restore a bus or two. Instead of seeking out institutional changes that will protect our transit services in advance, these politicians are simply pandering to their constituent demands. That’s no way run a public transportation agency, let alone an entire city or state.

  • Media Hit: BIT on the Culver Viaduct

    As the Culver Viaduct controversy swirled last week, the local Brooklyn media profiled the upcoming work and brouhaha over those who were unaware of the F train shutdowns. On Friday afternoon, reporter Lauren Moraski interviewed me from the Smith/9th Sts. station to discuss the work and Brooklynites’ reactions to it. The story aired earlier this week on Brooklyn Review on the Brooklyn Independent TV station, and I’ve embedded the clip above.

    Regular readers of SAS know the story by heart by now, but Moraski managed to track down a few more commuters who were surprised by the station closures. One wants to see a shuttle bus that, due to MTA budgetary problems, won’t run while others will just have to hoof it to Carroll St. While riders all along the F line in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington will suffer, Red Hook residents drew the short end of the straw. With limited subway service and no added bus lines, it’s going to be a long year for those who rely on the F for their commutes.

  • For Brooklyn F riders, all’s well that ends a week later

    After an intense debate over some Brooklynites’ shock at the looming closure of stations along the F line, the weather has intervened to give the Culver Viaduct rehab a week-long reprieve. As WNYC’s Jim O’Grady reported late yesterday, Transit has decided to postpone the work by a week due to the threat of up to six inches of snow this weekend. Thus, the work on the Culver Viaduct that requires Manhattan-bound trains to bypass Forth Hamilton Parkway, 15th St. and Smith-9th Sts. won’t commence until January 17, and neighbors irate over the late notice have another week to plan.

    Meanwhile, O’Grady quizzed Transit officials on the decision to wait until less than a week before work was to begin to hang up signs announcing the platform closures. “We have found that if you put it up too early, people lose sight of it,” agency spokesman Charles Seaton said. “It’s better to keep it fresh in people’s minds.” Seaton did say that signs will go up this weekend and that the authority will make “public announcements in the system.”

    Yet, I still believe warnings should have gone up in late December. The Viaduct rehab, talked about since 2007, will inconvenience a lot of F and G train riders throughout 2011. Either way, after the back-and-forth amongst commenters in my earlier post, on FiPS yesterday and on Gothamist, I had to laugh when this seven-day postponement was announced last night.

  • A tale of a viaduct, a sign and the need to pay attention

    Manhattan-bound F riders are gearing up for months of inconvenience. (Photo courtesy of @JeffreyNYC)

    One of my main themes at Second Ave. Sagas over the past four years has involved New Yorkers’ relationship with transit news. I’ve looked at how the millions of people who rely on the MTA for travel don’t pay attention to the news, how the news doesn’t do an adequate job explaining certain transit stories and how the MTA’s own approach to customer service oftentimes compounds the problem. Nowhere is that more evident than in today’s developing outrage over the upcoming shutdown of stations along the F line in Brooklyn as part of the Culver Viaduct rehab project.

    The basis for this tale is a simple one: After three years of planning and the start of Phase 1 of the Culver Viaduct rehabilitation plan, the MTA announced this week that, beginning January 10, Phase 2 shutdowns will begin. In other words, from January 10 through May, as part of a $275.5 million rehab on a structure that’s falling apart, the following changes will be in effect:

    • No Manhattan-bound F or Queens-bound G service at 15th Street Prospect Park and Ft. Hamilton Parkway Stations.
    • No Manhattan-bound F service at Smith-9th Sts Station. Queens-bound G service stops at a temporary platform.
    • All Manhattan and Queens-bound trains stop on the express track at Church Avenue and 7th Avenue stations.
    • Manhattan-bound F and Queens-bound G trains stop at a temporary platform accessed via the Coney Island-bound platform at 4th Avenue-9th Street station.

    Somehow, despite years of warning, the locals are outraged. Popular neighborhood blog Fucked in Park Slope is too beside itself for snark while Gothamist is fielding some priceless emails. “We’re new to Windsor Terrace (2 months) and fairly new to New York (6 months),” one Brooklyn resident said. “I’m absolutely livid that this is happening with a week’s notice, especially in the winter. This is the first we’re hearing of this and is part of a chain of the F train messing with us. I’ve lived in cities for the past 10 years and I can tell you this level of fuckery wouldn’t fly in LA or Boston.”

    So where to begin? Where to begin? Should we point out that subways in Los Angeles and Boston, you know, shut down over night so that people can’t get home via public transit after midnight? It certainly would be worse living in Windsor Terrace if the last F train departed from midtown at 11:30 p.m. every Friday and Saturday.

    But instead, let’s look at some history. In late 2007, New York City Transit unveiled their plans for the Culver Viaduct, and while the timeline has been pushed back and the project slightly scaled down in the intervening years, the same service changes apply. In fact, in a presentation to Community Board 6 in 2007, Transit presented the exact same service patterns going into effect next week. Take a look:

    A presentation from 2007 shows plans portending next week’s F/G service outage in Brooklyn.

    That 2007 presentation wasn’t the only one Transit has delivered to Brooklyn. Take a look at a similar one from 2008. It’s just another in a long line of slideshows Transit’s community relations officials have given to Community Boards. In fact, as recently as this past fall, I sat in on a meeting at which officials discussed these exact service changes.

    Furthermore, the MTA has released its own video on the project; and crews have been working on the viaduct for nearly ten months. In other words, since 2007, then, Brooklynites knew or should have known that their service was going to be cut for a few months, and if people moving to the area or already living their failed to do adequate research, that’s on them.

    Of course, oblivious locals who don’t seek out transit news aren’t the only ones to blame. In fact, I don’t expect people to attend Community Board meetings and few non-members do. But New York’s various news outlets pay people to attend and report on those meetings, and over that last few years, that’s just what they’ve done. Newspapers ranging from The Daily News to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle have covered the work.

    My site is but a small fish in the giant sea of New York media, but unfortunately, Brooklyn news outlets haven’t done a thorough job of explaining the impact of the Culver Viaduct rehab. Take a glance through the Brooklyn Paper search results of stories relating to this work. The paper mentions that service to and from Smith-9th Sts. will be impacted, but it doesn’t explore how the need to run F and G trains on the express tracks will lead to trains bypassing 15th St. and Fort Hamilton Parkway. That’s a failure of media.

    Finally, the MTA isn’t absolved of all blame either, and in fact, the authority hasn’t upheld its end of the deal. At a Community Board 6 Transportation Committee meeting earlier this fall, committee members specifically asked the MTA to warn the neighborhoods well ahead of time. Instead, the MTA started hanging up signs portending a four-month service outage just seven days ahead of time. Even though the MTA had warned community groups and received a far amount of press coverage, Transit should be papering stations well ahead of the service outages. The authority can’t force news down people’s throats, but it can do a better job of getting the word out ahead of time. One week is not enough lead time for a warning of this magnitude.

    This day of outrage in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace highlights how people simply take the transit system for granted. They’d rather every station but theirs get rehabbed and are content to let infrastructure age if it means they aren’t inconvenienced. The millions of New Yorkers who ride the subway every day are also content to ignore the news that impacts their lifeline to the economic hubs of the city, and the media that covers these areas is content to do a half-hearted job of it. The MTA too doesn’t make it any easier. This is outrage that has been in the works since November 2007, and with a little more effort from everyone, it should have been completely avoidable.

  • FDNY, DOT shut down Atlantic Ave. tunnel tours

    A simmering conflict between the FDNY, DOT and Robert Diamond, the main force behind the Brooklyn Historic Railway Association and the Atlantic Ave. tunnel tours boiled over this afternoon as DOT revoked Diamond’s permission to conduct tours. Citing fire safety concerns brought to light by recent FDNY investigations, DOT announced its decision in a letter to Diamond at 4:45 p.m. this afternoon.

    The recent battle between the city and Diamond started around 10 days ago when the Fire Department forced him to cancel a movie screening inside the tunnel. Rooftop Films had planned to air a few films inside the tunnel as they had done in August, and National Geographic was set to film inside the tunnel. Due to concerns over ventilation and the space available for entrances and exits into and out of the tunnel, the FDNY sent a letter to DOT expressing its safety concerns, and today, DOT pulled the plug on the tours.

    Diamond, who has been conducting tours inside the 165-year-old tunnel since the early 1980s, was apoplectic. FDNY has urged him to build a second entrance to the tunnel, but for years, DOT has dragged its feet on granting permission to open another entrance to a few feet further down Atlantic Ave. For now, then, the tours will stop at Diamond figures out his next move. He does not have kind words for the city.

    “This entire debacle has occured because the City of New York for the past 30 years has failed to address the status of this historical treasure,” he said to me. “The City, especially DOT, has ignored my pleadings for the past 30 years to come together and formulate a policy for the preservation and utilization of this remarkable historical resource. Now that the Bloomberg Administration’s ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude towards historic treasures has been exposed for all to see, I hope the next city administration, which is only around the corner, will have more common sense than to destroy a proven tourist attaction and historical resource.”