Category: New York

Do women pay a transportation ‘pink tax’?

This is a quick note, following my previous post, “Cities for woman: Transit and gendered spaces,” which raised the question of whether city planners and designers take women’s experiences and needs sufficiently into account.

A survey from New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management concluded that women in New York pay, on average $26 to $50 a month more for transportation due to concerns about harassment and safety.

According to an article in amNewYork, the survey took place during September and October and asked New Yorkers about travel habits. Read more here and here. Of the women who responded, 75 percent had experienced harassment or theft on public transportation, compared with 47 percent of male respondents.

And 29 percent of the female respondents, compared with 8 percent of men, said they avoided taking public transportation late at night because of “a perceived safety threat.” From that figure, the report authors estimated women’s higher transportation costs.

You call that an auto mall?

An auto dealership in an urban environment in Manhattan

I was in New York over the weekend for a meeting, and Saturday morning I went out for a quick walk beforehand. I was staying on West 55th Street so I decided to walk west toward the river.

By the time I got down to 11th Avenue I realized I had been walking past a large auto dealership. Sure enough, a look at signage told me this Mercedes dealership was taking up a substantial part of the block.

New York-style dealerships

Nearby was another new-looking, large building selling Audis. Across 11th Avenue was a building with the names for numerous makes of car – Ford, Volvo, Mazda, Jaguar, etc. I had stumbled on an urban auto mall! (It was the Manhattan Automobile Company.)

It seems developers – at least those who are not in Charlotte – are perfectly capable of designing auto dealerships, even facilities housing several dealerships – that sit right on a sidewalk along a city street, and do not require vast surface parking lots designed with the elegance of a Walmart superstore.

Back home in Charlotte, of course, the City Council just unanimously OK’d a rezoning to allow a vast expanse of auto mall asphalt within the quarter-mile walk zone of a to-be-built light rail station. (See “Don’t derail transit areas with an auto mall,” and “University City auto mall rezoning complete.”)

This was after the appointed planning commission recommended it, and after the city planning department recommended it. Those decisions remain a bafflement to me. None of it matches the city’s stated goals for its transit station areas. While in New York, I mentioned this transit-station-area rezoning vote to a former city planning director from another state who now teaches planning at a large state university. His jaw dropped. He was incredulous.

The said thing is, as these photos show, there are creative ways to have both auto dealerships and a pedestrian environment. I’m left to conclude that our local folks may just be too provincial to know better.

Mercedes-Benz Manhattan.

Grid love: NYC’s brutal 1811 plan survives, adapts

Drawing from New York’s earliest years shows now-leveled hills

NEW YORK – It brutally assaulted the land’s natural features. It rejected contemporary ideals of strong city planning in favor of helping business and real estate interests. Its disrespect for existing property lines and uses would be reviled today as government overreach.

In 1811, a three-man commission created and imposed a relentless street grid onto almost all of Manhattan’s then-undeveloped land. The grid ignored hills, ponds, creeks and swamps. With only a few exceptions it mandated that all of the island generally north of Houston Street would hold rectangular blocks – no curving streets, quirky intersections or irregularities to ease the eye. It offered only a few spots for parks or squares, and those generally weren’t built as planned anyway.

But viewed from 200 years later, the famous New York City street grid turns out to have been stunningly resilient, in contrast to the faddish and already failing cul-de-sacs and freeways of the past 60 years. It has accommodated dramatic changes in transportation habits. By creating short blocks and multiple street corners it boosted commerce. By making it easy for people to walk places, and to bump into each other at those same corners, it enhanced the proximity effect – the way random encounters among smart people in a city can spark partnerships, innovations, creativity and build new businesses. That, too, boosted New York’s growing role as the country’s top business hub.

With numbered avenues and streets logically marching northward and westward, the easy-to-navigate map also helped the city welcome and assimilate newcomers: foreign and domestic immigrants as well as millions of tourists. Its ease of use projected a subliminal welcome mat. Contrast that with the you’re-not-wanted-here feeling that Charlotte’s confusing maze of Myers Park streets projects to outsiders.

I spent a large chunk of Saturday afternoon at the new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York: “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan,1811-2011.” It might sound boring. It was anything but.

The exhibit calls the plan “a vision of brazen ambition” and one that “required vigilant enforcement.” The grid was not hailed as brilliant planning, in an era that saw more sophisticated plans for the District of Columbia, Paris and Savannah. And one of the interesting insights I gained was the recognition that, if I’d been writing in 1811, I would probably have criticized the plan for its disdain of natural features, its disregard for existing farmland and its general lack of elegance, in favor of enhancing commerce. But as the New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman writes, “It’s true that Manhattan lacks the elegant squares, axial boulevards and civic monuments around which other cities designed their public spaces. But it has evolved a public realm of streets and sidewalks that creates urban theater on the grandest level. No two blocks are ever precisely the same because the grid indulges variety, building to building, street to street.”

If you can take it in before the exhibit closes April 15, I recommend it.

And if you’re from Charlotte, it’s worth thinking for a minute what this city would be like if its development, like New York’s, had taken place under the guidance of a plan that assumed – admittedly with arrogance and grandiosity – that a small village was destined for big growth and would need city streets, city blocks and city corners, multiple route choices for traffic (whether horse and buggy or Hummers) and a layout to make walking as convenient as driving.

It’s too late for Charlotte. Retrofitting will be necessary over time, but that’s hugely expensive, contentious and politically fraught. Notice what happens when the city tries to connect streets between neighborhoods. People go nuts at the prospect that city streets near them will carry traffic. In the largest city between Washington and Atlanta, they are shocked at the thought of traffic. Go figure.

Better to have done it differently from the get-go.

Hey fellas, look out! I’m walking here!

What kind of drivers are most to be feared if you’re a pedestrian in New York City? If you’re thinking cabbies, think again. If you’re about to cough up one of those hoary jokes about women drivers – don’t. A New York Times article about a study from the New York City department of transportation tells us:

” … In 80 percent of city accidents that resulted in a pedestrian’s death or serious injury, a male driver was behind the wheel. (Fifty-seven percent of New York City vehicles are registered to men.)”

The article notes that even though a lot of pedestrians are killed in New York traffic, “New York is now far safer to travel within than most other American cities, with half the per capita fatality rate of Atlanta, Detroit or Los Angeles. But New York still trails world capitals like Berlin, London, Paris and Tokyo, all of which are statistically safer.”

The report itself lists a number of key findings. Here’s one: “Traffic fatalities in 2009 were down by 35% from 2001.” Here’s another that made me chuckle: “Most New Yorkers do not know the city’s standard speed limit is 30 m.p.h.” I think drivers the world over must be about the same. Everyone wants to go faster than the limit. For the record, Charlotte’s standard speed limit is 35 m.p.h. unless otherwise posted.

Let’s talk window shopping

The Caldwell Street item sparked some interesting back-and-forth (here’s a link) about whether one-way or two-way makes much of a difference for pedestrian comfort.

One commenter points out that the newly reconfigured intersection of Stonewall and Caldwell is so wide that it isn’t pedestrian friendly (or bicycle friendly or even motorist friendly) at all. Others say sidewalk width and street-level retail are more important.
Here’s my take: They’re all important.

If the sidewalk is narrow (one commenter mentions Seventh Street uptown between Seventh Street Station parking deck and Tryon) pedestrians will be turned off.

If there’s nothing interesting to look at – that is, if you’re walking on a wide sidewalk but you’re going past a vacant corporate plaza, a surface parking lot, a parking deck, a blank office wall, or even windows into office buildings – pedestrians will be turned off.

And if the cars are zooming past, as they tend to do on one – way streets when the lights are timed to let you cruise at 35 and hit them all green – then pedestrians will be turned off.

So reverting one-way to two-way is a good first step but if it’s the only step it may be a waste of time. I continue to maintain that street-level retail shopping (or as the late jeweler and City Council member Al Rousso used to cry, “Window-shopping! We need window-shopping!”) is what’s key for uptown, and it’s going to be incredibly difficult to achieve because:

• We’ve spent two decades demolishing storefront buildings until the few that remain are too far from each other to create any retail synergy.

• The city’s uptown zoning still allows new development without street-front retail. It requires ground-floor retail, not street-front. Thus we get Founder’s Hall and the shops inside office towers. To window-shop requires leaving the sidewalks and streets entirely. Unless you’re in an urban scene as dense with stores and lively sidewalks as, say, New York or Paris, that’s anti-urban.

NYC banning traffic on Broadway

(Photos show Herald Square before and after, courtesy of www.nyc.gov)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week he’ll bar auto traffic from several blocks of Broadway. It’s a way to try to reduce congestion in the Times Square and Herald Square areas. While it may sound like a crackpot idea, there’s some counterintuitive evidence that, in other cities where streets were barred to traffic, the overall traffic did, in fact, diminish. Newsweek has a rather in-depth article on the proposal and the underlying thinking.

The New York Times web site has a kind of pro-con debate among urban observers such as architect/planner Alex Garvin and the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole.

Conventional wisdom in the U.S. has been that pedestrian malls didn’t work – cities that tried them gave them up. Even our own Rock Hill, which turned its downtown into a covered-roof shopping mall, eventually had to pop the top and revert to a more traditional downtown, complete with sky, clouds, rain and sun.

But, as the Newsweek article points out, New York is unique among U.S. cities, due to its population density, rigid street grid, high proportion of residents without cars and excellent public transit services. It’s certainly an idea worth watching. That said, Charlotte doesn’t have density, a grid or extensive transit, so anything learned from the NYC experiment isn’t likely to be applicable here, regardless.