In 2009, NACTO launched its Cities for Cycling project, through which the organization studies and champions best practices in bikeway design, and began crafting an urban-oriented manual to guide cities who want to invest in bike-friendly roadway infrastructure and traffic engineering. The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide puts forth solutions for incorporating bicycle transportation options into the urban streetscape, based on a comprehensive understanding of the many bureaucratic restrictions and practical needs that dictate the design of our streets. In the face of design standards based on interstate highway travel, liability concerns, battles between State and City and competition between numerous stakeholders for use and right of way, this effort to overhaul our established ideas of how streets should work promises to be a struggle. And the folks at NACTO are dedicated to the challenge. In the following piece, Vega-Barachowitz looks at the example of the “cycle track” — a bikeway that is physically separated from motor traffic and is distinct from the sidewalk (such as the 9th Avenue bikeway here in New York) — to explain why our transportation networks are the way they are and how they should evolve. 

- V.S.

Photo by Harmony Blackwell, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

In the taxonomy of city streets, the cycle track is the platypus. Sandwiched between the sidewalk and the parking lane — neither a trail, a sidewalk, nor a travel lane — it defies the conventional spectra of classification and challenges where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.

In spite of their curious and (as of now) sporadic cameos on American city streets, cycle tracks have long tradition in Northern Europe, and have more recently emerged on streets from Seoul to Seville. Since 2007, when New York City cut the ribbon on its inaugural Ninth Avenue cycle track, the movement for separated bikeways has accelerated in the United States; and culminated in 2011, with the publication of the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a catalogue of innovative bikeway design concepts for US cities.

The NACTO Guide heralds a new era of thinking about our streets and public spaces, discovering in the asphalt tundra of the American metropolis an unlikely well of creative potential. Along with a growing cadre of city street design manuals, the guide beckons the twilight of the motor century and upholds the growing sentiment that the antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself. Today, as an emerging generation of designers and engineers rise to challenge the traditional rubric and protocol of traffic engineering, the first highly visible struggle will be that of the cycle track.

What follows contextualizes the cycle track in the lineage of transportation in the United States. Three persistent themes stand out: the tension between rural and urban transportation policy; the question of dedicating versus sharing road space; and the interpretation and limitations of conventional design standards and criteria.

This brief history will hopefully accelerate the launching of a new paradigm in urban transportation and street design, and thus engender more aggressive and creative streetscape interventions in the progress of design process and theory. This movement reinforces and reflects the recent cross-disciplinary shift from object to ground and from freestanding built form to landscape (set forth by architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton in 1990). It inverts the opportunity for design intervention from the built fabric of floors and facades to the dynamic spines and landscapes that weave around them and shape their context. City street design, though perhaps the least glamorous subfield in the dialogues surrounding landscape urbanism (or ecological urbanism), just might be its most highly contentious and politically volatile element — and therefore one of its most interesting.

Ocean Parkway bicycle path, c. 1894 | Courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive

The Gospel of Good Roads
The first separated bikeway in the United States was constructed along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn during the bicycle fad of the 1890s. The bicycle craze produced many follies, including a short-lived, elevated, bicycle toll road between Pasadena and Los Angeles named the California Cycleway. Though the impact of the bicycle at the turn of the century was truncated by the emergence of the private automobile, an early group of bicycle advocates, the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), successfully lobbied Congress for smooth, well-connected country roads at the height of the bicyclist era.

The California Cycleway | via bike.arroyoseco.org

Catering to the populist sentiments of the day, LAW published a series of tracts in Good Roads Magazine, including one called The Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer. The gospel, along with other materials issued by the League, called upon Congress to build a system of well-paved roads connecting towns and villages. Their literature appealed to farmers whose livelihood was compromised by inadequate road conditions and sought to leverage more effectively the railroads upon which they relied to get their goods to market. Though the energy behind the movement came primarily from groups of cyclists in cities, their political appeal to the peasant farmer struck a sympathetic chord with congressmen distrustful of city bosses and railroad tycoons.

The agrarian sympathies of a federal government reeling from a financial crisis sparked by railroad speculation set in motion the inequitable balance in transportation policy and funding geared away from cities towards rural areas. This bias persists to this day. Beginning with the establishment of the Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) in the Department of Agriculture in 1893, the government set a precedent for road and highway construction as a rural program based on rural needs and rural access — a decade before the advent of the automobile. As a consequence, from the early 20th century onward, the Bureau of Public Roads and its successor agency the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) charted a course that would spell the dissolution of railroads and urban transportation systems in favor of federally funded toll-free highways dominated by state interests and agencies.¹

League of American Wheelmen rally, 1880 | via ocbike.org

The establishment of the landmark Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 carried with it a provision that enabled each state to establish a highway department to handle grants and funds allocated from the federal government. The highway departments, assembled from an already forceful and emergent group of regional highway lobbies (backed by national automobile associations), formed the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) in 1914 — a group which, over the course of the 20th century, “developed into ‘one of the most important, least known political groups in the country…part lobby, part professional association, part quasi-political agency. No effective national highway policy could be enacted without its agreement.’”²

Evolving Guidelines and Standards for Roads and Bikeways
AASHO’s lead role in the federal highway program was underscored by their publication in the 1920s and 1930s of a series of road design standards, which eventually came to be known as the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets and the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The former, a set of guidelines commonly known as the AASHTO Green Book (AASHO was renamed AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, in 1973), is often referred to as the “bible” for traffic engineers. The MUTCD is a federally mandated set of codes intended to create standardized roadway signs and markings. The Green Book guides a road’s geometric proportions, such the minimum width of a travel lane (typically 10 feet, though engineers prefer 11-12 foot lanes), while the MUTCD mandates its signage and markings, such as the appropriate dimensions of a stop sign or a striped buffer.

The antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself.As cars became ever more prevalent on America’s roadways, the Green Book, guided by state highway engineers, continually added “safety” buffers to their street design standards to account for the growing frequency of accidents and driver errors. After 1966, based on the presumed inevitability of driver error,³ traffic engineers “became principally concerned with how to engineer [a] second line of defense, shifting the profession’s focus away from driver behavior and towards vehicles and roadside hardware.”⁴ Trees were routinely chopped down to improve sight distances on historic streets, sidewalks were narrowed to improve a car’s crumple zone, and intersection curb radii were altered to insure that trucks and other large vehicles could make smooth turns.

Ever more prohibitive traffic engineering standards regulated and regimented the city streetscape in the name of safety, even as these standards simultaneously eroded the urban realm and transformed ordinary commercial thoroughfares into high speed / high traffic urban arterials. Since only state-designated collector or arterial routes were eligible to receive federal funding, cities had an incentive to designate more of their city streets as state routes, and in doing so conform to AASHTO standards that compromised pedestrians, street life and commerce in favor of vehicle throughput.^5,6

Why AASHTO Excluded the Cycle Track
Among AASHTO’s supplemental publications released in the ensuing decades of the Interstate era was the 1975 AASHTO Guide to the Development of Bicycle Facilities. Demand for a better design policy for bicyclists emerged during the bike boom of the late 1960s and peaked in 1974, the year when, for the first time in decades, more bicycles were sold than cars.

Surging interest in the bicycle, then as now, sparked a reconsideration of the bicycle’s place in the roadway — specifically under what circumstances bicyclists ought to ride with or apart from traffic. At this juncture, despite a wealth of strategies being deployed in Europe, including the cycle track, the American standard fell curiously under the spell of John Forester, the champion of the vehicular cycling movement and author of Effective Cycling. Vehicular cyclists espouse the principle that cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.

In the early 1970s, Forester successfully fought (and continues to fight) against the inclusion of cycle tracks in the AASHTO Bike Guide. Though the vehicular cycling principle has many adamant advocates, the outright embrace of a behavioral approach to cycling coincided with a tacit rejection of the behavioral approach to traffic safety. In other words, as the engineering profession began to safeguard the built environment for terrible drivers and faster cars, a dominant group of bicyclists rejected the principle of separation in favor of “bicycle driving.”

At a point in history when the primary engineering solution was to segment users by grade and function, Forester may have seemed like a luminary. In practice, while cycling rates had a resurgence elsewhere, in the US, they stalled. 

9th Avenue, Manhattan | via NYC DOT's Street Design Manual

The Ninth Avenue Revolution
From the bike boom of the 1970s until today, efforts to make bicycling a mainstream form of transportation (rather than a child’s toy or an exercise regimen) have often focused on policy and education rather than engineering or roadway design. The few cycle track experiments that did take place were either situated outside of a large urban context, in left-leaning college towns like Madison, WI or Davis, CA; or quickly succumbed to political winds, such as New York Mayor Ed Koch’s infamous Midtown cycle tracks in the 1980s. A small but vocal group of engineers from the vehicular cycling community vehemently objected to changes to the AASHTO and MUTCD standards, propagating the philosophically sound but practically unrealistic “Share the Road” dogma that bicyclists should be accorded all of the rights and responsibilities of motorists.

Today’s call for cycle tracks differs, in part, because these interventions have been integrated into a bolder and more comprehensive reawakening and reconsideration of streets as public spaces for people. In 2007, when New York City constructed the city’s first protected bike lane pilot project on Ninth Avenue and transformed Times Square from a tumultuous interchange into a public commons, the city not only created a safe space for cyclists and pedestrians, they set a new precedent in the design of city streets. Cycle track projects, along with a host of bold engineering and communications strategies, have helped to revive the notion of the street as a place not solely for cars, but a front yard in which commercial and pedestrian activities may thrive.

In most cities, changes to city streets, beyond repaving or filling potholes, occur in geologic time. Transportation agencies and public works departments are (understandably) reluctant to attract bad press and political controversy by eliminating traffic lanes, and in much of the country, have little to gain from widening sidewalks or adding bike lanes. Moreover, innovation has often been discouraged by the threat of liability, as innovative cities and engineers fall back on prevailing standards (AASHTO guidance) rather than the immunity of good engineering judgment.⁷ In the 1970s, John Forester coerced the state of California and the federal government to withdraw proposals for cycle tracks by citing a lack of safety research and suing the city of Palo Alto for having mandatory sidepath⁸ laws — injecting a sword into the tender belly of the system.⁹ A steadfast reliance on research and the threat of liability created an untenable cycle, which New York City, by building the cycle track as a pilot project in 2007, may have finally broken.

The current movement to build cycle tracks and other innovative designs reflects a paradigm shift in the urban political-engineering-planning framework under which cities typically operate. City transportation agencies and public works departments are transforming themselves into public space departments to cater to a new generation, and are in turn finding that the dialogue of controversial new steps — such as an ambitious bike network expansion —helps them to transcend the business-as-usual approach to city streets and to forge new partnerships with community groups, businesses and advocates. When New York City built its first cycle tracks (as part of its larger complete street design initiative), it made the cycle track into an object of political capital, setting off a domino effect that now involves cities from Memphis to San Jose.

Excerpt from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

The quiet revolution of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide
The story of the cycle track does not end with the trials and successes of New York. In fact, despite the turmoil of the Prospect Park West Bike Lane in the winter of 2011, the imperative for cycle tracks has garnered even more momentum nationwide, with cities all around the United States prepared to lay their first miles of protected bikeways in 2012 and 2013. While controversy has a way of heightening interest and visibility, the publication in March 2011 of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide set forth for the first time an accepted, long overdue national standard off of which cities could base their designs.

While the cycle track is what makes the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide pioneering, the manual actually includes guidance for bicycle signals, bike boxes, buffered bike lanes, and a host of other new traffic engineering strategies now being deployed across the country. The designs in the guide draw on the European experience as well as existing projects and precedents in the United States. Following the official release in March 2011, NACTO undertook an unprecedented endorsement campaign for the document, drawing the support of countless city transportation officials, as well as US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. These developments have set the stage for a thorough reconsideration of roadway design standards in cities across the country, and reflect the long-recognized fissure between the reality of urban design and the tenets of state highway design.

Whether or not federal transportation policy and state highway design evolve to achieve a more representative balance between state and local interests remains to be seen. Nonetheless, the recent emergence of the cycle track and the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets a positive precedent for the future of urban streets and spaces. The modern solution to traffic congestion is no longer a multi-billion dollar highway or tunnel, but a recalibration of investment away from traffic and towards people, and away from highways and towards transit and public plazas. It is through the reinvention and re-imagination of this ubiquitous public asset, the street, that the American city may discover its latent potential. While cycle tracks may be an ephemeral protagonist in this evolving drama (as their late 19th century counterparts were for the Good Roads movement), this subtle traffic operation sets the stage for a more ambitious reconquest of the street — its place, purpose and future in the American city.

Bikebox at a signalized intersection, from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

David Vega-Barachowitz is the Sustainable Initiatives Program Manager at the National Association of City Transportation Officials and coordinator for NACTO’s Cities for Cycling project. Mr. Vega-Barachowitz joined NACTO in 2011 to develop and disseminate the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a national design guide which compiles innovative bikeway and street design in the United States. Prior to joining NACTO, he undertook a Henry Evans Travelling fellowship granted by Columbia University to study urban design, with a focus on bicycle and infrastructure planning and design, in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and France. His interest in bicycling as sustainable transportation was inspired by his time studying architecture and urban design in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008-2009, Mr. Vega-Barachowitz worked at the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked on a State of Good Repair initiative to improve system-wide asset management and systematic rehabilitation for stations. He is a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Urban Studies with Architecture.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

The immense distances trash travels (and the amount of cost and energy used to transport, transfer, recycle, incinerate or dump it) pose obvious questions about how we expend environmental resources in support of our country’s vast consumption practices. According to Rit Aggarwala, former director of the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, it’s time to shift the ways we measure environmental impacts “from combustion towards consumption.” He was speaking at a conference of city planning professionals entitled Zoning the City, but the implications of his words extend far beyond land use: he was expressing the far-reaching truth that there’s more than just carbon in our footprints. And while engines and energy usage are the primary metrics used to calculate degrees of green, zooming out to a broader inquiry into the infrastructure that supports both the supply chain and the removal chain raises larger questions about the life-cycles of the products and materials that pass through our daily lives.

Two years ago, for its landmark exhibition Toward the Sentient City, the Architectural League commissioned five innovative design projects that interrogated the convergence of digital technologies and the urban systems. One of the projects, Trash | Track, started with a simple question: “why do we know so much about the supply chain and so little about the removal chain?” To close this gap in public awareness about where stuff goes after we throw it away, the team behind Trash | Track (MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory) devised sensors that would track the movements of a variety of everyday objects on their often convoluted routes to their final destinations. They completed a pilot project in partnership with the City of Seattle that visualized these journeys and documented the ultimate fate of pieces of trash that are barely considered after being tossed in the garbage (see introductory video below).

Trash | Track from senseablecitylab on YouTube.

To be sure, sensors and analytics can help us make more intelligent choices about how we use resources, but as we go about enhancing or improving complex urban systems through technology, we must also provoke discussion about what kind of city we want. What are the values that should guide our quest for efficiency, reliability and convenience in the technologies that support the urban environment? And how can those values be informed by careful consideration of those infrastructures that may be out of sight, but should never be — if we want ecological, economical and resilient cities – out of mind.

-C.S.

This Urban Omnibus video is the fourth and final in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities. 

Garbage Truck at Night | Photo: Drew Geraets

Elizabeth Royte is the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It; Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash; and The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest. Her writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.

A double-stack intermodal train prepares to depart the Arlington Rail Yard on the Staten Island Railroad | Photo by Joshua Nelson

Many heralded the opening of the High Line for its innovative reclaiming of a disused freight rail line as a public, open space. Its abandonment was due, in part, to the rise of interstate trucking since the 1950s, along with changes to the economic geography and industrial practices of New York and its food industries. But just because the city no longer conveys freight via rail through the West Side of Manhattan does not mean that our city no longer has the need for the kind of hard infrastructure that moves goods cheaply, efficiently and reliably from point A to point B.

While the deindustrialization of cities like New York has accelerated over the past fifty years, our awareness of the consumption of environmental resources has grown: we can now evaluate all commodities through terms like carbon footprint, locally sourced or eco-friendly. But without deeper engagement and familiarity with the supply chain, environmental consciousness — not to mention sophisticated economic development strategy — only goes so far. When we think about infrastructure, the benefits of commuter mass transit are well-known, but we often fall short of extending the same logic to the transportation of goods. Freight trains might not be the most efficient thing that comes to mind, until we start comparing them to the trucks that dominate our distribution networks.

Joshua Nelson oversees freight rail operations at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. We sat down with him to help shine a light on some aspects of the supply chain that might not be topics of everyday conversation. Since he’s one of the only people working on these issues at the municipal level, we wanted to know exactly what his job entails, in order to peer into the city’s complex networks of transportation logistics. Trains don’t just get people to work, they also get potatoes to the grocery store, scrap metal to the recycling plant and they just might help keep our city competitive in environmental, economic and infrastructural terms.

– C.S.

The freight rail network of the New York City metropolitan area

A CONVERSATION WITH JOSHUA NELSON

What do you do?
I do planning and policy for the city with respect to freight rail operations and development. This means I make sure that the city has options when it comes to rail freight transportation and that there’s competition in the city among different freight rail carriers. I also do asset management work with the city’s three separate facilities that we own. The City has rail assets in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, at the New York City Terminal Produce Market in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and then the Staten Island Railroad (PDF) on the western shore of Staten Island, which was rehabilitated in 2007 by the City and the Port Authority.

How did you first get interested in rail infrastructure?
I’ve always loved transportation. My father’s a locomotive engineer, who recently celebrated 40 years on the railroad. He worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad in northern Utah and now works for the Union Pacific Railroad. So I grew up loving transportation, but never fully realized I could make a career out of it. After getting into urban planning in college, I found work in traditional transit planning. I worked for two different transit authorities, one in Salt Lake and one in Seattle. And after studying transportation planning in graduate school, an opportunity came up here, at New York City’s Economic Development Corporation, to work with freight rail. It’s a unique position: most cities don’t have somebody devoted to issues of freight rail exclusively. Most often, the planning functions associated with freight happen at the state level, not necessarily the municipal level.

How does rail compare to other modes of freight transport?
In terms of transporting freight, rail is most often compared to truck. There are some other alternatives, like inland waterway movements, but by and large, it’s rail versus truck. There are significant benefits to using freight rail. First, there is the technological advantage: a locomotive pulling a train of 100 rail cars can be operated by two individuals, an engineer and a conductor. A truck carries 1/3 of what a single rail car can carry, and each truck requires one driver. So you need 300 trucks and 300 drivers to transport the equivalent amount of cargo as one 100-car train. Freight requires a fraction of the labor, which translates into significant cost savings for the customer.

1 locomotive engineer + 1 conductor carries 300 truck loads; 1 truck driver carries 1 truck load

Second is the environmental advantage. Rail is more fuel-efficient than trucking. Of course, locomotives pollute. But replacing 300 tractor-trailers with one or two locomotives is obviously going to provide a net benefit in environmental terms. Overall, the big advantage is rail’s ability to transport a lot of stuff very cheaply over a very long distance.

A common concern is that railroads, because they’re inherently monopolistic, often don’t provide the levels of customer service that people require. So, here in New York, we’re constantly working with all of our freight rail partners to make sure that the businesses that do receive services from the railroads are getting what they need.

How does freight rail interface with other modes of freight? Particularly the maritime infrastructure, like tugboats and barges?
When people think of freight transportation, they often think of container ships, which is what we call intermodal containerized service. The premise of intermodal transportation is that when you’re switching between modes (say from ship to truck or to rail) you don’t have to unload a whole bunch of product from a ship and individually load it into a boxcar for rail transport. Instead, you just put everything in one container that stays closed and is picked off that ship, put directly onto a railcar, and taken to wherever its final destination is in the middle of the country. While containerization in the maritime industry had its origins in the late ’50s, the intermodal revolution on the rails has really come about in the last twenty years, alongside the booming trade with China. Southern Pacific Railroad introduced the first double-stack container car in the late 1970s, which made handling intermodal containers extremely cost-effective for the railroads. By the late 1980s, the technology was fully embraced by the railroads and intermodal really took off. Today, intermodal traffic accounts for approximately 20% of revenue for U.S. railroads.

The New York Container Terminal at Howland Hook, Staten Island | Photo by Joshua Nelson

Before intermodal, you had to unload the ship by hand, break bulk, and then get that cargo into a boxcar. If that boxcar was terminating in a place where there’d be a truck trip to a final destination, then all those goods would have to be unloaded manually and put into the truck. It was extremely costly and the multiple “touches” always led to the potential for damaged goods.

Here in New York, we have a unique operation where there’s a much more direct interface between the maritime world and the rail world, and that’s in the “car-float” operation that takes place between Greenville, NJ and Sunset Park in Brooklyn. It’s the last vestige of this huge network of barges and tugs that used to be owned by all the private freight rail carriers in the city. Because of the lack of bridges across New York Harbor, these railroads actually put rail cars onto the barges and used tugboats to deliver them to pier sheds all throughout the city, and also to interchange with other railroads.

A carfloat approaches the 51st St Float Bridge in Sunset Park, Brooklyn | Photo by Joshua Nelson

In New York City, how does most imported cargo get to market?
The vast majority, by tonnage, is trucked into the city. According to a 2004 report by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, which is our local Metropolitan Planning Organization, freight rail’s share of the cargo flow is right about 1%. It’s very small when you compare it to everything else.

So 99% of our cargo is trucked from our ports?
Pretty much. Most goods don’t travel from port to the end user immediately; it’s not like it goes from a boat straight to your local Target. Often, goods move from the port facilities to a distribution center, many of which are off exits 7 and 8a on the New Jersey Turnpike, and also in Eastern Pennsylvania. Everything gets consolidated in these big distribution centers, and then trucks take the goods from there to make deliveries throughout the city.

Trucks at the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market | Photo by Andreas Burgess

It’s important to note that there is a difference between cargo that terminates in the Port of New York and New Jersey, 100% of which is trucked to these distribution centers, and cargo that passes through the port. Approximately 10-15% of the cargo that enters the Port of New York and New Jersey on its way to, say, Chicago, Cleveland or St. Louis, leaves the port by rail on its way to other destinations.

Something we’re exploring, which is part of the Sunset Park vision plan and part of the Community Board 7′s 197(a) plan and in the latest update to PlaNYC, is turning two railyards in Brooklyn into “transload” facilities, places where you can bring in a railcar of goods and transfer all those goods to truck. That way, someone who doesn’t have a rail spur right into their building or their backyard can nonetheless pick up their goods by driving a truck, say, a mile and a half into Brooklyn, rather than moving their goods hundreds of miles by truck entirely. The city really lacks those kinds of facilities, and we think it’s important to develop them.

Tell me a little bit more about the three freight rail assets that the City maintains.
The Staten Island Railroad opened in April of 2007 and, for all intents and purposes, has been a huge success. When they did the initial projections for how much traffic they thought they would generate, I think it was 1/3 of what it’s generating today. The trackage formerly belonged to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) and, later, CSX Transportation. In recent years, the only customer was the Proctor & Gamble facility at Port Ivory, on the northwest shore of Staten Island. After Proctor & Gamble ceased operations there, the City acquired the right-of-way with the intention of reactivating the rail line. The City also saw the route as a means of effectuating its 2006 solid waste management plan.

The Port Authority and the City partnered and put $72,000,000 into the rehabilitation of the railroad in order to create direct access to the Howland Hook container port facility and also to the newly constructed Staten Island waste transfer facility in the Fresh Kills area. The container port really relies upon on-dock rail service and, of course, the Department of Sanitation definitely benefits from being able to export the waste by rail as opposed to truck. Now the City can shift its solid waste disposal out of Staten Island while retaining a significant number of jobs connected to solid waste disposal industry on the Island. And, besides saving money, the railroad eliminates about 90,000 truck trips, on average, from our roads every year. So that’s a big deal.

Double-stack container cars in the Arlington Rail Yard near Howland Hook Marine Terminal, Staten Island | Photo by Andreas Burgess

Then in the Bronx, the City maintains a relatively short spur that leads to the Hunts Point Produce Market. This line is important to us, and to the cooperators of the produce market, because it provides an alternative to truck. Five days a week, about 3-4% of the produce in the market comes in by rail as opposed to truck. The City is very focused on expanding the Produce Market and giving the cooperators what they need to continue to provide the valuable services that they do to all the restaurants, bodegas and grocers across New York City.

The cooperators of the market like rail because it’s cheaper by a significant price differential, but not all products can handle the long transit time. It takes about ten to twelve days for a boxcar of produce to make its way across the country, so the kinds of fresh produce that are still good after that kind of journey are what we call “hardwear”: potatoes, onions, sometimes carrots, coming from the growing regions of Eastern Idaho, Western Washington and sometimes California.

A locomotive crew switches refrigerated boxcars at the Hunts Point Produce Market | Photo by Joshua Nelson

The third of the City-owned freight rail assets, in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, is what we call the Brooklyn Waterfront Rail system — and I think this is the most exciting piece of the freight rail puzzle right now.

It’s comprised of components of a number of different old railroads: the Bush Terminal Railroad and the New York Connecting Railroad, which was operated jointly by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad and the Long Island Railroad (when previously owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad). What’s left of these networks is some trackage between 29th and 65th Streets to the west of 1st Avenue in Sunset Park. It’s a system that was all under private ownership until the Port Authority bought it in 2008, and it is in need of significant capital upgrades. So we’re working with the Port Authority on updating the railroad’s old service contract with modern legal terms; bringing everything into a state of good repair on the Brooklyn waterfront; and making capital improvements to enhance our ability to market the rail line and to market parcels within the Sunset Park area to companies that would be interested in rail service.

The Brooklyn Waterfront Rail System

What kind of companies are those?
For example, one of the companies that will be relocating to the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal (SBMT) is the Axis Group, an auto import/export distributer. They’ll be bringing in import vehicles via deep-draft ship and using the Marine Terminal area as a distribution facility. A portion of those vehicles will leave SBMT by rail. Another tenant is Sims Metal Management, which is building a municipal recycling facility in partnership with the NYC Department of Sanitation and they want to be able to ship out repurposed recyclables by rail. So those are two totally different kinds of operations: one ships out recycled tin cans and baled waste for sale on the domestic commodity markets, and the other ships out shiny, brand new automobiles.

What do you wish people understood better about freight rail and why it’s important for New York?
What I would encourage people to do is to think about their supply chain in general. When you’re on line at Duane Reade or the grocery store, take a look at whatever you have in your hand and ask yourself: “Where did this avocado come from? And how the heck did it get here?” By and large, when people think of transportation, they think of it in terms of something they don’t want around them: they don’t want trucks or freight trains rumbling past their door. But at the same time, they want a huge variety of consumer products when they walk into the store, and they want cheap prices. I think freight rail, for New Yorkers, is a totally unseen part of life in the city that the average person doesn’t think about, but it’s definitely there. And although it doesn’t handle a large portion of the overall traffic that we have coming into the city, it’s still very important.

I think that the more that we can encourage rail freight activity, the more transportation options small businesses will have and the more competitive the city will be. It’s a much more positive approach to the city’s supply chains, not only in relation to consumer products, but to anything that is manufactured, either on greater Long Island or within the city.

Does encouraging usually mean expanding the infrastructure?
I think in some cases it means expanding infrastructure, but it also means maximizing and leveraging what you already have. In a lot of cases, when we talk about the proposals for the 65th Street Rail Yard and the 51st Street Rail Yard to develop these transload facilities, this is land that the City owns that could be utilized in a much more robust way. It’s less a question of building railroads or building new infrastructure than it is about bringing everything to a state of good repair and then marketing the facilities we have to utilize them to their full potential.

"Where did this avocado come from? And how the heck did it get here?"

Graphics by Marcelo López-Dinardi.

Joshua Nelson is an Assistant Vice President at the New York City Economic Development Corporation specializing in freight rail transportation. He is responsible for managing the City’s freight rail assets while also developing goods movement policies that support more modal balance in the regional transportation system. Previous transportation experience includes improving the on-time reliability of Mexico City’s Metrobús bus rapid transit system, promoting rideshare programs in Seattle and launching the TRAX light rail system in Salt Lake City. Joshua received a BA and BS from the University of Utah and holds both a Master of Science in Transportation and a Master in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The locations, heights and age of the mobile phone antenna installations filed with the Department of Buildings since 2005. The variable density of base stations is a reflection of the extremes of architectural topography and the obstruction environment, as well as the volume of user demand.

The relationship between mobile infrastructure and a city like New York is complex, and subject to many different forms of negotiation. It is also subject to a remarkable degree of change, reflecting the evolving form of the city itself and the novel ways that people engage it. The variables that concern how mobile infrastructure operates, how it is deployed and located within the city, and how its tactics change over time are certainly all spatial in nature. And taken as a whole, the negotiation between the infrastructure and the city describes a fundamentally new form of space – the signal space of the city – where the city and its electromagnetic transmission environment meet.

Mobile networks are at once invisible, and are also the systems most associated with the soft dimensions of infrastructure and its potential to act as an engine for large-scale social, economic and technological change. At a recent conference on mobile communications technology, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission noted that “no sector of the communications industry holds greater potential to enhance America’s economic competitiveness, spur job creation and improve the quality of our lives.” And just as the operational and physical dimensions of conventional infrastructure, from transportation to utilities, manifest themselves and influence the growth of the city in important ways, signal space can be understood as a new and important public space, located at a nexus of public, corporate, governmental and technological concerns.

While much of the speculation about the future of the city in relation to mobile networks has been focused on applications and potential uses of the technology, less attention has been devoted to the way that the technology itself is developing and the impact that it may have on the city. Our research into mobile infrastructure centers around identifying some of the developments in mobile technology that have the greatest potential to affect the future development of the city, and speculating on where they may have particular relevance for design. Our aim has been to theorize and document signal space, to increase its visibility, and to make its protocols and characteristics available for action.

Cellular network organization

SECTORIZING THE CITY
At the most fundamental level, a mobile phone is a two-way radio. The phone contains an antenna that communicates with a mobile base station nearby. A base station generally includes a series or array of antennas that receive and transmit signals, and a computer that coordinates the communication and interfaces with the cabled phone system. The structure of mobile networks is generally comprised of sectors or cells, defined as the overlapping region of three base stations. At its simplest, a cellular network can be imagined as a continuously tiled set of hexagonal cells, with base stations located at every other vertex. An individual user making or receiving a call communicates with a nearby base station. As that user moves out of range, the signal is shared between other base stations within range until the most optimum base station is identified and the call is handed over.

The broadcast spectrum is a finite resource, so the region of the broadcast spectrum available for any given technology is rigorously policed and legislated. Mobile networks have access to a limited range of frequencies, so cellular communication is based on the reuse of frequency channels within the network. Any of the frequencies associated with a given cell are being reused at another cell, usually nearby but far enough away to avoid co-channel interference.

Frequency Allocations of the Radio Spectrum from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) | Right-click and open in a new window to see details.

The capacity of the system is limited by interference from the environment and by the depletion of available channels due to an increasing number of users. Each base station can only accommodate a certain number of simultaneous users, for instance, so one of the primary methods for increasing the capacity of mobile network technologies relies on subdivision — sectorizing the city into smaller and smaller individual frequency zones.

The surest measure of signal quality is the unobstructed line of sight from antenna to receiver. In dense environments, like cities, signals tend to be reflected off of obstructions and arrive out of phase at the receiving antenna. Coverage is dependent not only on the availability of a signal at a given location, but on the network’s ability to maintain a signal over time, throughout an individual cell, and as a user moves from cell to cell. Mobile base stations are strategically located to optimize the “fit” between the available signal and the specific physical environment. The complexity of this relationship is such that most base stations are located as a result of experimental testing and local calibration because no sufficiently powerful analytical methods or modeling are available to determine the behavior of signals.

Base stations and antennae | L-R: Jane Street at Hudson; E. 4th St. between Ave. A and Ave. B; E. 2nd St. and Ave D; Sullivan and W. 3rd St.

The FCC, in recent years, has authorized a three-fold increase in the commercial spectrum, which includes the recent auction of 700MHz frequencies previously in use by analog television. However, given that a 35-fold increase in wireless traffic is expected over the next five years, mobile providers constantly add antennas to their networks. While a single base station might have a range measured in miles in an unobstructed environment, in an urban setting installations are often separated by only a few hundred feet.

Rapidly increasing demand will mean that base stations, which today are almost exclusively located semi-stealthily on mid-rise building rooftops, will not only become denser, but will likely migrate into interiors, streets and other public spaces. The radical densification of sectoring into ever-smaller cells affords finer degrees of control over the transmission. It also calls for a miniaturization of the antenna equipment to allow for easier integration with other structures and camouflage. Already, hundreds of thousands of femtocells (small-scale base stations for boosting wireless signals indoors that are the size of a Wi-Fi router) are currently installed throughout the United States.

Base Station Density | L: The service volume, or exposure, for each base station was determined by calculating the total interior square footage of buildings within the broadcast radius of each antenna point. The size and color of each base station is proportional to its positive or negative deviation from the mean exposure. Not surprisingly, in Midtown Manhattan a high number of base stations service a large amount of building volume, or user volume. Fairly large differences are evident, though between the Upper West and Upper East Sides. | R: Base Station density by New York City Community District. The average density of antennas in Manhattan is one for every 218 square meters. Evaluated by community district, the density ranges from 380 square meters at the low end to 160 square meters on the high end. A number of other administrative boundaries show wide variation in the density of base stations. For instance, Landmark Districts as a whole have considerably fewer installations and on average have an antenna density just over half of that of the rest of Manhattan.

PROLIFERATION OF THE MOBILE NETWORK
One of the most significant factors in the development of the infrastructure and its proliferation will be any proposed change to the registration and reporting requirements currently in existence. No comprehensive documentation on the mobile infrastructure in New York is available, largely because the infrastructure itself is entirely owned by corporate entities and installations on specific buildings are often negotiated in private. Since 1998, New York City’s building code requires that new rooftop installations be approved under an alteration permit, though no data concerning the operation of a base station or its conformance to FCC radiation regulations are maintained by the City. And since 2005, the Department of Buildings has maintained a cellular antenna information database with information on mobile antenna permits. This data, coupled with registration from the FCC and FAA (above 200 feet, antennas must be registered as potential flight hazards), constitutes a substantial record of the infrastructure. To start to get a picture of the built infrastructure of mobile networks in New York, we developed a series of maps (seen throughout this piece) by cross-referencing permit and registration data with the NYC Planning Department’s PLUTO and LION datasets, as well as individual building information from the New York City Data Mine.

Not only are base stations proliferating, they are also developing sophisticated spatial senses and intelligence. Base stations employ spatial algorithms, probabilistic modeling and other soft computing methods to anticipate and coordinate the effects of signals that are lost, delayed, or arriving out of phase with the primary transmission. In effect, they reconstruct signals from the interference generated by the physical environment and are able to anticipate the transmissibility of a signal given a specific environment and user.

SIMULACRUM OF THE CITY
“Smart” antenna installations are designed to customize a radiation pattern for each individual user as a means to better negotiate obstruction-rich environments and to greatly increase the capacity of a given base station’s limited set of frequencies. The sensitivities of each component of the network are precisely tuned to users and to the physical environment alike. In aggregate, they add up to what is unquestionably one of the most comprehensive representations of the city in existence, capable of accounting for the physical obstruction environment of the city (its physical form) and the activities, communications, data transmissions and locations of the network’s users. As the network becomes denser, and cells finer, the resolution of the signal spaces increases dramatically.

Visually confirming the data set along the Bleecker Street and East 3rd Street from the Hudson River to the East River. While base stations are most frequently absorbed into the visual noise of rooftops, a number of camouflaging techniques related to color and matching brick textures are apparent. This limited sampling also reveals the broad range of scales associated with equipment. It is common in the far East Village, for instance, to see installations covering entire rooftops.

As recent reports have widely publicized, mobile phones and base station computers store significant personal data. That information, coupled with the emerging spatial and user sensitivities of the infrastructure itself, could be understood as a unique form of spatial memory. Proposals to embed sensors into mobile phones for sniffing out bioterrorism agents or nuclear radiation are indications of the network’s potential to support crowd-sourced passive surveillance, but also to retain memory of the activities of the city at particular locations and in relation to particular spatial environments.

In his work Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard recounts a fable by Jorge Luis Borges where a great empire creates a map of its territory so exact that it approaches the size of the territory itself. In many ways, the memory built into signal space reflects Baudrillard’s observation that in contemporary societies, the simulacrum supersedes the actual territory itself. In 2003, New York City’s Department of Information, Technology and Telecommunications collected information about signal quality by inviting New Yorkers to report areas with poor cell phone reception, so that they could be reported to mobile carriers. More recently, in a 2011 paper, researchers at AT&T Labs have proposed that cell phone user data has the potential to dramatically change the future of urban planning, noting that “cellular networks must know the approximate locations of all active cellular phones in order to provide them with communication services. Given the ubiquity of these phones and their almost constant proximity to their owners, cellular networks can be used to opportunistically sense the locations of large populations of people. They thus provide a means to monitor city dynamics frequently, cheaply and at an unprecedented scale.”

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All images, except the FCC Frequency Allocations graphic, by Michael Chen and Justin Snider.

Michael Chen is principal of Normal Projects, a New York-based architecture and design firm, and teaches design studios and seminars at Pratt Institute School of Architecture (www.crisisfronts.org). His design work and writings have been published widely. “Signal Space: New York’s Soft Frequency Terrains,” an article exploring the relationship between broadcast technologies and urban form with maps and visualizations by Chen and Justin Snider will appear in Bracket issue #2, Bracket [goes soft], published by Actar later this year.

Justin Snider is a designer and researcher based in New York.  He is currently a Project Manager for Hume Coover Studio and Teacher’s Assistant for the Pratt Institute Berlin Program.  His project REBOOT was winner of the ARCHIVE Seed Award.  Images and videos of his recent work are available at http://a-object.com/.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Manhattan’s density, supported by its mass transit infrastructure, is the principle reason the average New Yorker has a smaller carbon footprint than her counterpart in another large US city. At the urban scale, this density is, of course, enabled by a singular combination of geographic, economic, social and political factors. But at the scale of the city’s individual buildings, high-rise living and working are made possible by technological factors. And some of the technologies developed for lifting people, water, hot and cool air to great heights currently work in much the same way as they did when initially introduced. How often do we stop to consider the systems required to make a building function?

This question bears more urgency than casual wonder. 39% of CO2 emissions derive from building operations, including plumbing, electricity, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) and, in the case of high-rise buildings, the elevator system. To be sure, innovative work in architecture and engineering is improving the performance and efficiency of building operations, yet many people are unaware of the scope of energy intensive activities required for a building to function. So, with this in mind, we spent a day with Jim Ferrari, the chief mechanic of 515 Madison Avenue, a midtown Manhattan office building designed by J.E.R. Carpenter and completed in 1931, to find out more about what exactly goes on behind doors that typically only maintenance workers pass through. What Ferrari revealed was a series of day-to-day systems that many of us — those concerned with the environmental sustainability of our building stock — talk about improving without necessarily being able to visualize.

-C.S.

This Urban Omnibus video is the third in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

515 Madison Avenue | Photo courtesy of Newmark Knight Frank

The music in the video, “Mistral” by Loscil, appears courtesy of kranky.

The “infra-“ in infrastructure means below, which perhaps explains why we rarely pause to consider the sewers, water supply or electrical grids that enable the basic functions of urban living. Even when critical infrastructural systems are visible and not hidden below ground — like highways, power lines or traffic lights — their ubiquity and necessity put them just out of sight and out of mind. Until, of course, they break: a pothole is the quickest reminder of the good road maintenance we generally take for granted. How often do we stop to reflect on the full scope of what well-functioning roads and bridges and tunnels make possible? The desire to provoke that kind of reflection is what the City of Systems video series is all about.

Last year, Urban Omnibus spoke with Tom Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), an organization that since the 1920s has advocated strongly for “creating infrastructure and building big systems to protect landscapes and water supplies, to provide more mass-transit, to plan for the region’s growth.” Looking forward, Wright explained that future planning and advocacy efforts might be “less about creating new systems and more about getting more efficiency and productivity out of the energy supply, the water supply, community development networks. The bad news is that we’re doing a poor job of managing and operating these 19th and early 20th century systems; the good news is there’s a lot more capacity in them if we start to manage the systems better.” Digital technologies offer one mechanism to get more out of our basic urban systems, facilitating use-on-demand systems or creating responsive environments. Yet, while our new digital infrastructure will do many things, it won’t, by itself, build roads over water. It might, however, enable us to maintain our physical infrastructure better: monitoring usage to identify greater efficiencies, to alert us of potential malfunctions, or to extrapolate broader patterns in regional flows of people and goods. Imagine if the data from E-ZPass toll payments on the Verrazano were made available to support, say, a more nuanced proposal for congestion pricing.

As we go about instrumenting all of our systems in an attempt to harness the excess capacity within them, we would be wise to contemplate the implications of how those systems came into being, what the assumptions were about their eventual use, and how those assumptions have played out in the lived experience of residents and communities. Visible from places in all five of New York City’s boroughs, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stands as an iconic reminder not only to appreciate a masterwork of civil engineering, but also to reflect on the systemic urban change that infrastructure can bring about.

This Urban Omnibus video is the second in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

Interstate highway I-278 crosses the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

The original music in the video, “Verrazano” by Good Fruit, appears courtesy of the artist.

Illustration by Christina Sun

A new computer. Summer clothes. A better desk chair. Your cup of coffee. Tonight’s dinner. How all that stuff gets from factory to front door is largely a mystery to most people – unless you happen to be stuck behind a truck on your way home.

The Port of New York and New Jersey is the gateway for over $175 billion of cargo annually. It is an interconnected web of ship terminals, highways and rail lines, all connected like a circuit board. Goods travel from port to distribution center to store to front door, carried by a giant fleet of tankers, tugs, barges, boxcars and trucks — lots and lots of trucks.

Trucking is the predominant mode of freight transport in the US, carrying 58% of commercial freight (by tonnage). In the New York metro region, it’s more like 80%. Meanwhile, federal studies consistently describe truck routes, highways, bridges and tunnels as being chronically congested (PDF). This isn’t news. We see it on the BQE, the Gowanus and Staten Island Expressways and the George Washington Bridge. And these are routes — the very long trips, the heavily congested metropolitan corridors — that the truckers themselves don’t want. Our waterways, however, are underutilized, with existing capacity waiting to be filled.

Illustration by Christina Sun

New York is a city blessed with incredible waterways. They reach into every borough, across to New Jersey and out to the Long Island Sound. To the north runs the Hudson River, up to the locks of the Champlain and 524 miles of New York State canals, leading us to the Finger Lakes region. To the west are the indomitable salt marshes, the silting arteries of the Passaic and Hackensack, the very busy Kill van Kull and Arthur Kill, and the Raritan River, which once connected us to Delaware via a canal now long gone. The East River mingles with the Bronx River and flows out into the mighty Long Island Sound and beyond, or runs inland as Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal. Out the Narrows, the waters flow through Jamaica Bay, Sandy Hook… and out to sea.

Once upon a time, the waterways were used extensively. Manhattan Island was ringed with piers. The shores were so thick with vessels that one could walk for stretches by stepping from ship to ship. Ships, tugs and barges would bring goods into the city by water, where the raw materials were manufactured into products that were then shipped or transported by barge and train back out.

Illustration of Manhattan and Brooklyn, 1884

Trucking, the least fuel-efficient means of freight transportation besides air, has relegated rail and shipping to second-class status. Spurred by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 — essentially the beginning of what has become a long history of invisible subsidies to trucking (PDF) — the proliferation of road- and air-based shipping options have led to a “warehouse on wheels” model. Cheap overseas products are aggregated in large pick-up depots. Whatever we need, we simply call in, order and have it shipped. Small neighborhood stores can’t compete. And so, as Kunstler said, we have sold out our communities to be able to buy a cheap hair dryer.

But the prices of what we consume don’t always reflect their true costs. Truck-centric shipping relies on stable bridges, clear tunnels and smooth roads. It ensures that trucks will continue to rumble into the city, burning fossil fuels in snarled traffic and beating up the infrastructure even more. All of which demands significant maintenance, not to mention environmental, costs.

Regional Highway Corridors, Scaled by Freight Volume, 2004 | via the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC)

But you never get a pothole in the water, as many shipping advocates say.

Short Sea Shipping is the use of small vessels to bring goods from central container terminals to little ports around the city. By extending the distribution reach of waterborne vessels, fewer trucks and vehicles are on our streets and they are driving shorter distances. Roughly 40% of freight in Europe moves by short sea shipping. And in Hong Kong, mid-stream operation moves even more.

Let’s take a look at a few potential shipping routes. Imagine which one you would prefer to take – if you could.

At the foot of Astoria Boulevard, your big box store sells a variety of goods at wholesale prices. Memorial Day weekend is coming, meaning outdoor gatherings, barbecues and picnics — and plenty of party supplies and foodstuffs. You have to plan for a customer rush that is going to last five days. Maybe some of your baked goods come in locally, from one of Brooklyn’s commercial bakeries, but most of your packaged foods and fresh fruits get shipped in. From distribution centers in Philadelphia, the Meadowlands or farther, your stock arrives at the Port of NY/NJ at Newark or Elizabeth. From there, a daisy chain of highway trips begins: south along the Turnpike, east over the Goethals Bridge, a drive (or crawl) along the Staten Island Expressway, over the Verrazano Bridge and another crawl up the BQE through Brooklyn until you cross over into Queens, right on the banks of the East River at a calm embayment known as Hallet’s Cove.

Illustration by Christina Sun

Or, suppose you live in a new apartment building on West 42nd Street, where a few boxes from Fresh Direct have just been delivered. Your picture-perfect peppers, beef tenderloin and ears of corn were packed on the banks of Newtown Creek. They were then loaded into one of a legion of box trucks, which motored down the LIE into the maw of the Midtown tunnel. Once out at 2nd Avenue, they threaded their way across town, passing through, or avoiding, busy hubs like Grand Central or Penn Station, until finally it arrived in your delivery dock — just a baseball’s toss from the Hudson River.

Imagine you’re a restaurant manager in the Meatpacking District. There is a good chance you get your paper towels, soap and cleaning supplies from Burke, a major distributor in Manhattan for paper, bathroom and kitchen cleaning supplies. Burke’s trucks all head out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, along Kent or Flushing Avenues at the edge of Williamsburg or Vinegar Hill, then over the East River bridges. Once in Manhattan, they make way across Delancey, Canal, 34th or 57th Streets to any of the thousands of restaurants in Manhattan.

Or, we could use our waterways to better link the Port with the big box stores, the Newtown Creek-based food distributors with Manhattan’s households, the Navy Yard with our central business districts. The scores of parking tickets, the hundreds of hours of driver time spent in traffic, the thousands of vehicle miles traveled (VMT), just to get across the water before a single delivery has been made — all of these problems could be mitigated if New York City moved towards short sea shipping.

It’s slowly starting to happen. A few days a week, tugs pull barges of containers from the Port of NY/NJ up the East River to Bridgeport, carrying goods that would otherwise be trucked across Manhattan and up the Cross Bronx or the Bruckner on their way to and through Connecticut. Further south, New York New Jersey Rail (formerly the New York Cross Harbor Railroad) uses New York Harbor to transport boxes and boxcars between New York and New Jersey, from Bush Terminal to Greenville Yards, in the last remaining car float operation in the Port.

Last year, the Port Authority bought Greenville Yards to allow more goods, in this case New York City’s municipal solid waste, to move off the land-based network and onto the water network. And ferries are mounting a comeback, with publicly subsidized commuter ferries returning to the East River for the first time in more than 50 years starting this June. (Though a ferry linking Rockaway to Lower Manhattan was tried recently, but failed.) Freight ferries — a very local form of short sea shipping — may not be that far down the road.

Illustration by Christina Sun

Expansion of water-based intermodal shipping is a challenge and test projects haven’t always succeeded. The Albany Express Barge service, a 2003 pilot program to carry containers from NY/NJ to Albany operated by the private tug-and-barge firm Columbia Coastal, was terminated when cargo volumes didn’t meet expectations and their EPA funding ran out. Public perception still sees truck freight, erroneously, as a cheaper and faster option, either ignoring or unaware of the incredible inefficiencies of road-based transport, the costs of infrastructure wear-and-tear, the resulting air pollution and the hidden subsidies that pay for road maintenance and repair. The labor structure of who gets to work on the waterfront is very complicated. And of course New York City has lost most of its working piers and usable docks. But what we do have here in the heart of the harbor are the right conditions (traffic, congestion and a constant flow of goods), a revived appreciation for the potential of our network of waterways and a creative community of designers who can imagine new ways to re-activate its freight potential.

Potential economic benefit exists for both shipper and consumer. Hundreds of hours of driving time would be saved, as truck drivers could come to work via mass transit, meeting the incoming barge at East 35th Street or Downtown to start their day. Wear and tear on roads and river crossings would be reduced, as would traffic. Job opportunities would increase as tug companies need more captains, deckhands, cargo handlers, longshoremen, stevedores and cargo facility workers.

The environmental implications are also significant — and crucial to bear in mind. Less traffic means less congestion, which means better air quality for everyone. 73% fewer air emissions are released with every ton of cargo moved by barge rather than by truck. An increase in sea shipping also means fewer gas-guzzling trucks on our roads, an important shift in the face of maxed-out global oil production and the increasingly risky and destructive practices we are employing to get at what’s left.

National Highway Freight Network, 2004 | Reebie Associates and FHWA Freight Analysis Framework Project, via NYMTC

No picture is simple, no matter how it’s painted. Our nearly 100-year-old national highway system and its financial underpinnings are, for better or worse, ingrained in our transportation policy, our tax structure and our infrastructure. But looking ahead, we aren’t going to see a plentiful purse for the public sector for a generation or more and we need to use what we have to its fullest potential. The US Department of Transportation is taking notice. Last year, the USDOT launched the America’s Marine Highways Program, an initiative to develop marine transportation corridors in response to the same congestion, pollution and economic challenges we have been discussing here.

Just as the East River ferry plans will improve mobility for many individuals, so can the marine highway for the movement of goods. Making our waterways a more integral and reliable component of our transportation system provides an opportunity for us to improve the urban environment on land.

New York Harbor, 1951 | image by Fairchild Aerial Surveys, Inc. via the New York State Archives

Carter Craft is principal of Outside New York, a small consulting firm that provides a broad range of services including project management, program development, waterfront planning, communications, and fundraising. Current clients include the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, Randall’s Island Sports Foundation, NYC Swim, and Ver Nautica/ The Ferry Lab. Previous clients included the Red Bull Air Race – New York / NJ (2010) and the Kingdom of the Netherlands’ “Holland on the Hudson” Celebration (2009). Carter is a licensed Captain, and serves as a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, Adjunct Professor at Fordham University, and co-Chair of the Harbor Education Subcommittee of the full Harbor Operations Committee of the Port of New York and New Jersey.

Christina Sun is an illustrator and a part-time deckhand. She writes and illustrates Bowsprite, a blog on New York Harbor.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Earlier this year, Urban Omnibus sat down with TMC Director John Tipaldo, a systems engineer who oversees the facility, to learn firsthand about some of the priorities and technologies that influence the operation of traffic signals. Stoplights, it turns out, aren’t about limiting vehicular speed. They are about organizing who has the right to travel across a certain intersection at a particular time — cars going in this direction, cars going in that direction, pedestrians — and who has to wait until the other does so. In other words, traffic signals are about negotiating the interests of different users. What could be more urban than that? Find out more in the video below.

This Urban Omnibus video is the first in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

Most talk of urban systems these days seems to focus on efficiency and effectiveness, with a particular emphasis on using digital technologies to increase both. At IBM Smarter Cities New York in October of 2009, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano posed questions to illustrate the significant role that technology plays in building smarter cities. With four billion cell phones, 30 billion RFID tags and two billion internet users constantly providing and collecting data, what happens when we apply analytics to guide more strategic resource allocation as our digital and physical infrastructures converge?

Urban Omnibus and the Architectural League, as part of our mission to foster excellence in the design of the built environment, want to infuse this conversation about what’s technologically possible with informed debate about what kind of urban future is desirable. The Architectural League has been looking at the implications of computing embedded in our everyday environments, or situated technologies, for several years. Through a symposium, pamphlet series, exhibition and recently-published book called Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, the Situated Technologies project has engaged architects, artists and technologists in a provocative exploration of what design has to offer, and how design can critique, the ubiquity of sensors and automatic data generation in our urban experience. Gregory Wessner, who has overseen the project as the League’s exhibitions and digital programs director, characterizes the central issues as an urgent question: “At a moment when new digital technologies seem to be dematerializing more and more of the world around us (think books, CDs, photographs), what impact are they having on the insistent materiality of buildings and cities?”

Meanwhile, Urban Omnibus has been reporting on what some of these trends and technologies have to offer the evolving conversation about infrastructure investment, public participation and open data. But for all the innovations and policy recommendations that emerge from these multiple and overlapping convergences (digital and physical, dematerialized and apparent, data and visceral experience), our primary objective is to encourage greater intimacy with the choices and operations that give shape to the urban environment. To that end, we want to foster appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of the urban systems that currently enable us to go about our day, those systems that we take for granted — like the expectation that a stoplight will always, eventually, turn green.

The music in the video, “Bellows” by Loscil, appears courtesy of kranky.