MORE STATE OF THE CITY – Wi-Fi and WASTE-TO-ENERGY
In addition to the familiar Mayoral priorities reported in last week’s Omnibus Roundup (the economic potential of building projects, more jabs at the teachers union, etc.), Bloomberg’s speech last week also mentioned some tech initiatives, including partnering “with AT&T to bring Wi-Fi service to a dozen city parks – so even if you’re enjoying a beautiful day, you can still work or study or play ‘Words with Friends.’” And, as Next American City highlights, he also spoke about new sources of renewable energy, claiming New York City will “become one of the first cities in the country to turn wastewater into renewable energy and we’ll explore the possibility of cleanly converting trash into renewable energy.” Read the full text of the address at NYC.gov.

Undercity on MyBlockNYC

MYBLOCKNYC GOES UNDERGROUND
Before the holidays, we spoke with Alex Kalman and Alex Rickard about their video hosting site MyBlockNYC. Now they’re teaming up with Gothamist to bring viewers an exclusive glimpse at the world below ground with the series “Undercity.” The makers of the Undercity films, Steve Duncan and filmmaker Andrew Wonder, have been taking viewers on adventures into the unknown underground world of New York City, and now those adventures will be geographically located, visually correlating the world beneath our streets with the city above. Check out the series at MyBlockNYC and the coverage at Gothamist.

PARKING APP
This week the DOT started testing sensors in 177 parking spaces on both sides of 187th Street in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx. The sensors send information to a smart phone app that tells the user when fewer than two or more than four spaces are available on a given block. So instead of circling the block, searching for the right spot, a driver will know their chances of getting a spot and head towards a block with available space. The app will purportedly save drivers from endless frustration, alleviate traffic in shopping areas and help relieve “pollution associated with those people who are cruising around looking for parking,” according to Janette Sadik-Khan of the DOT. The sensors, bright yellow and about the same diameter as a hockey puck, are being tested over the next three months for how they withstand the weather and street sweepers of New York City streets. If they last the testing period, the city will launch a free app for drivers to try. Read the coverage at the Daily News.

CONGRESS INCENTIVIZES DRIVING TO WORK
For the past two years, commuters taking public transportation and those driving private vehicles have been granted the same pre-tax benefit of up to $230 per month. But starting this year, thanks to Congress, all pre-tax benefits are no longer equal: drivers can now set aside as much as $240 pre-tax per month for commuting costs, while the benefit for commuters taking public transportation has dropped to $125. The change means non-drivers will pay up to $550 more in taxes each year. Read more of the coverage at GOOD or in an editorial from The New York Times.

Manhattan Skyline | Photo by flickr user Marcin Wichary

SKYLINE PEAKS AND TROUGHS
The heights of New York City skyscrapers have long been thought to correspond to the depth of the bedrock beneath them. Conventional wisdom has held that the peaks of the Manhattan skyline, Downtown and Midtown, were situated atop the island’s most solid foundation, and that building high on the spaces in between was too difficult, and thus costly, to be worth the effort. Not so, according to “skyscraper economist” Jason Barr. Taking 173 core samples from the Battery to Central Park South, the study shows no correlation between the likelihood of skyscraper construction and bedrock depth. Read more from Matt Chaban at the Observer.

EVENTS AND TO DOs

Stargazing in Times Square | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

THE CITY DARK AT THE IFC CENTER
Last year we spoke to Ian Cheney about The City Dark, his documentary about the loss of the stars in the night sky to light pollution. The documentary takes a winding journey through the unforeseen repercussions of losing the stars, from Maine and back again. Now, The City Dark is showing at the IFC Center for one week only. More information and show times here.

007 URBAN SONGLINE
How can a space become a musical instrument? And how would one play such an instrument? Answer these questions and many more by visiting 007 Urban Songline at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, a project by Allard van Hoorn that turns Storefront’s iconic façade into an interactive and responsive acoustic device through a network of strings activated by vistors’ bodily movements. Through February 18th, you can play the building yourself, listen to performances the artist has recorded in and with the space, or take part in a series of discussions and events on the relationship between space, sound, tension and materiality. Once you’ve added to the cacophony (or symphony) of New York City, or partaken in the playing of a space, you can revisit Storefront at 5pm to hear the daily concert of the song of the day. You can find more information about the installation here, and prepare for your visit with the “Instructions for 007 Urban Songline” here.

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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.

Photo by Collin Erickson

HUXTABLE LAUDS EMPIRE STATE BUILDING RENOVATION
For her latest installment in The Wall Street Journal, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable focuses her attention on the extensive renovations of the Empire State Building and where the New York City icon fits in this “age of the superskyscraper,” in which technological innovation and “the timeless incentives of ego and profit” push our buildings to ever-higher heights. Despite its iconic status and popular appeal, by 2006 the Empire State Building was losing its value and appeal to business tenants. Facing a choice between selling the property or significantly investing in its renovation, building owner Malkin Holdings LLC decided to plunge into a restoration effort to the tune of $550 million. Mr. Malkin hired Beyer Blinder Belle, architects in charge of the restoration of Grand Central Terminal and other landmark structures, to bring the Empire State Building back to its original glory. Unfortunate additions and renovations from the 1960s were removed and a modern building even truer to its historical form emerged. Artwork in the 5th Avenue foyer was restored and recreated; unrealized chandelier drawings from the 1930s were brought to Rambusch Studios, the firm responsible for much of the original decoration, and produced. What resulted, according to Huxtable, was an all around success. Attention to historical detail coupled with a comprehensive modernization effort has finally brought the commercial success to the Empire State Building that its historical success long indicated it deserved.

Photo by Kadambari Baxi, via Places.

OWS: WHAT ARCHITECTURE CAN DO
Increasing attention is being paid to the spatial ramifications of Occupy Wall Street. This week in Places, Reinhold Martin has published an architectural call to arms. Citing the discipline’s “decades of voluminous research and activist practice in slums, emergency housing, and encampments of various sorts worldwide,” Martin maintains that architects have a responsibility to question the political structure that dictates the built environment both within the OWS movement and the general public. “Rather than be content with emergency measures, the field of architecture can take inspiration from the steadfast refusal to leave signaled by the Occupy movement, by refusing to play by the rules as written by developers and banks. And architectural thinking can contribute something invaluable to this extraordinary process by offering tangible models of possible worlds, possible forms of shelter, and possible ways of living together, to be debated in general assemblies both real and virtual.” Read Martin’s complete piece, “Occupy: What Architecture Can Do,” on Places.

ANATOMY OF A SKYSCRAPER
As a site devoted to nerding out about how cities are made and managed, it’s surprising that we’ve never talked about Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of a City, a fantastic book chock full of facts, diagrams, illustrations and stories about the systems that keep New York City running. This week, Ascher released her latest book, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, which explains the inner workings of our tallest buildings in similar fashion. To promote the book, Ascher spoke to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air about how much skyscrapers sway, the soundproofing of plumbing, live loads and dead loads, and an astounding fact about how the world’s tallest building handles its sewage. Check out the interview and excerpts from the book at npr.org. For another peek at the inner workings of a skyscraper, look back at our feature “City of Systems: Skyscraper Mechanical,” posted earlier this year.

screengrab from nytimes.com

CHARTING THE NYC MARATHON COURSE
The New York Times offers two unconventional ways to look at last weekend’s New York City Marathon. The interactive desk has put together an interactive map tracking ethnic and economic shifts along the marathon route since 1976, when its course first wove through all five boroughs. Accompanied by an article and a slideshow of photographs, the piece offers a glimpse into the transformation of a city, seen through the eyes of thousands of runners. Meanwhile, for his latest installment of his Abstract Sunday column, Christoph Niemann live-illustrated the marathon, running with pad and markers and tweeting his sketches along the way. Check out his 46 sketches over 26.2 miles here.

EVENTS and TO DOs

TRANSPORTATION 2030 CONFERENCE: On November 18, Manhattan Borough President Scott String and CUNY’s John Jay College will host a conference meant to examine the contentious transportation debates and imagine ambitious solutions for the city’s transit future. Details about speakers have not yet been released, but the agenda includes conversations on financing, technology, parking reform, transportation deserts, waterways, street design, accessibility and safety. The conference is free to attend, but pre-registration is required. Find more information here, or click here to register.

ON THE WATER’S EDGE: Last month, we talked to the minds behind Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City, an initiative developed by the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park that invited artist-led teams to propose visions for the future of the Queens waterfront neighborhood. This weekend, as part of their series of public programs accompanying the exhibition now on view, the institutions are hosting a panel discussion entitled “On the Water’s Edge.” Two of the artists participating in Civic Action, George Trakas and Natalie Jeremijenko, will join landscape and urban designer Diana Balmori and community activist Katie Ellman, for a discussion of the reinvention of the area’s post-industrical urban waterfront, moderated by Carter Craft. Find more information here.

WATER, EARTH, AIR AND THE CITY: If you can’t see Diana Balmori in Long Island City on Sunday, make your way up to the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday for a conversation between her and MoMA’s Peter Reed about how deign affects urban life and landscape. Balmori (who recently listed us as one of her favorite websites — thanks Diana!) will focus on the connections between, rather than the divisions between, art, nature and the city. Find more information here.

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screengrab of Examining MetroCard Usage from wsj.com

EXAMINING METROCARD USAGE
The Wall Street Journal has sifted through a year’s worth of data about MetroCard use, recently released by the MTA, to see what they could find out about how people move around New York. By breaking down what kinds of cards (unlimiteds, pay-per-rides, senior discount) are used where, patterns emerge across demographics and neighborhoods. A high percentage of senior discount MetroCards swiped at a station suggests an older population, and the variation in use of 30-day-unlimited cards versus pay-per-ride cards tells a story of where commuters go as opposed to visitors. The dataset also coincides with the most recent fare hike, which allows for additional analysis into how the cost increase has affected ridership city-wide as well as ways it has disproportionately affected people of lower income levels. Read more about the analysis here, or head straight to the interactive map to explore for yourself.

EAST RIVER FERRY EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS
When East River Ferry service launched early this summer, the city was optimistic that New Yorkers would take to the waters for a more pleasant commute away from subway crowds and service changes, but detractors claimed that waterborne travel was a flash in the pan, noting a drop in ridership once a month-long free pilot period ended. But now, word is that ferry use has exceeded expectations, drawing twice as many riders as anticipated (on weekends, ridership is six times higher than projected). Ferry operators are eager to expand service in response to enthusiasm and demand from both residents and tourists, and both the operators and the City agree that ferry service has the potential to bring economic activity and aid development in areas along the route. But city officials cite limited financial resources as a significant obstacle, and some are waiting until cold weather sets in to determine whether adding capacity year-round makes sense. Read more in The New York Times and The Brooklyn Paper.

Image by Massachusetts Institute of Technology via theatlanticcities.com

CAT SCANS FOR CITIES
Improved energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact are topics that dominate contemporary discourse about our built environment and urban spaces. Now, cities have a new tool to properly identify existing problems and better understand how to address them. A group at the MIT Field Intelligence Lab is advancing the use of “energy diagnostic imaging,” inspired by medical diagnostic scans like MRIs and CAT scans. Infrared cameras capture differences in energy use in the urban landscape in “thermal portraits” that divulge where insulation is failing or excess energy is being produced. Pinpointing the source of the inefficiency allows for more accurate and effective solutions, and a healthier city. Read more on The Atlantic Cities.

NEW ZONING FOR NEW YORK
The 1906 and 1916 zoning ordinances in New York City were landmark policies that combined use zoning and form zoning, and were incredibly forward thinking for their time, setting the standards for cities around the country. But our zoning ordinances, which have enormous impact on determining the form of our built environment, haven’t been comprehensively rethought for 50 years. Last week, during the Municipal Art Society’s second annual MAS Summit for New York City, a panel of zoning experts convened for “A New Zoning Resolution for the 21st Century: Its Necessity and Potential” to discuss the ways New York’s regulations don’t align with the changing needs of its residents and what could be done to make them better. Touching on land use codes, environmental review processes and contextual zoning, the conversation also focused on housing issues, such as the restrictive definition of what a “family” is according to zoning code. These topics were highlighted by panelist Jerilyn Perine, the executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (and our partner in Making Room, the project we introduced earlier this month to address how we can make New York’s housing more responsive to the ways we live now). For more coverage of the panel, check out Streetsblog.

Video of “Rebuilding Crumbling Infrastructure” with Chris Ward, Vishaan Chakrabarti and Madelyn Wills from masnycsummit201

REGION IN CRISIS
Also at the MAS Summit, outgoing Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward expressed some big ideas for New York. Calling the New York metro area a region in “economic and environmental crisis,” he emphasized the need for the city to wean itself off its dependence on truck transport and instead advocated the expansion of freight rail service — a topic we explored in depth earlier this week. Equally transformative was his vision for the Brooklyn waterfront and Governors Island. According to Ward, the success of Governors Island rests upon moving the activity of the Red Hook Container Terminal further south, to the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, and rethinking the use of different portions of Brooklyn’s waterfront, focusing instead on recreation and transportation to spur development. For more on Ward’s ideas from the Summit, as well as a recap of frequent Omnibus contributor Vishaan Chakrabarti’s thoughts on the advantages of intense densification for New York from the same session, click here. And to learn about Patrick Foye, Governor Cuomo’s choice to run the Port Authority when Ward steps down at the end of this month, click here.

MTA MANUFACTURING
Chris Ward’s proposal to shift industrial use out of Red Hook doesn’t mean the city is ready to abandon industry in the five boroughs. In fact, efforts are strong to restore manufacturing capabilities to some key sites. Building the Future, a conference organized a few weeks ago by “a coalition of union interests, policy organizations and sustainable-living advocates,” met to discuss options for encouraging the return of manufacturing to both New York City and State. One proposal: manufacturing for the MTA. The city’s public transportation system is in a constant state of disrepair — as many things that are loved and used constantly often are — but the production of repair parts and new vehicles is increasingly contracted to facilities out of state. Returning MTA manufacturing and repair to New York would be a boon for the economy and the job market, so what’s holding the MTA back from staying local? The buildings still exist, the workers are still here, but the money isn’t. Both the city and the state have decreased funds towards the MTA in the past three decades, and the proposals set forth by Building the Future would require unavailable public funds. Read more in The New York Times.

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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.

New York Next panel (L to R): Guy Nordenson, Rob Rogers, Betty Chen, Richard Olcott and Claire Weisz

Last week, a group of leading New York City designers met to discuss the future of New York City at New York Next: The Future City, hosted by the Architectural League and Architectural Record. The panel consisted of Betty Chen, currently a member of the New York City Planning Commission, formerly the Vice-President for Planning, Design and Preservation for the Trust for Governors Island; Guy Nordenson, of Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers and Commissioner and Secretary of the New York City Public Design Commission; Richard Olcott, founding partner and design principal at Ennead Architects and former member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1996 to 2007; Rob Rogers, principal of Rogers Marvel Architects, a firm whose portfolio includes streetscape design for Manhattan’s financial district, and flood mitigation strategies and street furniture for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; and Claire Weisz, founding partner of WXY Architecture + Urban Design and adjunct professor of planning at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.

The conversation was organized without a moderator, allowing the panelists to pose questions to one another. Their discussion revolved around questions of the physical city — In what kind of city do we want to live? Who decides what kind of city ours will become? — as well as questions of pacing, framed by their own experience with major redevelopment projects across the city over the last decade. The panel set out to define what constitutes the public realm, as well as the responsibilities of both public and private entities to that public realm.

Guy Nordenson opened up the discussion with the question, “Is privatization a good thing? Or should the public sector take over?” Nordenson situated himself as undecided. He referred to a recent New York Times article that claimed that the government pays more when using private contractors they they do when using government workers, but also noted examples of particularly successful public/private partnerships around the city, such as the Central Park Conservancy. Other answers varied: Richard Olcott cited issues of capital, and the private sector’s ability to raise funds where the public sector can’t. Rob Rogers, speaking specifically about New York City, claimed that the major boon of the last decade of building in New York City was the high skill level of public sector staffs: a high quality client begets a high quality project. Claire Weisz added that New York is the right kind of city, with not just an educated city government, but an educated and involved populace. Ultimately, we hope for a well educated, well meaning, capable government, but we have to be prepared to make design decisions without one.

Betty Chen’s questions — “Is there a way for architects and engineers to play more of a role in setting the public agenda? Are there other opportunities not generated by the traditional client model?” — led the discussion to one of timing and environment. According to Guy Nordenson, new public design ideas need to have a public sector champion to become institutionalized. The consensus of the panel was that the major success of the Bloomberg administration has been its ability to institute long term, visionary planning and policies and to institutionalize progressive ideas about what kind of city New York should be in the future.

Rob Rogers and Richard Olcott asked questions regarding the widespread attention on the public realm that has been generated by the World Trade Center site, whether that has led to a more interested and more involved public and, in a more disciplinary light, how it has changed how architects work. Betty Chen answered with a fear of complacency: New Yorkers are excited about their city, but does that excitement lead to satisfaction with the status quo, and thus a lack of urgency to push the city forward? According to Chen, designers have the training and the imagination, and therefore the responsibility, to look at the urban fabric and show the rest of the city its potential.

A surprising moment of consensus on the future of the city came when the question was asked, “What is the most urgent civic design issue facing New York today?” Across the panel, there was a call for further activation of the city’s waterways, specifically through reinvestment in a ferry network, to engage our “sixth borough” and alleviate our traffic problems.

The panel opened up for questions from the audience. League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro stayed on the topic of city transit by asking about what can be done to resolve the conflicts and frustrations that arise from, as an example, the city’s subways being controlled by a State agency. A State agency is less capable of responding to the needs of the primary users, less able to act nimbly. The question harkened back to Guy Nordenson’s first question, in that it asks how large an active government agency can be before it is no longer able to be responsive to it’s citizenry. Rob Rogers suggested that the need to wrest back control and funding extends beyond the MTA, using education as another prime example. Richard Olcott pointed to the mayors of Los Angeles, Newark and San Francisco as examples of how to think regionally, without looking to their States for help, and suggested that approach as a model for New York City in disentangling itself from the State as much as possible. Claire Weisz seconded the need for regional thinking, citing the US Northwest as leading the way, but also acknowledged that some of the State/City divide is an issue of timing and balance: there was a time when the city was less capable, Battery Park City needed the State to step in, and there are still circumstances in which it makes sense for the State to take control. It is more about how to work within those constraints tactically, using state or federal capabilities when necessary.

There was, all around the table, a real sense of apprehension about what could come out of the next administration. When the Bloomberg administration leaves, who will take over? What kind of city will they want New York City to be? And will they be capable of, or even interested in, instituting the kind of long ranging, forward thinking policies that the Bloomberg administration promoted? We’ll have to wait and see. But the panelists agreed, regardless of what’s next, we have to be willing to challenge and reimagine the status quo, drive the conversation and demand quality planning and design in dialogue about our public realm.

Jessica Cronstein is a designer and writer interested in the point at which the social, cultural and physical growth of a city intersect. She has just completed her M.Arch at Rice University and lives in New York City.

Suggest a Bike Share Station | via nycitybikeshare.com

SHARING IS CARING
New York City is joining the bike share club! Learning from the mistakes of other pilot programs across the country, NYC Bike Share will open big with 600 stations and 10,000 bikes. The city has chosen Alta Bike Share, of the successful Capital Bike Share program in Washington D.C. and the New Balance Hubway program in Boston, to run the program. Annual membership will cost “less than one monthly MetroCard” and will stretch from the Upper West and East sides down and into Brooklyn, according to an op-ed Janette Sadik-Khan wrote for The Daily News. Best of all, the Department of Transportation has launched a website on which New Yorkers can request docking stations at specific locations — the response has been impressive, with suggested spots already blanketing the city (see screengrab above). Some people are thinking creatively about how to implement these stations (2nd Ave. Sagas suggests activating disused bus stops) and bike share demonstrations will be held throughout the fall (including one in DUMBO tomorrow, Saturday September 17), with plans to launch the network sometime next year. Read more of the coverage at The New York Observer, and, of course, Streetsblog.

LIGHTS OUT NEW YORK
“I don’t know of any architects out there who want to kill birds,” said Brendan Owens, vice president of the Green Building Council, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Everybody loves glass. More specifically, everybody loves having big windows in their offices and homes. But the growing number of glass towers across the city are killing birds. New York City is in the path of the Atlantic flyway and every year 90,000 birds die flying into buildings. Solutions range from angling or curving glass to treating windows with netting, patterning or ultraviolet reflectivity that only birds can sense. Or, you can turn out the lights. Just under 100 buildings, including the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center and the Time Warner Center, to name a few, are taking part in the Audobon Society’s Lights Out New York program. According to the Audobon Society, “In the dark, and especially in foggy or rainy weather when birds fly at lower altitudes, the combination of glass and light becomes deadly.” The buildings will turn out their lights at night during major flyover times to prevent the loss of any more bird lives. Read more coverage in the Times.

Photo by Varick Shute

SUBWAY POWER
Running the subway uses a lot of energy. Stopping trains expends a lot of energy, mostly in the form of heat. What if we could recapture the energy lost by stopping trains and return it to the subway system’s electrical grid? Vycon Energy is putting forth a plan that will ostensibly do just that. By using flywheels, energy will be harvested and returned not only to subway cars, but potentially to the city’s larger power grid. Read more at Fast Company and Inhabitat.

ATLANTIC CITIES
Chances are, if you’re reading this site, you’ll want to check out The Atlantic Cities, a new online project of The Atlantic that’s all about understanding the way we live, work and play in our urban environments. According to the introductory article by site editor Sommer Mathis, the site has four main goals: to offer reported features about the past, present and future of cities; to deliver news reports about current events in cities around the world; to facilitate a big-picture, ideas-based conversation about urbanism; and to tell these stories using a variety of media. Read more of The Atlantic Cities here.

National Design Awards 2010 | Photo by Richard Patterson

MAKE IT WORK
This week Michelle Obama teamed up with Tim Gunn to present the National Design Awards, put on by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Architecture Design winners Architecture Research Office (ARO) are perhaps best known to Omnibus readers for their work with Guy Nordenson on the 2007-2009 Latrobe Prize Fellowship study On the Water: Palisade Bay, which was one of the motivating forces behind MoMA’s exhibition, Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. ARO’s project in the exhibition, “A New Urban Ground,” a collaboration with dlandstudio, sought to mitigate the flooding of Lower Manhattan due to rising sea levels by breaking up the edge of the island and reimagining sidewalks as soft infrastructure. Other NDA winners include typeface designer Matthew Carter, who received the Lifetime Achievement award; Seattle-based Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the recipient of the award for Landscape Architecture; and author, editor and educator Steven Heller, who received the Design Mind award. Read more about the National Design Awards here.

INTERVENTIONISTS TOOKLIT: PART 3
Over on Places, Mimi Zeiger offers the third essay of her fine series “The Interventionists Toolkit.” In this installment, Zeiger ponders the challenges of evaluating the authenticity and effectiveness of certain interventionist tactics, such as urban agriculture projects, mobile food trucks or ephemeral marketplaces, when corporate or institutional interests either generously expand their reach or cynically co-opt their principles (depending on whom you ask). She adapts the architectural methodology of post-occupancy evaluation to grassroots efforts at local or temporary urban improvement, but finds that measuring impacts can be as slippery as identifying the agenda behind any strategy of urban change. Read the full piece here.

EVENTS and TO DOs

URBAN DESIGN WEEK  Earlier this week, Institute for Urban Design Executive Director Anne Guiney told us about the inspiration and intentions behind Urban Design Week, six days of events dedicated to celebrating and increasing understanding of the public realm of New York City, currently underway. The Week kicked off last night with a launch party at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and between now and September 20th, there are plenty of events to choose from. Today is Park(ing) Day, an annual event that invites urban dwellers to transform auto-focused street space into people-friendly public space. Other social occasions include the launch party for the People Make Parks toolkit, an exhibit opening at Studio-X on urban design mixed media representations, and a street vendor picnic in the Financial District hosted by the Design Trust for Public Space and the Street Vendor Project. Talks include Cities in History, a conference exploring the development of urban identities; a discussion with Chris Ward of the Port Authority on the security and design concerns of the World Trade Center memorial; and the concluding debate for City Sessions on the “practice of tactical urbanism and socially active design.” GOOD will be hosting a presentation on design solutions for quality of life in cities to celebrate their new initiative, GOOD Ideas for Cities. For those interested in getting their hands dirty, check out Drawing the City (exactly what it sounds like); 72 Hour Urban Action, a public workshop in anticipation of an upcoming live-action design-build competition; Architecture for Humanity’s call for ideas on how to redesign the Manhattan Bridge Skatepark; and an illuminated version of the “Insert ____ Here” project created by 350.org and artists Eve Mosher and Paul Notzold. Or tag along on some walking tours: Women and the Brooklyn Bridge highlights contributions women have made and continue to make in shaping the bridge, and our friends at Elastic City will lead participants on a walk that creates musical scores from graphic features of downtown Manhattan. The week wraps up with the New York City premiere of Urbanized, a new documentary film by Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica and Objectified fame). If you’re not exhausted yet, check out the full list of events at urbandesignweek.org.

Reflecting the Stars

REFLECTING THE STARS  Last month, filmmaker Ian Cheney spoke with us about light pollution and the disappearance of the night sky in dense urban environments. This month (and next, as long as the LED lights hold out), take advantage of an opportunity to see the night sky recreated in the Hudson River through “Reflecting the Stars,” a light installation that projects the starscape onto the deteriorating posts of Pier 49. The lights twinkle throughout each night, but visitors can also press buttons to highlight constellations that, without the ambient city lights, would otherwise be visible overhead. This is the first New York City project for Jon Morris of the Windmill Factory, who developed the installation both to raise awareness of the disappearing night sky and to give urban-dwellers a rare opportunity for stargazing in the middle of the city. The installation will be on view through October 25 and, according to the project’s website, special events are in the works in conjunction with Climate Week NYC, which runs from September 19-26. Find out more here.

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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.

Gorton’s involvement with urban issues began in 1999, when he founded OpenPlans, a non-profit devoted to the pursuit of smart planning and civic engagement through media and digital tools. Since then, he has helped launch the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign, which advocates for a more dynamic use of public space, and the online media outlets Streetsblog, Streetfilms and Gotham Schools.

Last week, Gorton took me on a walk through the Flatiron District to talk about cars, people and the future of New York City. He painted a picture of a New York free from car dependency, in which both policy and the design of our streets give priority to people, social vitality and safety. (Look back at this 2009 Omnibus feature on Ulrich Franzen’s 1969 short film “Street” to see another bold vision of how to reclaim our congested streets.) Read on to hear Gorton’s thoughts about the largely car-free city he has envisioned and how it can come to be. —Alicia Rouault

Mark Gorton | photo by Alicia Rouault

In 1999, you founded OpenPlans, a non-profit organization that uses technology to improve the way that cities and citizens interact. How and when did you start moving towards transportation reform specifically?
Five years ago, nobody was talking about transportation in NYC. It was a non-issue. There was this sense that New York is a big city, it has a lot of traffic, so what?

We consciously launched an agenda to raise awareness of different policy options. We started Streetsblog and Streetfilms. We formed something called the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign and talked a lot about the potential of Bus Rapid Transit, programs like Summer Streets and bike lanes. We initially focused on leaders at the Department of Transportation (DOT), the mayor and other transportation policymakers, and we were very effective within that circle.

Now, thanks to the work of the DOT, people have seen change on the ground. It’s no longer theoretical. So all the people who couldn’t be bothered for years are taking notice. Whether it’s in The New York Times, The New York Post, on CBS News or amongst people in neighborhoods, there is a citywide debate about what we should do with our streets and people understand that there are policy alternatives.

So now that the current administration is supportive of your work and many of your initiatives have been enacted, how do you engage with transportation reform today?
The main point that I’m trying to make now is that cars are bad for New York and that the incorporation of the automobile into the fabric of the city was a big mistake. I want people to question, at the most fundamental level, the role of the car in the city.

Through both street design and policies, our city is programmed for driving and for maximum automobile throughput. But the needs of people and the needs of the automobile are completely different. The automobile asks for very simple, straight, distraction-free — people-free — places. Activity in a human context, at a human speed, won’t work with cars flying by.

Streets used to be safe places for kids to play, places where neighbors would gather. Now we have this definition of the street that was essentially promulgated by the automobile industry and the oil industry, in which cars dominate and people are considered only when absolutely necessary. It’s been incredibly pathological and as a result we have a much worse city than we could have otherwise. The automobile industry has been happy to tell people that the car is about freedom. It’s not about freedom for me. It’s an oppressive burden on my kids and my family.

Broadway and Houston, Manhattan | photo by Caitlin Blanchfield

Why do you think people are so protective of cars?
There are a number of reasons. First of all, I think there’s just an inherent bias towards the status quo. Most people are inherently resistant to change. Also, our society has been indoctrinated to see cars as exciting, fun and sexy, not dangerous, selfish, rude and annoying. Most people think that if they drive around and don’t crash into somebody, they haven’t done any harm. But much of the damage done by the automobile is social harm, invisible harm that degrades our neighborhoods and makes the city unpleasant and dangerous.

Donald Appleyard, a professor at UC Berkeley, did a series of studies on the societal impact of traffic. He looked at three streets in San Francisco, similar in every way possible except for how much traffic passed through. He found that people who lived on the lightly-trafficked street had more friends than those who lived on the heavily-trafficked street. 3.0 friends per person versus .09. The same went for acquaintances, people in heavily-trafficked areas had fewer. He also tracked where people congregated and how they engaged with their surroundings. He then asked the residents to draw their “home territory.” On the heavily-trafficked street, people drew their apartment building or maybe a piece of the sidewalk in front of their building. On the lightly-trafficked one, people included their entire street. At a certain level, Appleyard showed that traffic destroys people’s social connections with their neighbors and friends. [Watch a Streetfilm on Appleyard's study below. -Ed.]

Streetfilm: Revisiting Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets

So is the primary challenge to change the discourse? What comes after that?
This is going to be a decades-long process. There are a number of things we have to do. A lot of people assume that the car is important, essential and properly used. Therefore, if there’s not enough space to park, you need to create more parking. If there’s not enough road space, you should create more road space. That’s essentially what the story of the 20th century was. Sidewalks were narrowed, parking was added, the city became more friendly to cars and more hostile to people. But all of those efforts still failed to make the car work in New York City. The automobile does a bad job as a transportation technology in the city because it’s so spatially inefficient.

We want to communicate an alternative vision. We’re talking about changes that will get people out of their cars, that will make it difficult and expensive to drive. Of course, some drivers just don’t want to get out of their cars. And some people don’t want to consider alternatives, because it forces them to question their own behavior, to accept that every time they get in their car, they somehow, in some small way, harm their neighbors and use an unfair share of the scarce public space of the city. They don’t see how change can give us healthier children, improved social activity and a better economy.

What is your alternative vision? Do you want to completely eradicate cars?
I don’t want to eradicate cars, but I think we could reduce them by 90%. The automobile is one of the most significant technologies in this country, but it is fundamentally misused. Capable, healthy people should not be driving within the city at all. Any trip that you make on a regular basis, whether it’s going to school, work or the grocery store, should be possible without driving a car. Automobile trips should be limited to those where people are leaving the city or the occasional trip that requires a vehicle, such as carrying cargo.

The remaining traffic, whether it be automobile or truck, could be concentrated in space and time. Some streets could be fully pedestrianized and some could be auto-oriented. Maybe a street allows traffic from 6am until 10am, but then from 2pm until 5pm, when kids get out of school, auto access is radically reduced. You can concentrate the harm onto the auto-oriented streets and free up more space to be beautiful, peaceful and safe.

I think 20% of the streets in Manhattan alone could be fully pedestrianized, with no cars, buses or bikes. We should have a comprehensive network of pedestrian streets. Broadway, for the whole length of Manhattan, could be fully pedestrianized. On the east side, maybe Lexington Avenue. We could do that.

This is also good for business. Kalverstraat, a fully-pedestrianized street in Amsterdam, has the highest retail rents in all of Holland. Here in New York, the street with the highest retail rents outside of Manhattan is Brooklyn’s Fulton Street on Fulton Mall — which has no cars. No one wants to live on a street that’s choked with a lot of nasty traffic. No one wants to work, shop or eat dinner on a street that’s polluted, loud, dangerous and unpleasant. Automobiles are bad for business.

Property owners are one of the constituencies we want to reach. The easiest way to increase property value in the city is to get rid of cars on the street. When the real estate industry realizes that, we’ll start to see more change.

Of course, the transportation dynamics in Manhattan are different from those in eastern Queens or parts of the Bronx. There are neighborhoods in which getting rid of cars simply doesn’t work. But things can be done in every neighborhood. It’s just a question of engaging the residents and finding how they want their streets to be.

Fulton Mall, Brooklyn | photo by Varick Shute

You say that automobiles are bad for business, but what about car-dependent businesses, necessary truck traffic or the taxi industry?
Yes, I want to be sure to distinguish between truck traffic and automobile traffic, because you certainly need freight delivery, garbage trucks, things like that – though I think with conscious effort we can probably improve efficiency and reduce truck trips by 30-50%.

But there are very few auto-dependent businesses, particularly in Manhattan. Restaurant and store owners worry that their patrons won’t be able to show up without their cars. They will, they’ll just be using different means to get there. The idea that people need to drive to go shopping is simply not true. Only 6% of shopping trips in the central business district of Manhattan are done by car.

That’s not to say there aren’t losers if there are fewer cars – parking garages, auto-parts supply stores, there are businesses directly related to vehicles. But in New York there is always a process of creative destruction in the economy. And the alternative is endangering our children and having an obesity epidemic because people can’t live an active lifestyle.

The taxi industry is more of a grey area. Cabs produce noisy, dangerous traffic. But in some ways taxis complement the public transit system. They make cars available for people who need to use them without relying on private ownership. There are also options like car sharing. We’re not talking about banning cars, we’re talking about making them available for the rare trips where people really need them.

What else needs to be done in order to make your vision a reality?
We need to improve our buses and expand Bus Rapid Transit. Buses are much more spatially efficient than cars. And the surface route infrastructure is mostly there. The select bus service routes that New York City has already put into place have increased bus speeds by 20% and that number can definitely increase. But it takes funding, innovation and willingness to dedicate road space to bus-only lanes.

We also need to take the bicycle seriously as a transportation technology. Other big cities do: in Tokyo, 20% of all trips are carried by bicycle; Osaka 25%; Berlin 13%; Amsterdam 40%; Copenhagen, 37%. Without much difficulty, we could see 20-25% of all trips in New York being taken by bicycle, which would reduce congestion, increase mobility and make the city safer and more livable. But right now, our street network is implicitly hostile to the bicycle. And it’s unreasonable to expect people to take their lives in their hands just to get around, so they’re going to resort to other alternatives. The city has begun to take steps to make our streets safer but we still have a long, long, long way to go.

In some ways this is a generational issue. The automobile used to be a symbol of progress and economic might. But it doesn’t represent the future anymore. Now it’s part of this nasty, mechanized, dystopian world that we have to deal with.

Madison Square, Manhattan | photo by Caitlin Blanchfield

How does your work with participatory planning come in to all of this?
In order to achieve significant change in how the city behaves, you have to engage the public as deeply as possible. People have to understand why this in their own self-interest. I’m talking about creating a process where people come together and decide how they really want their streets to function. Do we want them to be thoroughfares for people outside the neighborhood or places for our children to play?

Do you see a role for the recent crop of web-based, interactive, democratic tools, like ChangeByUs or SeeClickFix, in doing what you’re talking about?
Software and internet tools definitely have a role to play in this participatory democracy, because they can help disseminate information and create a forum in which to build social consensus for change. Each of the tools you mentioned is good for what they do. But to really see change, I think we need more government agencies deploying them. Because the government controls the streets. It doesn’t matter how many people join a group or “like” something on Facebook, that doesn’t change government policy.

But if we can integrate these tools into a public input process and get the DOT to adopt them, there’s significant potential to galvanize communities. A lot of people feel that they aren’t being asked about changes made to their streets. New York is a huge city, and the only mechanism the DOT has to gather input from communities — Do you want a bench here? Do you want to put in a loading zone? Do you want that intersection daylighted? — is to have its staff facilitate tens of thousands of local dialogues, which is impossible. As a result, that happens only in a rare handful of circumstances.

What’s your strategy moving forward? Are you still focusing your advocacy efforts on policymakers?
The strategy now is to try and engage with and talk to the media and the thought leaders in the city. We’ve been faced with a lot of knee-jerk reactions against change. It amazes me how thoughtless a lot of coverage in the media is on this topic. Many reporters who don’t know anything about transportation show up to cover these issues — and much of the media drives around the city as they cover it, which gives them a very windshield-oriented perspective. The Post has been particularly awful. CBS news too. So what I’m trying to do now is to speak more publicly about these things, to reach both the media and a broader audience.

Will you continue to work with smaller groups or do you want to focus on changing the way the big outlets cover the topic?
It’s a combination. We’ve been working through the more niche-oriented media channels for the last five years, and we’ve made great progress. But to take it to the next level and get people all over the city who are now seeing the changes on their street to understand what these changes are for, why they should want them, and why they should ask for more, then we have to talk to them through the media that they’re used to consuming.

A lot of people feel that they aren’t being asked about changes made to their streets. I want people to understand that the automobile is a flawed technology for our city and that we need change. I want them to see the positive things that can happen if they embrace that change. I want my street to be safe for my kids so they can play. And I’m not content to wait for that. I want it to happen now.

Interview conducted by Alicia Rouault.

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Mark Gorton, the founder of a series of innovative financial and technology companies, is a leading advocate for alternative transportation and livable streets. He is the founder of Tower Research Capital LLC, a money management firm specializing in quantitative trading and investment strategies, as well as the founder of Lime Brokerage LLC, Lime Wire LLC, Lime Labs LLC, and OpenPlans. In 2005, Mark founded the New York City Streets Renaissance campaign in partnership with the Project for Public Spaces and Transportation Alternatives. Through his philanthropy, his leadership at OpenPlans, and his public and media appearances, Mark Gorton continues to advocate for alternative transportation, livable streets, and open government.

Mark holds a B.A. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a MBA from Harvard University. He lives on the Upper West Side and bikes regularly to his offices in Lower Manhattan.