34th Street Transitway

The latest plan for 34th Street isn't nearly as ambitious as the Transitway was.

The Department of Transportation unveiled another new new look for 34th Street on Monday, and despite my earlier doom and gloom, the proposed design isn’t all bad. Despite giving more space over to cars and parking while removing many of the benefits for pedestrians, it seemingly prioritizes buses and does give more sidewalk space to those who most need it.

Per the latest DOT presentation, 34th Street’s new look will feature dedicated — but not physically separated — bus lanes as well as bus bulbs and more curbside space. Traffic will be confined to one late in each direction, and from 9th Ave. to 3rd Ave., only one side of the street will enjoy precious curbside access. Plus, the MTA will institute pre-boarding fare payment procedures this year, thus speeding up the bus in the process.

During the presentation last night, DOT officials spoke about their goals for 34th Street. As it stands right now, the street plays host to 33,000 bus riders per day, but the vehicles average only 4.5 miles per hour. It also features some of the most tourist-laden sidewalks in the city and, as the Far West Side emerges as a residential and commercial hub, will play host to future growth.

Meanwhile, with input from the community, DOT tried to incorporate a variety of aspects into the new plan. While the old Transitway reserved most space for pedestrians and buses, the new proposal called for shared road space. DOT tried to “improve curbside access wherever possible” while also maintaining two-way traffic. Despite the focus on cars, though, the department also wanted to make sure that pedestrian improvements were key. Thus, the new plan includes 18000 square feet of new pedestrian space while increasing daytime loading spots from 55 to 355. As compromises goes, this one, while far from ideal, isn’t awful.

The future for 34th Street, though, is still hazy. Nearly four years after the Transitway was first presented to the public, DOT still has another year to go on this new plan. It will conduct open houses on March 30th and 31st before presenting a traffic analysis in the fall and an environmental assessment report by early 2012. We’d be lucky to see these badly needed street improvements before the next presidential election. That’s a timeline far too elongated by rampant NIMBYism.

And that brings me to this interesting article in The Times’ Week in Review. Noting the small but loud minority of folks who hate the Prospect Park bike lane, Elisabeth Rosenthal accuses liberals in particular of espousing green development — except for when it impacts their lives. She writes:

Nimbyism is nothing new. It’s even logical sometimes, perhaps not always deserving of opprobrium. After all, it is one thing to be a passionate proponent of recycling, and another to welcome a particular recycling plant — with the attendant garbage-truck traffic — on your street. General environmental principles may be at odds with convenience or even local environmental consequences.

But policymakers in the United States have been repeatedly frustrated by constituents who profess to worry about the climate and count themselves as environmentalists, but prove unwilling to adjust their lifestyles or change their behavior in any significant way. In Europe, bike lanes crisscross cities, wind turbines appear in counties with high-priced country homes and plants that make green energy from waste are situated in even the wealthiest neighborhoods. So what is going on here?

Robert B. Cialdini, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University who studies environmental behaviors, points to two phenomena: Humans hew to the “normative” behaviors of their community. In places where bike lanes or wind turbines or B.R.T. systems are seen as an integral part of society, people tend not protest a new one; if they are not the norm, they will. Second, whatever feelings people have about abstract issues like the environment, in practice they react more passionately to immediate rewards and punishments (like a ready parking space) than distant consequences (like the threat of warming).

It’s something to chew on at least as we’ve seen an ambitious plan for 34th street pared down to some relatively minor bus improvements. Of course, NIMBYism is a curse and a blessing for any democracy, but at some point, those of us who espouse pedestrian- and transit-oriented development have to win those folks over to our side. Along 34th Street, we didn’t, and the future plans are worst off for it.

Project opponents actually contended that the 34th St. Transitway would have blighted the area. (Image via NYC DOT)

As the city readies to unveil a drastically reduced plan for 34th St., the once and former Transitway will go down in history as another great idea for the transportation landscape in the City of New York that fell victim to the complaints of its neighbors. Instead of physically separated bus lanes and a pedestrian plaza that would promote economic activity along a busy and tourist-heavy corridor of Manhattan, cars and curbside access have seemingly won the day after months of bitter debate.

Still, despite my eulogy, the proposal isn’t all bad. Car traffic will be restricted, and buses will earn their dedicated — but not physically separated — lanes in the new proposal set to be revealed later today. Michael Grynbaum has the nitty gritty:

Cars and trucks on 34th Street in Manhattan would be squeezed into two lanes — one moving east, the other west — with a bus-only lane on either side, under a revised plan for the thoroughfare to be unveiled by the Bloomberg administration on Monday. The plan would eliminate an earlier proposal for concrete barriers that would have separated bus lanes on the street from other vehicular traffic, according to four people briefed on the city’s plans who did not want to be identified over concerns that city officials might be angry at them for releasing the information early.

The reconstituted streetscape is a stripped-down version of an earlier design, first proposed by the city in 2008, that drew ire from some residents and tabloid columnists. Other controversial elements of that plan have now also been scrapped, including a pedestrian plaza that would have banned cars and trucks between Herald Square and the Empire State Building.

The new proposal calls for buses to travel in exclusive terra cotta-hued lanes, similar to a street design recently installed along First and Second Avenues that has speeded up trips along Manhattan’s East Side. But a parking and loading lane would be installed in some places between the bus lanes and the curbside, a concession to residents and business owners concerned that the plan would block automobile access to the front of their buildings. A spokesman for the city’s Department of Transportation declined to comment on Friday.

Those involved in this months-long soap opera praised the Department of Transportation and, begrudgingly, Janette Sadik-Khan for their willingness to listen to what I will politely call community input. “In the midst of all this hubbub, there has been careful analysis going on behind the scenes,” Dan Biederman, head of the 34th Street Partnership said to The Times. “They have come to a scheme that they believe in, rather than one that’s only the product of political compromise.”

Daniel Garodnick, the City Council member who represents may residents along 34th Street, inadvertently exposed the true concerns: curbside space for cars. “Curb access is already the source of much frustration, and this plan may actually bring some relief,” he said. The Post meanwhile sees conspiracy theories everywhere and says the process cannot be trusted.

Even Gene Russianoff, a long-time transportation advocate, seemed ready to throw in the tunnel for the once-heralded Transitway. “This is New York. Every inch of public space has a constituency and a set of demands. It’s just realistic to pay attention to what those are and the parameters of what’s possible,” he said.

Yet, what happened here is a blow to improved transportation and pedestrian access. As Grynbaum writes in his piece, the new proposal is “also expected to create more space for parking, loading and deliveries than is found in the street’s current configuration,” and that’s just the opposite of what New York’s planners should be encouraging in mid-2011. To build a sustainable city, to cut emissions and congestion, the streets must be made safer and more friendly for pedestrians. Particularly around Midtown, in which people and not cars are the shoppers and browsers, unnecessary driving should be discouraged while activity that contributes to the economy should be encouraged.

What has happened instead is a tyranny of the minority. The people who would stand to see their personal auto access eliminated have risen a stink, and in a city in which curbside access is all but non-existent in most places, they have turned it into a rallying cry. The city itself failed to adequately consider input from commuters and allowed the opponents to grab the press. Who knows The Post has made it its mission to destroy any transit improvements that take street space away from cars? Maybe it’s advertiser-driver, but maybe it’s just ignorance and fear of positive change.

Ultimately, the city should offer this Transitway to a neighborhood that wants it. Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn needs some serious traffic calming and reengineering. Queens Boulevard is ripe for a Transitway as well. If 34th Street does not want to serve as a model for a better city, let another borough take a crack at it. This might be a setback, but it shouldn’t be an ultimate loss.

Macy's is concerned that Transitway could disrupt its Thanksgiving Day parade. (Image via NYC DOT)

As the dust is still settling over the Department of Transportation’s plan to scale back elements of the 34th St. Transitway, news and views are flying fast and furious. Ahead of this weekend’s Transportation Camp, let’s round ’em up.

First, The Post has proclaimed victory in a backhanded way on its editorial page. In a piece that devolves into unnecessary personal attacks and blatant falsehood, Murdoch’s rag calls upon the City Council to “topple” “Janette Sadik-Khan’s little kingdom.” Why? Because a few residents will be denied curbside access along parts of 34th St. It’s tough to see through the Post’s vitriol to find a true point, but it seems as though Alexander Hamilton’s once-great paper would rather see cars zooming past businesses in Herald Square than make room for tourists and residents to shop in comfort.

The Daily News too takes a self-congratulatory tone as well in its editorial. Claiming that “Sadik-Khan may well be trying to solve a problem that has already been remedied,” the unsigned piece claims that buses along 34th Street already move fast enough. We don’t need a $125 million upgraded — funded largely through federal monies — that make the street nicer for everyone because camera enforcement of bus lanes has improved travel time.

Again, the overall point of the Transitway wasn’t just to speed up buses. It was to re-imagine an area of the city congested with pedestrian traffic that prioritizes personal safety and public transit over automobile access. Cities thrive off of pedestrian life, and public transportation — buses that bring over 30,000 people per day — should take precedence over auto space.

Meanwhile, two news stories focusing on business in the area provide us with a glimpse into the powers-that-be who are at work here. The 34th Street Partnership, the Herald Square area BID, says they supported the pedestrian area because business owners know that more pedestrians lead to more business. Dan Pisark, VP of retail services, said though that some tenants were concerned about building access. “The plaza was a problem for some of our building owners,” he said. “So the commissioner heard that.”

On the other hand, a very powerful voice in Herald Square is against the redesign entirely. Macy’s Senior Vice President Ed Goldberg blatantly admitted that the retail giant is concerned about how the 34th St. Transitway could impact Thanksgiving. His statement can speak for itself, but the emphasis is mine. “Obviously anything that we do that is an obstruction, be it sidewalk or street, is of concern to us,” he said. “It’s about our one big magic day of the year during the parade.”

Finally, the Mayor has chimed in as well. As Streetsblog reported this afternoon, Michael Bloomberg in a radio interview voiced his support for Sadik-Khan and the Transitway: “My charge to her is don’t let anybody beat you down. Do the right thing, listen to people, try to explain, try to let buy-ins and that sort of thing, but keep coming up with new ideas even if your ideas — if you can’t implement them, if the people don’t want them or whatever, don’t go back into a car or a bicycle or whatever and be afraid of trying new things.”

He spoke further about the overwhelming need to improve bus service in New York City as well. Despite the flaws of his third term, if he could realize this goal, it would be a truly successful transportation initiative. “We have to address the fact that the buses are so slow,” he said, “that they are not a good alternative to cars, because then you’re in this ever declining cycle of what’s it — non-virtuous cycle I think is what they would call it.”

The next public meeting on the Transitway is March 14. This story is far from over.

Project opponents believe the 34th St. Transitway will blight the area. (Image via NYC DOT)

Once upon a time, the Department of Transportation had a Great Idea for 34th St. The Department recognized that this oft-choked road could go for some reengineering in order to deliver cars to where they want to go and better service the tens of thousands of commuters who use 34th Street-bound buses while allowing the pedestrians that drive the businesses to flourish. Thus, a Transitway was born.

Conceptually, the ideas seemed simple enough. Most traffic west of 5th Ave. is heading to the Lincoln Tunnel and most traffic east of 5th Ave. is bound for the Midtown Tunnel. The street, therefore, would go one way in its respectively direction while 34th St. from 5th to 6th — an area bound by Macy’s, the Manhattan Mall and the Empire State Building — would be closed to most traffic. A two-way, two-lane bus-only lane would span the length of the island.

For the people who ride and the people who walk, this would have been a grand experiment in restoring the streets to the people who make them thrive. But the residents, for selfish reasons, and business owners with some practical concerns that could have been addressed, did not like it. Coop and community boards played the senior citizen card. How could old ladies to get to their door steps behind bus lanes if taxis couldn’t reach them? What happens with deliveries? Won’t a wall of buses lead to constant blight?

I’ve sparred with these claims in the past. Basically, they amount to glorified NIMBYism. New Yorkers hate change, and they particularly hate being told that the streets belong primarily to people and to modes of transportation that carry more people and not to cars. The battle has grown fierce over the last few weeks as Steve Cuozzo issued an insanely wrong critique of the Transitway that Streetsblog quickly dispatched. But the opponents had the Post on their side, and as Janette Sadik-Khan and DOT took heat over the Prospect Park bike lanes, the Transitway came under fire.

Today, we learn dismayingly that DOT is starting to cave. As Michael Grynbaum reported, the Department has eliminated the pedestrian-only space between 5th and 6th Avenues, and it is reassessing the plan to usher in the city’s first physically separated bus lanes. “The design has evolved as we continue to work with the community,” Sadik-Khan said to The Times. “We want the public process to play itself out.”

For now, the city is mum on the fate of the Transitway. They will present revised design of the Transitway at a March 14th forum, and the plans will be finalized by the end of the year, four years after DOT first announced the 34th St. concept. Progress is slow in New York, and it’s hard to call it forward-looking by now.

Beneath the name-calling and the bitter debate, I wonder what’s really going on here. This project has been met with an obscene of community resistance from what many contend is the wrong or incomplete community, and the minority — a vocal and well-connected minority at that — is asserted its voice over the greater good of the city.

First, DOT does deserve a tip of the cap, in a sense, for listening to the concerns of those whose opinions it solicited. It hasn’t been a very movable participant in the redesign of New York’s streets lately, and to heed the public will lead to better cooperation.

That said, they’re not asking everyone they should. As Cap’n Transit has been pointing out for six weeks now, DOT has failed to consider how Queens and Staten Island commuters should have a say in this project. Over 33,000 people a day from Staten Island and Queens take buses that lead to 34th St. in order to get to work, and the opinions of those folks who would benefit most from improved transit aren’t actively courted by DOT.

As the Cap’n wrote, “Why did they limit the “community” to people living right near 34th Street? Why concede the frame that the only “community” that matters is the tiny group of people who really care about curbside car access? And once they did, why did they then let [Corey] Bearak in? They wound up with a bunch of entitled NIMBYs screaming about not being able to get bottled water delivered by truck, and a guy who seems to be paid to attack the Bloomberg Administration – and no express bus riders to balance them out!”

People and buses are being shunted aside by drivers along 34th Street.

Meanwhile, if any project demands a hard line from DOT, it’s this one. As the Cap’n noted last week, 34th Street could be a bellwether for the city. From personal safety to faster commute times to cleaner air and a nicer environment for pedestrians, this project matters. From a modeshare perspective, it’s a no-brainer. Cars are vastly outnumbered by pedestrians and buses, and cars, which are trying to escape 34th St., do not contribute to the area’s economy.

Right now, this project sits in the balance. If DOT unveils a new version without physically separated bus lanes, the city might as well throw in the towel on Select Bus Service. A loss here simply means the people who cry the most and scream the loudest win even when their arguments shouldn’t carry the day, and it means that buses — used by over two million New Yorkers daily — won’t get the upgrades they need to become more viable. The long-term ramifications of that decision will echo well beyond the hallowed curbs of 34th Street.

Will this Transitway see the light of day soon? (Image via NYC DOT)

By the time — or perhaps if — the 34th Street Transitway becomes a reality, the project will have taken at least four years from gestation to reality. On paper, the idea is not revolutionary. The city would eliminate some traffic lanes, install dedicated bus lanes and improve transit across a stretch of the city that sees tens of thousands of bus passengers per day. Who could object?

In reality, improving bus service — a laudable goal in New York City where buses are known not for speed but for their snail’s pace — riles up a vocal minority of residents who feel threatened by improvements to what they view as a second-class means of transportation. It brings out the worst in NIMBYism and leaves planners struggling to defend clear improvements they shouldn’t have to struggle to defend.

Over the last few years, Community Board members have come up with every excuse in the book to bemoan the Transitway. The underlying complaint — one that doesn’t come out much anymore — involves direct car access to buildings. Originally, residents complained that taxis wouldn’t be able to provide door-to-door service if the Transitway removed two lanes of traffic. When that sounded selfish, residents started talking about the blight a row of buses would cause (as opposed to, say, bumper-to-bumper traffic). They talked about how the Transitway would be bad for trees, how emergency vehicles would get stuck on 34th St., how unsupervised children would stray into the path of an oncoming bus. You name it; they said it.

A few months ago, I explored how ridiculous these arguments are, but still, the vocal minority speaks out. The city, meanwhile, will drag out the planning process. Per DOT’s project timeline, this spring, the city will propose another preliminary corridor design while soliciting community feedback. In the summer, they’ll complete the environmental review and traffic analysis. Maybe by April 2012, we’ll have a Transitway that runs a few miles across Manhattan. This process is akin to pulling teeth in slow motion.

With that said, forgive me if I’m less than enthusiastic about the latest news. The M34, says Pete Donohue, will soon be equipped with a pre-boarding fare payment system. In an effort to speed up bus service along the city’s slowest route, the MTA will introduce Select Bus Service-like pre-boarding fare card readers along 34th St. well ahead of any potential Transitway. “The introduction of off-board fare collection does a lot to help speed travel by cutting down significantly on the amount of time a bus sits in the bus stop,” Transit head Thomas Prendergast said.

Don’t get me wrong: All of the city’s buses should have pre-boarding fare payment systems. Speeds would improve dramatically across New York. Yet, the MTA’s current implementation is an intractable solution to a big problem. If 34,000 riders per day are taking buses across 34th St., that’s 34,000 proof-of-payment receipts. That, in and of itself, carries a steep cost and isn’t environmentally friendly. We simply need a better solution across the board.

Recently, as Scott Stringer has started to adopt the concerns of the 34th St. NIMBYs, Cap’n Transit has begun to question the planning approach for the Transitway. Why, he asks, aren’t those passengers who come from Queens and head to 34th St. being courted for views as well? What about those other users? He writes:

If you read pro-transit blogs and tweets, you would know that the buses contain thousands of bus riders: about 33,000 trips per day. Apparently there has been some representation of these riders by the Straphangers Campaign, but the meetings seem to be completely dominated by people who identify as either drivers or taxi riders.

Other than the Department of Transportation staff themselves, no one has acknowledged that the majority of these riders don’t even live in Manhattan. There are more than twenty express bus routes from central and eastern Queens, and a little bit of southern Brooklyn, that bring thousands of riders into Midtown every day. They travel down the Long Island Expressway through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, west on 34th Street, north on Third or Sixth Avenue, east on 57th Street, back across the Queensboro Bridge, and down Queens Boulevard…

There have been at least five meetings about this project in Midtown Manhattan, but to my knowledge there have been no meetings in Queens. There is a Community Advisory Committee for the project, but are there any representatives from Fresh Meadows or Bayside? I certainly haven’t heard from them in the news, the blogs or the Twitter feeds. It’s true that this is a pretty good case of a situation with concentrated costs and diffuse benefits, and these often get hijacked by the people who perceive themselves as having something to lose.

In a post this evening about the Staten Island interest in better 34th St. bus service, the Cap’n notes that some Queens residents have started to contact their City Council members. They should be included in the process. After all, bus improvements in Manhattan impact more than just the people who live on or near the chosen routes.

Ultimately, the 34th St. Transitway is a prickly route for transit advocates. The city isn’t great at keeping traffic moving on nearby one-way cross streets, and many would have preferred to see 125th St. pegged as the first Transitway. But buses that use 34th St. have a total ridership of over 40,000 per day. Even though some of those riders alit before Manhattan, a great many express bus riders take the trip to 34th St. and would benefit tremendously from fast dedicated bus lanes.

Improved transit comes with the need to take a step toward change. Can the city overcome that neighborhood resistance? Should it? I think so.