Downtown Brooklyn

As the New York Post continues its increasingly tedious assault on pedestrians and crosstown transit riders, its writers always seem to suggest that giving priority to buses in an important retail area is both radical and self-evidently bad for business. If they bothered to look just one borough away, they'd see that nothing could be further from the truth. The eight bus- and pedestrian-only blocks of downtown Brooklyn's Fulton Mall make up the most successful retail strip in the city outside of Manhattan.

If you've ever wished you could dodge more cars and inhale more exhaust on your way to the park, Downtown Brooklyn's next green space is for you. It will be built on top of a garage with nearly 700 underground parking spots.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Department of City Planning is currently studying the merits of parking minimums in some of New York's transit-rich neighborhoods, like Harlem and western Brooklyn and Queens. And local interests in at least one neighborhood, Downtown Brooklyn, are starting to mobilize around the issue. While the coalition has yet to go public, sources say there have been preliminary discussions about reducing, or even eliminating, parking minimums in the area, which would be a big victory for sustainable transportation.

Sometime around 2019, the state DOT will begin reconstructing the segment of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway that runs through downtown Brooklyn. There are years and years of review before a shovel goes in the ground, but when construction starts, local streets already jammed with trucks and car commuters heading for free East River bridges will see even more spillover traffic. And the project itself, which will run from Hamilton Avenue to Sands Street, will have important consequences for bus transit, access to the waterfront and Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the quality of life in nearby neighborhoods.

Brooklyn's new Long Island Rail Road terminal opened earlier this month to generally positive reviews for its airy interior. Outside the station? That's an entirely different matter.

A quick note about tonight's meeting on motorist-cyclist relations put on by Brooklyn Community Board 2. "Sharing the Road, Sharing the Responsibility" -- a panel discussion with NYCDOT, NYPD, Transportation Alternatives, and AAA -- is an important one for cyclists to attend.

A reader sent in these photos from a media scrum last Friday evening in the Tillary Street bike lane in Downtown Brooklyn. Notice how the press vehicles have completely blocked the two-way protected lane, forcing cyclists onto the other side of the barrier.

Elizabeth Press sends these shots of the northeast corner of Hoyt and Schermerhorn in downtown Brooklyn. In what may be a first for New York City, this nifty little DOT reclamation includes bike racks installed on the roadbed, not the sidewalk. (Update: DOT confirms that yes, this is something new for the city.) More on that later. First, take a minute to appreciate all the ways this project, which cost a mere $5,000, according to Ben Muessig at the Brooklyn Paper, has improved life for New Yorkers. 

The most telling answers at Transportation Alternatives' District 33 City Council candidates forum came after an audience member asked point blank for the debaters' stance on congestion pricing. "I can’t support a candidate who’ll support congestion pricing," said the questioner, Dave Reina. "I think it's punitive, and there are more creative solutions out there. Who’ll stand up against it?"