Eyes on the Street: The Bike Corral Has Arrived in Park Slope
On her way into the office this morning, Streetsblog development manager Christa Orth spotted some fluorescent safety vests as she pedaled up Brooklyn's Fifth Avenue. A DOT crew was out in front of local coffee shop Gorilla Coffee, which had agreed to maintain a new bike corral in front of their store. One parking space is being replaced with room for about eight bikes -- or as Gorilla might call them, seven new customers.
May 17, 2012
Inez Dickens and EDC Want to Keep Four Stories of Parking in Harlem Project
The New York City Economic Development Corporation's commitment to replacing any parking spaces the agency builds on top of is a one-way ratchet toward ever-increasing amounts of automobile infrastructure. For projects at Flushing Commons and the Lower East Side's SPURA site, slated to be built over surface parking lots, EDC has pushed for the new developments to include hundreds of parking spaces in addition to replacing the old parking.
May 17, 2012
How Bike-Share Stations Stack Up Against Other Curb Consumers
Bike-share, no doubt, is going to be a major addition to the streets of New York -- in terms of both impact and visibility. Within the service area, there's going to be a station every few blocks. And some of those stations are going to have a lot of bicycle docks: 59 in many locations, and a whopping 118 next to Grand Central. Thanks to the small footprint of bikes, however, overall this new form of transit will consume relatively little space while allowing people to make tens of thousands of trips per day.
May 16, 2012
EDC Wants 500 Parking Spots at Long-Awaited Lower East Side Development
The Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, or SPURA, is the largest undeveloped, city-owned area south of 96th Street. Located along the south side of Delancey Street at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, SPURA currently consists of five empty lots, the leftovers of a 1967 slum clearance project. Though mid-century towers-in-a-park style housing was built elsewhere on the site, these lots have remained vacant since the tenements were torn down 45 years ago, displacing a population that was two-thirds black and Hispanic.
May 15, 2012
Mapping How NYC Bike-Share Meshes With Jobs and Transit
Hungry for more bike-share maps? Yeah, us too. Thanks to Steven Romalewski, the director of the CUNY Graduate Center's Mapping Service, we've got our fix.
May 15, 2012
City Still Wants to Privatize Parking Meters, But Not Pricing or Enforcement
New York City is still interested in contracting out the operations of its roughly 82,000 metered parking spaces, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal. A prime motivation, it appears, is the belief that a private company could more quickly roll out high-tech additions to the city's parking system, such as sensors that provide real-time parking data. In the next few weeks, City Hall will put out a request for qualifications to put together a short list of potential private partners.
May 14, 2012
Eyes on the Street: Fowler Square Plaza Opens in Fort Greene
Fort Greene's newest public plaza opened today and Brownstoner was on the scene to capture the moment. The plaza, which reclaimed space for pedestrians on a short, lightly-trafficked block of South Elliott Place between Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue, connects the sidewalk to an existing public triangle.
May 11, 2012
MTA Chooses Busway For Possible Staten Island North Shore Transit Line
The MTA announced yesterday that if it builds a new rapid transit line along Staten Island's North Shore, it will opt for bus rapid transit over light rail, an MTA spokesperson told Streetsblog. The obstacle now, as always, is money.
May 11, 2012