BRAND NEW TRAM
After this morning’s F train delays, the reopening of the Roosevelt Island tram will come as even more of a relief to the island’s commuters. The iconic cherry-red tram will again grace Manhattan skies after a 9-month hiatus, during which it underwent $25 million in repairs and improvements. Riders will now enjoy faster, more frequent and calmer runs in cabins with larger windows and increased stability. The reopening is not just a boon for Roosevelt Islanders, the tram has captured the imagination of New Yorkers since it opened as a temporary service in 1989, and more recently has inspired proposals for cable-propelled mass transit on a large scale. Now, once again, for the price of a subway fare, you can get a spectacular view of the city on one of its quirkier public transportation options – without fear of getting stuck!

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EAST RIVER FERRY
Streetsblog unpacks the planned East River ferry service discussed in a panel at Tuesday’s Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance conference (read our recap of the conference here). The service, slated to launch in the spring, will make stops in Hunters Point South, Greenpoint, North Williamsburg, South Williamsburg, Fulton Ferry, and Downtown and Midtown Manhattan, and will run every 20 minutes during peak hours. The project is privately run but publicly subsidized, meaning ferry service could cost the city (aka tax payers) $20 a head. Such is the cost, it seems, of trying to implement aquatic public transit, as the city maintains this is a pilot program as part of an ongoing feasibility study. Streetsblog cites New York/ New Jersey ferry service and the ferry line used to linked the city’s harbor parks as models of success, and one can conclude that should the new service work out it would fuse the practical and recreational potential of the ferry (much like the renowned Staten Island line).

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Rendering of the new Education and Cultural Arts Building at Weeksville

WEEKSVILLE CULTURAL CENTER
This week, Fast Company took a look at the design for a new museum, community center and green space celebrating the country’s first free black community in Crown Heights. Pratt professor Jim Hurley discovered the three remaining homes from the Weeksville community in 1968 while surveying the area in a helicopter and began a project to restore and convert them into a cultural center. The houses were granted landmark status in 1971, and by 2005 all three houses were fully restored and opened to the public. The new building, designed by Caples Jefferson Architects (who were named to the League’s list of Emerging Voices in 1998) and slated for completion in 2012, will complete the campus of historic structures with a respectful, sleek and modern design benefitting from green construction and energy efficiency. Replete with a community garden, research center and library, the space will be an asset to the current neighborhood while honoring its past.

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SHRINKING DELEGATION
New Yorkers, infamous for their opinions, are losing their voice. The Times anticipates the Census Bureau’s announcement that New York State’s House of Representatives delegation will shrink to its smallest size since the Madison administration (though at that time the state population was under one million, making the representation greater). Westward and Southern migration have claimed one, if not two, of New York’s seats, prompting Governor-elect Cuomo to propose a non-partisan redistricting committee. While this could reshape the City’s political map, it’s unlikely. The loss will probably be felt upstate and perhaps in the suburbs, according to Queens College sociologist Andrew Beveridge.

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STATE OF THE MTA
Benjamin Kabak of Second Avenue Sagas has posted a comprehensive four-part interview with MTA CEO and Chair Jay Walder probing the MTA’s financial state, labor relations, the status of the much discussed Second Avenue line, and the potential death of the MetroCard. Walder recounts the difficulties in finding funding for New York’s costly subway system and the unsurprising bureaucratic road blocks, like the $118 million in transit-intended tax dollars apparently misappropriated by the State. The MTA has also celebrated some successes, like adding 50 million new users in 15 years and raising the mean breakdown distance from 7,000 to 150,000 miles – improvements that take capital. Walder explains that our transportation system “is a huge system that in essence is composed of lots of unseen hidden infrastructure that’s depreciating and deteriorating all the time. We need to continue to invest in that.” So, what’s next in New York’s underground labyrinth? According to Walder, modern signal switches, the potential for hiked fares, and a swipeless fare payment a la London’s Oyster Card. Walder lays out a paradigm for the future of the subway in which the MTA is kinda like a stool. “The first leg of the stool is to show that you’re an efficient and effective provider of public transit and that you’re meeting people’s needs in doing that. The second leg of the stool is accept the fact fares are part of the picture and what you’re doing [sic], and the third leg of the stool is the fact that we will rely on public support to do this.” Is this the stool we are sitting on while we wait for the train? Hopefully not, but regardless, Second Avenue Saga gives a well developed view into the workings and difficulties of the MTA, essential for the well-informed complainer commuter.

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ESQUIRE’S BRIGHTEST
“There is such a hunger for open spaces in New York. We want to sate it as much as possible,” says Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik–Khan in an Esquire profile recently published as part of the feature “The Brightest: 16 Geniuses that Give us Hope.” The article paints Sadik–Khan as an anti-Moses of sorts, equally headstrong and savvy, but where the loved/maligned former planner imagined cars and highways, she imagines plazas and pedestrians. In last week’s roundup, you read about Sadik–Khan and the DOT’s role in the development of an NYC bike share, which is only one part of her program to increase usability in the city’s public spaces. Under her auspices, the DOT has shut down parts of Broadway to auto traffic and converted congested Times Square to a plaza, and done the same with sections of Herald and Madison Squares. The queen of the pop-up plaza has painted asphalt, imported cafe chairs and large planters and brought people to the streets around the city – something that will hopefully permeate other boroughs as it has Manhattan. Her agenda may radically differ from Moses but she is armed with the same vision and confidence, and, according to the article, plenty of facts to back her up.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Paul Rudolph, Isometric drawing of overall project showing the HUB including people-mover, c. 1967-1972, Color slide. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Few figures invoke the tensions of urban planning in New York City like the larger than life Robert Moses. But it is another iconic figure, Paul Rudolph, who may have the last word on the project that Moses hoped would seal his legacy — the Lower Manhattan Expressway. An important new exhibit at Cooper Union, organized by the Drawing Center, provides a much-needed reminder of Rudolph’s breadth of vision for Lower Manhattan.

In 1967, following Rudolph’s tenure as dean of the Yale School of Architecture, the Ford Foundation commissioned him to do a study of the Lower Manhattan Expressway project. The idea for an expressway connecting the Holland Tunnel with the east side of Manhattan was, of course, nothing new. City planners had conceived of such a project in the ’30s and Moses, with his broad brushstrokes across the New York City canvas, envisioned three major expressways in Manhattan: the Lower Manhattan Expressway, using Broome Street as a corridor; an elevated midtown route that would punch through skyscrapers; and a third expressway uptown coursing through Central Park. Moses attempted to break ground several times throughout the next three decades. By the 1960s, however, with a trail of condemned lots, razed blocks and miles and miles of new highways behind him, the City and Governor Rockefeller had finally grown tired of his particular brand of public works and, perhaps, his hubris. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published her famous tome about preserving the social fabric of the city, very much in reaction to Moses, and this contributed to and reflected his waning influence. In 1968, Moses was removed from his position and his LoMEX project was demapped and eventually canceled.

Into this atmosphere of Moses disfavor and a nascent, outspoken preservation movement entered the Gropius-trained, modernist Paul Rudolph. From 1967-1972, with the continuous financial backing of the Ford Foundation, Rudolph devoted himself to this study.

Paul Rudolph, Plan of overall project prior to the HUB development, 1970. Ink and graphite on mylar, 36 x 68 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph was known as one of the best architectural draftsmen, and it is through his drawings that the Lower Manhattan Expressway has come to life, at first to Brett Littman, director of the Drawing Center, and then to us, in the exhibit Littman organized with Cooper Union and Ed Rawlings’ architecture office.

It is only recently that any attention was paid to Rudolph’s original drawings for the study and it is their “rediscovery” that fueled this exhibit. In 2008, after years of fermenting curiosity about the LoMEX study, Littman went to the Library of Congress to look at Rudolph’s drawings. According to Rachel Liebowitz, a curator at the Drawing Center, “It was the first time anyone had looked at the drawings and until we came, the Library of Congress hadn’t catalogued and photographed [them].” It is because of Littman’s interest, and the work on this exhibit, that the Library of Congress has now catalogued, scanned and uploaded this portion of the archive.

View looking west toward the HUB showing depressed roadway with Broome Street corridor in the background. Photo by Barb Choit / The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.

Using 31 reproductions of drawings found in the archive, the curators, Ed Rawlings and Jim Walrod, recreated the vision of Lower Manhattan Rudolph developed over those four years. The drawings on display range from skeletal sketches that he must have used as notes to himself, to immense, colorful perspectives of the project that don’t seem to have possibly been made by a human hand. At the center of the room, anchoring the exhibit, is an amazing 33’ × 16’ model built by the curators and students from Cooper Union and based on the archive material and on some pictures of a film Rudolph made of his project (the script of the film is also on display, though no copy of the film could be found). You can spend a long time surveying that model, and, after understanding the project further by studying the drawings, you will surely return to it with renewed curiosity. If you have lived in New York for any significant amount of time, the moment you fully comprehend what it is you are looking at in the exhibit, the drawings become utterly jarring. There is one drawing, just in front of the model, that looks east across Manhattan Island with the Williamsburg Bridge in the distance. For some reason that image, possibly because it is the most contextualized, makes Rudolph’s vision seem most real.

Paul Rudolph, Perspective rendering of vertical housing elements at the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge, 1970. Brown ink on paper, 29 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph’s conception of the LoMEX took some inspiration from Moses’ plan but mostly used it as a point of departure for his own vision of tomorrow. His study consisted not just of a super expressway and a massive central HUB, like Moses’ plan, oriented by traffic flowing to and from the Holland Tunnel in the west and the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges to the east. His was a completely integrated world where the flow of cars existed in tandem with life in the residential towers above. This included monorails, people movers, and a surreal vertical expanse of multilevel parking lots that are likewise integrated into the buildings, leaving space surrounding the structures. The basic unit composing this megastructure was Rudolph’s “20th century brick,” which can be added infinitely and in various ways, unifying the whole structure while also providing variety, like a large modernist Lego.

Paul Rudolph, Final rendering of the interior of the HUB including people mover, c. 1967-1972. Color slide. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Rudolph’s design differs from Moses’ in another significant way. Moses planned his expressway to career down Broome Street and, as he had made plain before, buildings and neighborhoods in his path posed no obstacle. Simply condemn and raze. Perhaps as a token gesture to Jane Jacobs and other preservationists, Rudolph’s expressway would use the back gardens between Spring and Broome as its corridor, though the scale of the project would still disrupt the street life of any neighborhood it passed through, even if one block removed. Like Moses, and many other utopian modernizers of the post War era, Rudolph designed with the automobile in mind. As the curators described the HUB in their wonderful essay, “It is automotive transit fetish at its most decadent.” The other mid-century modernizer’s imperative – slum clearing – also characterizes Rudolph’s approach and he designed his tall towers to house a mass of people and also provide each one with an outdoor terrace.

For various reasons, projects of this scale and vision, at least in New York, might be a thing of the past. Futuristic utopian solutions have fallen out of favor (indeed they had already fallen out of favor when Rudolph created this) and the public does not have the appetite to appropriate public funds for such large scale projects. Ratner’s Atlantic Yards is minuscule in comparison. However, Norman Foster, who studied with Rudolph, just recently unveiled his own megastructure in Abu Dhabi, the same week this exhibit opened. It even includes people-movers, elevated buildings and an underground world, much like the LoMEX. And as one of the curators pointed out, Mayor Bloomberg’s demapping of streets in the heart of the city is very much related to Rudolph’s vision of our world.

Several interdisciplinary projects, like MoMA’s and PS1’s Rising Currents, have recently attempted to address New York’s 21st century infrastructural needs. The time seems ripe for novel approaches to New York’s urban fabric, and this exhibit is a brilliant way to further tap into that creativity and stoke the imagination.

Paul Rudolph, Plan diagram of the HUB area showing transportation networks, 1970. Graphite and color pencil on paper with taped overlays of the same, 24 x 32 inches. Courtesy of the Paul Rudolph Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Paul Rudolph: Lower Manhattan Expressway

On view: October 1 – November 14, 2010

Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homely beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

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.

Since speaking with Chase, we have told the stories of innovators using web-enabled technologies to use all kinds of resources more efficiently, from office spaces to regional rail. Today we return to the streets and cars of New York, and talk to David Mahfouda and Alex Pasternack, two of the people behind a new mobile app that makes booking a car service fast, simple, cheap and, if you want, shared. You’ve seen the posters pasted along a sidewalk near you, now read an interview that explains what Weeels is, how it came about, and what the ideas behind it might mean for the future of how we get around.

Urban Omnibus: What is Weeels? How does it work?
David Mahfouda: Weeels allows users to order cabs with the click of a button, to and from anywhere in the city. The application maps travel routes, provides your fare in advance, and books the ride as well. We work with livery – or chauffeured – cars, which are more prevalent in areas yellow taxis don’t serve.

In addition, leveraging the potential of location-aware social networking, Weeels can pair users taking similar trips so they can share a ride. Users who are flexible about departure time can opt to wait for a match, saving money on the fare and cutting emissions by reducing the total number of car rides.

Alex Pasternack: In short, it links people and taxi cabs to create a more flexible, efficient, reliable, and affordable mode of transit. It begins to address the incredible excess capacity of New York City’s 13,000-car taxi fleet, much of which is underutilized even when engaged in fares; when not, its drivers must often troll around for rides, wasting time and energy. Starting with the premise that we need to not only improve our bike and train infrastructure, but also better use the road infrastructure and vehicles we already have, the mission is to make transit less costly, more flexible and more social. Think of it as transit-friendly rezoning, like the kind the city has been pushing, but for vehicles.

UO: The excess capacity in existing infrastructure is something we think about a lot. Say a little more about how this line of thought influenced you as you came up with Weeels?
David: I started thinking seriously about using existing infrastructure as a design strategy after reading Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building. He dedicates a chapter to repair that makes the case for re-use (“Every act of building…is an act of repair”), not from an ecological perspective, but from a truly environmental perspective.

Christopher Alexander is particularly interested in the positive potential of concerted human attention — if we are all repairers/builders, then our environment can be exponentially denser, richer, etc. I see that ethic in projects that deal with excess capacity as well – information and information technology are used as tools to activate or accentuate human agency and attention. Weeels poses this question explicitly by providing an opportunity for a large community of users to improve their environment by acting together.

Alex: I should add that figuring out how to make the city and its inhabitants more responsive to each others’ needs — and turning all of us into agents of repair and renewal — is an especially poignant issue for David. In 2009 he started the Fixer’s Collective, a weekly meeting in Gowanus of amateur and expert tinkerers who attempt to repair and teach how to repair any old household item that New Yorkers bring in.

David: In 2006 Alex and I took a trip on the Trans Siberian railroad, and the immensity of that movement across Asia inspired me think seriously about improving mobility in the United States.

I love trains, but the train infrastructure in the United States is impoverished. If you’re going to think about mobility in the context of the United States, you have to address the automobile directly. So I started to ask, What if the car is not a private transit vehicle, but a public transit vehicle?

Something about the idea seemed inevitable to me, perhaps the correspondence between our digital information systems and physical road/car systems. I built some computer models to approximate the behaviors of these socialized cars. Then the iPhone came out and all of a sudden many of my ideas seemed less like science fiction. So I started mocking up a smart-phone interface — and a few years later, here we are.

Weeels unites our need for mobility, our desire to save money and our responsibility to be more efficient, all underwritten by our willingness to share.Alex: I lived in China for over two years, working as a journalist on the environment, design and urbanism, and saw a society in the throes of a shift from thrift to Western-style excess. To see that country’s twin impulses — the ingenious efficiency and sharing attitudes that came from many lean years, evident in my neighbors’ ability to reuse practically anything that many in the West might consider trash, and the drive toward luxury, literally, in the hordes of private cars that clog the streets of Beijing — I could see more clearly than ever the need for being more conscious of our resources.

The advent of social networking, largely with the rise of Facebook, held out the promise of an interesting technological solution to excess capacity: more responsive shared knowledge, and the many efficiency benefits that could come with it. Imagine a smart version of Craigslist. Now, for instance, we could perhaps know if someone in our friend group was getting rid of a book that we wanted to read — or had extra room in their car or in their cab.

And yet, I’ve been dismayed to see that that promise has never been quite fulfilled. Instead we have more diversions, and certainly more data, but not presented in a way that’s often useful. That’s not to mention the many headaches over privacy, which only underscore the commercial interests that underpin so much of our favorite technology.

That’s starting to change now, in part because users recognize a need. Weeels appeals to me because it makes use of our networks to tackle a very straightforward problem that we intuitively know can and should be solved through sharing. Potentially, its solution is a very elegant one: Weeels unites our need for mobility, our desire to save money and our responsibility to be more efficient in our use of natural resources, all underwritten by our willingness to share.

UO: Given the trouble the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) has had setting up cab sharing stations that are actually used in Manhattan, how do you see Weeels as a successful tool?
Alex: Rather than asking people to wait at a few locations for a cab, imagine that taxi stands can be anywhere. The taxi stands turned cabs into buses, traveling along a fixed route. But what people deserve are buses that turn into cabs, or simply cabs that are easier to use, more accessible, and potentially cheaper than they currently are.

UO: What has been your experience with livery cab drivers and dispatch companies? How have they responded to and participated in the creation and development of Weeels? What do drivers think?
David: The company that we’re currently working with, Eastern Car service, one of the largest in the city, has obviously been very responsive to the work that we’re doing. The manager at Eastern, Marvin Aleman, is himself a technologist — he built the driver’s iPhone application that Weeels accesses when booking rides.

The drivers that I talk to are generally positive about the project. I think they understand that sharing is a necessity in these economic times, and they are excited by the prospect of offering rides to more people. Though Weeels rides feel pretty different from a passenger’s perspective, they’re not actually all that different from a driver’s perspective. We built the product with that in mind. We knew there was room to increase the efficiency of this system without drastically disrupting the way the service works from the provider’s standpoint.

UO: How have you interacted with the TLC?
David: We’ve had conversations with both Commissioner Yassky and Policy Director Gallo. We’re currently waiting to hear back regarding two pilot proposals — one to operate Weeels in a select group of yellow taxis, another to build shared taxi stands/kiosks at transit hubs (like JFK and Grand Central Station) capable of real-time route matching, so that even users without phones can create shared rides to anywhere in NYC.

Photo by Flickr user Joep Roosen.

UO: What is the potential for yellow cabs to eventually be a part of Weeels?
Alex: Huge.

David: Yeah, it would be a fantastic boon for the city if the TLC decided to pilot the Weeels application in yellow vehicles. Drivers would reduce the number of hours they spend trolling around looking for fares, which would decrease the amount of fuel wasted and CO2 emitted on NYC streets. And because it would eliminate the need for trolling, such an app would also allow drivers to get out of their vehicles in between fares, which would decrease the existent negative health risks associated with driving taxis for 12 hours per day.

Drivers would make more money as shared trips would garner higher fares and, given the reduced cost of a shared ride, more customers. City traffic would be significantly reduced as more cheap mobility in the city would obviate the need and/or desire for private vehicle transit. It would be possible to hail a cab in the rain, and to do it without even having to go outside until the last minute.

The city would effectively multiply its accessible and utilizeable public space as the interior of vehicles becomes a place for encountering the city and its other inhabitants. (That’s especially true if the city chooses a progressive automotive design via the Taxi of Tomorrow competition. This design reorients the interior of the taxi to make it feasible to actually hold a party of four comfortably.)

Regarding the way Weeels will work practically with yellow cabs: rather than using Weeels as a booking instrument, it would be a way for prospectives (taxi-hailers) to access rides already in progress. On the other hand, as a passenger, I would be able to “open” my ride to other prospectives headed my direction. I would be able to identify those prospective passengers, and choose which I would like to pick up to reduce the environmental and monetary cost of my ride.

Alex: Also: the TLC recently and quietly ended its accessible cabs program, which allowed handicapped New Yorkers to dispatch yellow cabs specifically designed for handicapped-accessibility. It’s no surprise that handicapped rights groups are upset about this. Weeels for yellow cabs could prove to be one solution.

UO: What about Weeels’ relationship to privately-owned mass transit, which is especially prevalent in Brooklyn with services such as the Flatbush dollar vans. Can you talk about Weeels in the context of multi-modal connectivity between different types and modes of transport.
Alex: We’re building Weeels to become an ubiquitous interface for optimizing all kinds of unrouted vehicle transit. The algorithms we’re testing on taxis are directly applicable to many other kinds of unrouted vehicles currently operating on the US roadscape.

David: Since Weeels runs on digital, responsive infrastructure, not on fixed routes or schedules, it will, as a matter of fact, come to be most useful where other fixed transit infrastructure (again, anything that runs on a fixed schedule or route) doesn’t provide service. Namely, in the seams: Weeels cars and Weeels passengers will be most prevalent wherever existing modes of transport cannot or have not yet provided mobility.

What’s more, these patterns will be self-reinforcing. As Weeels establishes itself as a transit mode along a particular route, that route will become more popular (and cheaper, and more efficient) until individually-organized mobility is no longer needed along that corridor, and Weeels use establishes itself fluidly in some other sector of a city or even county.

Learn more — and get the iPhone and mobile web version of the app — at Weeels.org.

David Mahfouda is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Weeels. David graduated from Harvard in 2005 with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies and received a master’s degree in Product Architecture and Engineering from Stevens Institute in 2009. He is a member of EyeBeam’s Sustainability and Urban Research groups, the founder of Flag Project, a co-founder of the Fixers’ Collective, and a co-curator of this year’s TRANSPORT exhibit at Proteus Gowanus.

Alex Pasternack is the Chief Communications Officer for Weeels. A native New Yorker, Alex Pasternack has worked as an editor and writer with a deep interest in the environment and design. Since Harvard, where he studied History and Literature and worked on environmental campaigns, Alex has been interested in the essential role that infrastructure and transportation plays in creating a sustainable future. His writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Paper, Icon, Metropolis and TreeHugger, among others.

Graphics courtesy of Weeels.

Roosevelt Island Tram, photo by Steven Dale.

In 2007, famed architect/engineer Santiago Calatrava publicly proposed a Cable-Propelled Transit connection between Governors Island, Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. It did not go over well.

For a designer as accomplished as Calatrava is, the packaging of the idea was shockingly amateurish. The renderings were poor, the concept was confusingly explained and because no one actually lived on Governors Island the entire idea was easily positioned by opponents as a trivial frill catering to tourists.

Some might have been tempted to describe Calatrava’s idea as “before its time,” but it was not. It was a half-baked idea and, predictably, reaction ranged from mild bemusement to outright hostility.

And yet, here’s the funny thing: the idea was not without substantial merit. However, given the Big Apple’s previous experience with Cable Propelled Transit (CPT) in the form of the Roosevelt Island Tram (RIT), no one could blame New Yorkers for their outrage.

Rendering by Santiago Calatrava of his proposed aerial gondola system, via The New York Times.

Built in 1976 by the Von Roll company of Switzerland, the RIT was a temporary measure designed to connect Manhattan to the then-nascent community of 10,000 people on Roosevelt Island. It was a revolutionary concept for the time, more common to ski resorts than concrete jungles. A subway connection was supposed to replace the RIT but didn’t materialize until 1989 and by then, the Tram was a permanent fixture of New York’s skyline. It remains there to this day.

Built today, the Tram would cost around $25 million USD for roughly 1 kilometer. Compare that to the $125 million per kilometer price tag attached to the Vision42 Light Rail scheme for Midtown’s 42^nd Street and you begin to understand why it was an attractive option for the economically-challenged NYC of the 1970’s.

Transit doesn’t have to exist purely in the roads we know and love. It can fill other arteries, causeways and environments.The problem was not the cost to build the RIT. Rather it was the cost to operate it. More specifically, the cost of insurance needed to operate it. The cost of insurance on the RIT rose dramatically year after year. From 1976 to 1986, premiums rose from $800,000 to $9 million, a staggering 1,025%. This despite having an excellent safety record. Insurance costs almost exclusively made the Tram a perpetual money loser. In 1986, the insurance company added further insult to injury when they refused to renew the policy, threatening the only existing transit connection to the island. New York State stepped in and adopted a “self-insurance” policy to address the situation.

Problems, however, persisted. On April 18^th, 2006, 69 people were stranded above the East River for seven hours when the Tram lost power due to human (not technological) error. There were no injuries but, in combination with another power outage the previous September, authorities concluded that the system needed a major overhaul. It was closed for the better part of a year.

Ironically, after re-opening, the tram experienced ridership levels higher than before the closure. Higher ridership did not, however, make the RIT a money-maker. Unlike the subway that now travels to Roosevelt Island, the Tram is not fully integrated into the New York City transit system. Riders only recently have been given free transfer onto the Tram from the subway and bus system rather than paying an additional fare, the result of a deal struck between the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation and the MTA, brokered by the City Council, that allows RIOC to receive all fare revenue, first-swipe or transfer. (According to RIOC, the terms of this arrangement are currently under discussion, as the original deal is up for renewal. -Ed.)

It’s no wonder then that New Yorkers balked when they heard about Calatrava’s vision. It should be noted, however, that the technology envisioned by Calatrava could not be more different than the RIT. In the cable industry, the RIT is what is known as an “aerial tram.”  The technology features two large cabins shuttling back-and-forth between two terminals. Wait times between vehicles are long and the size of the cabins require costly infrastructure.  It is a high cost, low efficiency technology that is entirely antiquated. Current CPT systems are capable of much more.

For instance: Maximum capacity offered by the Tram is about 900 PPHPD (persons per hour per direction), whereas more advanced CPT systems today offer up to 6,000. Newer CPT systems allow for intermediary stations, dense urban alignments, corner-turning, full-integration with transit systems and less-than-one-minute (LT1M) wait times at a price cheaper than most aerial trams (not to mention light rail). It’s also the safest transit technology around save for elevators, which, if you think about it, operate in a very similar manner.

The Sentosa Island Gondola, photo by Flickr user ericlbc.

These systems, however, did not exist when the Tram was first built. Had the RIT been designed and built today, it would likely be a continuously-circulating gondola system with LT1M wait times. It would likely terminate in a tall building (such as on Sentosa Island, Singapore), thereby allowing users to transfer directly (via elevator) to a nearby subway station. That’s what was built in Medellin, Colombia in 2004 where the system has been a tremendous success and has spawned two other multi-station cable lines. Systems in Constantine, Algeria and Caracas, Venezuela have met with equal acclaim.

Portland, Oregon also got into the action a few years back but made the mistake of choosing an aerial tram. And yet, despite this oversight, the Portland Aerial Tram experiences ridership nearly double what was originally forecasted, a rarity in transit planning.

Calatrava’s Governors Island cable system most closely resembled those of Colombia and Algeria, but it was never packaged, presented and explained that way. He also imagined the system arcing upwards instead of downwards adding unnecessary complexity and cost to what is a very straightforward and simple technology. But since few people know anything about cable transit, confusion was almost a certainty and one has to forgive New Yorkers’ skepticism towards his proposal.

Technology concerns aside, Calatrava’s vision was also suspect because it attempted to solve a problem that no one had. Development of Governors Island was and is likely a decade away, making any current transit link premature. There is, however, a way to re-mix the Calatrava concept into a worthwhile addition to the Manhattan transportation network that solves a problem millions of people have each year:

What if we extended the link all the way to Newark Liberty International Airport?

A possible Brooklyn-Governors Island-Manhattan-Newark Liberty Airport route (in blue) as compared to the current commuter rail route (in red). Image by Steven Dale.

The current experience of getting from Newark Liberty to Lower Manhattan is an infuriating and expensive odyssey of subways, transfers, commuter rails and people movers. Delays and missed transfers are constant. An urban gondola cable trip from Brooklyn to Newark would take around 45 minutes and would certainly be a more pleasant ride. Constructing and implementing such a link would be challenging, but it is technologically and economically feasible.

Or how about connecting Queens to the Bronx via Rikers Island? Or Harlem to LaGuardia via Randalls Island? A Staten Island connection across the Verrazano Narrows? They’re all doable. Once you wrap your mind around the implications of cable, you can quickly imagine the possibilities.

Cities need effective transit more than ever, but the state of government finances makes system expansion difficult. Cities are determined to get people out of their cars, yet traditional road-based technologies present serious difficulties. If we are to solve our cities’ transit problems, we need to think “off-grid.” Transit doesn’t have to exist purely in the roads we know and love. Transit can fill other arteries, causeways and environments. And due to the lack of “competition” in these arteries, transit can be built more sustainably from both an economic and ecological view. We need transit solutions that provide high levels of service but don’t burden future generations with exorbitant bills to repay.

We need transit that treats riders with respect and addresses their actual needs. Transit should not be the inconvenient hassle that it is now. Transit planners too often work under the assumption that our current regime is what transit is. Don’t like it? Tough. We need to take the time to think about what transit should be. Cheap, with LT1M wait times, high speeds, quick transfers, no schedules and – heaven forbid – an elegant, fun-to-ride system. These are all things that riders hope for and deserve. Cable can offer that.

Santiago Calatrava’s design may have been flawed, yes. But at least it was pointing in the right direction. We should recognize that and then re-interpret it, dream it and run with it.

Steven Dale is the founder of Creative Urban Projects (CUP Projects), a boutique planning shop in Toronto, Canada. He is an expert on Cable-Propelled Transit with several years experience researching and consulting on the matter. Steven recently launched The Gondola Project, an information campaign in support of CPT. For more information, visit www.gondolaproject.com or www.creativeurbanprojects.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.

Rachel Abrams is a design strategist. With a background in interaction design and political research, she identifies people-friendly, technology-mediated experiences for commercial spaces and public places. Her interest in New York City’s yellow cabs began in 2005, as a participant in the Design Trust for Public Space’s Designing the Taxi initiative. From there, as one of the Design Trust’s six Taxi07 Fellows, she contributed to its report to the NY Taxi and Limousine Commission, Taxi07: Roads Forward. Following the fellowship, Rachel’s independent research has continued to focus on opportunities for policy and tech-led enterprise to intersect and inform each other, exploring how regulators and design innovators can collaborate to improve everyday experiences of public space.

But what is design strategy anyway? We know what IDEO’s Tim Brown thinks. According to Omni-blogger Alex Kauffmann, Brown’s definition stems from his belief that while traditional analytical thinking “narrows and reduces ideas, design thinking broadens and multiplies them.” Rachel agrees: whether by invention or improvement, design for her is a way of interpreting and intervening in our common experiences of places, objects, each other and ourselves.

Five Steps
So, everyone knows what’s involved in taking a taxi. But sometimes breaking down even the most obvious of processes into their constituent elements can provide insights into how design thinking can reimagine, and improve, everyday experiences. She took us on a cab ride in mid-summer 2009. Through her design thinker’s lens, Rachel’s understanding of the basic elements of daily transactions can offer insight, suggesting the touch-points where technology can usefully, appropriately, seamlessly intervene.

Actors Involved
As we analyze the steps that we take for granted, the network of actors involved, previously unapparent in a system as complex as this, is revealed.

One of the actors most directly involved in and affected by the conditions of the taxi system is, of course, the driver. For this cab ride, we found ourselves in the capable hand of Anzou, an Ivorian man in his late twenties, who drives a Ford Escape hybrid. Like most cabs, it’s on the road pretty much 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Anzou drives an 8-12 hour shift six days a week and shares ownership of his cab with a colleague who drives it six nights a week. But they don’t own the medallion – the value of which Anzou estimates to be near to half a million dollars these days. It belongs to a small-scale license holder who does not drive a cab. The medallion is what signifies this vehicle is a legitimate yellow cab for hire. The associated hack license indicates its driver is licensed to pick up passengers.

The Passenger Information Monitor
The day before this cab ride, Anzou had a good day of fares: he picked up 23 passengers in 12 hours, trips that ranged from three minutes to 45. These trips provide not only opportunities for capturing hard data, but also chances to learn how the taxi experience itself might be transformed, for drivers and riders alike. Take, for example, the passenger information screen or Taxi TV. How might we reimagine what this screen presents? What other services are viable on-screen that would appeal to passengers and drivers? For programming content, that’s where some design thinking comes in handy.

Soft Knowledge
As the City draws inspiration from the Design Trust’s work, and elsewhere, to improve the taxi system’s efficiency, economic value, ease of use and sustainability – to harness the excess capacity both within and among cabs and their users – it could certainly make more of other untapped value in the system, such as what New Yorkers and drivers already know about the city.

The potential of this kind of thinking – capturing simple observations about what’s been previously overlooked, and applying these in both efforts, to keep regulation relevant and to finesse tech-enabled invention – is by no means limited to the taxi cab. Rachel’s current interests go beyond any one New York City government agency or one policy issue. “More broadly,” she says, “bureaucrats face an exciting, if daunting challenge: they serve citizens who, these days, also happen to be tech-savvy consumers with high expectations of commercial services in other everyday life transactions. The bar’s been raised. It’s no longer enough to throw digital capabilities at an institutional mandate to deliver tech-mediated public services. Who’s missing? Designers with empathic skills. Our process for revealing what citizens want and need can help policy makers meet their goals and broker not only what’s technically feasible but also appropriate and desirable.”

Just as we may not usually think of cabs as a central part of the public realm, much less a field of action for designers, many urban systems could benefit enormously from the kind of design thinking that questions the assumptions hiding in plain sight and then finds synergies with social imperatives and policy agendas. Many systems – whether a public good or a private amenity – also require greater efficiency, economic value, ease of use and both financial and environmental sustainability. We’re certainly at a point where public information for and about everything from mass transit to healthcare is opening up and going online. According to Rachel, “as authorities open up access to public data to applications developers and service designers, our transactions as public, participatory actors will be transformed. “At this open moment, a design approach can only enrich the outcomes of this emerging dialogue between government authorities and technology’s innovators. Why? Because although this exchange is already underway, it invites (demands?) public engagement, not least as it promises to shape, among other significant things, the public spaces of the city.”

Photos by Jacki Munro.

Steven Jones lives 12 blocks from the Queens County border, in Cambria Heights — “the edge.” Even though it takes him longer than most to get into the city, he still leaves earlier than he needs to. He told us that he leaves at the crack of dawn to cut down on stress and the number of encounters with fellow commuters.

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.

sample data for Google’s Transit Feed Specification

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hearing a lot of people wondering what’s so special about the L train and the 34th Street crosstown bus that allows these transit routes to make known the ETA of the next train or bus? And then, just when civic-minded web developers take matters in their own hands and push schedules onto the mobile devices of riders, they get the smackdown from transit agencies claiming infringement of intellectual property.

On Tuesday night, I joined a group of passionate open data advocates, technologists, legislative aids, lawyers and assorted straphangers to brainstorm, over pizza and beer, potential modes of and arguments for greater collaboration between web developers and the MTA. The meet-up was in response to the flare-up over the past couple weeks when the MTA sought licensing fees for an iPhone app that provided Metro-North schedules. The events’ organizers provide a good overview here.

Can factual data have a copyright? Maps, logos, branding: sure. But data? The licensing precedent invoked by the MTA in this instance essentially treats schedule apps for mobile devices the same way as it would shower curtains, cuff-links or those flashy silk boxers bedecked with a subway map.

I should say that I went in to the meeting, which was organized by the Open Planning Project (TOPP) and took place at their appropriately open plan offices, feeling like an unlikely apologist for the MTA. I don’t normally get in the habit of defending the embattled agency, but I can understand the misgivings of a public authority that doesn’t want to be forced into taking responsibility for the accuracy of data delivered to its ridership by third parties. And if web and mobile tech developers are going to profit from products that trade on the schedules of a service funded by the public purse, shouldn’t the cash-strapped transit system be able to offset some of its costs by taking a cut? Besides, I do find that many commuters, frustrated with the state of transit in New York, often fail to appreciate the complexity of the services that the MTA delivers, not to mention the political challenges of reforming a state-run operation (have you read the latest from Albany recently?) Surely, there are issues more pressing than creating a more efficient system to share scheduling data.

Or are there? On second thought, maybe making open data a top priority is one of the best ways for the MTA to make significant gains in public perception and the quality of riders’ experience without the need for any capital investment.

The group Tuesday night, I’m glad to report, appreciated the challenges, and everyone took a pro-active approach to identifying opportunities for positive collaboration rather than berating the MTA. Attendees were highly informed. The crowd was not only intimately familiar with the MTA’s anachronistic data request process: first, you file an official Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request, then you wait several months for an (often outdated) CD of schedule data, and then (if you are so inclined) you laboriously parse the data to make it conform to Google’s Transit Feed Specification (GTSF) for use in a mobile app. The assembled were also aware of the ways other municipal and state transit agencies across the country had been able to leverage the expertise of the open source community to improve their public transportation systems, such as in Massachusetts, the SF Bay Area and (of course) Portland.

The event resulted in a wiki. Read it and contribute ideas to help flesh it out.

More information * ease of access = happier riders. Right?

Does that sound impossible? Politically unpalatable and financially unsound? Like it will take too long and is just too hard?

Well, we have an example of exactly that kind of accretive process in one of the city’s most beloved places, Grand Central Terminal. Why does it work so well? Listen to Vishaan tell it like it is. First, he reflects on some design details of the spectacular Main Concourse. Next, he wanders down Park Avenue and shares some of the history of how private sector competition led to a major public amenity and transformed the entire metropolitan region. Then he explores the terminal’s tentacular North-end Access and reflects further on how the terminal has transformed urban and regional economies. Finally, as he delves into the food court, he ponders lessons to be learned from Grand Central that could be applied to Moynihan Station.

Main Concourse

Lesson #1: Design matters. Beyond the obvious grandeur of its public spaces, Grand Central relies on a sophisticated layering of uses that has influenced the design of airports and train stations around the world.

Video running time: 3:22

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“It’s more than just the building. It’s about how hundreds of thousands of people move around a region.”Park Avenue and Midtown East

Lesson #2: The building is only part of a larger exercise in citymaking. Grand Central catalyzed the development of some of the most valuable real estate in the world. Running time: 4:27. Right-click here to download mp3.

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All great train stations… have tentacles that reach out into the city. There’s not just a front door. North-end Access

Lesson #3: Plan for phases. Grand Central wasn’t built in a day, and part of what makes it work can be found in the less than glamorous network of pedestrian access passageways. Running time: 2:41. Right-click here to download mp3.

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Train stations still have an openness about them. … as hubs [they] speak to the nature of the city that’s around them.

Lessons for Moynihan
Station

Lesson #4: Think big. If we could make a commuter terminal this nice – and one that’s had such wide-ranging urban and metropolitan ramifications – imagine what we could do with a major inter-city regional rail hub? Running time: 4:36. Right-click here to download mp3.

Six weeks ago on the Omnibus, we listened to Bob Yaro reflect on the destruction of the original Penn Station and imagine a new future for Midtown West. Perhaps realizing that future will require looking carefully into the city’s past. -C.S.

We are seeking information about the archival image of Park Avenue under construction posted above. If you know the source of the photograph, please email us.