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The Topic
Land Use refers to the ways the city's built environment is used, preserved and developed. City planning is a discipline concerned with the present and future use of land and the quality of urban life. Zoning refers to a set of regulations that determine such matters as which areas will be deemed residential, commercial or industrial, how tall buildings can be in a specific area, how much open space will be required. The law governing zoning, New York City's Zoning Resolution first passed in 1916 and was substantially revised in 1961.
The Context
New York City has over 200,000 acres of land, and we fight over every square foot. The city's land use policies set the stage for that fight. Will there be parks? And where? How high can Donald Trump build? All these questions and more are are addressed by the city's land use policies and community planning. The City Planning Commission sets land use and planning policies through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). Community boards may prepare neighborhood plans for approval by the City Planning Commission and the New York City Council.
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Long Commutes and Lost Opportunities for Planning

by Tom Angotti
March 2004

If you live in New York City chances are it takes you longer to get to work than everybody else in the country. This news from a current U.S. Census study made headlines: "No one works harder getting to work than New Yorkers," wrote Pete Donohue of the Daily News. The average commute in the city is 38.4 minutes. People who live in the Bronx have the longest stretch, almost 42 minutes on average. The census study measured the time it takes to commute door-to-door.

These astounding statistics raise a lot of questions: Why does the city with the largest mass transit system in the country have the longest commutes? After all, trains usually travel at average speeds greater than those achieved by cars in cities. Aren’t the subways supposed to be “rapid transit?” They can move larger numbers of people faster than just about any other form of urban transportation.

Let me suggest two possible answers to this puzzle. The first is the city’s woefully inadequate surface mass transit system. The second has to do with the city’s land use policies that are lengthening the distances between the places that people live and work.

Getting To The Subway Is Not Easy

The majority of commuters in New York City don’t live around the corner from a subway stop. “New Yorkers do a lot of walking to get to the subway,” says Brian Ketcham, a transportation expert with Community Consulting, Inc. in Brooklyn. That extra time it takes to get to the subway would be shortened a good deal if there were an efficient and reliable bus system in the city. “The bus system could be a lot better,” said Ketcham. Right now, for many commuters from the outer boroughs, waiting for a bus would prolong their commute even more, and “you can travel faster by auto the farther you get from Manhattan.”

According to transportation expert and Gotham Gazette columnist Bruce Schaller, New York City has the slowest buses in the country. The average speed is about 7.5 miles per hour. The Straphangers Campaign’s Pokey Award for the slowest bus went to the M23, which averages 3.4 miles per hour, about the pace of a brisk walker.

Bus problems are especially critical in the outer fringes of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx where subway stations are spread out. Buses don’t come often. They get stuck in traffic because the city’s traffic engineers don’t design streets to give preference to mass transit (for example, by having dedicated bus lanes). Buses can’t stop and load properly because bus stops are designed so that cars can use them for temporary parking.

Some commuters to Manhattan from the other boroughs often just make a decision to drive to the nearest subway stop. Others decide to hop in the car, turn on the A/C and radio, and then creep into Manhattan – an option disproportionately taken by people with higher incomes. This option, taken by a small minority of commuters, has an overall negative impact on air quality, noise levels and public safety, and the easier we make it for people to do this the worse the traffic mess in Manhattan will get.

Other options yet to be seriously pursued by the city are improving bicycle commuting and the conditions for walking. Secure bicycle lanes and bicycle parking at subway stations could cut down the time it takes to get on a train. In Dutch, German and Danish cities, for example, large bicycle parking lots are a standard fixture at subway stops. Traffic calming measures that make it easier and safer to walk by minimizing conflicts with autos would also help speed up the commute.

There are also problems related to subway operations that affect the commute. Fifty-nine percent of all subway trips are work-related. This means that more people tend to ride during the rush hours. The number of riders has increased in the last decade, and the more riders there are the more time it takes to load passengers at stations. This increases the overall travel time along subway lines.

The Housing and Jobs Mismatch

The second important factor behind this puzzle has to do with the growing separation between workplace and residence in the city and region. This is a gradually changing land use pattern that the city is encouraging by zoning out industry.

New York City lacks a strong and consistent industrial retention strategy. The city has been rezoning viable industrial and mixed use neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens to encourage new residential development. The jobs in these neighborhoods are being pushed out into the suburbs and beyond. This is feeding a modest increase in long-distance reverse commuting to the suburbs. It is also putting more workplaces in environments that have poor mass transit access, thus making for longer commutes. At the same time, the city is losing its traditional walk-to-work communities. Mixed industrial/residential areas that are now turning into havens for apartment developers, like Greenpoint/Williamsburg and Red Hook in Brooklyn, and Long Island City in Queens, once had about one-third of their residents walking to work. The current percentage citywide is only about ten percent.

As in most central cities, downtown financial sector jobs are also migrating outward. Recent census data shows a gradual increase in the number of New Yorkers commuting to places outside the city, and many of these commutes are by car. If there were a decent surface transportation system – buses, for example – in the outer boroughs and inner suburbs, more people would be encouraged to choose mass transit over cars, and their commuting times might be shorter. Still, it would be far easier to preserve the city’s mixed use neighborhoods, where walking and mass transit options are already in place.

Another problem is that new bedroom communities in the outer boroughs are being built like suburban-style enclaves that encourage auto use. They are allowed to have lots of parking so that it’s more convenient for residents to own more cars. This creates even more problems for buses. The fewer people that use buses, the fewer buses the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will put in service, and the fewer buses in service the more people will be prompted to get in their cars.

Mass transit is potentially a “cleaner” form of travel. Subways use one-sixth the energy to carry one passenger a mile than the automobile and cut down drastically on air pollution. But the city’s mass transit system isn’t yet able to claim an award for environmental achievement. Subway platforms can be hazardous to your health due to high levels of air pollution, noise and heat. Once again, buses are among the worst polluters. The MTA’s bus fleet is gradually being converted to cleaner natural gas, but in the meantime bus passengers will continue to gasp as they get a face-full of hot diesel air while waiting to get on board.

To make the commute shorter for New Yorkers, we don’t really have the option available to the sprawled American suburbs – more highways and cars. That is, unless we want to live in an environmental swamp. The city is densely developed and has a great urban railroad. Now it needs a great surface transit system to complement it.

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.

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