Stone Street: Before and after.

Emil Kozerawski has a dream. One day the stretch of Bedford Avenue that passes through his Williamsburg neighborhood is going to be car-free. In the place of aggravated truckers blasting their air horns and spewing diesel, there will be cafe tables, street art and social activity. The 20-year-old School of Visual Arts advertising student is serious about his campaign. He is connecting with community leaders and organizations, lobbying shop owners, and has started a web site, CarFreeBedford.org. He is thinking pragmatically and aims to get things going by organizing daylong car-free experiments. He has printed up t-shirts. So, what's it going to take to make it happen?

In the neighborhood, there appear to be two clear reactions to Kozerawski's idea. If you've lived in Williamsburg for more than 25 years, then chances are you think the idea is insane. The owner of an old bakery insists that most of his customers drive, and if cars weren't allowed on Bedford it would destroy his business. (Where these customers all park is a mystery.) A hairdresser doesn't like the idea because she dreams of one day owning a car, and when that day comes she wants to be able to drive and park on Bedford. A fellow named George, living in the area for 52 years, has been leaving vitriolic posts on Kozerawski's online message board. He believes that, "If you want car-free areas you're living in the wrong city." George wouldn't say, however, where he thinks one should go to live their car-free life. Long Island? New Jersey? Los Angeles?

The second reaction comes from the new generation of young Williamsburgers. Between N. 4th and N. 9th, the stretch that Kozerawski wants to make car-free, this group appears to be the majority. Their opinion is neatly summed up by a real estate agent sitting on a bench in front of The Read Café. "I'd love to see it happen," she says. "But it's never going to happen. Have you ever been to a community board meeting?" Kozerawski is clearly a notch less pessimistic than his peers. With a nearly imperceptible sigh he goes on to explain, yet again, the benefits and possibilities of a pedestrianized Bedford.

Regardless of whether Community Board crustaceans and DOT traffic movers take Car-Free Bedford seriously, his idea is clearly worth looking at. Car-free streets can work well in New York City. The proof is Stone Street, one of those ancient, crooked alleys at the very southern end of Manhattan. Built by the Dutch, Stone Street is said to have been the first paved street in the New World. But by the early 1990s, it had become blighted. Stores were shuttered and buildings empty, cars were parked all over the sidewalk, and petty drug dealing was the only activity on the block.

In the mid 1990s, Lower Manhattan's business improvement group the Downtown Alliance got together with the city's Landmarks Commission, hired consultants, and began putting together a new master plan for Stone Street. Despite the protests of building owners, the Alliance managed to get Stone Street designated a historic landmarks district. This enabled the Landmarks Commission to apply for $800,000 in federal transportation dollars. The Alliance chipped in another $150,000 and the city paid the rest.

Ultimately, the car-free public space they envisioned took five years, $1.8 million and a ton of perseverance and political willpower to become reality. Stone Street has been car-free since 2000; today, it is thriving.

"It's a miracle. It's beautiful really," says Harry Poulakakis, the owner of Ulysses and a few of the other restaurants on the block. Having owned restaurants on and around Stone Street for 32 years, Poulakakis knows as well as anyone how beneficial the changes have been. "The big thing is not to have cars. People feel they have nothing to worry about. They sit outside. It makes them happy."

As Kozerawski has by now discovered in Williamsburg, when you talk about the idea of car-free streets in New York, entrenched interests jump up and scream that restricting automobiles will create economic and transportation meltdowns. Needless to say, these catastrophes haven't materialized in Lower Manhattan. Stone Street has successfully "created a backdrop for economic development," says Suzanne O'Keefe, vice president of design for the Downtown Alliance. "Owners of other buildings are now saying we want a Stone Street." Williamsburg wants one too.

9:56 AM | Link | (9) comments   

Of course, I can't truly enjoy the crisp, clean, sunny spring days we've been having this week without thinking about the fact that they will soon be gone. In a matter of weeks, the concrete will begin to heat up and the city will be enveloped in the summer aromas of broiling garbage cans, urine and diesel exhaust.

It's the diesel exhaust that really gets to me. Toward the end of last summer, a seven-year-old boy in my neighborhood developed an intense hacking cough and a bad case of asthma. He wasn't alone. New York City has the highest asthma rates in the nation, and over the last decade, the problem has grown significantly worse. Over 500,000 New Yorkers, about six percent of the population, is afflicted. The burden of this illness falls disproportionately on the young, the poor and minorities. More than 10 percent of the city's schoolchildren have asthma. In the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, surrounded by expressways and choked with commercial-truck traffic and bus depots, over one-third of the kids have it. These are some of the highest asthma rates in the world.

In an effort to figure out what exactly is making the city's kids so sick, New York University professor George Thurston has been conducting a study in which he attaches mobile air-pollution-sampling monitors to the backpacks of Bronx fifth-graders. For a month, the kids carry the monitors everywhere they go. Meanwhile, a stationary air-pollution monitor sits outside their school gathering baseline data. Though the final results have not yet been published, Thurston says that he is seeing a direct correlation between high-traffic days and asthma attacks. Particulate matter from diesel engines is the main culprit. "The worsening of the lung function was especially related to the particles that are associated with traffic," Thurston said. On high-traffic days, wheezing, coughing and other asthma symptoms increase significantly.

Ascent of the Euro

I had the opportunity to visit Rome last spring. The weather was unusually hot the day before I arrived and the government had declared it a "bad air day." When air quality reaches dangerous levels in New York City, the Environmental Protection Agency warns the elderly, children and people with heart and respiratory problems to stay indoors. The way they deal with bad air days in Rome really blew me away. They simply close the city's streets to automobiles. In fact, cities all across Europe do the same thing.

It's never easy for New York to suck it up and admit that it's got a problem, or that another city is doing something better. But when it comes to dealing with the problem of cars in the city, European cities are absolutely kicking New York's butt. There's a lot of innovation happening on the other side of the Atlantic; New York City should take note.

A couple of weeks ago, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, unveiled plans to make an entire three-square-mile zone of the Right Bank completely car-free by 2012. Elected in 2001, the openly gay, openly socialist mayor of Paris has multiplied bus lanes, eliminated parking spaces, widened sidewalks and converted a riverfront stretch of the Pompidou Expressway, Paris's answer to New York's FDR, into an artificial public beach complete with palm trees. Traffic in the city is down by more than 10 percent, and the initiatives appear to be rallying the local economy, not hurting it. Though suburban commuters are pissed, 80 percent of the city's residents approve of Delanoe's car crackdown and want more.

If banning cars from sections of the city is simply too much for New Yorkers to swallow, London has another solution: Make money off of them. Since setting up its automated tolling system in 2003, London is generating £100 million a year ($190 million) off of motorists driving through the city's crowded central business district. Traffic congestion is down by 30 percent and new revenues are being pumped into improving mass transit, cycling and pedestrian facilities. Easily winning reelection in 2004, Mayor Ken Livingstone -- also a socialist -- is a hero. This summer he aims to reduce traffic another five percent by increasing the fee from £5 ($9.50) to £8 ($15). Do we still have a socialist party in New York City?

Those who find London-style congestion pricing simply unimaginable in New York City are going to have a difficult time wrapping their minds around the woonerf, or "living streets" movement. A growing number of cities in Holland and Denmark are building "streets" completely free of traffic lights, signs, speed limits, paint stripes, sidewalks, bike lanes and any other form of boundary or control. Cars, pedestrians and bikes simply mingle. This forces motorists to slow down, make eye contact, and engage with other users of the road. Research is showing that woonerfs actually move cars through the city faster, reduce congestion, and completely eliminate traffic fatalities.

So who is going to be the first one to stand up at their community board meeting and demand a woonerf?

2:54 PM | Link | (1) comments   

Wearing ties, L to R: Transporation Alternatives' Noah Budnick, Borough President Marty Markowitz, and Councilmember David Yassky at a September 29, 2003 press conference at the Manhattan Bridge

In June of 2003, Transportation Alternatives bike program director Noah Budnick and I had a meeting with a small group of Department of Transportation officials at the agency's Brooklyn borough commissioner's office. At the time, I was working as a coordinator for T.A.'s Brooklyn Committee. The item at the very top of our agenda that day was safer bicycle and pedestrian access to the Manhattan Bridge, an issue that Budnick has spearheaded for years. We brought a video to the meeting so DOT officials could clearly see how dangerous the on- and off-ramps of the Manhattan Bridge were for cyclists. We told DOT officials in no uncertain terms that the Manhattan Bridge was a disaster waiting to happen.

Well, the wait is over. On Tuesday, March 29 at about 7 p.m., Noah Budnick had a disastrous crash on Sands Street in Brooklyn, just after exiting the Manhattan Bridge bike path. Though he was wearing a helmet, Budnick suffered severe head trauma. He is now in stable condition, floating in and out of consciousness in a hospital intensive care unit.

Police initially said that Budnick's crash was caused by a hit-and-run driver. Now they say that he dropped into a pothole after swerving to avoid a vehicle parked in the bike lane. There are still "many questions about inconsistencies and omissions in the accident report," T.A. says.

What I can say for certain is this: Despite major improvements made to the bike path on the Manhattan Bridge since our meeting two years ago, access to the bridge is still extremely dangerous, especially on the Brooklyn side.

I don't need to use Noah's crash to make the point. Last summer I had the worst bike crash of my life only a few yards away from where Budnick wiped out. Riding toward a pothole, I momentarily peeked back over my shoulder to see if I could safely merge to my left. By the time my eyes were back on the road in front of me, my front wheel had dipped into a series of abrupt ripples in the asphalt. Merely a nuisance to motorists, these kinds of hazards are devastating to cyclists. In a split second, my bike and I were crumpled on the pavement directly in front of a BQE on-ramp. If a truck had been behind me, accelerating onto the expressway, I'd have been roadkill.

Are Budnick and I lousy riders? I don't think so. Noah is a skilled and experienced urban cyclist, and I am pathologically careful. I ride under the assumption that drivers don't see me and, even if they do, they'd be perfectly content to kill me and keep going.

To understand the problem, all you have to do is spend some time riding a bike in cities like Berlin, London, Montreal or Portland. These are cities that put real time, energy and money into making their streets safe and convenient for cycling. By comparison, New York City is still way too hostile an environment for bikes despite the fact that in an era of increasing subway fares, air pollution, gas prices and traffic congestion, record numbers of commuters are pedaling. Let's hope Budnick gets better soon. Few have worked harder and done more to improve New York City's cycling environment.

Bliss Out
As if Budnick's crash, 37 more arrests at the March Critical Mass ride, and the presence of the New York International Auto Show weren't enough to give one the sense that some sort of vast anti-bike conspiracy is underway, George Bliss, the founding father of New York City's burgeoning pedicab industry, has been curbed by a bogus law suit.

The accident that led to the lawsuit occurred in December 2001 when the pedicab carrying Dr. Jerome Perlmutter, a dentist from Florida, and his wife was hit and slowly dragged to the curb by a tour bus in front of the Plaza Hotel. The Perlmutter's sustained minor injuries.

The tour bus operator was clearly at fault, and Bliss's driver did nothing wrong. But unlike many of his competitors, Bliss's company, Pedicabs of New York, insures its drivers, making it a target for the Perlmutters' attorney. Rather than trying to defend a company that operates gigantic urban tricycles, Bliss's insurer chose to settle and cancel Bliss's coverage. They paid the Perlmutters $150,000 while the tour bus operator shelled out $1.75 million.

It was enough to put put Pedicabs of New York out of business. "We'd have been better off if we didn't have insurance," says Bliss. "The irony is that by doing the right thing and providing liability insurance to my drivers, I get screwed."

There are now about 200 pedicabs operating in the city. With no barriers to enter the business, an increasing number are run by unscrupulous players. Bliss has been pushing the Department of Consumer Affairs to begin requiring a simple revocable pedicab license and liability insurance for drivers.

Like the Department of Transportation, DCA has been slow to recognize bicycles as a legitimate form of urban transportation worthy of their attention and promotion. Until this recognition happens, one of the city's pioneering pedicab operators is closed for business and the broken bikes and bodies will continue to pile up beneath the Manhattan Bridge.

3:00 PM | Link | (4) comments