Transportation Policy

A couple of different sources tell me that Bob Kiley is moving back to New York City to take a position with Parsons Brinckerhoff, the global engineering firm with a lead role in Partnership for New York City's secretive, long-delayed congestion pricing study.

Via the Manhattan Institute's new blog, Streetsblog learns of a pdf-formatted report entitled A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Famillies, which looks at the housing and transportation expenses paid by lower income families in a number of cities. The report, published by the Center for Housing Policy, a K Street think tank, finds that lower-income families in central cities spend significantly less on the overhead of life than suburban and exurban ones.

On Friday, Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall stood up in front of 600 people at Borough President Stringer's Transportation Policy Conference and said that her agency was serious about reducing car use in New York City. It was a great policy speech.

Photo: Mike Groll/Associated Press via The New York Times

DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall's speech was, for many long-time Livable Streets advocates, the single most remarkable aspect of yesterday's Manhattan Transportation Policy Conference. As Jon Orcutt at TSTC noted, Weinshall's speech "laid out an array of measures to improve New York's pedestrian and bicycling environments, soften the quality of life impacts of heavy traffic, and begin to reclaim the sheer urban acreage given over to automobiles." Added up, these measures appear to represent the beginnings of an altogether new set of transportation, land use, and public space policies for New York City and, as Orcutt writes, "a significant departure" from past priorities.

Three congestion charging rumors, all from excellent, though, un-named sources:

I'm up at Columbia University covering Borough President Stringer's Transportation Policy Conference, live:

It looks like the City's promise to build out the bike network is already bearing fruit. Streetsblog reader Alex Kahl sends along these photos of new bike lane markings being striped on W. 77th and W. 78th Street near Columbus Avenue. Unlike the new, Class III, "shared lane" markings spotted yesterday in the middle of Clinton Street near Delancey, it looks like these are going to be Class II lanes running along the side of the street.