Today’s Headlines

  • Shocker: Cuomo Will Probably Pay for MTA Capital Program By Borrowing (News)
  • NYT: Albany Should Pay for MTA With Higher Gas Tax or Tolls on Free East River Bridges
  • Here’s How Much Rolling Stock the Capital Program Will Buy for NYC (Crain’s)
  • And Here’s What the Daily News Thinks of the MTA Funding Deal
  • Coke Truck Driver Crashes Into Bronx Bus Stop, Killing Sheniqua Silva, 37 (NBC, NYT, Post)
  • Truck Traffic in NYC Is Worse Than Any Other Big City in America (WNYC)
  • Carl Weisbrod Wants to Set Up a New Regional Planning Office Inside DCP (Politico)
  • Safer Intersections Coming to Upper East Side Avenues (DNA)
  • Sheepshead Bay “Community Leaders” Freak Out About Parking Reform (Sheepshead Bites)
  • Home Reporter Gives Verrazano Bike/Walk Path the He Said-She Said Treatment
  • “I Love Bikes, But Because I Have a Car, I Hate the Bikes Now” (Brooklyn Paper)

More headlines at Streetsblog USA

  • Alexander Vucelic

    amusing post at the Sheepshead Bay parking article:

    “..It’s disgraceful that people have such a difficult time parking. Restaurants and shops want our business but we can’t get near them because of the lack of parking. The only borough where it’s easier to park is in Staten Island and certain parts of Queens. Supermarkets for the most part have parking lots but if you want to go to a restaurant in the Bay you can’t get near them because of the parking. We’ve got to start thinking like the suburbs and allow for parking facilities when any community board approves buildings over 2 or 3 stories…”

    Yes, someone living in New York City actually wrote ‘we got to start thinking like the suburbs’

    Laughed so hard

  • Reader

    The Brooklyn Paper article is a real sign of progress. For once it’s a car owner who’s portrayed as arrogant and entitled.

  • van_vlissingen

    Why not just close that weird eastbound section of E66th between 3rd and 2nd Aves? There’s the issue of access to the parking garage but that could be solved with two curb cuts.

  • Greg

    The truck traffic story is… depressing.

    We have a terrible situation with coherent infrastructural solutions should there ever be the will to build them. But not only are we not going to get improvements any time in the next decade, it’s only going to get worse.

    The truck traffic in my quaint little Brooklyn neighborhood alone is egregious. It’s a real hit on our city’s quality of life.

  • Joe R.

    I’m convinced there’s no long-term planning or thinking whatsoever in this city. We react to problems as they happen, rather than plan to avoid them. Today’s levels of truck and car traffic could easily have been avoided had NYC built both the rail freight tunnel and more subways a few decades ago. We choose not to out of arrogance, or perhaps a misguided belief that motor vehicles would be the answer to all the city’s transportation problems. It’s not even a question of money. Today’s problems are costing more money than building to avoid them would have. It sadly seems despite having a few decades to realize things just aren’t working out all that well, we’re still repeating the same mistakes. The very definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again while expecting a different result.

  • Alexander Vucelic

    MoveNY

    plus

    SMARTmeters

  • Alexander Vucelic

    How would SUVs zoom past the congestion ?

  • Is that the portrayal? Seemed fairly neutral. Didn’t even really talk about the fact the man called 911 about a car. I mean, even if your car is legit stolen, unless you are in it while its being stolen, 911 is not the appropriate number to call.

  • Driver

  • Really? That’s shocking. What a waste of 911 resources. Every place I’ve lived has a non-emergency number to call for things which aren’t emergencies. A stolen vehicle is not an emergency by any definition of emergency.

  • Eric McClure

    “Parking is a commodity.” Is Theresa Scavo finally admitting that parking should be priced?

  • Jonathan R

    A motor vehicle is a deadly weapon. You should let the police know it’s been stolen as soon as possible, so they can stop the thieves before they kill someone.

  • Matthias

    I never imagined the “I love bikes” quote came directly from the story! Incredible. The article left a lot to be desired in terms of journalism, but the comments ripped it to shreds. My favorite: “Local Man Doesn’t Read Street-Posted Signs, Blames Vast Bureaucratic Conspiracy To Provide Him With Better Transit”

  • J_12

    It’s exactly a question of money.
    People aren’t stupid – it’s was well known a few decades ago that building the infrastructure you mention would help avoid many of our current problems, and it’s well known today that building this infrastructure will pay dividends well into the future.

    The issue is how to pay for it. There is no political will to take a hit now, in terms of increased taxes or reallocating resources from other areas, in order to fund infrastructure that will mostly benefit people decades into the future. Debt financing is the obvious solution, but we have already borrowed so much just to fund ongoing maintenance of the existing infrastructure that there is limited capacity for mega-projects. And that capacity gets eaten quickly by the handful of projects that are happening.

  • AnoNYC

    Not just arrogance and misguided belief but a complete disregard for (black/minority) cities for (white) suburbs.

  • Driver

    It’s not a waste of 911 resources if 911 is staffed to expect these kinds of calls. There is a non-emergency number, which is 311. That’s not the number to use when you want the police to come and file a stolen property report, whether it is a car, bicycle, or any other type of personal property.

  • The availability of cars means this isn’t a real concern, and in our system, you wouldn’t call 911 for theft of a firearm either. An emergency is something which requires immediate dispatch of first responders, a theft isn’t that situation.

  • I suppose you can, but 911 requires a different level of staffing from non-emergency numbers. If I call the police, non-emergency number, I expect to be put on hold for a short time. If I call 911, that absolutely should never happen. Even more, I’d argue the training for 911 operators should be at a higher level, as they’re required to handle different types of calls with people undergoing severe stress. It seems wasteful to have these people also answer routine non-emergency calls. Like I said, everywhere I’ve lived has had a non-emergency number to call the police to file a report for any situation which is not an emergency. Here, you call 911 if and only if you need someone to come with sirens on.

  • Joe R.

    That’s all very true except these same people fail to realize we’re paying right NOW for failure to act in the past. How long can we keep kicking the can up the road?

    I personally feel NYC has plenty of money to pay for what needs to be done out of existing tax revenues, without borrowing another cent. It’s just a matter of reallocating funds. Alter questionable labor contracts with clauses which never should have been agreed to in the first place (i.e. retroactive pension increases), reduce staffing levels at some agencies, eliminate some services which never should have been a function of government to start with (i.e. pre-K), etc. I’ll bet the budgets for both the NYPD and Board of Education could be cut in half doing these things. That would free up billions of dollars for infrastructure. Once we free up this money, I’ll also recommend scrutinizing every dime spent on these infrastructure projects. Again, I’ll bet there’s a ton of room for cost cutting. We shouldn’t have $10 billion bus terminals, or $4 billion train stations.

    The fact is NYC for decades pandered to labor unions, resulting in us paying much more for labor than other places. It even paid twice in the form of retroactive pension increases (those make little sense since by definition you’re paying more for past workers who at this point are no longer contributing anything of value). Then you have nonsense expenses like the extensive busing of students. Children through middle school should just go to their neighborhood schools, much like they did for most of the history of the school system. It just goes on and on. I’m sick of it. We pay just about the highest taxes in the US, yet we end up with third rate services. On top of that, we’re still borrowing.

  • ahwr

    Not exclusive to autos.

    http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/2522/stolen-property

    >Call 911 to report stolen property.

    Firearms, cars, bikes etc…would all seem to qualify as property.

    How burdensome would it really be for a 911 operator to transfer you to a local precinct non emergency number if your issue isn’t ‘urgent’? Or to put you on hold?

  • neroden

    “I’m convinced there’s no long-term planning or thinking whatsoever in this city.”

    I believe that.

    Much of NYC seems to have a “I got my grift, why you botherin’ me?” attitude. Think of the Department of Buildings refusing to do their job, which was to inspect and examine the buildings along the Second Avenue route for pre-existing structural weakness, until the MTA finally was forced to spend MTA funds to do it.

  • neroden

    The Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel would have cost about $7 billion, but could be paid for by *fees* on all the trains running through it.

    Shippers would save so much per year that if the savings all went to the tunnel, it would pay for the tunnel in 10 years; more reasonably, you could charge them fees to pay off the tunnel in 20 years.

    In this case at least, it’s not a shortage of money. It’s a shortage of political will to do anything about problems.

  • neroden

    The NYPD budget could probably be eliminated. It would most likely reduce crime in the city, given how much of the crime seems to actually be committed *by the police*.

    (Yeah, I’m exaggerating… a little.)

  • neroden

    “:I personally feel the biggest problem is a small subset of the population managed to game the system for their own personal gain.”

    Larry Littlefield agrees with you.

    Unfortunately, the problem may be that that subset of the population isn’t that small. If it’s 1%, you can outnumber them at the ballot box.

    But if it’s 10% or 20% who are in on the grift, it starts getting pretty hard, and if it’s 30% or 40%….

  • neroden

    (In response to the post you quoted) Oh come on. NYC already allows for parking. I don’t think there is anywhere in the whole of NYC where constructing a parking garage is *prohibited*.

    What this idiot is saying is that they want to *force* developers to build parking whether it makes business sense or not.

  • Larry Littlefield

    “I don’t think there is anywhere in the whole of NYC where constructing a parking garage is *prohibited*.”

    Actually parking garages are generally required to get special permits, or were, unless they are for required parking in a new building, and are only allowed in certain zoning districts even with the permit.

  • Alexander Vucelic

    Larry – If a Developer wanted to include Parking in a Sheepshead Bay project in excess of the minimum required, do you believe Zoning would give him grief ?

  • Frank Dell

    The car was not stolen.

  • Frank Dell

    Dude’s car wasn’t stolen. The fact that there was a CitiBike station where his car used to be should have been a clue to this guy. Is he new to NYC? There was no reason to call 911.

  • I did gather that from the original link. Its not burdensome, it is however, unnecessary. As I explained, everywhere I have lived 911 is simple, is it an emergency? No? Don’t call 911. There’s always a non-emergency number to call.