John Kaehny

Nobody knows whether the convoluted and difficult congestion pricing "deal" reached by political leaders yesterday will actually result in anything. The deal is complex even by Albany standards. A few things, however, are clear:

Yesterday, New York State's Four Men in a Room agreed to a process that may or may not result in congestion pricing for New York City. Even by Albany standards, Bloomberg, Spitzer, Silver and Bruno's deal is incredibly complex. The deal, which is supposed to be formalized by a vote in the state legislature shortly, lays out very specific deadlines that must be achieved before New York City is granted the power to collect congestion charges. The first step in even beginning to understand the implications of yesterday's deal is to understand the timeline that it set forth.

An enforcement camera in London captures a motorist in the bus lane.

Did you watch Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing testimony before the New York State legislature? If so, what did you think? Here is the initial impression of John Kaehny, former executive director of Transportation Alternatives: 

On Earth Day Mayor Mike Bloomberg placed transportation and environmental issues at the top of New York City's political agenda. He took a major step towards changing the conventional wisdom that traffic congestion is a sign of the city's vibrancy and economic health. And he joined the list of forward-thinking global mayors like London's Ken Livingstone and Bertrand Delanoe in Paris who have said that excessive automobile dependence is a drag on the urban economy, detrimental to public health, and a contributor to global climate change.

As New Yorkers well know, sidewalks around subway stops and major transit hubs are often intensely crowded. Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC team is aware of this and buried on page 48 of the Technical Report supplementing PlaNYC's transportation recommendations is a new program called "Safe Routes to Transit" (SR2T). While the attention to pedestrian issues is welcome, given the scope of the congestion problem near major transit stops, SR2T is a fairly modest proposal and is best viewed as a good beginning, a point of departure for significantly improving the walking part of transit trips.

Gene Russianoff, Senior Attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, has been New York City's leading transit advocate for decades. Streetsblog recently spoke with Gene about the MTA's impending fiscal crises and other transit issues.

With a new commissioner coming in to run New York City's Department of Transportation, now is a good time to begin a conversation about what the agency could be doing differently to make itself more effective. DOT has a tough job. It has conflicting, and sometimes contradictory, mandates from the mayor, city council and communities it serves. The agency is often asked to bridge deep differences in neighborhoods between those most concerned with parking and driving and those focused on better walking, cycling, quality of life and long-term sustainability. It's not unheard of for the same council members who demand better bus service to protest changes in parking rules that would reduce double parking and speed bus service. But there are things that DOT can do relatively easily and at low cost to improve its relations with the public and raise the level of the transportation discussion. Here are five of them:

When Streetsblog set-out to compare pedestrian safety in New York City and London we had an easy time finding detailed statistics from London's transportation agency. Back home was a bit more challenging. For some reason the number of pedestrian crashes reported by the State Department of Motor Vehicles, the City Department of Transportation the and NYPD are completely different. This is a bit mysterious since everyone's tally is based on the same police crash reports.

More enduring than Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster and the resurrection of Elvis is the deeply held belief that there is such a thing as "free" parking for the average motorist in New York City. "Free" means you do not have to pay.