Earth Day -- April 22 -- will mark the third anniversary of PlaNYC2030, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's self-proclaimed "long-term sustainability plan." While the city has taken many steps toward the plan's goal of "a greener greater New York," particularly in energy conservation, one gaping hole remains in the plan.
PlaNYC2030 left out any role for the city's hundreds of neighborhoods, 59 community boards, and the countless civic, community and environmental groups that care about the future of the city. It was a top-down plan, conceived at City Hall with minimal input, and it was never approved as an official plan. In the long term this will only undermine the ability to sustain the plan itself, and both implement and improve it.
The plan now stands at a critical juncture, Rohit Aggarwala, director of the Mayor's Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability, recently announced his resignation, and the city's budget situation and the overall economic situation have delayed and even derailed some of its initiatives. With Aggarwala's departure and the convening of a commission to review the City Charter, now is the time to fill the gap that excluded neighborhoods. An updated PlaNYC2030 could then be reviewed and voted on by community boards, borough presidents, the City Planning Commission, and City Council, as required in the City Charter.
The problem started in 2007, and it started at the top. You would think that such a daunting task as planning for a city of 8 million people and projecting our priorities over a period of more than two decades would be really difficult and take a long time. Yet it was all done in the time it takes to approve the average rezoning, about seven months.
The mayor's consultants, who completed the plan in record time, never went through any of the steps, outlined in the City Charter, the city’s constitution, that plans must take in order to be approved.
Under Section 197-a of the City Charter, plans should be reviewed and voted on by the affected community boards, borough presidents, the City Planning Commission and the City Council. At each step there must be a public hearing. None of this happened.
One can surely argue that this could be a long and tedious process because the 197-a plan approval process does not have a time limit like the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, which is used for zoning and other major city actions and generally takes some seven months. However, the delays in approving plans in the past have largely been the result of action (and inaction) by the city’s planning department, an agency the mayor controls. In the two decades since the 1989 charter revision made it easier to submit plans under Section 197-a, only a handful have been approved and almost all of them were initiated not by the city but by community boards, despite a lack of funding and technical support.
Since PlaNYC was never officially approved, it remains an initiative of the mayor, owned and operated by City Hall. Generally, the Department of City Planning is responsible for planning and engaging other branches of government.
The department, however, played a minor role in preparing the 2030 plan, and long-term plans of any kind have been notably absent from City Planning’s portfolio. Instead, the agency touts as one of its top achievements the 100 rezonings it approved in the last eight years.
While the rezonings have opened up opportunities for new development -- also a major goal of PlaNYC2030 -- and protected many other areas, they hardly pass muster as "plans." Rezoning for new development is often done without planning for new schools, transit and other services, nor does it entail measures to deal with existing service deficits or the myriad problems that face communities. In some neighborhoods that have undergone massive rezoning, such as Williamsburg, residents are now up in arms because new high-rise luxury development has overtaxed the capacity of local schools and transit.
While City Planning often echoes PlaNYC's call for "transit-oriented development" by promoting higher density development around subway stops, it does not insure that transit capacity will grow to meet increased needs. Trains and buses are even more overcrowded than they were before the rezoning, and with more service cutbacks planned, the situation promises to get worse. If that's planning it's surely not good planning.
Fortunately the 2030 plan looks more like a long-term plan for the city than the 100 piecemeal rezonings, even if they both favor growth over community improvements. But it's still the mayor's plan and not the city's plan and could easily change or disappear under the next mayor. Even though the City Council approved the creation of a permanent office of long-term sustainability, there is no guarantee it will always be adequately funded.
If we look at how the plan came about, we begin to see the problem. PlaNYC was the product of a small group in the Mayor's Office of Operations.
The bulk of the work was done by McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm, under contract with the city's Economic Development Corp.
The EDC itself is a non-profit wholly owned by the city. It functions as the mayor's proxy in negotiating deals with developers and undergoes minimal oversight. The McKinsey report was not made public -– I received a copy by filing a Freedom of Information request. It appears to have been the core of the PlaNYC, apparently embellished after consultation with specific agencies that have offered their ideas, such as the million trees, and public plaza initiatives. All of the proposals fit into the plan’s giant spreadsheet, a perfect instrument for CEOs and the budget office but not something that most New Yorkers have a chance to work with.
Once the mayor’s office came up with goals and selected projects to put in the long-term plan, the administration held consultations throughout the city and solicited feedback. Despite this, there was no public involvement in making the final decisions about priorities and programs. I must confess that I sat through some of these meetings and focus groups and felt ashamed that the many committed and bright community representatives in the room were treated like subjects in a marketing experiment and not partners in an important civic discussion.
Even if PlaNYC was bottled up in the city's executive offices, it still could have turned out to be a great plan. But because the process was rushed and top-down, many opportunities were missed.
For example, the plan could have penetrated much deeper into the problems of sustainability as they affect all New Yorkers where they live and work. In the end, after weeding through the 127 projects in the plan's matrix, it seems energy efficiency received the highest priority. A review of 2009 mayoral press releases about the 2030 plan by Brian Paul, a fellow at the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development, found that two thirds deal with energy efficiency, climate change and efficient transportation.
This is not to say energy or efficiency shouldn’t be top priorities, only that they are closely related in a holistic way to the way we live in our neighborhoods. Without the engagement of neighborhoods, businesses and residents, progress on this front will be slow. The mayor's failed effort at congestion pricing provides dramatic evidence of this. And then there are serious issues of social equity, barely touched upon the 2030 plan.
The problem of sustaining and implementing the plan goes back again to the problem of the planning process. McKinsey’s background in management consulting led it to emphasize issues of efficiency -– particularly with energy. This is clearly the most elaborate element in the long-term plan and, not surprisingly, the area in which the greatest progress seems to have been made in the last three years. The city has purchased hybrid vehicles and passed rules encouraging owners to make their buildings more energy efficient, among other efforts.
But many of the gains, like reducing the wasteful use of city-owned vehicles and reducing traffic in Midtown, could have been done without a plan. At the same time, much less has been done to encourage grassroots efforts in energy efficiency and the use of alternative energy sources. PlaNYC does not include any community-based plans and initiatives to address problems of environmental quality and public health, housing, transportation, and open space. In fact, the 100 community-based plans in the city, most of them ignored and never adopted by the city’s planners, were not even taken into account for PlaNYC.
New Yorkers are most familiar with the neighborhoods where they live and work. In this sense they are specialists, and neighborhood leaders and activists are usually a great source of knowledge. Surely they can be parochial and narrow-minded, but so too can people in government agencies. PlaNYC did not look at the city from the perspective of its hundreds of neighborhoods or incorporate the vast experiences and histories of its neighborhoods. Only after the giant spreadsheet was made were the citywide programs and projects broken down, but mostly for reporting purposes.
The city’s 59 community boards, now struggling to salvage their limited role in decision making, are still invisible in the 2030 plan, barely mentioned in the scores of spreadsheets, maps and colorful images that herald the coming of the green city. They can post comments but play no role in setting priorities or initiating change. They are not consulted until after the fact, yet they are often criticized for only reacting. Civic and advocacy groups, including many that started fighting for a greener and greater future decades ago, and advocated sustainability long before the term was uttered in City Hall, are similarly sidelined.
This is a unique and important time. A fresh approach to long-term sustainability planning at the top could lead to a true partnership between neighborhoods and City Hall. The New York City Charter already provides the framework, and that can be strengthened to insure that all planning is open, transparent and accessible to all, and that the plan belongs to everyone. And that, in turn, will help assure that the plan survives to guide New York to a truly sustainable future.
Tom Angotti is director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development and author of "New York For Sale" (MIT Press, 2008).
Imagine it is 2013 in New York City. Many things in your life haven't changed since 2010 but one thing certainly has: You won’t need to buy gas in order to drive. Instead, while you recharge your battery after a long day at work, your new electric car could be recharging as well.
Late this year, a new wave of electric vehicles will begin to arrive on the U.S. market. The Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf will lead the way, with other manufacturers including Ford, Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Tesla planning to introduce their electric cars sometime between 2011 and 2012.
Last week, the Obama administration announced new fuel economy standards for automobiles that provide some incentives for electric cars.
The policy, intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and oil consumption, is geared to a nation where most people rely on cars for transportation. But do electric cars make sense in New York City, where streets are snarled with traffic and many people park on the streets rather than in their own driveways? Would these vehicles truly help to lower carbon emissions? Should the city encourage their use?
The Bloomberg administration sees electric cars as part of its overall move to create a more environmentally sustainable New York. Others, however, think the city should focus more on getting people out of cars altogether.
Potential demand for electric cars in New York City is strong enough that consumers will likely buy up all available supply for the next several years, according to a PlaNYC study, released in January, that explored potential demand and environmental benefits for electric vehicles in the city.
Consumers here and elsewhere soon will be able to choose between two types of electric vehicles: the plug-in hybrid and the all-electric car. Plug-in hybrids run on an electrical charge for about 40 miles before switching to gas power. The new plug-in-hybrids, like the upcoming Chevy Volt, contain the same technology as the hybrids on the market today but have larger battery packs and get about twice the fuel economy of a conventional hybrid.
All-electric cars, like the upcoming Nissan Leaf, have a range of about 100 miles and are powered by electric motors instead of the gas-powered internal combustion engine found in most current cars. They rely on a battery charged from a standard 120 volt or 240 volt outlet and do not produce carbon emissions while running but require frequent charging.
PlaNYC2030, New York's "comprehensive sustainability plan" to reduce the city's overall greenhouse gas emissions includes electric cars as part of its strategy. In 2008, transportation accounted for 22 percent of all city carbon emissions. Passenger vehicles and light trucks were responsible for 74 percent of these transportation emissions that, as part of the overall PlaNYC effort, "would be reduced by 44 percent by 2030."
To accomplish this, the plan calls for improving public transit, getting cars off the road and making sure the vehicles that remain are more fuel-efficient. According to a previous PlaNYC study, car trips produce five times more carbon emissions than a trip on mass transit. Electric cars, though, could "provide a significant reduction in fuel usage, greenhouse gas emissions, noise, and local air pollution compared to conventional gasoline-powered vehicles,” according to the electric vehicle study.
Significant reductions in carbon emissions, though, would require a large-scale shift to these new cars. If by 2015, 2.5 percent of all cars in New York City are electric, which the PlaNYC study suggests is possible, the city's carbon emissions would be reduced by approximately 170,000 metric tons per year from 2008 levels. That represents only 1.43 percent of the city's 11.8 million metric tons of transportation emissions in 2008. The city's overall emissions that year totaled 53.3 million metric tons, according to a previous PlaNYC study.
On the national level, the Obama administration has set the goalof 1 million plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads by 2015 and has provided $2.4 billion in stimulus grants to the industry. The federal government also offers buyers a tax credit of up to $7,500 per electric vehicle.
Although electric vehicles might help to ease carbon emissions, congestion and deaths and injuries from vehicles will still persist, said Transportation Alternative's communications director Wiley Norvell. "If we're looking at what's going to solve all of these problems, we have some silver bullets out there: movement to transit, walking, and biking. Electric vehicles aren't a silver bullet," he said.
Instead, he said, the city needs to look at alternatives to cars. "Our streets have been all car, all the time and for us, the New York of the future is not slightly more efficient cars all the time, it's a better balance with more cycling, more on street space dedicated to moving public transportation, and making our walking environments safe," Norvell said.
According to Norvell, millions of Americans are reevaluating their decision to own and drive cars, creating an opportunity for changes in transportation. "If we come out of this window with a handful of half-measures I think a lot of us will see it as a missed opportunity," he said. "We can see a role for more efficient vehicles in a New York City with vastly diminished automobile use."
Robert Paaswell, director emeritus of the University Transportation Research Center and interim president of City College sees a place for electric cars, but his main concern is mass transit. To boost that, he would increase taxes on gasoline and put tolls on expressways and the East River bridges. "Nobody is willing to go after it but gasoline should be taxed another dollar a gallon," he said."
The PlaNYC study, conducted by McKinsey & Company, surveyed New Yorkers about their driving behavior and their attitudes toward electric cars. It found that 21 percent of city residents are considered potential early adopters, people looking to buy an electric vehicle as soon as they become available for purchase. Partly due to limited supply of electric cars, it found, these early buyers "will likely outstrip the available supply of electric vehicles to the New York market for at least the next five years."
Electric car owners must have a parking space with access to an electrical outlet charge their cars. The early adopters indicated they would for a charging station even without tax incentives and do not see the need for a large public charging network throughout the city.
The Nissan Leaf will have a price of $32,780, and the Chevrolet Volt is expected to cost around $40,000, both without the $7,500 federal tax credit.
The New York study anticipates that by 2015, electric vehicle prices should decline because of reduced battery costs, that there will be a sufficient supply of electric vehicles to purchase, and that consumers will take advantage of the existing federal tax credit of $7,500 for new electric cars. The number of electric cars bought, according to the study, "may be significantly less if these assumptions do not materialize."
Paaswell believes there is a "huge market" for electric vehicles that needs to be supported and developed with incentives such as preferred parking spots. While the first buyers will be "environmental people or people who want to be cool," eventually, Paaswell said, the eventual market "will be the everyday user who buys cars for price competitive reasons for their families or for their businesses."
"As the demand goes up, the technology is going to change rapidly," Paaswell said. "The example I always like to give is when cell phones came out, they were these suitcases people carried around, and now you carry a mini-thing in your pocket. The technology will take care of itself when the demand is there and the monetary reward is there."
But Paaswell also believes that electric cars won't take off unless new taxes make conventional vehicles more expensive and the city takes steps to encourage other electric vehicles, such as trucks. "If the city requires all delivery vehicles to be electric and begins to put in charging stations, that will make it easier for people to buy cars," he said.
Car manufacturers and the PlaNYC study count on consumers paying a higher price for an electric car to save money on fuel in the long run. "If gas prices increase, the savings from using electric cars will be higher," the report said.
Electricity prices go up as well -- Con Ed announced another increase last month -- but not as rapidly as gas prices, according to the report. As a result, it concludes, "The day-to-day cost of driving an electric vehicle in New York, including electricity and maintenance, will be 40 percent to 70 percent less than a gasoline vehicle costs to operate" meaning that "electric vehicles offer the potential to save drivers significant sums of money over time."
The study does not see the need for the city to create a public network for charging electric cars. "The market will be saturated with early adopters so in the long term, that's something to be looked at but in the short term, the study found it wouldn't be necessary," said Jason Post, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The report did, however, recommend other possible steps for the city and stakeholders to take to encourage electric vehicle adoption. These include discounts on garage parking spaces with charging infrastructure, a free unlimited MetroCard for one year, and street trees being planted in the name of the first 5,000 New Yorkers who buy an electric vehicle.
As part of its sustainability strategy, the Bloomberg administration has purchased some hybrid police cars. In 2007, the administration announced a plan to replace the city's 13,000 taxis with conventional hybrid cars by 2012. That, however, has been blocked by the courts.
The study also considered how much strain electrical vehicles might put on the city’s electrical grid. It concluded that if the number of electric vehicles reaches about 50,000 vehicles by 2015," it would not have an impact on the grid," according to Post.
If the number of vehicles exceeded 200,000, the city could reduce their effect by allowing charging stations to work only when demand for power is low, such as overnight. This is known as smart charging.
Power plants that produce the electricity for the cars have their own emissions, though the exact amount varies widely. The Obama administration recognized that power plants produce carbon dioxide emissions when it decided to not treat all electric cars as emission free. Under its plan, a manufacturer would receive a credit for 0 grams of carbon dioxide emission only for the first 200,000 electric vehicles it produces by 2016.
In New York, the report found that, if electric vehicles became widespread, emissions at local power plants might increase but emissions from gasoline consumption would be lower, "resulting in a net benefit of lower overall emissions."
How much lower, though depends to a great extent on how that electricity is generated, according to Jeffrey Zupan, a senior fellow with the Regional Plan Association. "Since the electricity is going to have to come from somewhere, you want it to come from clean energy sources whether it be wind or solar and those sorts of things. If the power plants are going to be fueled by coal we're going to be worse off than if we fuel them by gas," said Zupan. "It's a conundrum because ultimately there aren't too many clean energy sources."
Dumping in any New York City waterway is about to cost more than environmental quality.
It's going to cost money.
The City Council unanimously approved legislation Wednesday that creates a civil penalty dumping in the city's rivers, creeks or canals. Anyone found guilty of dumping in a city waterway could receive a fine between $1,500 and $10,000 for a first violation. Dumping in the city's waters already carries a criminal penalty.
In addition, the council approved legislation to streamline the process of getting green technology in buildings and a bill to formalize the replacement of trees on pubic property.
Whether it’s tossing trash along the bank of the East River or abandoning your boat in Jamaica Bay, the city can not now invoke a civil penalty for dumping in waterways. The only civil penalty for waterfront dumping up until now, said Council Speaker Christine Quinn, is if someone throws something into a waterway from a car.
The bill (Intro 54) the council approved Wednesday would make the city's regulations more consistent, said Quinn.
"What we have in the city of New York is a set of waterfront pollution regulations that are unfortunately inconsistent, full of loopholes and not fully enforceable," said Quinn.
In addition to expanding the city's dumping fines, the legislation would give the departments of sanitation and environmental protection the power to enforce the law. Before this bill, the Department of Small Business Services was the only agency that could enforce waterfront penalties.
The council also approved legislation (Intro 77) that establishes an "interagency green team" within the Department of Buildings to assist residents, contractors and developers navigating the city's permitting and regulatory process for green technology projects. The team was first announced in Quinn's State of the City address last month and is charged with streamlining the city's regulations for green building.
It will include representatives from the buildings, environmental protection, transportation, design and construction and health and mental hygiene departments as well as the City Planning Commission.
The bill, which was approved unanimously, also sets up an innovation review board to review projects that employ new technologies and recommend when these technologies should be used by the city.
Both boards hope to elevate New York City's standing in emerging technology market sectors.
The council also approved legislation (Intro 4 ) that creates a process for removing and replacing trees on public property.
Under the current law, property owners can be fined $100,000 if they remove a tree on public property to, say, make room for a driveway.
Under the legislation, which was approved unanimously, a person who wants to remove a tree from public property would have to get a permit and pay a replacement tree fee based national standards. If the person replace the tree, the Department of Parks and Recreation will reimburse the fee.