Developers pushing for faster ride to LGA

From the Daily News:

Viable mass transit to the closest “business airport” is a vital part of many cities in America. For example, airports like Reagan National and Midway have easy rail access from throughout Washington and Chicago.

At only 8 miles from midtown Manhattan, LaGuardia serves more than 25.7 million passengers, making it one of the 20 busiest airports in the country.

Yet LaGuardia has no viable mass transit options, putting New York City at a severe competitive disadvantage. Instead, passengers are forced to choose between expensive taxis, inconvenient private bus service from a few locations in Manhattan or long public bus rides.

That’s why we have urged New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn and MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast not to allow the concerns of a few politicians in one neighborhood to kill the new SBS rapid bus service route from 125th St. to LaGuardia Airport, and to go further by publicly committing to finding more viable mass transportation options to the airport.

The SBS line would include only six stops between its origin on the West Side and LaGuardia, providing a real option to thousands of riders in Upper Manhattan and along Astoria Blvd. in Queens, both burgeoning areas.

Who wrote this? Hmmm...

Joe Sitt is CEO of Thor Equities (developer destroying Coney Island)
Stuart Appelbaum is president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union
Stephen Sigmund is executive director of the Global Gateway Alliance
Lee Sander is president and CEO of HAKS Engineering and Architects
Bob Yaro is president of the Regional Plan Association
Tom Wright is executive director of the RPA

I see. It seems to me that everyone who wants to get to the airport manages to do so already. Sure, it could be improved, but it's not the most pressing transportation issue in the city. Unless, of course, you're looking at "burgeoning areas" as targets for development.

Gruesome twosome may team up

Photo from SHoP

From Crains:

The city's transportation chief, Janette Sadik-Khan, and planning czar, Amanda Burden, are close friends who share a passion for creating vibrant, sustainable cities. They have been travel companions—to India, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Copenhagen—and even sat next to each other at a recent benefit gala honoring Ms. Sadik-Khan.

And when the Bloomberg administration draws to a close this year, the powerful pair could go into business together, spreading their brand of urban planning across the globe. Several former Bloomberg administration sources confirmed that the two have been in discussions about forming their own urban-planning policy institute, either as an offshoot of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's foundation or as a stand-alone entity. Another source said they were angling to open a global consulting firm.

"Those two have traveled together on their own time," a former administration official said. "They've done the urban-planning grand tour."

The pair are the latest administration all-stars planning their exodus as part of a transition that is as likely to transform the private sector as it is the face of government. Aides to Ed Koch, the last three-term mayor, turned their government experience into prominent careers. Some, like developer Bruce Ratner and transportation planner Sam Schwartz, continue to influence public policy. Top Bloomberg alumni may go even further.

149th Street LIRR bridge still closed with no answers

From Eyewitness News:

The bridge that crosses the railroad tracks in Flushing, Queens on 149th Street between Roosevelt and 41st Avenues is still not open to the public.

It's a brand new bridge rebuilt for $4 million.

It was set to re-open in May 2012, nearly a year later, but 11 months later, not a single car has driven over it.

Back in February Eyewitness News reached out to the City Department of Transportation asking whether any "defects were found during the (bridge's) inspection."

Stone-walled by DOT, Eyewitness News filed a Freedom of Information request and still there are no answers.

"It's almost like a cover-up is going on," State Sen. Tony Avella said.

Queens State Senator Tony Avella ran into the same wall of silence.

"This contract was done by a city agency with public dollars, we should know what's happening," Avella said.

Documents Eyewitness News obtained reveal that the builder is "Unicorn Construction Enterprises" which has been contracted to refurbish many bridges throughout the city.

Discovering how many contracts Unicorn has had with the city, more than 20 since 2008, Eyewitness News decided to go right to the top with our questions.

"There were issues with the concrete and we're not going to open a bridge until its safe," said Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC DOT Commissioner.

Sure enough, a closer look at the bridge shows cracks running the entire length of its new concrete span and the DOT installed sensors to monitor the cracks.

Eyewitness News asked the Commissioner why her DOT inspectors failed to discover the defective concrete sooner.

But it didn't open until after the refurbishment project was done and the money was spent.

"I can't really say anything else because we're looking at legal action right now. The bridge will remain closed until it is safe to the travelling public," Sadik-Khan said.

"We've been trying for weeks to get the inspection reports on the bridge. It is a public document. Will you release that to Channel 7?" Hoffer asked.

"I'll have to get back to you, I don't know what the status of that is," Sadik-Khan said.

It's hard to be a neighbor of Sadik-Khan

From the NY Post:

City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan was so convinced her neighbor was spying on her family with a video camera that she pulled strings at One Police Plaza to get cops to search the man’s apartment, law-enforcement sources told The Post.

Sadik-Khan called Police Headquarters to report that a man living in a high-rise building across the street from her West Village apartment was using a video camera to peep on her and her family, the sources said.

“It looked like a recording device and that’s what spooked her,” a law-enforcement source said.

An NYPD detective was dispatched to Sadik-Kahn’s home earlier this month and looked out the window to see what looked like a video camera in the man’s window.

The detective was satisfied that the device appeared to be a video camera and went to a Manhattan judge, who signed a search warrant allowing cops to search the man’s apartment for the device in his window, the sources said.

“It’s a total invasion of privacy. Are we living in a police state?” said a police source. “Sadik-Khan says, ‘I think he’s got a recording device.’ That’s pretty flimsy.”

When cops searched the man’s apartment, the “video camera” turned out to be a piece of equipment that can’t record anything.

“Why would the DA’s Office and the judge go along with that and sign off on a search warrant?” the police source fumed.

If you or I called the police and claimed something like this, would they even show up to investigate?

New parking signs more readable

From the NY Observer:

This morning, the Department of Transportation unveiled new parking signs that greatly simplify and clarify on-street parking regulations. As Tranportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan joked, “We used to have signs with 250 character on four different signs in three different colors. Now we can say it in about 140 characters on a much clearer sign.”

The new signs, common throughout the city’s business districts, now feature two separate but similar sections, one for commercial vehicles (in red font) and one for passenger vehicles (in green). There will be 6,300 new signs deployed in the coming months in Midtown, roughly between 14th and 60th streets and Second and Ninth avenues. Similar signs will come to the Financial District at a later period, and then on to the outer boroughs’ main commercial areas. The city began rolling out the new signs in October, and 450 have already been installed.

Unlike the old signs, which were in a mishmash of colors, fonts and styles, the new ones are in a unified format, putting the length of time for parking first, then the days and times. And no longer are they the creative work of the Department of Transportation’s sign shop, but instead a collaboration with Michael Bierut and a team at Pentagram. Among the small but important innovation are the formatting of the signs and the location of the font (justified left, rather than centered, which is considered more legible).

When idealism meets reality

From the Daily News:

Recent adventures on the bike lanes of New York had me in so many close encounters of the vehicular and pedestrian kind, so many embarrassing tumbles, that I have no more faith in two-wheeled transport here.

On a recent weekend of rare beauty, I bicycled 70 miles around Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan, with a pit stop (i.e., beer) in the South Bronx.

It was enough to convince me that while it is possible to bike in New York, it is not wise to do so. Yes, we live in an unpredictable city. But the kind of unpredictability that involves a tourist stumbling out into your bike lane is not the sort to celebrate.

I started out a believer in the urban vision of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who has more than doubled the city’s bike lane mileage in the last five years, from 285 to 540 — with many more to come.

But once I finished my journey, into my basement went the bike, where it will remain entombed.

Before Sadik-Khan’s biking revolution, New York’s cars and pedestrians partook in an uneasy pavement truce. She has fostered a three-way rivalry, encouraging just about everyone to pedal and giving the false impression that bike lanes are the equals of sidewalks and roads.

By two days’ end, I had done 70 miles, and I was done with biking. It is senseless — no, reckless — to bike in New York in 2012.

In the meantime, the City Council is passing bills to crack down on bad cyclist behavior, knowing full well that we don't have the police manpower to enforce our current laws.

Pothole-filling machine a dud

From CBS 2:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg kicked off the city’s road paving season Monday by unveiling a new pothole filling machine. The problem is the debut was a dud, leaving a hole in the road and a hole in the mayor’s initiative.

Al D’Amato used to be known as “Senator Pothole,” but it may take a while for Bloomberg to earn the title “Mayor Pothole.”

In fact, some might say he had a hole in his head Monday for unveiling a new state-of-the-art one-man pothole filling machine on a Flushing, Queens street that couldn’t fill the entire gap in the road, reports CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer.

Yes, it spit out tar and tried to rake it into the crevice, but try as it might — and it tried mightily — there was still a large strip that remained unfilled.

Get ready for some really bad acting

It may take you all weekend to recover from this...

Bike lane through projects not very safe

From the Brooklyn Paper:

Brick-tossing teens have turned a major cycling route through a public housing project in Fort Greene into death trap, injuring or terrorizing at least six cyclists — one seriously — in a spate of attacks this year.

The attacks are launched from the maroon-colored pedestrian bridge that links the Walt Whitman and Ingersoll houses between Myrtle Avenue and Tillary Street.

In the most violent crime, the attackers pelted a computer programmer from Park Slope in the face with a brick, cracking his helmet and ripping a gash in his cheek on Aug. 12.

The brick busted his teeth and knocked him off his bike, requiring emergency surgery. The physical wounds have healed, but the mental scars linger; Arthur said that he has had trouble sleeping and has given up cycling, which he used to do every day.

“I don’t think my life will ever be the same,” he said.

The footbridge is a cowardly sadist’s dream: It sits above a well-used bike route that links Fort Greene and points south with the Manhattan Bridge, has a mesh cover that hides the perps, and is fenced off from the street, providing an easy get-away route.

DOT gets even flakier

From NBC New York:

New York City is using poetry to boost traffic safety.

Colorful 8-inch square signs featuring safety messages in haiku are being installed at high-crash locations near cultural institutions and schools, including the Bronx's Grand Concourse, MoMA, downtown Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced the new safety campaign, called Curbside Haiku, on Tuesday.

Funded by a state grant from DWI funds, the series includes 12 designs with accompanying haikus that each deliver a targeted safety message by focusing on one transportation mode.

Rush hour observations

From City Journal:

Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, continues to argue that the bike lanes are popular, but the claim doesn’t seem to square with observation. To test my suspicion that these lanes are barely used, I stood at two busy locations— 30th Street and First Avenue and the intersection at Houston and Allen Streets. In the second case, I arrived at 5 PM on a weekday, the beginning of rush hour. For the next half-hour, I didn’t see a single bicycle in use, despite bumper-to-bumper traffic on Houston Street. Similarly, at First Avenue, where both sides of the street have bicycle lanes, I stood near the entrance to New York University Medical Center counting bicycles at 9:30 AM, near the end of the morning rush. In one hour, I counted just two bicycles, only one of which used the bike lane.

No doubt the mayor is reluctant to admit that his efforts to control traffic in Manhattan have failed—and have only increased congestion. Given the investment of millions in creating the pedestrian plazas and bike lanes, undoing these reforms is unlikely, at least in the near term. If the mayor could only hear the cursing every weekday morning from drivers at, say, 34th street and First Avenue, he might develop a different view.

Now there's a push to slow down the installation of bike lanes.

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all

From DNA Info:

Broadway’s new pedestrian plazas are being overrun by homeless people flocking there to sleep, driving some fearful residents to avoid the street.

“It gets filled with homeless people, the whole entire length,” said Scott Bowen, 48, an accountant who’s lived in the neighborhood for nearly 20 years and said the situation between 34th and 42nd streets has grown so bad he now avoids Broadway altogether at night.

“I no longer feel secure walking this route after dark,” he wrote in a letter to Midtown’s Community Board 5, urging them for help.

Broadway’s pedestrian plazas were intended to serve as peaceful oases along bustling Midtown streets, giving locals and tourists a place to sit down, people watch and relax.

But instead they’ve served as an oasis for the city’s growing homeless population, creating an eerie nighttime tableau of people sprawled on benches between pink flowers and giant potted plants.

On multiple visits to the plazas in the middle of the night this week, DNAinfo spotted dozens of men and women camped out, slumped in chairs, leaning against tables and sprawled out along the ground.

City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan was surprised by the growing number of homeless people using the plazas to sleep.

Council wants more input on Bike Share program

From the NY Times:

The Bloomberg administration, facing unexpected resistance from the City Council over its plan to bring a large-scale public bike-sharing network to New York, agreed on Friday to hold hearings with politicians and community leaders before the program is up and running.

The move by City Hall came after weeks of increasingly heated discussions over whether the administration had wrongly excluded the Council from the planning stage of the project, and it clears the way for the city’s Transportation Department to award a contract to an operator for the program, known as bike-share, as early as next week.

Bike-share, a signature project of Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner, has already been met with concerns about the placement of thousands of bicycles and dozens of rental kiosks in parks and on sidewalks and streets.

But the latest challenge came from an unexpected place: the usually compliant Council, some of whose members said they believed the administration was trying to steamroll the plan without going through the proper legislative channels.

At issue is whether a bike-share network, which would be run by a third-party vendor, should be considered a franchise, defined as the use of city-owned property to provide a public service. Any franchise must be authorized by the Council, which was not consulted when the city issued its call for vendors last year.

Bridge biking still a menace

From the Daily News:

Nine days ago, we published an open letter to Sadik-Khan pointing out what was going on. That provoked uproar among cycling activists who contended that we had labored under a misimpression and invited us to visit again.

We did so and discovered that Sadik-Khan had sent staff to the bridge to prevent cyclists from entering the walkway. Her office said that such vigilance is common. Hmmm, we thought, and returned unannounced.

During the evening rush of 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursday, at least 74 bikers zipped along the pedestrian side of the bridge, which, due to the presence of construction sheds, is narrowed to less than 50 inches in places.

At the peak of the evening commute, at 5:45, about 40 bikers invaded the pedestrian lane, overwhelming the dozen or so walkers.

The transgressors were young and old, tourists from Asia and hipsters from Bushwick. They were united in breaking the rules and nearly doubled the number of pedestrians who used their own lane during the entire 90-minute period.

We asked a biker why he violated posted signs. He answered, "It's easier," than using the DOT-mandated route that will be in place until construction is complete, probably in January.

Oh, and it turns out those polls that showed NYers are overwhelmingly in favor of bike lanes were bogus.

Sadik-Khan admits big mistake

From CBS:

It was a rare mea culpa from the New York City Department of Transportation.

On Tuesday it began jack-hammering traffic islands in Borough Park that, as CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer first reported some 10 months ago, blocked ambulances, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles.

Not that New Yorkers should gloat, but they won.

In a first for the city, construction trucks were actually digging out and getting rid of DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s cherished traffic island projects — a dangerous project Kramer reported on last November.

Lame response from Sadik-Khan

From the Daily News:

Manhattan: "Letter of the Law" (editorial, Aug. 12) reported instances of bike riders going the wrong way on the Manhattan Bridge during a construction detour. Doing so is wrong and dangerous, and we hope New Yorkers will heed our ad campaign, "Don't Be a Jerk," and call out the rogue riders. With social pressure, better signs and engineering and increased enforcement, we can encourage more cyclists to follow the rules of the road. Walking away from bike lanes that New Yorkers overwhelmingly support, and that help make streets 40% less deadly for pedestrians, would be a bridge too far.

Janette Sadik-Khan
Commissioner, N.Y.C. DOT

Hey Janette - How do bike lanes make the streets safer for pedestrians? I thought the biggest threat was cars. And on the Manhattan Bridge, which was the subject of the editorial, cars and pedestrians don't mix. Oh and one more thing: have you noticed the condition of our streets lately?

Pedestrians imperiled on Manhattan Bridge

The following is an open letter to Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan (from the Daily News).

Dear Ms. Commissioner:

We invite you to take a walk across the Manhattan Bridge today so you might understand why so many New Yorkers - even reasonable New Yorkers - are so dead-set against your bike lanes.

As you know, two lanes of the bridge are dedicated to people rather than to vehicles: one on the north side, one on the south side. In July, you rerouted all bike traffic to the south, reserving the north for pedestrians. This was done to accommodate repairs. And it was done with clarity. Bright orange signs tell bikers to go one way and pedestrians another.

But you will see that bikers are illiterate, blind or merely - this is our guess - oblivious to all man-made law. They zoom along the pedestrian side of the bridge as if it were the last leg of the Tour de France. And pity the pedestrian who slows them down.

They ring their bells. They shake their heads in disgust. They curse out the family from Japan trying to take in the East River view. They flip the bird at the working stiff from Brooklyn who's trying to burn off a few calories on the way home from the daily grind.

What use have bikers for signs, regulations or restrictions? Walk across the mighty Manhattan, Ms. Commissioner, and you will see that you have loosed upon New York a two-wheeled army run entirely amok. We're so terrified of these Cannondale-mounted maniacs that we fear getting out of our cars.

All the best.

And the other boroughs get...?

Sadik-Kahn changes mind about Brooklyn traffic islands

From CBS:

The Borough Park traffic islands that CBS 2 first told you about six months ago, the ones that caused such chaos, are apparently going to be removed, Marcia Kramer reports exclusively.

When CBS 2 first aired this story last November you saw Ladder 114 having trouble rushing to a fire in Borough Park. It ran smack dab into cement traffic islands installed by the DOT.

A back-up caused by the traffic island forced an ambulance to pull into oncoming traffic to swerve around the barricade and the problems of ambulances trying to reach the Maimonides Hospital emergency room down the block continue to this very day.

But apparently not for very much longer.

In a rare change of heart, Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Khan has, sources say, agreed to remove the offending barricades. The move will head off a threatened suit by Assemblyman Hikind, who had gathered petitions from more than 1,000 constituents.

Mocker calls out Bloomberg for caring more about tourists than Queensfolk

Mocker went to a press conference recently that the Mayor, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and get this - former president Bill Clinton - held in order to brag about how much air quality has improved in Times Square with the installation of the pedestrian plaza there. (Pretty bogus since the pollution didn't disappear, it just was diverted to other streets.) Then Mocker compared that initiative to how Bloomberg has ignored the 5-year plea for parkland in Maspeth. The City is about to dump yet another bus depot on the community, but continues to stall in converting the St. Saviour's site into a park, even though the elected officials have had the money raised for its acquisition for just about a year. Apparently, Bloomie and company would rather make nice with the owner than start the acquisition process. Forget PlaNYC 2030...Developers and tourists rule!