Grieve-Smith on Transportation

Photo: Travis Fox

Here's a great Planet Money video where you get to see Adam Davidson figuring out why jitneys in Haiti are painted so vibrantly. However, I think there's a mistranslation at 3:48 in the video.

Driver Patrick Toulousma is translated as saying "One can read the skill of a driver from the exterior of the vehicle in question," and Davidson, clearly not a Creole speaker, goes with that.

I don't know Creole myself, but it sure sounds like Standard French to me, and pretty formal: "On peut lire l'image du chauffeur à travers la véhicule en question," literally, "One can read the image of the driver through the vehicle in question." If a Parisian said that to me I would translate it as, "You can pick up on the driver's image by looking at their vehicle."

What does Toulousma mean by "image"? I'm guessing he's referring to glamour, which Cap'n Transit argues can influence people's decisions about a single trip.

This appears today as a letter to the editor, on Page 8 of the Woodside Herald (PDF).

In a June 4 op-ed, Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce President Ira Greenberg laid out the Chamber's transportation agenda for making Queens Boulevard better for business. One of his top recommendations was to allow for parking along the Boulevard at all times. This would not only be good for business, but it would also make the Boulevard safer for pedestrians.

For most of the day parking is allowed along Queens Boulevard, but from 7 to 10AM every weekday, there are No Standing zones on the north side of Queens Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue. From 4 to 7PM, the south side of Queens Boulevard, Roosevelt Avenue and one block of 43rd Avenue are No Standing zones.

This restriction means that if morning drivers commuting to Manhattan stop for juice from Go Natural, they get parking tickets. Evening drivers who stop to pick up a bottle of wine from Lowery Liquors get tickets. Drivers who don't want tickets shop elsewhere, and that means that Sunnyside gets the pollution, noise and danger from the cars passing through, but receives no economic benefit to offset any of it.

The rush hour parking restriction is not just an economic hardship. Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside has been the site of numerous pedestrian injuries and at least four deaths. There is a very real danger of out-of-control cars injuring people on the sidewalk. In 2007, the New York Times reported that a sixteen-year-old boy named Gonpo Dorjee was seriously injured while waiting to cross the Boulevard at 47th Street. He was unable to walk for months.

One thing that protects pedestrians like Dorjee from speeding cars is parked cars. Without the parked cars, the only things protecting pedestrians from a wayward vehicle are the parking meters, and they will be replaced by muni-meters in a few years. As Ira wrote, "Pedestrians waiting to cross every block feel unsafe as they stand inches from fast moving vehicles." When we feel unsafe, we shop elsewhere. A double-whammy for the stores along Queens Boulevard: less business from drivers, and less business from pedestrians.

This parking restriction is a relic of the old Department of Transportation, where moving traffic was more important than business or safety. Over the past several years the DOT has made protecting lives a higher priority. We have already seen this change on Skillman, 43rd and Barnett Avenues, where speeds have gone down and injuries are less common.

Removing the rush hour parking restriction is the next step in the direction of safety. It would not have protected Gonpo Dorjee, because he was hit on the corner, but it will protect thousands more. It will also bring more customers to Sunnyside businesses, in cars and on foot. Good for business, good for safety, good for Sunnyside.

I heard the horn honk a second time and turned around. There was a man parked in a minivan sitting at the corner. I pointed to myself with a questioning look on my face, and he nodded and beckoned me over. "Want a ride?"

The author in 1989.

My mother always told me not to get into cars with strangers, particularly strange men. But I was running late from my job as a cashier at Caldor's on Ulster Avenue. I was worried about getting to Uptown Kingston in time to catch the bus home. That was the last bus that Sunday evening; if I missed it, my parents would have to drive to Kingston to pick me up.

When "John," as he introduced himself, took a turn away from Uptown, onto the highway, and sped up, I got a little uneasy. When he said, "So, Angus, have you ever been with a man before?" I definitely got worried.

"Uh, no," I answered.
"Do you want to have sex with a man?"
"No, sorry."
"Do you want to have sex with me? If you close your eyes you won't know it's not a woman."
"No, thanks. I just want to go to Searstown."

Thinking back on it, the sidewalk was pretty desolate on a Sunday evening, the perfect place for gay men who don't want to be observed. John must have been inviting me to have sex with him, and figured that nobody who didn't want to have gay sex would get into a minivan with a strange man. When he realized that I had taken his offer of a ride literally, he was understanding about the whole thing. Fortunately, he was a decent guy and he dropped me off in Searstown just like he had said, with a little pat on my knee. I made it to the bus in time.

Of course, there could have been another guy cruising that block of Ulster Avenue who wasn't as decent as John. That was one of the many commuting dangers I faced during the six months I worked at Caldor's. I had a car when I took the job, but shortly after that the right front wheel broke. I couldn't afford to get it fixed (on an entry-level part-time cashier's wages?), so I had to pay $35 to get it junked. I couldn't ride my bike, because it was too far to ride the whole thirteen miles back to Woodstock. I took the Trailways bus instead.

The store, and many others like it, was four miles from the Kingston bus station, in the town of Ulster. The Trailways buses never went there, the Kingston city buses don't go past the city limits, and the Ulster County buses only ran a few times in the middle of the day. Neither of them ran on Sundays. Trailways didn't allow bicycles that weren't in boxes, so I couldn't ride my bike from work to the bus. I walked.

The biggest danger by far, a much bigger danger than a few cruising gay men, was the speeding traffic along Ulster Avenue, especially on the part that is Route 9W. For the two miles in the Town of Ulster, there is only a narrow sidewalk on the west side of the four-lane road, nothing on the east side. The speed limits are high, and the cars are noisy. There are many curb cuts to get to one strip mall or another, and drivers take the turns too fast.

Ulster Avenue is one of three roads that go from Kingston to the shops in Ulster. The other one is East Chester Street, Route 9W, and it's worse. It has only two lanes, but no sidewalks, and people drive even faster. The third is U.S. Route 209, a limited-access highway.

Sometimes, to get away from the noise and danger of Ulster Avenue, I would walk along the West Shore railroad tracks. Of course, walking on an active rail line is a very dangerous activity as well. I was always careful to listen and to look in front and behind me, but if I had tripped and fallen I could have been unable to escape from a train.

I survived the summer at Caldor's, but I never took another job in Ulster County again. I didn't want to buy another car, and I didn't want to have to deal with getting to the strip malls of the Town of Ulster, where more and more of the county's jobs are concentrated. Instead, I spent the summers in Binghamton and Chicago, and moved to the city when I finished school.

My sister lives in Uptown Kingston now, but most of the work is in Ulster. The county buses run more frequently these days, but only a few times on Saturdays and not at all on Sundays. So my sister takes taxis a lot of the time, which cut into her wages.

Tonight on the Tri-State blog I read that the City of Kingston has received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to combat childhood obesity through education, complete streets.

It's true that there are a few difficult spots for walking in the city. One street that really feels uncomfortable to walk on is Washington Avenue north of Schwenk Drive, which leads to most of the city's motels. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's project page also describes the difficulty of getting to Kingston Point Park, along streets with no sidewalks.

Honestly, though, most of the streets of Kingston are pretty good for walking and bicycling. Tri-State's Nadine Lemmon points out that Broadway is four lanes, but it's got sidewalks on both sides and there are parallel side streets. The intersections could definitely be more pedestrian-friendly, but I've seen much worse. Most of the streets without sidewalks are small streets with little or no car traffic.

The biggest challenge to safe walking and cycling in Kingston is in getting to the commercial heart of Kingston, which has actually not been in the City of Kingston since 1975 or so. It's in the Town of Ulster. Caldor's is now a Jo-Ann's Fabrics, but there's the Hudson Valley Mall, a Wal-Mart, a Barnes and Noble, a Lowe's, and lots of other stores. A large proportion of the area's jobs are at these stores, but there are also jobs at the old IBM plant nearby, which now hosts a data processing center for Bank of America.

It's been clear to me for a long time that the development in the Town of Ulster has been a way for people to get around whatever rules (and taxes) existed in the City of Kingston. They didn't have to build sidewalks or run buses, just a couple nice highways was all the infrastructure that IBM needed to suck all the workers out of Kingston, and all the stores needed to suck the shoppers out. But the city limit is a legal fiction. These stores and offices see a lot more shoppers than the stores and offices on Wall Street in Uptown, and have a greater claim to being part of the Kingston metropolitan area.

It's nice to get kids to parks and schools, but I can say from personal experience that teenagers from all over Ulster County want to go to those shops, and Kingston teens are no exception. Maybe some are more sophisticated and want to go shopping in Poughkeepsie or even New York City, but most are headed to the mall.

I can kind of understand that government institutions are bound by the city limits. That's why the Kingston city buses don't go to the mall, although if I had ever been mayor I would have tried to figure out some way to send them there. What is more puzzling is that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation also seems bound by those same city limits. The RWJF is a nationwide organization, and they work with pairs of counties like Nash and Edgecombe Counties in North Carolina. Why not pair up the City of Kingston and the Town of Ulster, and get them to work as a unit to solve a problem that affects them as a unit?

This Healthy Kids program will probably do some good for the children and teenagers of Kingston. But as long as it lets itself be confined by artificial boundaries it will fail to serve these children well. Because when they get old enough they will want to go to the mall. They may try walking on Ulster Avenue, and be the recipients of unwanted sexual attention. Walking or cycling, they may put their lives at risk on Ulster Avenue. They will probably give up, and depend on their families and friends. If they get enough money, they'll buy their own cars one day. But they will not use active transportation on their way to and from the malls, and they'll wind up waddling around Kings Plaza.

What the walking population of Kingston really needs, most of all, is reliable, frequent, round-trip transit to the malls, all day, seven days a week. The next thing is to make either Ulster Avenue or East Chester Street into a complete street that is safe to walk and bicycle, a street that attracts pedestrian-oriented development and a positive street life to drive away sexual activities. But it's not going to happen as long as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation thinks that its mission ends at the city limits.

After tonight's zoning presentation, I am fairly well satisfied that the current proposal is a good one. The existing zoning requires developers to build too many parking spaces, and the proposal would reduce those requirements as much as is feasible.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Tom Smith, the planner who is most directly involved in this project. He pointed out that my R5B proposal would invite people to tear down existing single-family houses and replace them with multi-family homes that would then be required to have more than one space per lot, resulting in a net increase in cars. Essentially, the R4 and R4-1 zones are the best we can hope for without rewriting the zoning code.

The most promising prospect for reducing parking requirements would be to expand the "Long Island City subject area" (PDF) to include Sunnyside and Woodside. That's a much bigger deal, though, and I can understand why they didn't want to bring it up in this rezoning.

With regard to the zoning of Sunnyhills and the Phipps Gardens, Tom observed that any new development would essentially require "a gas explosion" and maybe an earthquake too, so I didn't need to be concerned about that. In the current draft, Sunnyside Towers would be rezoned R6A, which conforms to its current use.

There is a proposal to amend the zoning code, which prohibits sidewalk cafes on any street with an elevated railroad, except for a specific list of streets. The amendment would add Queens Boulevard to that list, which makes a lot of sense because the el does not cover the street there. I fully support this part of the proposal. Lily Gavin was in attendance, and I mentioned that I look forward to eating al fresco at Dazie's someday.

The other people who spoke had various objections and concerns. A couple of them agreed with me about reducing parking requirements. Al Volpe disagreed with me, but chose to take a bizarre dig at bicycles, which hadn't been mentioned up to that point. Gert McDonald of the United Forties spoke about providing parking for everyone, but I was distracted while she was speaking, so I didn't hear everything she said. If anyone else heard her argument, please fill me in.

A number of people, including Angel Gil and Sherry Gamlin, pointed to the crowding in the schools and asked if there was a way to get more school space to accommodate the increase in population. I agree completely: my son's second grade classroom squeezes 29 kids into a trailer, and it makes things difficult. John Young from City Planning said that when the proposal is finalized it will include an estimate of the potential population increase, but he did not discuss any steps that could be taken to accommodate that increase, either with schools or with transit.

Young said that once the proposal is finalized, it will have to be reviewed by the Community Board, the Borough President, the City Planning Commission and the City Council. Each group will have to hold hearings, and the entire process takes around seven months. I will keep an eye on the proposals and try to make sure that no districts with high parking requirements creep in, but please let me know if you see any.

So far this looks like a good proposal. I appreciate the efforts of Jimmy Van Bramer and his staff, Joe Conley and the Community Board, and the City Planning staff, to make the process accessible and understandable to all.

Jimmy Van Bramer's staff got an updated version of the zoning proposal, dated May 19, and passed the maps on to Christian Murray, who posted them on his Sunnyside Post blog.

The main differences I could find between the February maps that I posted previously and these May maps all relate to commercial zoning along Greenpoint and Roosevelt Avenues.

To understand this, you need to know about commercial overlays. These are zoning districts that are established along avenues for retail businesses serving the neighborhood. They only extend 100-200 feet back from the street. The districts that start with C1- are meant to be 1-2 story buildings, and the ones that start with C2- are a bit higher, and the ones starting with C4- are significantly higher. The second number indicates parking minima, where the ones that end in -1 require lots of parking, those that end in -2 a bit more, and so on.

These avenues currently (PDF) have a commercial overlay C1-2 from 41st to 44th Streets and from 59th to 65th Street, and C2-2 from 50th to 58th and from 65th to the BQE. There is also a district (not an overlay) from 47th Avenue to half a block north of Queens Boulevard and from 44th through 48th Streets that is zoned C4-2.

The February revision of the proposal (PDF) would have changed the overlay from 41st to 44th to C1-3, the overlay from 52nd through 59th and from 65th to the BQE to C2-4, and the overlay from 59th through 65th to C1-4. The area from 47th Avenue to just north of Queens Boulevard was split into a C4-5X zone along Queens Boulevard and a C4-4A zone along Greenpoint and 47th Avenues.

The May 19 draft that Christian posted does away with the commercial zone along Queens Boulevard. Now the area south of the Boulevard is a solid R6A district with a C1-4 overlay along Greenpoint Avenue. That C1-4 overlay continues along Roosevelt Avenue, pretty much all the way to 65th Street.

Overall, I think this change is good. In C1-4 districts, parking requirements are waived unless at least 40 spaces are required. For a supermarket or other retail store, it would have to be at least 40,000 square feet (two-thirds the size of the Stop and Shop on 48th Street) to require any parking at all. That's an improvement over the C1-3 district, which would require 25 parking spaces to be built for a supermarket over 7500 square feet. Ideally, I would prefer C1-5 which has almost no parking requirement at all, but I'd much rather work to get the R4 and R4-1 districts upgraded to R5B. I might prefer more commercial density, but I'm focusing on parking in this discussion.

I'm planning to attend the meeting this Wednesday from 6:30 to 8:30 at Sunnyside Community Services. If you're planning to go and want to coordinate with me, send me an email or leave a comment!