Andrea Bernstein

(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation, May 3) A sign of the times? Spotted yesterday, on Sixth Avenue and Union Street, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Transit systems around the county face deep cuts.

Succumbing to the fiscal realities faced by transit systems across the nation, NJ Transit begins drastic fare hikes and service cuts today. The third largest transit system in the nation will see hikes of 25 percent on commuter and long distance buses -- up to 50 percent if you account for the elimination of off-peak fares. Local buses and light rail will see hikes of up to 10 percent. The cuts are the largest in the three decades, but they won't stave off big service cuts, being phased in later this month.

Two months ago, despite loud opposition from cabbies and some motorists, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the permanent closure of parts of Broadway to automobiles. The pedestrian plazas that were created as result are a blank slate -- and the city has issued an RFP for designs. That contest is closed - but WNYC is hosting it's own (though not for people who've submitted to the DOT. Learn how here.

Listen to Andrea Bernstein's interview with Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance:

[MP3]http://audio.wnyc.org/news/news20100430_timessquare2way_tt.mp3[/MP3]

(WNYC, New York, Matthew Schuerman, April 29)

The headlines today in New York were all about far-off plans to redo LaGuardia Airport.   The head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the airports, says LGA has a host of problems, among them too little space for security screening.

Many tourists know one other thing about LaGuardia: it’s the only major airport in the region *without* a rail link. And Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward said today that’s not going to change, even with the billion-dollar plus renovation. He sees no reason for it.

“LaGuardia is well served by bus service from Manhattan,” Executive Director Chris Ward said today.

He’s right: there is bus service from Manhattan. It’s called the M60. If you are lucky enough to live on the Upper West Side or Harlem, it can take you less than an hour to get there. (Try to finding a place to put your luggage on the crowded bus, however.)

Former Mayor Giuliani toyed with the idea of extending rail service to LaGuardia, but the financially strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority ended up using the planning funds for other purposes. (A local blog, Second Avenue Sagas, explores the complicated logistics that doomed the idea.

Just a few years ago, the much wealthier Port Authority (it gets a lot of its money from drivers via bridge and tunnel tolls) acted the magnanimous transit patron and built a monorail to connect the subway to Kennedy Airport. But Ward doesn’t think that’s necessary at LaGuardia.

“It obviously doesn’t face the traffic problems that Kennedy has,” he said.

If you check out the Port Authority’s website for directions to LaGuardia, it doesn’t even give you the option of choosing to take mass transit there. Instead, you can drive or walk. Walking from WNYC’s offices in lower Manhattan, by the way, would take 3 hours and 17 minutes.

From: PressOffice-ManhattanDA <pressoffice@dany.nyc.gov>
Sent: Thu Apr 29 15:28:36 2010
Subject: DA VANCE STATEMENT ON VERDICT IN PATRICK POGAN TRIAL

It's become a symbol of the conflict between bikers and everyone else -- the endlessly circulated YouTube Video of a police officer shoving a cyclist participating in a demonstration.

This just in, from the AP -- A former New York City police officer has been convicted of lying about a clash with a bike-riding activist. But the ex-officer has been cleared of the assault and harassment charges stemming from the Times Square confrontation.  Jurors delivered their verdict Thursday in the criminal case against Patrick Pogan.  The Manhattan trial underscored tensions between the city's police and a group of pro-cycling demonstrators.  The case also highlighted the growing prevalence of witness videos in law enforcement.

Pogan initially reported that cyclist Christopher Long steered into him and knocked him down in July 2008. A tourist's video replayed on YouTube contradicted Pogan's account.  Pogan testified last week that he was trying to protect himself during the encounter and never meant to misrepresent what happened.

(St. Paul, Minnesota-- Laura Yuen, MPR News) MPR's four-part series on the travails of the Minneapolis-St. Paul light rail project has begun. It's a terrific, in-depth look at what happens when a community decides to re-organize its street space.

From the story --

And now we hear, 'It's a development project; it's not really a transit project at all,'" anti-Central Corridor blogger Eric Hare tells MPR. "So, in the process of being all things for all people -- and making julienne fries on the side -- what is this thing really trying to accomplish? As we get closer to construction, people who believed the project is one of those three things suddenly find that there are all these compromises made along the way, and it's not what they expected."

But proponents point to another line's success.

After that line -- the Hiawatha line -- was built, skeptics who didn't believe Minnesotans would ride big-city trains finally had an on-the-ground example to draw from, said Karri Plowman, director of the Central Corridor Partnership. It's the business coalition that came together six years ago to advance the project.

Just two years after trains started rolling along Hiawatha, the line carried an average weekday ridership of 26,270 -- well above the original projections for the year 2020.

"Very quickly, the numbers in terms of ridership and success became evident," Plowman said.

Listen to part one here.

Part two examines the University of Minnesota's opposition to the line.

It's become a symbol of the culture clash between cyclists and everyone else.

This just in, from the AP: A former New York City police officer has been convicted of lying about a clash with a bike-riding activist. But the ex-officer has been cleared of the assault and harassment charges ...

We’d like to know what YOU think should define the pavement on the new Broadway Plazas. Share your ideas here.

(Washington, DC - David Schultz, WAMU) -- Homeowners and developers, environmentalists and big businesses, motorists and pedestrians - everyone agrees.  Something must be done about Tysons Corner, the massive office park in Northern Virginia's Fairfax County.

Tysons Corner is one of the largest business districts in the country. Several Fortune 500 companies are headquartered there.

I don't have a terribly high opinion of Tysons Corner. For a little more than two years, I worked at an office located right in the heart of Tysons, less than a mile from its massive shopping mall.

Nearly every morning and every afternoon, I battled its soul-crushing traffic jams. Since Tysons is comprised almost entirely of retail and office buildings, few people actually live there. So when the working day ends, everyone gets in their cars all at the same time.

At the peak of rush hour - and especially during the dreaded holiday shopping season - it usually took four or five traffic light cycles to just to pass through an intersection. There were times when, if I didn't leave the office by 4:30, I had to wait until 7:30 to avoid the congestion.

Making matters worse, there were few other options for getting around. Public transit in Tysons Corner was paltry at best. And the area has wide roads with no sidewalks. That created a third rush hour during lunchtime, when workers would get in their cars and drive a quarter mile to the local sandwich shop.

It was a nightmare. Every time I found myself trapped in stop-and-go traffic - which was often - I cursed the regional transportation planners who, with their lassiez-faire land use policies, allowed this to happen.

Now, those regional planners have a chance to make things right.

In a few years, the D.C. subway system will expand out to Tysons Corner. To prepare for the expected boom that will accompany this, Fairfax County is undergoing a total makeover of its zoning laws.  County planners hope this will transform the area into a livable, walkable community that's not entirely dependent on the automobile.

There's a lot at stake here. Depending on how this zoning revamp shakes out, local developers could stand to lose - or gain - tens of millions of dollars.

But while the details of the new Tysons Corner are still very much up in the air, everyone agrees the status quo is unacceptable. Even Stu Mendelson, head of the usually-conservative Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, is calling for change.

"The question isn't whether we transform Tysons," he said at a recent planning commission meeting. "It's how."

Here they are.

(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation, April 27) New York cops are notorious for freely handing out tickets, or so it seems to drivers, parkers, and the occasional cyclist. But one area where they've been seemingly timid is in ticketing bus lane violators. Last year, while reporting a story on the city's experiment with bus rapid transit in the Bronx, I even found an MTA car parked in the bus lane.

As it happens, the MTA was responsible for blocking plans for physically separated bus lanes on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan (coming this fall). The MTA feared delivery trucks would park in bus lanes, bringing buses to a standstill.

So a lot rests on being able to enforce bus lane violations. New York City has been stymied in -- where else? -- Albany, where assembly democrats have for years blocked legislation that would allow the city (don't ask!) to install cameras at intersections to catch red light violators -- and, as it happens, bus lane violators.

Now, as Matthew Schuerman reports from WNYC, the MTA is taking matters into its own hands, sort of, by mounting video cameras on two of the Bronx "select buses" -- the so-called Bx 12. The MTA can 't hand out tickets, but the cameras are designed to see whether software can detect whether cars are actually violating the bus lanes or merely for the "expeditious drop off/pick up of passengers and to make the next right turn," which according to the MTA, is legal.

(Matthew Schuerman, WNYC, April 26)

New York's MTA is investigating "keygate" Transit officials say they will conduct "an immediate audit" of subway emergency gate keys, to try to keep them from being copied and sold. This comes after the Daily News reported that gate keys have been copied and are widely available.

Thomas Prendergast, president of New York City Transit, says that he's taking an inventory of all of the people who have the keys, how many keys there are out right now, and will then take the necessary steps to ensure sure only authorized people have the keys.

Raymond Diaz, chief of the New York Police Department transit bureau, told MTA board members that in at least two stations perpetrators have intentionally jammed MetroCard vending machines. They then opened the security gates with the stolen keys and charged passengers, who have no other recourse, to enter the system. Diaz didn’t specify which stations have been vandalized.

The keys are now widely available for transit personnel as well as for fire and emergency personnel who would need to enter a station in an emergency.

A Daily News reporter obtained the key from a man who says he bought it for $27.

Transit Police say they have arrested 60 people in the past two years for having copied keys.

(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation, April 26) When he was appointed US DOT Commissioner, Ray LaHood was a bit of a cipher outside of Washington. What was known: he was a Republican Congressman from rural Illinois, a friend of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and a recreational biker. So it's been a bit of a surprise to some -- even in the President's circle of advisers -- that LaHood has become such an advocate of sustainable development, biking, and transit. His blog entry for today argues that bike infrastructure is a good thing, even for the ninety percent of Americans who don't regularly bike. Maybe he should debate this with Marty Markowitz?

(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation, April 26) When it comes to saving money from not driving, New York wins big, and Houston loses big, or so says CEOs for Cities. But listen here to find out why not everyone in New York is running over to Macy's to spend that $19 billion.

(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation, April 26) We'll take our lumps.
On Friday, we ribbed the Times for waking up to the planned changes on 34th Street in Manhattan (home to Macy's, the Empire State Building, Penn Station, Madison Square Garden, and beginning in 2010, an end-to-end, fully physically separated Bus Rapid Transit, and a one-block-long pedestrian plaza from the Empire State Building to Macy's). WNYC News had reported on the plan back in February.

But on Saturday, the Gray Lady scooped us fair and square, by being the first to report on a plan to convert part of Broadway north of Union Square to a pedestrian plaza.

The New York Times gives big play today to the proposed changes on 34th Street. The DOT plans have been around for a couple of years, but we caught up with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan when she spoke at a conference on Bus Rapid Transit at NYU in ...

(New York - Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation) The New York Times gives big play today to the proposed changes on 34th Street. The DOT plans have been around for a couple of years, but we caught up with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan when she spoke at a conference on Bus Rapid Transit at New York University in February. The plan calls for a pedestrian/bus-only zone between 5th and 6th Avenues, and eastbound car-traffic only from 5th Avenue, westbound only from 6th Avenue. You may have heard about the plan back then on WNYC News, but here's a bit more: the full audio of my interview with the Commissioner from February 24, where she describes the plan, which she calls "really cool"

Listen here:

And here's a transcript:

(New York - Matthew Schuerman, WNYC) -- In the wake of a well-publicized double-stabbing in a Greenwich Village subway station last month, many hands were wrung about the woeful lack of security cameras in subways.

Turns out that New York's attempts to install security devices in subways have been fraught with questions from the beginning.

In the weeks after the London Underground bombing five years ago, New York City officials repeatedly hammered the region’s transit agency for being unprepared for a similar terrorist attack. Six weeks alter, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority responded with a massive $215 million dollar contract to Lockheed Martin.

But almost immediately, watchdogs and oversight officials began to wonder aloud whether Lockheed could deliver on a high-profile promise: installing cameras that could detect unattended bags on subway platforms.

Fast forward to 2010: Large portions of the contract have failed to deliver what was promised. MTA and Lockheed are fighting in court. And the zooming technology? Didn’t work, because it didn’t take into account the hundreds of people who would be passing in front of, behind, and next to that briefcase.

WNYC's Matthew Schuerman traces the history of the contract, from its original promise until today.

Bike share users register online, and pick up and return bikes at any of 40 stations around Denver (photo: Andrea Bernstein)

(Andrea Bernstein, Transportation Nation) Boston, Minneapolis, and Denver all have been planning roll-outs for major bike share programs this spring, but Denver is first out of the gate. A rainy earth day marked the launch of 400 bikes in the bike-share program, which is designed to significantly augment Denver's public transit system. (Washington DC has been up and running for a while, but with only 100 bucks, it's widely seen as too small to serve that mass transit function). Denver's program is run by B-cycle, which has built-in GPS devices to deter theft -- at any one time the operators will know who has checked out a bike and where it is. Boston and Minneapolis start later this spring. Several dozen European cities have bike-share programs, and New York, San Francisco, and Portland are all in the early stages of development.  Hear from a rider, and a reporter in Denver on the day of the launch: The Takeaway.