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05/19/10
Zoning revisions in Sunnyside and Woodside
The Department of City Planning has initiated a process to rezone Sunnyside and part of Woodside. They have their agenda, developers have their agenda, and various residents and business owners have theirs.
Here's my agenda: I think Sunnyside and Woodside have too much off-street parking. Off-street parking encourages people to own cars, and to drive, as shown in this PDF. That's bad for the neighborhood. Worse is that new buildings are required to have parking that's really not necessary. The result is that all the new apartment buildings have garages and curb cuts, messing up the pedestrian experience and encouraging people to own cars in the neighborhood.
Business owners in Sunnyside and Woodside should also be in favor of reducing parking minimums. None of them have much customer parking, so most customers arrive by foot. Neighborhood residents who own cars are often tempted to drive to competing businesses outside the neighborhood with more parking. Thus, it is in the interest of business owners to keep residential parking low.
The best thing would be if we could scrap all parking minimums, bringing Sunnyside and Woodside into the same category as Long Island City and most of Manhattan, but as far as I can tell that requires a change to the zoning resolution, which would need approval by the full Council and is thus outside the scope of these hearings.
The next best thing is to push the zoning towards zones with lower parking minimums, and resist pressure in the other direction. We should also keep in mind waivers for small numbers of spaces required under parking minimums. If someone wants a zone with a particular height, I would like to encourage them to go for the subtype with the least parking required, as follows:
- R4/R4A/R4B or less (100%) -> R5B (66%, waive up to 1 per lot). R4B (100%, but allowing waiver) is an improvement, but would still give us lots of curb cuts.
- R5/R5A (100%) -> R5B or R5D (66%, waive up to 1 per lot)
- R6 (70%, waive up to 5) -> R6A or R6B (50%, waive up to 5)
- R7-1 or R7B (60%, waive up to 5) -> any other R7 category (50%, waive up to 15)
- R8B -> any other R8 category
The good news is that the City Planning proposal already has mostly low-parking-requirement zones: R5B, R5D, R6A and R7A. There are some areas that have too-high parking requirements in the proposal: three zones in Woodside that are R4-1, and two in Sunnyside (47th Street and Sunnyside Towers) that are R4. These should be R5B. Sunnyhills and the Phipps Gardens would remain R4 under the proposal, which doesn't make any sense; they should be R7-2.
I hope you will agree with me about the need to keep parking minimums low and waivers high. If you do, please go to meetings and support this agenda. If you have another agenda (changing the density, for example), you may be able to get my support if you also argue for a lower parking minimum.
To help you make up your own minds, here are documents and maps about the proposed Sunnyside and Woodside rezoning, courtesy of Thomas Smith and Penny Lee at the Department of City Planning:
01/29/10
Paris will roll out two-way bike routes in 2010
Paris développe ses doubles sens cyclables en 2010. La République du Centre, January 10, 2010.
Over the course of the year, Paris will gradually extend two-way cycling in 30 kph zones.
The Second and Eleventh arrondissements (districts) of Paris will see changes in mid-January as work begins. Marking will start in the Eighteenth and Twentieth arrondissements in mid-February, according to the Mayor's office.
Two-way cycle routes consist of two lanes, one open to both cars and bicycles, the other available only to cyclists. Bicycles are thus allowed to ride in directions that are illegal for cars, giving them greater mobility.
After the Second, Eleventh, Eighteenth and Twentieth arrondissements, all the other neighborhoods of the French capital will benefit in turn from this improvement and special dispensation. All in all, more than 60 neighborhoods will introduce two-way cycle routes by the end of the year.
The mayor's office is taking advantage of an interpretation of the traffic laws allowing cyclists to ride in either direction on streets where the speed limit is 30 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour) or less, when authorized by law enforcement agencies. Many other municipalities in France have already adopted this arrangement, including Bordeaux, Nantes, Strasbourg and the Paris suburbs of Colombes, Montreuil and Issy-les-Moulineaux.
Two-way cycle traffic is also found in other countries, particularly in Canada (Montreal), Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, Germany and Denmark.
Paris's campaign to encourage cycling is bearing fruit. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of cyclists on the streets of the capital jumped 93%. The arrival of Velib' in July 2007 fit with this pattern: according to surveys conducted by the city, on June 19, 2007 there were 36,396 bicycles ridden on the streets of Paris, and 57,846 on October 16 of that year, of which 37% were Velib' bicycles.
Since that date, on average 30% of the bicycles ridden in Paris have belonged to the bicycle rental system, and the number of bicycles has consistently grown month after month.
01/22/10
Van Bramer, Nolan, Quinn, Gianaris call for Midtown Tunnel bus
The MTA is doing track work on the #7 line to improve speed and reliability. That's good. As they have done for previous track work projects, they will be shutting down the line between Queensboro Plaza and Times Square for the next seven weekends. That's bad.
The N, R and E trains will be running, and people coming from points east will be able to transfer. The MTA usually runs shuttle buses for people to get to and from the three stations in Long Island City with no service. That's good. But the transfers can add five to ten minutes to a trip. Worse, the shuttle buses don't go to Manhattan; they stop at Queensboro Plaza, where passengers have to change for the N. For the next several weekends, people who are normally fifteen minutes from Grand Central will spend fifteen minutes on the bus just to get to the N, which doesn't even go to Grand Central. That's bad.
What's especially frustrating for LIC residents is that many of them live only five minutes by car from the Queens Midtown Tunnel. If they could walk through the tunnel, they could get to Manhattan faster than by taking the shuttle bus. Those who own cars can drive into Manhattan if they want to deal with the traffic and the hassle of finding parking. Those who don't own cars are stuck with the shuttle bus.
Last year, in response to a previous service disruption, Councilmember Eric Gioia held a rally asking the MTA to run buses through the tunnel to Grand Central. Cap'n Transit took that a step further and suggested running the buses on the 34th Street bus lanes to Penn Station, so that travelers could switch to the subway at Penn Station, Herald Square or Park Avenue. He produced maps showing that, according to Google directions, when there is no traffic (as on weekends), buses can get to Penn Station in ten minutes from Ravenswood, Dutch Kills, Sunnyside or Greenpoint. In fifteen minutes they can get to Penn Station from the Triboro Bridge, Jackson Heights, Maspeth, Bushwick or Williamsburg. Of course, if they made stops in between it would take a little longer; the point is that lots of people want to go to Manhattan, and a bus could get them there pretty darn quick.
Map: Cap'n Transit
As far as I know, the MTA never responded to Gioia or to Cap'n Transit. They ran the inconvenient shuttle buses, and that was it. Now they're planning to do it again. This morning, Gioia's successor, Jimmy Van Bramer, held another rally asking for a tunnel bus. He was joined by Astoria Assemblymember Mike Gianaris (who has announced that he is running to represent this area in the State Senate next year), Assemblymember Cathy Nolan and Council Chair Christine Quinn.
WNYC's Brian Zumhagen was actually able to get a response from the MTA. An unnamed spokesman says that "shuttle buses directly to Grand Central would create big traffic tie-ups in Long Island City and on the East Side of Manhattan." It's not clear why they would cause any more tie-ups in LIC than the buses to Queens Plaza, or why they would cause any significant tie-ups in weekend traffic. That comment shows that the MTA is looking for reasons not to accommodate riders.
At this point it remains to be seen whether all that star power will have the desired effect. If you care about this issue, I suggest that you contact Jimmy or Cathy and ask how you can help.
10/25/09
Spatial narratives
Jarrett Walker has another thought-provoking post up, this time on spatial vs. narrative navigators, linking to a magazine article that gives more background. In the comments, Russ links to a paper(PDF) about the effect that the Tube Map has on people's mental maps of London.
The distinction between spatial and narrative navigation makes a lot of sense to me, but disagree with the way that Jarrett seems to set them up as a zero-sum game - either you're good at mental maps, or you're good at remembering narratives, or you're mediocre at both. This portrayal is supported by the Maguire study discussed in the article that indicated that London cabbies who create too big of a mental map wind up with hippocampi that are shrunk in the front. But I feel like I'm relatively good at spatial navigation and not so bad at narrative navigation, so I think it's possible to develop both - at the expense of whatever else you could be learning, of course, like how to pick up women.
An interesting point in that area: when I developed my prototype English to American Sign Language machine translation system (PDF), the biggest obstacle were phrases like "winds SSW 30 mph gusty near canyons."
I asked a native signer and professional interpreter the best way to say "gusty near canyons" in ASL, and she drew a map of Albuquerque in the air, pointed to the canyons with a topic marking nonmanual, and made the sign for "wind" with emphasis. I asked her if it could be said another way, just with the sign for "canyon," but she said that the map would be much more natural for a native signer.
To get a machine translation system to handle that would not only require a kind of sophisticated mapping subsystem that's not usually found in these programs, but also a lot of background knowledge of geographic features - for every locale that has weather reports. It made me realize that not only is ASL much more complicated than I had given it credit for, but it's a lot harder to write down than spoken languages. In the terms of Jarrett's post, it seems clear that the National Weather Service was using narrative description, while the interpreter I consulted was using spatial description.
While I would agree with the comment left by Pantheon that spatial navigation is more effective than narrative navigation, particularly when it's done by computers, I strongly disagree with his condemnation of narrative navigators, or of inferior navigators in general. Complaining about people who have difficulty finding their way across town is like complaining about bad spelling or malapropisms. In some cases you can make the case that people should develop these skills betters, but for a lot of them it's too late to learn. There's a range of ability along both axes, and a transit agency that only caters to riders within certain limits will run the risk of alienating riders.
10/21/09
Gertrude Stein on Paris
I found this book in the library. To be honest I didn't get into it enough to finish it before I had to bring it back, but there were a few good quotes. The first one relates to this post from the Streetsblog Network.
There are two things that french animals do not do, cats do not fight much and do not howl much and chickens do not get flustered running across the road, if they start to cross the road they keep on going which is what french people do too.
Anybody driving a car in Paris must know that. Anybody leaving the sidewalk to go on or walking anywhere goes on at a certain pace and that pace keeps up and nothing startles them nothing frightens them nothing makes them go faster or slower nothing not the most violent or unexpected noise makes them jump, or change their pace or their direction. If anybody jumps back or jumps at all in the streets of Paris you can be sure they are foreign not french. That is peaceful and exciting.
It turns out that the behavior Stein observes in the second quote is affected by economics:
Sarah Bernhardt made me see the thin arms of frenchwomen. When I came to Paris and saw the little midinettes and Montmartoises they all had them. It was only many years later when the styles changed, in those days they wore long skirts, that I realised what sturdy legs went with those thin arms. That is what makes the french such good soldiers the sturdy legs, thin arms and sturdy legs, if you see what I mean, peaceful and exciting.
That is what makes all the french able to ride up hill on bicycles the way they do, no hill is so steep but that slowly pedalling up and up they go, men and girls and little children, the sturdy legs and thin arms.
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