When Transit Goes Down at the Polls, Here’s Some Advice on How to Regroup
Last week, voters in the Vancouver region rejected a half-cent sales tax to pay for a package of transit infrastructure and service expansions necessary to handle growing demand. Even in the city of Vancouver, the measure fell shy of a majority. Polling revealed that most "No" voters didn’t trust the regional transit agency, TransLink, to make good use of the additional revenue.
July 6, 2015
Killing a Transit Project Isn’t Going to Fix Your City’s Parking Crunch
Yesterday we ran a post from Michael Andersen about how Newark fixed the glut of parked cars on Mount Prospect Avenue, the first street in New Jersey to get a protected bike lane: Instead of letting people park in the bikeway, the city started charging for parking. With a price on parking, people stopped storing their cars on the street all day long, and there was finally some turnover. Problem solved.
July 2, 2015
Motivate and DOT Squabble, Jeopardizing Success of Bike-Share Expansion
A dispute between NYC DOT and the company that runs Citi Bike threatens to rob New York City's bike-share expansion of the very quality that's made the existing service so useful. The key issue is station density, and whether the stations where Citi Bike expands will be within easy walking distance of each other like in the rest of the system.
July 1, 2015
Eyes on the Street: Protection for Cyclists on Bruckner Boulevard
DOT crews were out on Bruckner Boulevard yesterday putting in Jersey barriers to protect a new two-way bike lane. The bikeway will run for half a mile between Hunts Point Avenue and Longwood Avenue, the first phase in what should eventually be a link between the Bronx River Greenway and Randall's Island. For the time being, it will terminate at Longwood, with sharrows pointing to the less-stressful Southern Boulevard.
June 25, 2015
Andrew Cuomo Is Failing at One of His Most Basic Tasks
In 1981, then-MTA Chair Richard Ravitch wrote to Governor Hugh Carey, pleading for action "to meet the increasingly desperate situation of public transit in New York." Carey responded by moving a suite of measures through Albany that led to the MTA's first five-year capital program. Investments made through the capital program brought the transit system back from the brink, leading to vast improvements in reliability and convenience, and the city flourished.
June 23, 2015
Eyes on the Street: A Better Bikeway Linking the High Bridge to Highbridge
Ten days ago, DOT broke ground on a nice set of new bike lanes linking Upper Manhattan to the reopened High Bridge. Meanwhile, bike access improvements on the Bronx side are already pretty far along.
June 22, 2015
The Case for 24/7 Access to the High Bridge
Video of opening day on the High Bridge: Clarence Eckerson.
June 22, 2015