Curbed NY: All Posts by Dave ColonLove where you live2020-02-18T11:24:26-05:00https://ny.curbed.com/authors/dave-colon/rss2020-02-18T11:24:26-05:002020-02-18T11:24:26-05:0010 tips for riding NYC transit like a pro
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<p>Give yourself extra time, get an app, and more tips for navigating NYC’s mass transit</p> <p id="XpDcn7">If you’re not from New York City—or if you haven’t lived here for so long that you’re basically a native—you might be used to getting around with a thing called a “car,” a two-ton box with four wheels that runs on gas. </p>
<p id="asQr5J">But that’s not the best mode of transit for many New Yorkers; our traffic is <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/2/6/16979696/new-york-city-traffic-congestion-second-worst">among the worst</a> in the world, and it’s not getting better anytime soon (at least, not without <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/8/1/17631480/nyc-subway-transit-crisis-congestion-pricing-progressive">congestion pricing</a>). If you want to stay sane (and not devote a good chunk of your life to dealing with alternate-side parking regulations), it’s best to embrace mass transit in New York—specifically, the subways and buses. </p>
<p id="6qhVCg">Pieces of the former <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/6/20/17485564/nyc-subway-brooklyn-ceiling-collapse-mta">may be falling</a> from the ceiling, and speeds for the latter <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/4/20/17263192/mta-select-bus-service-ridership-decline-bus-speeds-report">may be slowing</a>, but New York’s subway and bus have some things going for them: They’re relatively cheap, open 24/7, and go through all five boroughs (yes, even Staten Island). </p>
<p id="vxjf6h">Whether you’re a visitor or a new transplant, you may want some advice to feel more at ease in New York’s vast subway system—so here are 10 tips for navigating the subway and bus like a pro (though we can’t help you with the MetroCard swipe, short of telling you that it’s all in the wrist).</p>
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<p id="9pW8JJ"><strong>1. Plan way, way ahead. </strong>Subway delays are, unfortunately, a part of life, and nothing short of courageous political leadership <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/7/9/17549182/nyc-subway-state-of-emergency-andrew-cuomo-repairs">to bring about the necessary upgrades</a> that will drag the subway into the 21st century will fix that. Until then, no matter what the MTA or Google Maps tells you about how long it’s going to get somewhere, do not believe their lies. Leave early—15 minutes, an hour, whatever makes you comfortable—to get somewhere if you really need to be on time. At worst, you’re a little early and have time to kill, which is better than grinding your teeth as the train inches forward due to signal problems at the next station.</p>
<p id="PGMGDh"><strong>2. Download an app.</strong> No one has ever accused the MTA of being ahead of the curve, and in the year of our lord 2018, the agency <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.mta.mymta">finally rolled out an app</a> that covers its subway, bus and commuter rail services. You can save frequent trips, pull up subway stations and bus stops near you, get service updates, and find all sorts of bus and train maps. (Another good app option is <a href="https://transitapp.com/">Transit</a>, if you find the MTA’s beta version to be too clunky.)</p>
<p id="0HreSx">You’ll need a separate <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mta.mobileapp">e-Tix app</a> to buy a virtual ticket for the Long Island Rail Road. The MTA’s <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/5/22/18617849/nyc-subway-mta-omny-contactless-payment-system">contactless payment system</a>, <a href="https://omny.info/">OMNY</a>, doesn’t have its own app—yet—but you can use a digital wallet on your smartphone to tap and go. </p>
<p id="erVOxb"><strong>3. Unlimited or not unlimited?</strong> Depending on your daily commute, you might find that you do better with an unlimited MetroCard, which comes in two flavors: a 30-day MetroCard for $127 and a 7-day for $33. Take some time to see how much you ride the subway to figure out how much you’re on it before committing to something like a 30-day card every month. You just might find that you walk or bike everywhere (especially since a one-year Citi Bike membership is just $169); in that case, buy an occasional $40 MetroCard, or get a 7-day card if you’re entertaining a visitor who you’ll be riding around with all week. And if you <em>do</em> have an unlimited, be sure to <a href="https://www.wnyc.org/story/can-i-get-swipe-can-we-get-trouble/">swipe it forward</a>.</p>
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<img alt="New York City’s Subway Fare Increases, Amid Rider Dissatisfaction Over Delays And Outages" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/96vF5S3e01r32Y7qHAe6VfL18U0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13176217/467354322.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Keep your MetroCard refilled, and remember—the key to a good swipe is all in the wrist. </figcaption>
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<p id="wH0GUu"><strong>4. Don’t forget to refill your MetroCard.</strong> You know what sucks? Running to catch a train, hearing it pull in as you swipe, and only then realizing you don’t have enough money on your MetroCard. (This also applies when running to make a bus.) To avoid this, pay attention to how much is left on your card when you swipe in. If you’re under $2.75, just fill up again at the station when you exit, which will help you avoid getting stuck behind a family of tourists trying to figure out the MetroCard machine as you watch the time tick down on the arrival sign (assuming it’s working).</p>
<p id="YIeyae"><strong>5. Or just snag a pre-tax card.</strong> If you’re one of these fancy people with a full-time job (look at you and your employer-based health insurance), you can save a little money thanks to the <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dca/about/commuter-benefits-law.page">city’s pre-tax MetroCard offer</a>. Yes, a 30-day card will still cost you $127, but that $127 will be deducted from your pay before taxes, which is a pretty good deal. The Riders Alliance <a href="http://www.ridersny.org/commuter-benefits-savings-calculator/">even made a calculator</a> so you can see how much money you can save per year with the pre-tax option.</p>
<p id="HPv70O"><strong>6. Get to know the stations you frequent.</strong> You might be tempted, at the end of a long and exhausting commute, to just get off your train and leave it at that. But it’s worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with your most-visited stops. Walking down in an entrance that puts you closer to where a train stops—crucial on, say, the C or G lines, where trains don’t always extend for the full length of the track—could be the difference between getting where you’re going and waiting around for for the next train. </p>
<p id="zKZNkR"><strong>7. Be mindful of what you eat (or drink).</strong> There may be train systems where you can’t scarf down your morning bagel, but New Yorkers don’t buy that sort of thinking—you can eat a BEC or have a cup of coffee without someone threatening to call the cops. But your odds of becoming a viral photo or video increase along with the olfactory intensity, so try to avoid chowing down on anything too strong in order to spare your fellow commuters. (This also goes for food that will make the subway messier than it already is.) </p>
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<cite>Shutterstock.com</cite>
<figcaption>When you enter a subway car, don’t just stand there—keep moving inside. </figcaption>
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<p id="VKeDAu"><strong>8. Keep moving, especially when you leave a station.</strong> It bears repeating: When you get to the exit of a station, walk some steps forward, even if you don’t know where you are. This will prevent people from walking directly into your back—or worse, stopping until you start moving and therefore causing a traffic jam of people trying to leave. Getting your bearings is important, but don’t jam up the works by not getting the hell out of the way. </p>
<p id="7z952u"><strong>9. Observe other common-sense etiquette rules. </strong>The subway is a cramped space that has to fit a lot of people, but you can try to make the ride slightly easier for yourself and others. Stand to to the side to let people off the train; put your backpack or messenger bag on the ground in crowded trains; avoid filling the seats next to you with all your stuff <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2016/3/11/11206942/transit-etiquette-manspreading-nyc-museum-exhibit">or your sense of entitlement</a> ; and walk all the way into the train instead of stopping six inches after walking through the doors. </p>
<p id="CZqqTY">Admittedly, you’re going to come across dozens of people who violate these etiquette rules, or clip their toenails, or even <a href="https://twitter.com/dorseyshaw/status/1019300972202512389">bring a whole moped on the car and park it in front of the doors</a>. The truth—as any exhausted, beaten down New Yorker will tell you—is that often, there <em>are</em> <em>no rules</em> on the subway beyond the New York City Criminal Code, no matter what any subway etiquette guides might tell you. But it never hurts to have a little bit of spatial awareness. </p>
<p id="b2pvF4"><strong>10. If all else fails, get a bike.</strong> Everything in the city is dangerous to some degree, we’ve even got <a href="https://twitter.com/NYCMayorsOffice/status/1017045081956802560">coyotes running around like they own the place</a>. So, don’t let someone tell you riding a bike is “too dangerous,” especially as the city <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2017/12/20/16798982/nyc-protected-bike-lane-expansion-vision-zero">continues to embrace more bike infrastructure</a> across the five boroughs.</p>
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https://ny.curbed.com/2018/9/28/17913948/new-york-subway-bus-etiquette-guide-tipsDave Colon2019-05-06T12:21:08-04:002019-05-06T12:21:08-04:00Elizabeth Street Garden’s future debated at raucous City Council committee hearing
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<p>The debate over the future of the open space—garden or affordable housing—is now in the City Council’s hands</p> <p id="UfKiWE">The <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/1/23/18194444/nolita-new-york-affordable-housing-elizabeth-street-garden">fight over Nolita’s Elizabeth Street Garden</a> moved to City Hall last Thursday, as a pair of dueling rallies preceded an hours-long, and occasionally feisty, hearing by a City Council subcommittee over the future of the land the garden sits on. It’s the latest step in the process to determine whether the garden will remain as-is or become a 100 percent affordable housing development.</p>
<p id="5fCg5A">Garden advocates rallied on both Wednesday and Thursday to ask the City Council to vote against the new development, known as Haven Green, and instead save the Elizabeth Street Garden. They were joined by advocates for the Mandela Garden and Pleasant Village Community Garden, two gardens in Harlem that are also slated for development by the city. </p>
<p id="nrFFkb">Echoing previous statements from garden supporters, Elizabeth Street Garden executive director Joseph Reiver blasted the Haven Green development as giving public land to private hands at Wednesday’s rally. After the rally, Reiver told Curbed that he believes Elizabeth Street Garden should be turned into a conservation land trust rather than a Parks Department space, saying that it would lead to more community-focused private management of the space. </p>
<p id="qSLBFb">“I believe the way we can really save the Elizabeth Street Garden as the unique space that it is, is as a conservation land trust, and many of our members do,” Reiver said, adding that he’d be happy to go over other potential futures for the garden if it isn’t developed. The difference between “privatizing” the spaces in that instance, according to Reiver, “is that it would be run by a non-profit that’s run by the community, and they’re the ones who are governing the space, and that in turn benefits the community.” </p>
<p id="MowT6C">“[Haven Green] is privatizing the land with luxury retail, privatizing it with profit, it’s privatizing it in a completely different way,” he continued.</p>
<p id="Dkapnf">The next day, Haven Green’s supporters rallied prior to the City Council hearing, with speakers from Habitat From Humanity, building developer Pennrose, and organizations like Housing Works and the Cooper Square Community Land Trust arguing that the affordable housing/open space design of Haven Green is a necessary compromise to fight the city’s housing crisis. They also spoke to <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/5/1/18524416/nolita-elizabeth-street-garden-haven-green?utm_campaign=ny.curbed&utm_content=entry&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter">the tensions of wealth and class that have bubbled up</a> in the fight over the development.</p>
<p id="5Q6xMO">Jim Fouratt, an LGBTQ activist going back to the Stonewall uprising, cast the fight for the garden as one fought by wealthy NIMBYs who are telling a different history of the land. “A longtime Italian resident of the neighborhood had a sweetheart deal with the city for what has become a very valuable piece of property,” Fouratt told the assembled crowd. “When Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg, at the pushing of [City Council member] Margaret Chin, designated the publicly owned space for housing, what did he do? He invited the rich women of SoHo to come and squat on that land and build quote unquote a garden containing his statuary which was his business. That’s the story. How dare these rich people and their allies confuse the issue, it’s selfish.”</p>
<p id="ZzRQV2">“In a crisis, you don’t ask what somebody can do across town,” K. Webster, a Haven Green supporter and local activist said near the end of an impassioned speech, referring to the suggestion from garden advocates that the city build housing on an empty lot one mile away from the Elizabeth Street Garden. “You ask yourself ‘What can I do in my neighborhood?’”</p>
<p id="kGpNkr">Council Members for the most part listened to the testimony delivered by speakers on both sides of the issue, though Chin took the opportunity to ask representatives from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development how Haven Green would remain in the city’s affordable housing program for longer than 60 years. HPD’s Leila Bozorg said that there were “financial incentives” for Haven Green developer Pennrose to remain. In particular, Bozorg told the Council that HPD is “essentially providing a mortgage for the construction of this project, and we have the terms set up in a way so that there’s interest growing over time over those 60 years on our mortgage, and that becomes a very large balloon payment at the end of that 60 years that the developer is responsible for paying back unless they extend the affordability with us.”</p>
<p id="ntGQr8">Where the City Planning Commission hearing <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/3/14/18265979/nolita-affordable-housing-elizabeth-street-garden-cpc">had in-person testimony</a> from Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who supports Haven Green, Thursday’s hearing featured testimony in favor of the garden from state Assembly member Deborah Glick, who represents pieces of lower Manhattan that include the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, and the East Village.</p>
<p id="1Hkdnu">Glick urged the city to instead situate affordable housing at 388 Hudson Street, a site garden proponents have floated as a better alternative. “It is disappointing to me that residents are asked to choose between critically-needed affordable housing and vital open public space,” Glick said during her testimony. “These two elements are essential to the quality of life in our increasingly dense city. The concept of livable communities is often lost in the equation in favor of pursuing other public policy goals, even when more appropriate and robust opportunities exist elsewhere.”</p>
<p id="IPAJa8">Glick also suggested that the fight over the garden was an example of the wrong kind of city planning, which deserves more local input and control. “In the case of the Elizabeth Street Garden, the community uses this space as a park, it has all the characteristics of a park,” she stated. “In theory the community board process should allow for local control and discussion about how city-owned sites can be used in the future. It is a false choice.”</p>
<p id="nNUFH9">The hearing was also occasionally raucous, as uniformed City Council security guards had to tell audience members multiple times to stop cheering and taunting. The phrase “sex abuser” was yelled on two different instances by an audience member after pro-Haven Green speakers were invited to testify, and one member of the audience fled the Council chamber after screaming “liar liar pants on fire” at Fouratt before his testimony. </p>
<p id="1zrkHK">The committee didn’t actually vote on whether the project would be allowed to move forward at the conclusion of the hearing, and subcommittee chair Adrienne Adams told Curbed that there isn’t a date set for the vote yet. While the City Council has a long tradition of deferring to local council members on the subject of land use issues, Adams didn’t give Curbed any clue as to how she might vote, instead saying that “I was very grateful for everyone that spoke today on both sides of the issue. It’s a very important issue, and I think it was very important that all sides be heard. There’s still a lot to consider and I’ve really made no decision one way or the other yet.”</p>
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https://ny.curbed.com/2019/5/6/18531167/nolita-elizabeth-street-garden-haven-green-city-councilDave Colon2019-04-25T13:34:32-04:002019-04-25T13:34:32-04:00DOT will implement Amsterdam Avenue safety improvements despite community objections (updated)
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<figcaption>Protestors at a recent CB9 meeting. | Courtesy of Transportation Alternatives</figcaption>
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<p>“When there’s the safety of my constituents on the line, I don’t think the delay is an option”</p> <p id="a3khv0">New York City’s Department of Transportation announced that it will implement much-needed safety improvements along Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem, following <a href="https://www.silive.com/crime/2019/03/woman-26-killed-by-alleged-drugged-driver-in-harlem-a-staten-islander-talented-artist.html">the March hit-and-run death of pedestrian Erica Imbasciani on West 141st Street</a>.</p>
<p id="TA5GTz">The news comes after a trio of Manhattan elected officials asked the DOT to overrule the veto that Community Board 9 gave to a street safety redesign <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/03/03/dot-proposes-painted-bike-lanes-not-protection-for-amsterdam-above-110th/">that’s been pitched for two years</a>. </p>
<p id="gDw8He">Council Member Mark Levine (who represents the street in question), Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, and state Senator Robert Jackson all signed a letter obtained by Curbed that expressed the trio’s “unequivocal support of the Department of Transportation’s proposed street redesign on Amsterdam Avenue between 110th Street and 155th Street, and request that the Department immediately move forward with implementing this proposal.” </p>
<p id="ys07PU">While community board support isn’t required for a safety improvement (and Council Member Antonio Reynoso <a href="https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/04/11/want-a-bigger-bike-network-reduce-community-boards-role-says-one-local-pol/">wants to move forward on safety improvements regardless of that support</a>), the DOT tends to seek community board approval before instituting redesigns. But in this case, the DOT and the de Blasio administration decided to move forward without the CB’s approval. </p>
<p id="4BwDBQ">“The changes we will bring to Amsterdam Avenue this summer are proven measures that will calm traffic and create safer spaces for pedestrians and cyclists,” DOT commissioner Polly Trottenberg said in a statement. “We thank the community’s elected officials—Borough President Brewer, Council Member Levine and State Senator Jackson—for their leadership and unqualified support for a project that we believe will save lives.”</p>
<p id="Xh3LNZ">Levine and Brewer <a href="https://patch.com/new-york/harlem/city-postpones-bike-lane-plan-harlems-amsterdam-ave-report">previously backed the street redesign</a>, but Jackson is a new supporter of the traffic calming measure that would remove a north and south car lane from each side of the street, while adding left turn bays and painted bike lanes on those 45 blocks in Harlem. </p>
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<cite>NYC Department of Transportation</cite>
<figcaption>A visual of the proposed changes to Amsterdam Avenue. </figcaption>
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<p id="rlOTME">The letter was an escalation from Levine’s previous efforts to work with CB9, whose leadership has disputed the <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2018/10/16/outrage-dot-delays-lifesaving-amsterdam-avenue-redesign-in-fight-with-nimbys/">DOT’s data on car ownership rates</a> in the neighborhood, and also <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/15/de-blasio-punts-again-on-safety-improvements-for-amsterdam-avenue-despite-carnage/">claimed that</a> the proposed measures would lead to increased pollution in a community that already deals with high asthma rates. </p>
<p id="GQvje8">CB9 president Padmore John recently <a href="http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2019/apr/11/importance-traffic-safety-mcb9/">wrote an editorial for the Amsterdam News</a>, in which he claimed the redesign wouldn’t have saved Imbasciani’s life. He wrote that her “tragic death was caused by an impaired driver, as per police investigations, therefore if we were to prevent this tragedy, addressing illegal substance use in our community would be the right recourse” and that the advocates had “another agenda” besides attempting to cut down on injuries and fatalities.</p>
<p id="0ZpgYk">“There is absolutely no evidence linking road diets to increased asthma,” Transportation Alternatives’ Thomas DeVito told Curbed. “The way to make our air cleaner is to make our streets safer and more attractive for walking, biking, and mass transit use. Maintaining a dangerous speedway on Amsterdam Avenue—or anywhere else—is not the way to cleaner air.”</p>
<p id="hGOEYJ">In <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/amsterdam-110-155-cb9-dec2017.pdf">DOT’s own presentation on the proposed redesign</a>, the department showed that double-digit traffic injuries happened at almost every intersection along Amsterdam Avenue between 110th and 155th streets from 2010 to 2014. In that same time period, 28 pedestrians and eight cyclists were severely injured, while four pedestrians were killed on the stretch of road between 2010 and 2016. DOT data also showed 70 percent of drivers were seen to be speeding on a stretch of the road when the agency did a speed study in 2017. </p>
<p id="FmG8Ky">Last week, members of Transportation Alternatives and Families For Safe Streets <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeCutrufo/status/1119021634004946944">attended a CB9 meeting</a> to argue in favor of the safety redesign, but CB9 leadership insisted that the design was still not up to its standards.</p>
<p id="LzyPlH">Levine, for his part, told Curbed that while there had been a compelling case for the redesign for years before this, Imbasciani’s death in front of his district office “made [the redesign] incredibly personal for me.”</p>
<p id="t5wyT9">Levine said that the community board had raised fair questions and said the process was a good one, but “at this point, I don’t think there’s anything more to debate. There are few cases where I’d urge a city agency to act before there’s a sign off by the community board, but when there’s the safety of my constituents on the line, I don’t think the delay is an option.” Additionally, delaying the installation of the redesign until after the warmer weather would potentially keep the improvements from being put in until next year, he said.</p>
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https://ny.curbed.com/2019/4/24/18514755/harlem-street-redesign-amsterdam-avenue-safetyDave ColonAmy Plitt2019-03-14T15:04:31-04:002019-03-14T15:04:31-04:00Elizabeth Street Garden redevelopment debated at tense public hearing
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<figcaption>Courtesy of Curtis + Ginsberg Architects</figcaption>
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<p>Supporters of the garden and those who’d prefer to see affordable housing on the site faced off</p> <p id="v83DJo">With the land use process out of the <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/1/28/18200719/elizabeth-street-garden-redevelopment-haven-green-shot-down-by-community-board-2">community board level</a>, supporters and opponents of Haven Green, the affordable housing building that could replace the Elizabeth Street Garden in Nolita, faced off in front of the City Planning Commission (CPC) yesterday at a hearing on the proposed development. After representatives from the building’s developers and Housing and Preservation Development (HPD) went over the basics of 123-unit affordable housing development, over 30 speakers gave occasionally emotional testimony <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/1/23/18194444/nolita-new-york-affordable-housing-elizabeth-street-garden">that veered into the class and race issues</a> that intersect with the question of whether to keep the garden or build senior housing.</p>
<p id="avXshJ">Witnesses in favor of the garden cast the fight as one in which a beloved city landmark was being steamrolled by a government that wouldn’t listen. “My heart aches to have to stand here and defend something that’s been part of my life for 21 years,” Beth Joy Papaleo told planning commissioners, calling the garden “the fabric of our community.” Papaleo’s daughter, Vivie, spoke as well, opening her testimony with words from Dr. Suess’s <em>The Lorax</em>. </p>
<p id="zc0LbB">Joseph Reiver, the executive director of the Elizabeth Street Garden and the son of garden founder Allan Reiver, told the commission that the garden “is not just open space,” when making the case for its continued existence. “It’s not just a community garden, it’s not just park space, it’s not just a center for the community or just a museum—it’s all of these things combined,” he said. </p>
<p id="vFic79">Housing supporters, on the other hand, pointed to the dearth of affordability inCommunity Board 2, where only 93 units of affordable housing have been built since 2014. “No one’s denying the people of Little Italy and Community Board 2 are underserved by open space,” Steve Herrick of the Cooper Square Committee said during his testimony, “but the lack of affordable housing is a much more severe crisis.” The lack of affordable units meant that “low-income people are locked out of Little Italy,” according to Herrick.</p>
<p id="EUM74v">“As a caring community, [CB2] can and must do better,” Valerio Orselli, also of the Cooper Square Committee, said during his testimony. Orselli also pointed to the nearby Sara D. Roosevelt Park as an example of nearby open space, and asked that the city’s Parks Department set aside 20,000 square feet there to add some of the amenities and statues that currently live in the Elizabeth Street Garden.</p>
<p id="WWuUvs">The commissioners pressed those on both sides for answers relating to the housing project and the way the garden is run. Veanda Simmons, the director of Manhattan planning at HPD, was asked about the terms of the affordability; she later admitted that while the current agreement calls for rent-stabilizing the units for up to 60 years, the department could still only say there were “ongoing negotiations” around any further extension. In response to a question as to whether, as Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer asked, the amount of green space included with Haven Green could be expanded by 30 percent, architect Matt Melody said that the project would have to break existing height cap on the building to both fit an acceptable number of affordable units and add more green space.</p>
<p id="FIJqwE">Brewer was at the meeting to give testimony in favor of Haven Green, noting that CB2 hasn’t built much affordable housing in recent years. While City Council Member Margaret Chin did not appear at the meeting, she submitted written testimony in support, in which she said she spoke for a population that was “less visible.”</p>
<p id="atg7Yy">“I speak regularly with seniors who fully support this effort to bring more safe, accessible and affordable housing to the people of our City,” Chin’s testimony read. “They want to know when it will be ready. Telling them that now is not the time, and that this city-owned lot is not the place, is unacceptable.” </p>
<p id="zDO86Q">Garden proponents had their own stumbles. Asked by a commissioner if Elizabeth Street was open “each and every day, or does it depend on the weather,” garden volunteer Ed Morris said “both.” Commissioner Anna Hayes Levin expressed frustration with the garden’s schedule, telling Reiver that “A number of us have passed by the garden in the past year, and I don’t think any of us have had success getting in, having been there at times when it should have been open.” </p>
<p id="w042tW">Reiver blamed the current fight over the garden for the lack of funding for more volunteers to keep the land open more often, and promised the garden (which would sometimes be closed for fundraisers under <a href="https://www.elizabethstreetgarden.com/future">one of the proposed futures for the garden site as a community land trust</a>) would be more accessible if Haven Green was voted down.</p>
<p id="JHxHgg">Reiver seemed to contradict the history of the garden that its supporters have put forward. Instead of an effort to get more green space moving parallel to Chin’s decision to ask the city to develop the space, Reiver told the commission that “upon realizing the city’s plans to develop this space, that’s when the community really got engaged” and reacted by opening it up with a street entrance instead of just letting people in through the gallery, an accessibility issue he dismissed as “the past” that the garden wouldn’t return to.</p>
<p id="Lk9MjL">On occasion, the discussions turned more barbed. Garden supporter Nina Taylor disparaged Chin (a Chinese-American member of the City Council) as someone who is “loyal to her base, Chinatown, and has eagerly supported expansion of and refurbishment in that area. She believes we here in northern Little Italy are somehow dissimilar to her people in Chinatown.” Another garden supporter, Ingird Wiegand, though misidentifying Sara D. Roosevelt Park as being on Allen Street, called the park a “broken, deserted, cracked median” and suggested senior housing should go there instead “if you find it so delightful.”</p>
<p id="cDbYlA">Ben Carlos Thypin, a member of YIMBY organization Open New York testified in favor of Haven Green, asked pointed questions of the opponents in his testimony. “I ask the opposition, particularly the politicians <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/3/6/18253253/nolita-elizabeth-street-garden-affordable-apartments-lawsuits">who are co-plaintiffs on these shameful lawsuits</a>: If you can’t get behind a project like this, what can you get behind? How many homeless seniors will freeze on days like this while your futile and self-indulgent lawsuits wind their ways through the courts?”</p>
<p id="Px6GUD">William Arroyo, a Lower East Side resident testifying in favor of the housing, weighed the options in his testimony and maybe best summed up the stark choice facing the city—though his position was very clear. “Every community should be able to say ‘Gee, I have a nice garden in my backyard,’ he said. “The people that are here today say ‘my community.’ There are people who don’t have communities because they don’t have apartments, they don’t have a place they can call home.” </p>
<p id="pcb8je">“Given a choice, do I want a park, to see greenery? Or do I want a roof over my head?” he continued. “This is what is happening to a lot of people in New York City. They don’t have a place to call home, they don’t have a place to say ‘my community.’ Please, let this building go up so people can say ‘I have a community, I have a home.’”</p>
<aside id="ylEEYQ"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ny-curbed"}'></div></aside>
https://ny.curbed.com/2019/3/14/18265979/nolita-affordable-housing-elizabeth-street-garden-cpcDave Colon2019-03-08T08:15:39-05:002019-03-08T08:15:39-05:00Building a bike network in south Brooklyn
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<figcaption>The bike path on the Belt Parkway is one of the few protected bike lanes in south Brooklyn. | Shutterstock</figcaption>
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<p>The historically car-friendly neighborhood has seen an uptick in interest from cyclists</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="bSt4tF">Neighborhoods in southern Brooklyn like Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, and Gravesend — with <a href="https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/profile/18542/housing">higher than average car ownership rates</a> when compared to the rest of New York City — aren’t traditionally thought of as cycling hotspots. But as the city adds more and more bike infrastructure, and elected officials call for an ambitious bike network buildout, a new generation of activists is working to get southern Brooklyn its fair share of bike lanes and let the world know that bikes are welcome south of 65th Street.</p>
<p id="5afmUW">“I think [southern Brooklyn’s attitude towards bikes] is actually more positive than people have been led to believe,” says Brian Hedden of the recently formed organization <a href="https://www.bikesbk.org/">Bike South Brooklyn</a>. “When you get to talking to individual people, you realize that there’s actually a lot of support from people who are expressing interest in wanting to be able to cycle. They just don’t do it right now because they don’t feel as though the roads are particularly safe or comfortable.”</p>
<p id="OTU6HO">The group grew out of Transportation Alternatives organizing that had been going on in Bay Ridge since the summer, when the neighborhood saw a series of demonstrations centered on street safety. Now, Bike South Brooklyn has 115-person email list (the great majority of whom live in Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights), whose members can be relied on to represent the cyclist view at community board meetings. The group is committed to <a href="https://www.bikesbk.org/campaigns/">expanding the area’s bike infrastructure</a> with the addition of safe north-south and east-west routes. </p>
<p id="PyTky5">Before the Department of Transportation held a visioning session devoted to placing bike infrastructure in Bay Ridge, the group <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2018/12/10/bay-ridges-anti-bike-cold-war-starting-to-melt/">was able to get itself heard</a> at a meeting of Community Board 10’s Transportation Committee, which Hedden says was a breakthrough for bike-friendly residents.</p>
<p id="g53HWO">“It was the first time that the board had heard from 25 cyclists at one time in at least seven or eight years, possibly ever,” says Hedden, who has lived in Bay Ridge for five years, and Bensonhurst for seven years before that. “Certainly for the new people on the board, it would have been the first time that they had had heard too many cyclists at once.” While there was one suggestion from a board member to just build a velodrome to make cyclists happy, Hedden says “it was my perception that the committee members were receptive to the message that they were hearing”—one that was about people using bikes as everyday transportation and tools to get around the neighborhood.</p>
<p id="5a2mp1">Pitched battles with community boards over bike lanes are, of course, nothing new in the city. But the fight over a proposed, then abandoned, Bay Ridge Parkway bike lane in 2010 put a damper on efforts to add more than sharrows a few years later, leaving cyclists in Bay Ridge wirh <a href="https://www.heyridge.com/2017/09/bicyclists-arent-safe-in-bay-ridge/">no options for a protected ride, aside from the Belt Parkway path along the water</a>. The 2010 bike lane was opposed by Vincent Gentile and Dominic Recchia, the City Council members who represented Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst during that time. The fight was contentious enough that one member of CB10 <a href="https://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/34/23/br_cassaraout_2011_6_10_bk.html">claimed he wasn’t reappointed to the board</a> over his support for the Bay Ridge Parkway lane, <a href="https://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/34/24/br_gentiledeniesit_2011_6_17_bk.html">though Gentile denied it</a>.</p>
<p id="cAoX7B">(Bill de Blasio, who was then the public advocate, <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2011/04/27/domenic-recchia-theres-a-place-for-bike-lanes-but-im-not-telling-where/">applauded DOT dropping the bike lane as well</a>, suggesting it was a correct time to listen to the community.)</p>
<p id="mWzUsN">But today’s politics are different. Neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, and Borough Park were the focal point of the rage over the state Senate’s inability to renew or expand the city’s speed camera program, a flub that helped cost state Senator Marty Golden his job. City Council Member Mark Treyger, Recchia’s successor on the council, was a visible presence at demonstrations outside of Golden’s office, and Golden’s successor, Andrew Gounardes, has continued to make street safety a part of his agenda in Albany. And City Council Member Justin Brannan has <a href="https://twitter.com/JustinBrannan/status/1085011607791517697">made no secret of his contempt for unsafe drivers</a> in Bay Ridge, as crashes have reached ridiculous heights (there were <a href="https://brooklynreporter.com/2019/01/bay-ridge-dyker-heights-see-17-car-crashes-in-a-single-day/">17 separate crashes on a single day in January</a>). </p>
<p id="Dkk7gE">Still, that change isn’t a silver bullet in Hedden’s eyes.</p>
<p id="jjfEE5">“I think that helps bring awareness to road safety overall, but I don’t know that everyone necessarily makes the connection between bike safety specifically and safety for all road users,” Hedden says. “I don’t know if there’s always going to be a natural progression towards someone who is supporting speed cameras going all the way to supporting Bay Ridge bike infrastructure, but it’s certainly got to help more than it hurts.”</p>
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<cite>Shutterstock</cite>
<figcaption>Bay Ridge has historically been more friendly to drivers than cyclists and pedestrians.</figcaption>
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<p id="QruMTt">At DOT’s visioning session, many attendees seemed open to some kind of expansion or addition to the neighborhood’s bike infrastructure. Going from table to table, you could hear familiar gripes with bike lanes, like how they go unused or how cyclists break traffic laws. But for the most part, bike lane proponents and opponents sat at the same tables and tried in earnest to hash out how to share the road.</p>
<p id="brSOCy">After 45 minutes or so of breakout tables, where each table determined how participants got around and where they thought bike lanes could go, the groups presented their ideas. Four tables brought up bringing bike lanes to Fourth Avenue (a roadway <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2018/11/09/fourth-avenue-protected-bike-lane-is-very-delayed/">already slated for</a> an “uninterrupted, four-mile protected path from 65th Street in Sunset Park to Atlantic Avenue”) and reviving the once-defeated Bay Ridge Parkway bike lane as an east-west route to get to different neighborhoods. A table led by CB10 Chair Doris Cruz—who urged people to go to the meeting <a href="https://mailchi.mp/098515afc1cc/action-alert-bike-meeting-at-cb10-286985?e=165afd3f6e">by warning</a> that cycling advocates were “out in force” and “well-networked”—called Bay Ridge Parkway too congested and suggested 83rd Street as a westbound bike lane, although it’s a street that gets cut off at Fort Hamilton Parkway after Fifth Avenue. </p>
<p id="qzKZki">John Murphy, a 30-year Bay Ridge resident, says he’s seen “a reluctant acceptance” of bike lanes. “Over the last number of years there’s been a direction towards bike lanes that never existed,” he explains. “Sixth Avenue, 72nd Street, there’s been great improvements.” And while the visioning session was non-binding and will only provide guidance to DOT, Murphy said public meetings about bike infrastructure serve a purpose.</p>
<p id="aNrF4B">“I think you just have to have more meetings, and convince people it’s the right thing to do,” Murphy notes. “Even the seniors—when they drive, if someone’s riding a bike, it’s one less car that’s in their way, so it cuts down on the actual traffic and congestion.”</p>
<p id="Pavarj">“In these conversations here, it’s about respecting the generation of people that have lived here for 30 years and try to help them understand that biking is a beautiful thing in New York City,” says Kerrin Stokes, a bike lane supporter who grew up in Marine Park and eventually moved to Bay Ridge. “It’s coming, and you should listen to the bikers who want to build the network.”</p>
<p id="KHCNwY">Even though Stokes says Bay Ridge has “a strong car culture,” she thinks the neighborhood would benefit from an expansion of the current bike network. “I’m finding more people who are biking,” she says. “I think this neighborhood’s missing out on keeping people in the neighborhood by bike, and buying coffees here and shopping by bike. It’s a beautiful community by the shore, and people would visit if they could bike here more.” </p>
<p id="77omiQ">And unlike the previous generation of local representatives, cyclists have some support from the political establishment. Though Brannan did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the question of bike lanes in Bay Ridge, Hedden said that the council member’s chief of staff has stayed in contact with the organization, and he “is generally pretty supportive of cyclists in his district.” </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Yes, it's about focusing on particular corners and corridors but its also about correcting a pervasive car culture where, to some, people are merely obstacles. Having a candid community conversation about pedestrian safety is important. This is about saving lives. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/VisionZero?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#VisionZero</a> <a href="https://t.co/TO5E3k3j3M">pic.twitter.com/TO5E3k3j3M</a></p>— Justin Brannan (@JustinBrannan) <a href="https://twitter.com/JustinBrannan/status/1097973935281528834?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 19, 2019</a>
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<p id="skkOgo">Treyger, meanwhile, gave a full-throated endorsement of bike lanes in his district next door.</p>
<p id="fEoAyz">“We need to understand that we are sharing space together—we’re sharing the road, and no one has a monopoly on the road, on the street,” says Treyger, who also <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/02/12/ocean-parkway-bike-path-to-get-long-overdue-fix/">recently announced a million dollar repair job for the Ocean Parkway bike lane</a> (the nation’s first dedicated bike lane). “We are in this together. I think it’s a matter of necessity for us to have a very serious conversation about greater connectivity to bike infrastructure throughout the borough and the city of New York.”</p>
<p id="ntdfst">Treyger, who represents an area that also includes Coney Island, believes the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy was a turning point for how people in his district viewed the relative utility of the humble bike.</p>
<p id="kZ9egv">“My sense is that Superstorm Sandy was a game changer in many ways for many residents in southern Brooklyn,” he explains. “During and after the storm, the fact that many cars were underwater, and their engines were destroyed, made cars really have no use. There were many people that I would see on bicycles carrying supplies in and out of the neighborhood, because their cars were destroyed, or some the roads were still not accessible for a variety of reasons. And so I just remember saying, you know, thank God for bikes, you know, thank God for someone who had a bicycle to get certain basic supplies in and out.”</p>
<p id="IAc6U4">Beyond the environmental problems caused by a car-reliant transportation network, Treyger says that he feels like extending the city’s bike network is exactly the kind of connection to the city at large that southern Brooklyn has asked for and deserves. “Many of us insouthern Brooklyn have argued historically—and rightfully so—that we feel like we’re the outer-outer boroughs, that we’re very disconnected from the rest of the city,” h says. “But we can’t argue that we’re disconnected from the rest of the city and at the same time, oppose reasonable bike lanes in our neighborhood; you can’t have it both ways. We do need to be connected to the city, we do need more modes of transportation in and out of our neighborhood.” </p>
<p id="98F3CV">And while Treyger didn’t commit to specific routes (his district is home to L&B Spumoni Gardens, which a number of the visioning workshop participants pointed to as a good destination for a bike lane), he did lay out his terms of engagement for any proposed routes that would run through areas he represented. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="VwFTAg"><q>“We need to understand that we are sharing space together. No one has a monopoly on the street.”</q></aside></div>
<p id="a98all">“If the only thing we’re hearing is just emotional arguments that some folks just might not like bicycles and just like cars, that to me, is just not substantive,” he says. “We need to have a substantive conversation about transportation in a growing city where space is becoming more more scarce and in a city that’s vulnerable in so many ways to the impacts of climate change.” </p>
<p id="1TJZdA">He also said that his experience growing up in the district taught him the folly of trying to squeeze more cars into the increasingly populated and popular area.</p>
<p id="ZN1RKN">“I have seen where historically, in Coney Island for example, the DOT would try to come up with ways at the request of folks from the neighborhood to try to accommodate more cars,” Treyger says. “It doesn’t work. Any time that they’ve tried a plan to accommodate more cars, it just it led to more congestion, it led to more traffic, it led to more double parking, triple parking.” </p>
<p id="HYLwYL">As for the future of southern Brooklyn’s bike network, it will have to wait until at least the spring for the next chapter, which is when the DOT is set to go back to CB10 “to present projects and discuss next steps,” according to a department spokesperson. Whatever the DOT proposes, Hedden says that cycling isn’t just some passing trend in southern Brooklyn, and that bike riders are going to continue to press and make themselves heard. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="bOHCBM">“Contrary to popular belief, cyclists do exist in this part of the borough,” he says. “They have the same needs and concerns for safety and for transportation that anyone else does.” </p>
<aside id="VIoew7"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ny-curbed"}'></div></aside>
https://ny.curbed.com/2019/3/8/18255574/brooklyn-new-york-bike-lane-bay-ridgeDave Colon2019-03-05T16:20:22-05:002019-03-05T16:20:22-05:00Cyclist’s hit-and-run death spurs outcry from bike messengers, calls for street safety improvements
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<figcaption>A vigil for Aurilla Lawrence, a cyclist killed in a hit-and-run in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. | Dave Colon</figcaption>
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<p>“Riding a bicycle on the street should not be a death sentence”</p> <p id="o8clz3">Five days after bike messenger Aurilla Lawrence <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/03/01/cyclist-killed-by-truck-driver-in-brooklyn/">was killed by a truck driver</a> in a hit-and-run on Broadway and Rodney Street in Williamsburg, her friends in the tight-knit messenger community, joined by street safety activists and local elected officials, held a vigil at the site of the crash. </p>
<p id="OcJ5xy">“Aurilla was a gem, a light, a ray of sunshine,” said Lawrence’s friend Genesiss M. “She touched the lives of so many of us, we’re at a loss she’s gone. We still don’t believe it.”</p>
<p id="Wmlp2c">The mourners and activists also used the memorial as an opportunity to call for faster street safety improvements, and to demand the NYPD stop its well-documented practice of ticket blitzes against cyclists when bikers are killed by drivers.</p>
<p id="G1YRkG">“What happened to Aurilla could have happened to anyone in the city,” Erwin Figuroa, a senior organizer at Transportation Alternatives, told the crowd. “Riding a bicycle on the street should not be a death sentence.”</p>
<p id="qVdNae">Monday’s vigil was the third public action memorializing Lawrence, following <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/03/02/working-cyclists-mourn-one-of-their-own-and-demand-more-safety/">the installation of a ghost bike</a> in her honor on Friday afternoon, and <a href="https://twitter.com/paddymyke/status/1102291683146940416">a group ride from Harlem to Williamsburg on Sunday</a>. The crowd of about 30 messengers mourned with activists from Transportation Alternatives and Families for Safe Streets, along with City Council Member Antonio Reynoso, all of whom pledged that Lawrence’s death wouldn’t be in vain amid cries of “We want justice” and “You don’t need parking” from the crowd.</p>
<p id="uIoi78">Figueroa noted that the city had seen a spike in cyclist deaths since the calendar turned to 2019; that list includes Lawrence, along with cyclists <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/01/01/hours-into-2019-a-cyclist-is-doored-to-death/">Hugo Garcia</a>, <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-metro-brooklyn-woman-dead-bike-crash-20190202-story.html">Suan Moses</a>, and <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/02/04/elderly-cyclist-killed-in-hit-and-run-near-times-square/">Joseph Chiam</a>. “That is half the total [of cyclists killed] in all of 2018, in two months,” Transportation Alternatives North Brooklyn activist community chair Phil Leff, told the crowd. “This is not just a worrying trend; this is an urgent public health crisis.” </p>
<p id="J3MHR8">Leff laid the responsibility for the spike at the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/nyregion/iowa-bill-de-blasio-2020.html">travel-heavy</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/BilldeBlasio/status/1101959254087483393">feet</a> of Mayor Bill de Blasio. “Mister Mayor, wherever you are, what’s your excuse? Why aren’t we making the proven changes we need to our streets?” Leff asked. </p>
<p id="2ISuOb">A number of speakers, including Figueroa and Reynoso, noted that Broadway between Kent and New York avenues was deemed a priority corridor under Vision Zero back in 2015, due to the street’s history of pedestrian and cyclist injuries and fatalities. But to look at the street today, one would be hard-pressed to notice any major changes. </p>
<p id="cMh6Au">“How a prioritized street doesn’t get fixed in four years is beyond me,” Reynoso said. “How officers can come and ticket cyclists after one of their own has died is completely beyond me. It is a mayor that is completely disconnected with basic progressive transportation policy. He believes that he is making progress because there were only 200 deaths last year. We should only be celebrating when there are actually zero deaths.” </p>
<p id="lEoAFI">The council member said that despite <a href="https://twitter.com/AustinHorse/status/1102414376689111040">one member of the 90th Precinct ticketing a cyclist</a> following the crash, he contacted the precinct’s commanding officer to make sure the 90th was not out hunting bike riders. But Reynoso also noted the <a href="https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20170912/greenpoint/cyclist-vision-zero-fatality-traffic-nypd-94th-precinct/">reality of</a> <a href="https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2016/07/05/hit-and-run-driver-murders-cyclist-so-90th-precinct-tickets-people-on-bikes/">ticket blitzes</a> as a byproduct of a mayor who recently insisted <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-pol-deblasio-nypd-bicycle-tickets-20190219-story.html">the post-crash ticketing of cyclists was necessary enforcement</a>. </p>
<p id="cqLJEU">“It absolutely happens. It’s a big problem,” Reynoso told Curbed. “The city’s done a poor job at being able to have a thoughtful and comprehensive understanding of why [fatal crashes] happen and how they are preventable. And at the end of the day, the victims end up being the cyclists in crashes and deaths, and then enforcement after.”</p>
<p id="7WOCge">Reynoso told the crowd he’d be meeting with the Department of Transportation to go over what it can do to improve safety on Broadway, and also vowed to “break car culture,” a line that Council speaker Corey Johnson also used in his State of the City address on Tuesday.</p>
<p id="LzWm2Q">“This is the first prioritized site in Community Board 1 that gets done before the end of this year. Let’s get it done right away in [Lawrence’s] memory,” Reynoso said. He also demanded CB1 members not slow down the street redesign efforts. </p>
<p id="15nmOB">“I don’t want one community board getting in the way of any of these changes,” he said. “This is not about anecdotes; this is about data and safety. We don’t need the city of New York to have to go to people who are not experts to design these streets.” </p>
<p id="NLDruZ">Kelsey Leigh, another of Lawrence’s friends, noted that working cyclists bear a tougher enforcement burden than most, even under Vision Zero. “We know the mayor doesn’t care about us. The NYPD doesn’t care about us,” sh said. “They’re so quick to act, the next day after a cyclist’s death, handing out tickets to working cyclists, commuters, anybody they can get their hands on. Meanwhile you have big, huge trucks roaming all over the city in every nook and cranny, racking up tickets. And who pays? They don’t pay. The city excuses their fines by thousands and thousands of dollars”—a reference to the <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/description/nyc-delivery-solutions-the-stipulated-parking-fine-program">stipulated fine program</a>—“and they crack down on cyclists.”</p>
<p id="Ee9rRI">The city <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/nyregion/nyc-pedestrian-deaths.html">has in fact made progress</a> on the traffic fatality front, but it wasn’t enough to save Lawrence’s life—or make the gathered cyclists feel like the city or the police had their best interests in mind. “The mayor needs to do a better job, he has to take our lives seriously. We’re not just bikes, we are humans on bikes,” Genesiss said.</p>
<p id="VwTNgZ">Lawrence’s death also brought to the fore a weariness with not only the mayor and the NYPD, but the prevailing attitude among drivers toward cyclists in New York. </p>
<p id="hiWJP9">“Frankly, we know that nobody fuckin’ cares,” Bloom, a courier, said. “They say they’re gonna do stuff, and they do sometimes, <a href="https://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/42/2/dtg-grand-street-bike-lane-l-train-snafu-2019-01-11-bk.html">but then look at Grand Street</a>,” Bloom said about the recently built bike lane on the Williamsburg street. “Grand Street is a disaster; they put in a bike lane and now it’s parking and random construction. It’s hard for us to believe in the NYPD and the council members and everybody in charge of doing this stuff. I think it’s a culture thing. People in cars needs to respect us.”</p>
<p id="UVdYUA">But despite those challenges, the cyclists and activists vowed to keep up the fight for safe streets—a fight that’s undertaken for every victim of traffic violence, a roster that now includes Aurilla Lawrence.</p>
<p id="Eg3VHX">“We will keep fighting for her, we will be optimistic,” Leigh told the crowd. “We won’t stop riding for her, we won’t be afraid. We will be riding in her honor.”</p>
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https://ny.curbed.com/2019/3/5/18252079/new-york-safe-streets-cycling-aurilla-lawrence-rallyDave Colon2019-02-18T11:45:00-05:002019-02-18T11:45:00-05:00In Long Island City, mixed reactions to Amazon’s abrupt HQ2 about-face
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<img alt="After Local Opposition, Amazon Cancels Plans For Major Campus In New York" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/WdjZqX3JUJpykTl0z90R2n4DXEw=/311x0:5286x3731/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63070062/1124899029.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>“I think they were pennywise and pound foolish”</p> <p id="0jbvdx">With the sudden <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/2/14/18224997/amazon-hq2-new-york-city-canceled">end of the Amazon era</a> in New York, city and state politicians either pinned blame, took credit, or tried to figure out how the city once <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/16/18098589/amazon-hq2-nyc-queens-long-island-city-explained">had a deal</a>, and then didn’t have a deal, to be one-half of the tech giant’s new North American headquarters. </p>
<p id="2TK5eT">But on the streets of western Queens the day after the company’s sudden pull out, life went on as normal, as people walked their dogs, fixed their mopeds, and waited for the bus. Plenty of neighborhood residents had <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/2/14/18225110/amazon-hq2-nyc-deal-canceled-reactions">opinions</a> about Amazon’s decision, but true to form for a controversial development project, there was no one answer as to whether the planned corporate campus would have been worth the money, or what the best next step would be for the land that development would have occupied.</p>
<p id="yvqXsy">In a plaza at the Queensbridge Houses, just blocks from where a pro-Amazon press conference was held last Monday, resident Joan Jordan told Curbed she was ready to welcome Amazon. “I think it was a good idea to have that come out here so that people could get jobs,” she explained. </p>
<p id="QUw0kK">“I didn’t see anyone up here against it,” she said, noting that she missed canvassers in the massive housing project last weekend. “Down by Hunter’s Point, I saw those people complaining about it, No one from up here.”</p>
<p id="FdZxbD">On Jackson Avenue near MOMA PS1, LIC resident Ninand Faterperkar, who was walking his dog, told Curbed the city’s elected officials didn’t do enough to preserve the deal. “It comes down to the political leadership around here,” he said. “They didn’t take into account the future and how it should be built around this amazing neighborhood.” </p>
<p id="jZ2BDg">Faterpekar wasn’t the only person who blamed politics for the end of the development. “I think they were pennywise and pound foolish,” an employee at Citigroup, who asked for anonymity to avoid workplace retaliation, said as she left the Citi building, where Amazon was due to take over about 1 million square feet of space. “There was ego involved because they weren’t included to begin with, so I think it was more political posturing,” she said. And the tax breaks, while not ideal, “should have been a negotiating point, not a shut it down point.” </p>
<p id="8KhbND">For supporters of the project, the tax breaks that went into luring Amazon were just a fact of life. “One hand washes the other,” Jerome Hopkins, a Long Island City native, said about Amazon getting offered a cash grant, and being eligible for tax breaks in exchange for meeting certain hiring goals.</p>
<p id="Cs47XR">“I think [the tax abatement] is sort of normal; companies of that magnitude come into communities, they usually get some tax incentives,” Prince Evans, a Queens native who works in e-commerce, told Curbed. “The employees are gonna generate taxes on that end, it’s kind of a tradeoff.” As for whether there was anything that could have been done to save the deal, Evans said that the city could have “opened our arms a bit more,” but also that Amazon could have been more interested in bargaining with area residents</p>
<p id="ptccNw">Of course, not everyone was ready to roll out the red carpet of course. “$3 billion in tax breaks was kind of a big, big deal,” Bardie Cunie told Curbed while waiting for the bus on his way back from work. “We pay a lot of taxes in New York, you know that. You can find other ways to create new jobs.”</p>
<p id="c2LyMN">Luxury goods manufacturer Ally Rosson, who is leaving her LIC manufacturing space this spring because her landlord was likely going to upgrade the building before Amazon’s arrival, said she was “pissed as hell” about the tax breaks the company was getting. “I didn’t like how they made the deal behind closed doors,” she said. “I don’t like that kind of politics.“ She did, however, tell Curbed that she thought the corporate campus would be an upgrade for the area, and that she was hopeful the next plan for the land would lean business over residential. Previously, <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2017/11/14/16652104/long-island-city-anable-basin-rezoning-affordable-housing">the campus site</a> and <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2017/7/29/16059892/anable-basin-long-island-city-waterfront-development">the nearby land</a> in Anable Basin were earmarked for mixed-use developments that would have added 6,000 apartments to the neighborhood. </p>
<p id="0MOLXc">That wasn’t the case for Joseph Genkins, a Queensbridge Houses resident who was working on his moped on Vernon Boulevard. “We’ll find jobs somewhere else,” he said. “We can always find jobs, there’s so many factories around here already. There’s FedEX, UPS, we’ve got stuff like that around here.”</p>
<p id="xsM4nI">He believes the neighborhood needs better housing and neighborhood services. “We need more residential, less industrial,” he said. “We’ve got Con Edison right across the street from us, all down there is factories until you hit 44th Drive. You cross the Pulaski to Greenpoint, it’s so beautiful out there. It’s all residential, clean beautiful living. We have nothing around here. The closest pizza shop to us is down Vernon.” </p>
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https://ny.curbed.com/2019/2/18/18229407/amazon-hq2-cancel-queens-long-island-city-reactionsDave Colon2019-01-23T12:19:55-05:002019-01-23T12:19:55-05:00Inside the fight over the Elizabeth Street Garden
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_fnwB6gavrafUvG_Uek12m77Qm4=/287x0:4860x3430/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62892236/GD98NB.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>The Elizabeth Street Garden. | Alamy</figcaption>
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<p>Park advocates want to keep the unique green space, while affordable housing champions say it’s needed for low-income seniors</p> <p id="u7fSfm">It’s a story that’s all too common in the history of New York City: A beloved community space finds itself under threat from rapacious private development that doesn’t care about things like “beauty” or “neighborhood character.” And for supporters of the Elizabeth Street Garden, a one-acre green space between Prince and Spring streets that’s slated to be replaced with a residential development, the notes are all the same: community opposition, plenty of favorable coverage of the effort to save it, and prominent friends fighting for it. (“Sadly, like so many of this city’s gems, the garden is being threatened by development, and its destruction may be imminent,” HQ Trivia host Scott Rogowsky <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2018/12/reasons-to-love-new-york-2018.html">recently told <em>New York </em>magazine</a>. “So be sure to stop by before the bulldozers beat you to it.”)</p>
<p id="ds6xII">But lost in the noise of the opposition is the fact that the development going up on Elizabeth Street isn’t full of luxury condos would block out the sun: The development, known as Haven Green, is a Habitat for Humanity-backed affordable housing complex specifically designed for low-income seniors, a population that desperately needs housing. It’s also backed by community members who’ve fought to save Rivington House, as well as the neighborhood’s City Council member, who staked an election on it. </p>
<p id="YHBsVm">Looked at through another lens, the fight is a common, though much less sympathetic, story in the history of New York City: a neighborhood banding together to fight affordable housing.</p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="CMEzro">
<p id="63fi0z"><a href="https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160918/nolita/heres-what-you-need-know-about-fight-over-elizabeth-street-garden/">The history of the lot</a> that the Elizabeth Street Garden sits on is a long one. <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1902/12/14/118488374.html?pageNumber=27">Originally home to a public school</a> that was torn down in the 1970s, the land, between Elizabeth and Mott streets, was slated to become Section 8 housing. Those apartments were never built, and eventually the abandoned (but still city-owned) lot was leased to Elizabeth Street Gallery owner Allan Reiver, who planted greenery and used it to store sculptures. Until 2013, the garden was open to members of the public who entered through Reiver’s gallery. But that year, a handful of community members convinced Reiver to let them open an entrance on Elizabeth Street in return for volunteering to take care of it. </p>
<p id="hjZKVx">At the same time, City Council member Margaret Chin asked former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration to include the lot <a href="https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20121017/lower-east-side/search-for-former-spura-tenants-ratchets-up-with-development-plan-place/">as an affordable housing component to the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area</a> (SPURA, later renamed Essex Crossing), a request that was granted by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) in 2012. Not long after that, Community Board 2 began fighting the effort to develop the lot, proposing a series of alternate sites in the district. The most popular is located at 388 Hudson Street, about a mile away, and is owned by the Department of Environmental Protection (which itself is supposed to be turned into a park). Meanwhile, HPD issued a <a href="https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160915/nolita/elizabeth-street-garden-supporters-lash-out-at-city-request-develop-it/">request for proposals for the Elizabeth Street site in 2016</a>. </p>
<p id="LSEHad">Along the way, those who want to save the garden racked up support from local electeds who weren’t Chin, as well as <a href="https://elizabethstreetgarden.org/press/">friendly press</a> and celebrity might <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZeUpMF0JKE">in the form of Gabriel Byrne</a> and attorney Norman Siegel, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. </p>
<p id="RRx8Ek">All of the heavy artillery has not been a high-profile NIMBY effort, says Jeannine Kiely, the president of the Friends of the Elizabeth Street Garden; instead the group is demanding a more democratic process. </p>
<p id="mkEjMa">“This is grassroots community planning,” says Kiely. “This is listening to the community. This is not a community saying ‘No,’ this is a community being asked for what they want, offering a better alternative, and being ignored.”</p>
<p id="7xb1WH">But in the face of a thousands-long waitlist for affordable senior housing, Chin questions why the city has to make a choice between two different sites as opposed to utilizing both of them. </p>
<p id="msBGda"><a href="https://www.havengreencommunity.nyc/">Haven Green</a>, which is being developed by Pennrose (a developer that’s worked <a href="https://www.brownstoner.com/development/prospect-plaza-affordable-housing-brooklyn-development-dattner-ocean-hill-1835-sterling-place/">on the Prospect Plaza NYCHA/affordable housing development</a>), will include 123 studio apartments, 15,000 square feet of ground-level retail, and an 8,000-square foot open space as a replacement of sorts for the current garden. The open space will be managed by Habitat for Humanity, which—along with elderly LGBTQ advocacy organization SAGE and RiseBoro Community Partnership—will provide programming and support for the residents of the building. </p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lZbvOUy20pTafUtSKNTe__Fl3y0=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9834165/MottElizabeth_Arch_View_3_RearFacade.jpg">
<cite>Courtesy of Curtis + Ginsberg Architects</cite>
<figcaption>A rendering of the proposed Haven Green development. </figcaption>
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<p id="HKzwzq">“In my City Council district, there over 5,000 seniors on waiting lists for senior housing, and citywide there are over 200,000 waiting for senior housing,” says Chin. “When we look at [388 Hudson], that is not an alternative site; it’s an additional site. If we can build affordable housing on that site, we should build it, because there’s such a tremendous need. It’s not one or the other.”</p>
<p id="KK4BXV">Chin also disputes the story of the garden as it’s popularly told. She remembers the land as a place Little Italy residents always looked at for housing. “I grew up in that neighborhood, and I remember walking by every time, and it was always locked,” says Chin said. “And when I talked to community people in Little Italy, who desperately need affordable housing, they were always looking at that site and said ‘Wow, it would be great if we could build housing on that site.’ So that’s why we advocated to build senior housing there.” </p>
<p id="eQXJ9O">And rather than a decades-old community space—a “<a href="http://bedfordandbowery.com/2018/10/elizabeth-street-garden-ralliers-to-city-hands-off-my-bush/">cornerstone of the neighborhood</a>” since the 1990s, as one story about the garden described it—Chin said for most of its life, access to the garden was a perk of being friendly with Reiver.</p>
<p id="RlB6uz">“When you look at that site, don’t forget about the history: It was never open to the public,” says Chin. “Members of Community Board 2 came to my office, sat down with me, and gave me the history from their perspective. One of them told me, ‘Margaret, yeah, it was always locked. But if you go to the gallery, and if the gallery owner liked you, he would let you go to the garden through the back of his building.’” </p>
<p id="lAXugx">“They know the history,” she continues. “It was never open to the public until they heard that the site was going to be designated for affordable housing, and then all of a sudden it’s open? They cannot rewrite history.”</p>
<p id="AsxhSI">Kiely disagrees with Chin’s assessment. “This [effort to save the garden] started from a grassroots initiative to get more open space, period,” she says. “What the gallery owner did in those prior years is irrelevant.” </p>
<p id="mkJRak">The Friends of the Elizabeth Street Garden say they’re fighting for an area that’s drastically lacking in city-owned green space. CB2 is <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/site/oec/environmental-quality-review/open-space-maps-manhattan.page">one of only four Community Districts classified</a> by the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Coordination as “underserved” by green space (defined as an area with less than 1,000 acres of green space per 2.5 residents). </p>
<p id="mXV2O9">Still, long-promised parks <a href="https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20161007/hudson-square/elizabeth-street-garden-hudson-clarkson-west-houston-street/">are on the way</a>, and neighborhood data <a href="http://furmancenter.org/neighborhoods/view/lower-east-side-chinatown">compiled by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy</a> also shows that while 99.8 percent of the residents of the Lower East Side and Chinatown live within a quarter mile of a park, only 7.4 percent of the neighborhood’s housing units are affordable for people making 30 percent or less of the area median income. </p>
<p id="tzhhSe">Haven Green would, in theory, serve the latter need: <a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/html/mancb2/downloads/pdf/Elizabeth%20Street%20Garden/HPD_Haven%20Green%20Presentation%20to%20CB%202%2012_5_18.pdf">According to a presentation</a> from the developers, annual income limits for the studios will range from $18,774 to $37,548, with 72 of the units set aside for people making 30 percent AMI or less. For Benjamin Dulchin of the Association For Neighborhood and Housing Development (<a href="https://anhd.org/blog/affordable-housing-right-use-elizabeth-street-garden-site">which has endorsed the project</a>), the competing claims of parkland versus affordable housing have to be weighed in the larger picture of what the neighborhood needs.</p>
<p id="2J7OuE">“You need to find the right balance, and the truth is that one of the issues in that neighborhood, from the affordable housing point of view, is that there are very few opportunities to develop it,” says Dulchin. “So the opportunity to build a substantial new project with a lot of genuinely low-income senior housing, which is really what that neighborhood needs, is the the higher good in this particular case.”</p>
<p id="mBpxGM">The neighborhood also doesn’t lack for community gardens as K. Webster, a neighborhood activist with Friends of Rivington House, <a href="http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2015/10/opinion-elizabeth-street-garden-should-be-used-for-affordable-housing.html">pointed out in an op-ed of support of using the land for affordable housing</a>. Class issues also inform the attachment to Elizabeth Street, Webster argues.</p>
<p id="AFIaKy">“I think it has to do with what people perceived as beauty without any sense that that’s … determined by your culture, your class, you race sometimes, what you consider beautiful,” Webster says. “There’s people who will disparage the M’Finda Kalunga garden, which is in Sara D Roosevelt Park, and that’s one of the most beautiful gardens there is going.” And like Chin, Webster remembers the garden as more of a luxury item. “It never felt very open to me,” she says. </p>
<p id="UygLES">Calling the leaders of CB2 good people with every right to fight for what they want, Webster notes that the level of rhetoric and vitriol surrounding the effort to keep the garden is out of step from what’s being proposed, and drowns out less affluent voices. The public meetings on the garden have a “level of unwelcome that a large part of this community feels, and then get targeted for any thoughts they have contrary to what some want in the outcome,” she says. “I just feel like we don’t know how many people really would like to have this go forward, because people have told me they can’t and they won’t speak up.”</p>
<p id="BoM5PD">That fear was borne out at a December meeting of CB2’s Elizabeth Street Garden working group. Objecting to the size of the studios Pennrose is building (375 square feet each), committee chair David Gruber called the apartments “elaborate prison cells.” Amid comments that the development was some kind of plot by big real estate, and a charge that HPD and an affordable housing developer were “crude students of Trump,” one audience member said that “Mayor Bill de Blasio, along with HPD, is colluding with the real estate developers and real estate market in New York to remake the city for the one percent,” a plot whose ultimate goal was, according to the speaker, “community and ethnic cleansing.”</p>
<p id="rwJkHf">The insistence that there’s more support for the project than is seen at community board meetings might be tough for garden supporters to swallow. But the fact remains that <a href="http://vote.nyc.ny.us/downloads/pdf/election_results/2017/20170912Primary%20Election/01102200001New%20York%20Democratic%20Member%20of%20the%20City%20Council%201st%20Council%20District%20Recap.pdf">however narrowly Chin won her last primary</a>, and then the general election—despite garden supporters throwing their weight (<a href="https://cityandstateny.com/articles/politics/campaigns-and-elections/elizabeth-street-garden-nonprofit-plays-politics-in-backing-margaret-chin-challenger-christopher-marte.html">sometimes questionably</a>) behind her opponent—she still won. As the old chestnut goes, elections have consequences.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="ssPypx">“There are seniors living in Little Italy who are living in tenement buildings on the top floor or even on the second or third floor—they cannot come down to enjoy the sunlight in a park or in an open space,” Chin says. “They desperately need housing with elevators. That’s who I’m fighting for: the seniors who helped build up the neighborhood, who should be able to continue to live there.”</p>
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https://ny.curbed.com/2019/1/23/18194444/nolita-new-york-affordable-housing-elizabeth-street-gardenDave Colon2019-01-04T09:28:26-05:002019-01-04T09:28:26-05:00The L train shutdown is no more: Transit advocates weigh in
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<figcaption>Shutterstock.com</figcaption>
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<p>“Subway riders are sick of being lied to and jerked around”</p> <p id="AdVjZ9">Elected officials, transit advocates, and experts were left grasping for answers in the dark, as if in some sort of tunnel, as they began to process Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2019/1/3/18166933/l-train-shutdown-andrew-cuomo-cancel">sudden announcement</a> that the Canarsie Tunnel repairs set to begin this April would not actually shut down the L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan.</p>
<p id="4ZsxZd">“The questions it raises in terms of process are, if this was possible, did the MTA think about this years ago when this problem became apparent?” says Jon Orcutt of the TransitCenter. “If so, why did they reject it? If not, why weren’t they looking around the world at new ways of doing things? If the governor wants to bring in independent engineers to review big things they’re doing, why can’t you do it much earlier in the process?”</p>
<p id="TWLthl">Process aside, Orcutt is happy with the new plan, which will circumvent a total shutdown. “It’s good news for riders and everyone else dealing with the transportation system in Brooklyn and Queens,” says Orcutt. “I don’t think people got how unbelievable it was going to be to stuff L train riders into other people’s trains, how bad that would be if you had problems on any other lines.”</p>
<p id="r9XKot">Former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who’s currently running for public advocate (on the Fix the MTA line, no less), is more skeptical; she released a statement that began “Um, what?” and criticized the process that led to this point. </p>
<p id="lE1R7o">“Of course everyone wants the subway fixed quickly and running smoothly, but the MTA and the Governor owe New Yorkers the truth about why this new plan came so late in the game,” Mark-Viverito wrote. “Families moved neighborhoods, businesses suffered, and suddenly the Governor says—just kidding? Subway riders are sick of being lied to and jerked around. After two years of being told one story, New Yorkers deserve to know what systematic failures led to a shutdown being deemed necessary before all options were explored.”</p>
<p id="eiinMy">The new plan, relying on a process that hasn’t been used to fix a tunnel in the United States before, will involve <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166983/nyc-mta-l-train-shutdown-averted-subway-cuomo">hanging power cables on racks on the side of the tunnel</a> and wrapping them in fiberglass polymer instead of embedding them in the tunnel walls. The technology, and the plan itself, was questioned by MTA board member David Jones, who told Errol Louis last night that the board found out about the new plan at the same time as the general public, a fact that he called “disconcerting.”</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">One <a href="https://twitter.com/MTA?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MTA</a> board member says not even the board knew Gov. Cuomo would halt plans for the shutdown of the L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. And he has concerns if the proposed new repair plan is a long-term fix. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NY1Politics?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NY1Politics</a> <a href="https://t.co/M5hMCYSZMM">pic.twitter.com/M5hMCYSZMM</a></p>— Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) <a href="https://twitter.com/NY1/status/1081009894336151553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 4, 2019</a>
</blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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<p id="Zs1gSC">Jaqi Cohen of the Straphangers Campaign also used the “d” word—disconcerting—to describe the way in which Cuomo’s big announcement was made. </p>
<p id="MdK5wM">“It’s disconcerting to pull the plug months before the [shutdown] plan was supposed to go into place,” says Cohen. “Our biggest concern is that there’s very little public accountability in the plan as presented. There was no real sense of what the specific timeline was for this, the start date, how much it will cost, how exactly it will impact service.” </p>
<p id="tEC7ol">During the afternoon press conference, acting MTA chair Freddy Ferrer said weekend work <a href="https://twitter.com/vinbarone/status/1080897921892188160">would mean 15 to 20 minute headways on the L</a>, and that the project would take 15 to 20 months to complete. Cuomo later told reporters it would be “silly” to promise a specific timeline for a construction project.</p>
<p id="3O5JvG">For Cohen, huge questions remain. “What will the real impact be on riders? Very little information was provided about that specific detail, and that’s what I think riders really care about,” she explains. “They want to know the work will be done on time and without costing an exorbitant amount of money, but also ‘What is the day to day impact this will have on my life?’”</p>
<p id="SdXMrr">John Raskin, the executive director of the Riders Alliance, was more skeptical. In a statemnt, he wrote that “we need a full public release of the details of Governor Cuomo’s idea, as well as the mitigation plans that will allow hundreds of thousands of L train riders to get around during the inevitable shutdowns and slowdowns in service.” </p>
<p id="OFofkJ">The statement continues, “actual transit professionals, who owe nothing to the governor or the MTA, should evaluate whether this is sound engineering or a political stunt that will ultimately leave riders in the lurch.”</p>
<p id="CrVYQ1">And while the plan theoretically brings innovation to the tunnel itself, many were also left wondering what would happen to above-ground changes promised as part of the shutdown. “I think what this looks like is an opportunity to squander some really good ideas, because the 15-month plan shutdown had started to bear some fruit on some good transportation policy,” says Joe Cutrufo of Transportation Alternatives, pointing to the busway expansion of pedestrian space on 14th Street, the city’s embrace of e-bikes, and the 12th and 13th Street bike lanes. </p>
<p id="ClBqTC">“The MTA and DOT need to figure out that these things need to be preserved, and even though the L train isn’t shutting down 24/7, there still need to be alternatives to the subway,” says Cutrufo. On the idea that those nights and weekend riders would now be the only ones with an affected commute, Cutrufo said that it seemed like “a political calculation, to shift the burden from ‘everyone takes a hit’ to ‘night and weekend riders taking a hit.’” </p>
<p id="GEcpng">Calling the plan “promising,” Nick Sifuentes of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign nevertheless agreed that the mitigation plans should remain in place. “Whether New Yorkers can expect to see a full or a partial shutdown on the L train, the MTA and the city DOT must move forward with their current mitigation plans,” Sifuentes wrote in a statement. “With 400,000 daily riders, the L train is already at capacity, and any reduction in service will mean riders will struggle to find ways to get around. Every bus, every ferry, every HOV lane will still be needed to meet the demand.”</p>
<p id="ZkvuC3">Politically, an unofficial City Council caucus of members who represent L-adjacent districts has emerged to back those mitigation efforts. Calling for hearings on the new reality facing the city, council member Carlina Rivera wrote in a statement that “the city Department of Transportation must stay the course with that the current L Train Alternative Service Plan, including new bike lanes, bus routes, and protected bus corridors, until the public and advocates are able to process and comment on this new plan.”</p>
<p id="rSylhd">Rafael Espinal questioned what the new plan would mean for service workers and others who rely on the trains on late nights and weekends. A spokesperson for the Council Member elaborated for Curbed: “Even assuming the 15-20 minute headway figure is true, that still makes it more difficult to get from A to B efficiently. Especially for someone with an inflexible work schedule, that could pose major problems.” </p>
<p id="PUHSA8">Espinal later tweeted that bus and bike lanes and Citi Bike expansions planned for the shutdown should stick around.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">FYI <a href="https://twitter.com/NYC_DOT?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NYC_DOT</a> should STILL move forward with the expansion of bus & bike lanes and Citibike into Bushwick. It will ease congestion and a packed L train, making North Brooklyn more livable <a href="https://t.co/62EIHoOA1H">https://t.co/62EIHoOA1H</a></p>— Rafael L Espinal Jr. (@RLEspinal) <a href="https://twitter.com/RLEspinal/status/1080927966903914501?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 3, 2019</a>
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<p id="daBNBp">Council member Antonio Reynoso, who represents the district next door to Espinal, tweeted that he was currently on vacation, but did take the time to compare the L train situation to that of the Brooklyn Nets, whose former GM Billy King insisted on chasing flashy upgrades <a href="https://twitter.com/RichAzzopardi/status/1081027529400561664">that got him praise from tabloids</a> instead of taking a more measured approach, eventually leaving the team in a seemingly impossible-to-escape hole.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Huge <a href="https://twitter.com/BrooklynNets?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@BrooklynNets</a> fan. Can't wait to see what we do when Caris gets back. But L train situation is the transportation equivalent to GM King days. Get ready for many more years of losing w/o first round picks and no Sean Marks to dig us out of this transportation nightmare.</p>— Antonio Reynoso (@CMReynoso34) <a href="https://twitter.com/CMReynoso34/status/1080890518987595776?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 3, 2019</a>
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<p id="8LI5iO">A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation tells Curbed that the agency is reviewing the new plan, but did confirm that the north Brooklyn Citi Bike infills would still be moving forward as planned. </p>
<aside id="8vb3pA"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ny-curbed"}'></div></aside><p id="15RO4E"></p>
https://ny.curbed.com/2019/1/4/18168173/l-train-shutdown-cancel-questions-transportation-alternativesDave Colon2018-12-13T10:38:35-05:002018-12-13T10:38:35-05:00At first City Council hearing over Amazon HQ2, venting but few answers
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<figcaption>Dave Colon</figcaption>
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<p>The hearing did little to shed light on what, if anything, will change in Amazon’s deal with New York</p> <p id="C2VY7B">The first of a promised series of City Council hearings on the <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/16/18098589/amazon-hq2-nyc-queens-long-island-city-explained">deal</a> to bring Amazon’s second North American headquarters <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/11/5/18064152/amazon-hq2-search-new-york-city-finalist">to New York City</a> was at times contentious, but did little to shed light on what, if anything, will change regarding the subsidies Amazon is getting for locating its offices in Long Island City. Representatives from the NYC Economic Development Corporation and Amazon were also criticized for the decision to cut the City Council out of the process, forgoing the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) in favor of the state-led General Project Plan (GPP). </p>
<p id="uQLmO0">“If you’re proud of the deal, if you’re proud of coming to new York City, you should want to answer every question New Yorkers have,” City Council Speaker Corey Johnson told a panel made up of James Patchett, the president and CEO of NYCEDC; Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of policy; and Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s head of economic development. “It should not be a two-step tango to meet with us.” </p>
<p id="guCp8N">Johnson’s opening would be oddly prescient, as the hearing ended in less of a two-step tango and more of a slamdance when Huseman turned the usual “see you next hearing” platitude into an argument as to whether Amazon would send a representative to future hearings at all.</p>
<p id="iGLpMw">Before that, the trio sat through a grilling from Johnson and Council Members Jimmy Van Bramer (who represents the area in question), Paul Vallone, Carlina Rivera, Brad Lander, Inez Barron, and others, in a round of questioning that seemed to leave everyone unsatisfied. </p>
<p id="Uz8ZaR">Johnson suggested the anger seen in Queens over Amazon’s arrival was because the company chose to “avoid the land use process.” Patchett and Huseman argued that even without ULURP, plenty of community input that would happen under the Community Advisory Committee, <a href="https://ny.curbed.com/2018/12/11/18136323/amazon-hq2-long-island-city-community-advisory-committee">announced the day before the hearing</a>. (As Johnson noted, this will have no legal authority.) An hour into the hearing, Huseman told the Council that it was the company’s view that the GPP was “the most efficient” route to taking care of the land use and design issues around the project.</p>
<p id="t7Zmyh">Some of Patchett’s testimony took aim less at the Council itself and more at the people who’ve decried the deal at all. Bringing up the city’s economic downturns in the late 1980s, post-9/11, and at the peak of the Great Recession, Patchett said the addition of Amazon to the city’s economic portfolio would help the city weather the next financial storm whenever it happens, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/opinion/amazon-hq2-new-york.html">echoing a recent Times op-ed</a> which argued for the city to rely less on Wall Street.</p>
<p id="jXQX36">Despite a note at the beginning from the Council’s sergeant-at-arms that “There’s no screaming, there’s no booing,” protestors in the gallery chanted (“GTFO, Amazon has got to go”) and unfurled a sign that read “NO TO AMAZON.” After the second round of chanting drew a warning from Johnson that the entire gallery would be cleared if there was one more interruption, the anti-Amazon activists stuck to theatrical laughter in response to the answers given to City Council members.</p>
<p id="0QPrxp">The hearing was ultimately less about oversight than venting—a chance for both sides to stake out their positions, ask ridiculous questions, and give ridiculous answers. Would Amazon give back its incentives? (No, but don’t worry—this is a 9 to 1 return.) What’s with the helipad? (We were looking at safety and security issues.) Did Amazon <a href="https://nypost.com/2018/11/18/nyc-politicians-still-use-amazon-despite-slamming-hq2/">leak my wish list</a>? (There was no answer here, though wish lists <em>are</em> public.) </p>
<p id="GM5Q8r">Amazon posited itself as just your friendly “customer-centric company,” not a trillion-dollar corporation whose warehouse workers <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse-jobs-worker-conditions-bathroom-breaks">routinely describe awful working conditions</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/12/18138246/amazon-hq2-new-york-city-hearing">are kicking off a union drive locally</a> due to said working conditions. Pitching a government hellbent on deportation schemes <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-pushes-ice-to-buy-its-face-recognition-surveillance-tech">some facial recognition software</a> is just making sure the government “has the best technology available to them,” not amoral profit seeking.</p>
<p id="xm1wwh">Van Bramer did see some positives from the afternoon. “By putting this pressure on and shining a bright light on this, we’re having an effect on all of this,” he told Curbed. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on them to answer for what they’ve agreed to in the deal. I think that’s a good thing and I do believe that will produce some changes here.”</p>
<p id="egNrBU">But if the hearing was the opening round of a boxing match, it would be one fighter marching around the ring furiously windmilling their arms and the other one choosing to run for their life just out of range from the windmilling. Round two will be in January.</p>
<aside id="XtHtDV"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ny-curbed"}'></div></aside>
https://ny.curbed.com/2018/12/13/18139200/amazon-hq2-new-york-city-council-hearingDave Colon