Over the last few months I have been interviewing some of the city’s leading transportation policy and planning experts asking them this one question:

In light of the Atlantic Yards project and the all of the other major development taking place in and around Downtown Brooklyn these days, what policy, planning and design ideas should be considered to ensure that the neighborhoods around Atlantic Yards and the transportation network that serves the area remain functional and healthy?

Remarkably, I found that everyone I spoke with, whether from city agencies, advocacy groups or policy think tanks generally presented the same set of ideas. In other words, New York City's transportation and planning communities know how to solve the area's traffic problems. The ideas are there. The question is whether the city can generate the political will and revenue to make these changes happen.

Still, changes start as ideas. So, here are seven ideas that the city, state and private developer Forest City Ratner should seriously consider to ensure that this massive project of 16-towers and a 19,000-seat arena has a chance to work:

1. Improve subway service and facilities.
Fun though it may be to one day call Manhattanites the “bridge and tunnel” crowd, former Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz says that Manhattanites don’t like taking the subway into Brooklyn. Data collected by the Brooklyn Academy of Music shows this to be true. To convince Manhattanites to take the subway to events at Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn’s downtown subway stations must be improved significantly, and train service needs to be more frequent and reliable, particularly during big events. This will require significant funding by the MTA.

2. Create incentives to take transit.
To get people onto trains and buses, Jon Orcutt, president of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, suggests we “build a transit incentive into the basketball ticket.” When people buy event tickets, give them a free or reduced ride on a subway or bus. An interesting version of this idea is being proposed for the 80,000-seat NASCAR track on Staten Island. Tickets to events would be linked directly to mode of travel. Your ticket doesn’t only get you a seat at the racetrack, it also assigns you a parking space, a ride on a ferry, or a seat on a bus. The number of parking spaces around the track has been limited to ensure that Staten Island’s bridges and roads are not overtaxed. By contrast, no such transportation planning has been put forward by the developer of the Atlantic Yards. Rather than computer modeling the area's traffic they are filming the intersection of Flatbush, Atlantic and Fourth, ostensibly, to show that traffic isn’t as bad there as people believe it is. Note to the videographers: Make sure you film the intersection from the pedestrians’ perspective, not just the motorists’.

3. Limit and manage parking space
The hot book in urban planning circles these days is Donald Shoup’s 700-page thriller, The High Cost of Free Parking. It turns out that the single biggest generator of automobile trips is free, abundant parking. Even if Atlantic Yards is built atop the city’s second largest transit hub, if lots of parking space is available, people will use their cars to get there and traffic congestion will increase. If parking is scarce and expensive, people will be far more likely to leave their cars at home and use transit. At Atlantic Yards, Regional Plan Association’s Jeff Zupan said, it is vital that “we not build a big supply of parking that then creates more of an automobile environment.”

To ensure that the surrounding residential streets don’t become de facto arena parking lots, a residential parking permit program needs to be set up in all of the nearby neighborhoods. So that local businesses are not hurt and residential permits aren’t condemned as “elitist,” the permit system should allow for non-residents to park their cars for one or two hours – enough time to shop but not enough time to attend a basketball game.

4. Design a great pedestrian environment.
The intersection of Flatbush, Atlantic and Fourth is, simply, a terrifying place to cross the street. That is because the needs and requirements of vehicular traffic have, for years, been prioritzed above all else. With the amount of pedestrian traffic that an arena and other development would bring, we need to redesign the Crossroads of Brooklyn with the needs and priorities of pedestrians and transit users first in mind. The developer, city and state need to ask themselves: How can we turn this intersection into a truly great public space?

To begin to do this, we should install traffic-calming features where busy thoroughfares meet quiet residential streets along all three avenue corridors. We should not bury pedestrians in underground tunnels, or narrow the sidewalks to accommodate black limo drop-offs and increased vehicular traffic flow. Gehry’s current plan to build big super-blocks with “towers in the park” set way back off the street has to be redesigned. These ideas are proven neighborhood killers.

5. Get Bus Rapid Transit Rolling (BRT)
Cities around the world are using BRT with great success. BRT gives buses their own dedicated lanes and a variety of other features that vastly increase the speed, reliability and, subsequently, the ridership on buses in crowded cities. BRT is relatively cheap and easy to get up and running. The MTA is studying the idea of turning the Flatbush Avenue B41 into a BRT route. “We have to squeeze more transportation performance out of our streets,” Transportation Alternatives’ Director Paul Steely White, said. “The best way to do this is to switch people out of their cars into high-capacity buses.” The cost of BRT, of course, is that cars would be banned from two or even four lanes of Flatbush Avenue, at least during rush hours when the lanes would be dedicated exclusively to buses. If people really want to solve the area’s traffic problems, this is the price that must be paid.

6. Make Brooklyn more bike-friendly
Visiting Northern European cities many Americans discover, as I did, that the bicycle can be a cheap, fast, clean, efficient and extremely pleasant form of urban transportation. As New York City grows more dense, as the price of gasoline ratchets up, and as local and global environmental issues become more urgent, bicycling is emerging as an obvious solution to some of our city’s most pressing problems.

“The highest rates of cycling in the whole city are in Brooklyn,” White said. If we’re thinking towards the future, then the development of Atlantic Yards should improve Brooklyn’s bike network. Likewise, the Atlantic Avenue transit hub should have a Bike Station, a park’n’ride facility where commuters, shoppers and employees can safely park their bikes during the day and evening.

7. Implement congestion pricing
All these ideas are nice, but how do we pay for them? First, it should be remembered that Forest City Ratner is asking for more than $200 million in public subsidies for the Atlantic Yards project. A significant portion of that public money should be invested in improving the public space around the project. It shouldn’t all go into a half-billion-dollar basketball arena, the most expensive ever built.

Second, every transportation expert I spoke to suggested that we take a very serious look at implementing congestion pricing in New York City. Congestion pricing is an automated tolling system that is used to control traffic. London, the world city most analogous to New York, has had remarkable success with congestion pricing. To drive into London’s busy, crowded central business district motorists are automatically charged 8£, or about $14. There are no toll plazas and drivers don’t have to slow down to pay. The system has been a tremendous success, even in the eyes of earlier skeptics. Traffic congestion is down 38 percent, and if you do need to get through London in a car or delivery truck, driving is now fast and reliable. The system has not hurt local business or reduced the number of people visiting Downtown London. Congestion pricing is raising about $175 million a year, all of which is being plowed back into bus, pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure.

Well-served by mass transit, suffering from crippling traffic congestion, and overrun by through-traffic to the free East River bridges, Downtown Brooklyn is a place that should seriously consider the benefits of congestion pricing.

3:22 PM | Link |