Traffic

This week’s MTA vote won’t just cost New Yorkers 25 percent more per ride, it will also be costly in lost time.

As Albany lawmakers ponder which of a half-dozen Ravitch plan variations they might support, the possibility looms that no solution may come in time. New Yorkers could see their fares rise 25 percent while service is cut back -- a twin catastrophe in this tough economic time. Yet no big new ideas are being advanced to protect mass transit users, which is why I believe the time has come for consideration of Ted Kheel’s and my traffic plan.

Sheldon Silver's partial endorsement of the Ravitch Commission's MTA rescue plan [PDF], which includes East and Harlem River bridge tolls, offers the best political hope in years for reducing the daily truck tsunami pulverizing downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.

From the new San Francisco branch of Streetfilms, Janel Sterbentz takes a look at one of the city's main bicycle routes -- Valencia Street -- and asks how it would function if signals were timed to give cyclists the "Green Wave" instead of cars. Cyclists would get a smoother ride and feel less compelled to roll through red lights. Pedestrians would benefit from slower vehicle speeds and more predictable cyclist behavior. As for transit vehicles, Janel reports, average travel times for trams and buses have improved on Amsterdam streets with a cyclist green wave. Even motorists, it turns out, should be rooting this on:

As many as four million people are expected to descend on the National Mall today for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation's 44th President. Contending with that mass of humanity has left officials with no choice but to implement temporary policies to get people in and out of the city as efficiently as possible. All of which has been great fodder for DC's thriving livable streets blog scene. Some are hoping today will prove to be what Obama might call a teachable moment, showing residents what downtown Washington feels like with fewer cars and more freedom for pedestrians, cyclists, and buses.

Yesterday NYCDOT released the first Sustainable Streets Index [PDF], a scorecard to measure how well New York is progressing "towards achieving more sustainable mobility." This is the fruit of Local Law 23 (a.k.a. Intro 199), which passed earlier this year after former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall helped scuttle it at the end of her tenure.

New Yorkers can expect more misery on the streets as well as underground if the MTA has to follow through on the austerity measures it unveiled yesterday. The transportation analysts behind the Kheel Plan -- the congestion pricing variant that balances higher driver fees with free transit -- calculate that the likely combination of service cuts and higher fares and tolls will put tens of thousands more cars on the road:

The confluence of Flatbush, Atlantic, and Fourth Avenues is a traffic nightmare of epic proportions right smack next to a huge transit hub and shopping center. (We hear some sort of arena and housing complex might get built there too.) Crossing the street here is an unwelcome adventure for thousands of pedestrians every day, and biking is out of the question for the vast majority of cyclists.

When it comes to reducing traffic in New York City, improving transit performance over river crossings is a no-brainer. Faster buses lure people out of their cars and take traffic off the streets, which is why the Tri-State Transportation Campaign is advocating for a New Jersey-bound express bus lane through the Lincoln Tunnel.