In its first meeting since Mayor Michael Bloomberg won re-election by a narrower than expected margin, the City Council took on the administration's enforcement of parking regulations and passed four bills on how the city issues tickets. The mayor has vowed to veto at least one of them.
At Monday's stated meeting, the council also approved a land use measure paving the way for a new police academy in College Point and passed a resolution calling for the state to ban drilling for natural gas in the city's upstate watershed.
The parking rules, though, attracted the attention and heated discussion. The most controversial of the measures, Intro 907, would allow drivers a five-minute grace period at MUNI meters and after alternate-side parking restrictions go into effect.
The other bills would ease parking restrictions on members of the clergy, require advance notification of changes in parking meter rules, and improve procedures alerting people of parking regulation changes and make it easier for drivers to avoid being fined for offenses five days after a new rule goes into effect.
In total, Council Speaker Christine Quinn said, the package would make enforcement of parking rules in the city clearer and fairer. Supporters said they would bring some courtesy and common sense to a system that now, justifiably or not, angers many New Yorkers.
Several members accused the administration of using tickets to raise money rather than to move traffic and protect public safety. "Fines and tickets and fees are not supposed to be revenue generators," Quinn said.
The mayor reiterated Monday that he would veto the grace period bill. "I think it's a very misguided piece of legislation,” he said, adding, "A five-minute grace period is only going to lead to chaos and enormous increases in the number of contested tickets, and in argument.”
Quinn, though, said the bill reflects the fact that "everyone isn’t on some universal clock."
According to Councilmember Simcha Felder, one of the bill's sponsors, 300,000 tickets out of more than 1.4 million issued in 2007 were given within five minutes of the time a regulation went into effect or the meter ran out. Neither Felder nor Quinn would estimate how much not issuing those tickets would cost the city -- but it stands to be at least several million. Council members, though, said that is beside the point.
"If the administration wants to say this is about revenue, then we should call it a ticket tax and issue it to people who don’t even have cars," Felder said.
The bill passed by 47 to 2, with members Tony Avella and Daniel Garodnick voting no. ( Maria Baez did not attend yesterday's meeting reportedly because of medical problems.) This provides well in excess of the number of votes needed to override any veto.
The bill on the clergy, Intro 0662-A, would allow members of the clergy with a permit to park for extended hours near their houses of worship and outside a hospital or a funeral establishment. It would also provide permits to clergy who work in New York City but live outside the state and to those who work for at least 20 hours for a religious organization even if they do not receive full-time pay.
"God's work is not controlled or dictated by traffic rules," said Councilmember Letitia James, speaking for the measure.
While supporting the intro, a number of council members said it does not go far enough.
"It's a shame we even have to have this type of bill," said Councilmember Helen Foster, whose father is a minister. "Common sense and common courtesy indicate that, particularly in the black community, the black clergy is where you go first" when someone has died, is sick or in trouble."
She urged the mayor to sign the bill, saying if he did not he would be "sending a message that what you [clergy] do is not important."
Intro 1017-A would require the Department of Transportation to give advance notice of permanent and temporary changes in parking restrictions. It also allows any driver who gets a ticket for violating the rules within five day of the rules change to contest the ticket -- assuming the car was legally parked under the old regulations.
The fourth measure, Intro 1076-A, was apparently prompted by a rash of tickets issued after the city changed meters to reduce the amount of time one bought for 25 cents from 30 minutes to 20. It requires the city to provide 30 days notice of any such change and to alert people through mail, email and the Department of Transportation website.
"An orange parking tickets should never be the most common way of discovering the rules have changed," said Councilmember Vincent Gentile, a sponsor of the bill.
All these measures passed by a vote of 49 to 0.
Whether or not Monday's meeting signals the emergence of a more assertive City Council, much of the rhetoric had a decidedly harsh tone with even some allies of the mayor, such as Felder, criticizing the administration.
"Do you have any doubt there are de facto quotas for traffic agents in this city?" Councilmember Lew Fidler asked. "The people of New York City are sick and tired of being sick and tired of being ticketed to death."
Councilmember James Vacca said he hopes the bills will lead to "a discussion about traffic enforcement fairness" in the city. Now, he said, "people feel the city is judge and jury" and that motorists are guilty until proven innocent.
Last week the New York Post reported that the level of passion about the parking issue prompted Quinn, who has worked closely with the mayor, to postpone debate and voting on parking until after the election.
Quinn denied that. "These bills were not delayed as a favor to anyone," she said yesterday.
The council voted 47 to 2 to approve construction of the new police academy on a 35-acre site in College Point, Queens. It would replace the current academy on East 20th Street in Manhattan and also consolidate at a single location other training facilities, such as a driving course and target range, which are now scattered throughout the city. Once complete, the new school would be able to accommodate 1,900 recruits at a time as well as classes for officers already on the job.
"If you want a better police force, you need a better training facility," said Councilmember Peter Vallone in support of the new school.
The measure passed by 47 to 2, with Barron and Avella voting no.
"I don’t know what they're training these people in," said Barron. "We have people coming out of that academy who don’t know how to respect the rights, constitutional rights of black and Latino citizens."
In casting his vote, Councilmember Alan Gerson expressed concern that the New York City Police Museum remain in downtown Manhattan and not be moved to the College Point location, although Gerson said there might be justification for some kind of museum there as well.
The existence of natural gas reserves in upstate New York threatens to put upstate economic interests against those of New York City. Much of the land in the so-called Marcellus Shale formation lies in New York City's watershed. Environmentalists and other have expressed concern that extracting the gas -- drilling and then pumping in millions of gallons of water mixed with various chemicals -- could endanger the city's drinking water.
"This could lead to a situation where the water supply would be degraded," said Councilmember James Gennaro, who has lead opposition to the drilling, and could require the city to build filtration plants which, 10 years ago, were estimated to cost $10 billion. "It's hard to imagine how this could even be proposed by the state, Gennaro said.
The decision whether to allow the drilling rests with the state. But in a voice vote yesterday the council passed Resolution 2191 calling on the state to ban drilling in the city's watershed. It also urges the federal government to regulate the process under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
Quinn said the measure was necessary even though the one company that wanted to drill, Chesapeake Energy, has backed away from its plans. Saying the company was "forced out," Quinn continued, "We want to make sure that if anyone wants to come back and do it again, we’re not interested."
Although Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reputation as a bona fide straphanger suffered a bit after the New York Times revealed that two Chevrolet Suburbans regularly ferry His Honor from his home on 79th Street to 59th Street where he catches the Lexington Avenue express to City Hall, it would be unfair to paint Bloomberg as nothing more than a grandstanding populist who only swipes his MetroCard for the cameras.
After eight years in office, it is undeniable that the mayor wants to tackle traffic and improve biking, walking, and public transportation, even if it means ruffling feathers along the way. If Bloomberg's tenure were to end in November, his impact on the city's pedestrian spaces and bicycle infrastructure would surely be on his list of legacies.
That said, he lost the fight for congestion pricing -- easily his most publicized transportation initiative -- and the financial forecast for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which serves 14.6 million people with 2.6 billion trips around the region each year, is grim to bleak, at least in part because of funding choices made by the mayor.
The most comprehensive analysis of the administration's transportation record is, like so many other comprehensive analyses offered by the administration, an internally authored document. Released in December, the Department of Transportation's Sustainable Streets Index tracks transportation trends over the past decade. It's a well-designed, fact-packed, reader-friendly report that unsurprisingly depicts the agency that authored it quite favorably.
That is not to say the department doesn't deserve to toot its own horn. Since Janette Sadik Khan took over the department in April 2007, it has converted acres of street space to pedestrian plazas, installed hundreds of miles of bike lanes, piloted a new bus service that is significantly speeding commutes in the Bronx, launched the wildly popular Summer Streets initiative, and made the city safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
The index includes a slew of figures detailing these facts, but the most staggering, and the one that casts Bloomberg in the best light, is that transit ridership increased by nine percent between 2003 and 2007, while citywide traffic volumes remain the same. As the report points out: "These years mark the first time since World War II that the city experienced a period of entirely transit-centered growth, where non-auto modes absorbed all growth in travel in New York City."
Bloomberg has always fancied the English. Back in his private-sector days, his media empire's second largest office was in London, and one of his first transportation-related rows as a public figure came over toll for the East River bridges, an attempt to emulate the then brand-new congestion charge that revolutionized transportation in London. The phrase "congestion pricing" even made its way into a 2002 proposed budget, but after it proved poisonous in public opinion polls, the initiative was dropped, at least for a few years.
In 2007, congestion pricing came crashing back onto the scene, stealing the show from all 126 other points in Bloomberg's omnibus sustainability initiative PlaNYC. For months advocates and newspapers opined. Depending on whom you asked, the proposal was either a regressive tax on the working class or the city's salvation. In the end, the plan died in Albany, as did an attempt, launched by a blue ribbon panel earlier this year, to charge drivers to cross the East River bridges.
The pieces of New York City's transportation pie that Bloomberg directly controls have been handled very well, according to most advocates and urban planners. His transportation department has garnered more positive media attention than any in recent memory and truly revolutionary transformations are underway on streets throughout the five boroughs. On the other hand, the single most significant actor in our urban transportation drama, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has had no shortage of trouble in the past eight years.
Although the authority is far from under the mayor's control (his appointees fill only four of the board's 17 seats), its successes and failures are intensely intertwined with the city's well-being and Bloomberg's transportation track record.
The 2005 transit strike stalled the city during one of the busiest shopping weeks of the year. It was only the third strike ever against the MTA, and as such it is imprinted in the minds of millions of straphangers with heavy ink. A New York 1 poll taken during the transit strike showed mixed opinions about Bloomberg's actions: Fifty-one percent said his handling of the situation was not so good or poor, while 45 percent said it was great or good.
The authority's financial standing did see some good years under Bloomberg. The real estate boom helped the MTA unload large parcels of land for big bucks. That balanced the books for a bit, but when the bubble burst and dedicated tax revenues dropped precipitously, the authority was back in the red.
During those long-gone good years, Bloomberg cut the city's contribution to the MTA. It is now about $60 million a year, or just 1 percent of the authority's capital budget. Previously, the city's contribution equaled about 10 percent of the MTA's capital budget. The cut has inspired some advocates, like John Petro of the Drum Major Institute, to claim that Bloomberg is "shortchanging mass transit" and others like Veronica Vanterpool of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign to call for the city to increase its aid to the MTA.
Certainly, Bloomberg has campaigned as though the decrease hadn't happened. In August he released Moving NYC, a populist, voter-friendly, MTA-dependant transit platform that suggests a slew of new proposals, like free cross-town buses, that are either inspired ideas or empty promises.
If the voters re-elect Bloomberg in November, we'll have four more years to find out if he is really the MetroCard Mayor or merely another politician in a big black SUV.
Graham T. Beck is the managing editor of Transportation Alternatives' StreetBeat and a freelance writer. He lives in Brooklyn.
Religious rhetoric often seems to find its way into discussions of Moynihan Station, which makes a good deal of sense if one subscribes to the notion that, in the historical schema of civic architecture, grand cathedrals were replaced by train terminals and post offices. Moynihan Station involves both: Its most current iteration calls for the construction of a railroad station inside of the eastern half of Farley Post Office, which would then be known as Moynihan Station.
Speaking of the project that would come to bear his name, the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan intoned at a 2002 press conference: "In the old time, you arrived at Pennsylvania Station at the train platform. You went up the stairs to heaven. Make that Manhattan. And we shall have it again. Praise all."
The old time, of course, referred to the era of old Pennsylvania Station: the Beaux-Arts masterpiece designed by McKim, Meade & White in 1910, where Moynihan sold newspapers and shined shoes as a boy fresh to the city from Tulsa, Okla. It was replaced by the new Penn Station in the mid 1960s, an act that the critic Lewis Mumford then characterized as "irresponsible public vandalism," and is now seen as a catalyst for the architectural preservation movement in the U.S. The two stations are so drastically different that the Yale architecture professor Vincent Scully once compared the old to the new by saying, "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat."
Moynihan's plan to restore Penn Station's greatness -- which has been stalled so long that it's hard not to see the whole thing as some sort of civic penance -- has always aimed to turn the Farley Post Office across Eighth Avenue -- a McKim, Meade, and White Beaux-Arts building designed to match its former neighbor -- into a grand railroad station befitting New York. Over the years, the proposal has called for a variety of anchor tenants, including Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad, and a litany of additional components such as a relocated Madison Square Garden, 850,000 square feet of commercial space, 5.5 million square feet of towering office space, and much more. Despite all of the permutations, state funds, private money, a few environmental impact statements, and even an engraved marble cornerstone that has gone missing, the project never managed to get off (or into) the ground.
Earlier this month, Gov. David Paterson and Sen. Chuck Schumer started up the Moynihan chatter once again. After six months of negotiations with Amtrak, parties reached a preliminary agreement for the company to relocate its operations to the Farley Post Office, if a train station were to be built there. That move improved, but by no means guaranteed the prospects for federal stimulus funds for the construction needed to turn the post office into Moynihan Station.
The long holdup has nothing to do with a lack of support. Since Moynihan started to champion Amtrak's suggestion that the Farley Post Office serve as New York City's new train station in 1993, civic groups and elected officials have crowded on board as though the plan was Noah's ark. At times, perhaps, all this enthusiasm has caused problems. When Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver shot down one of the biggest iterations of the project, known as Plan B, in 2006, it was not because he was opposed to the development, but because he thought one of the cooks in the kitchen, the Empire State Development Corp., wasn't doing its job well.
The real trouble, though, has been getting all of the project's financial ducks in a row, a dilemma that this latest try seems eager to best with a piecemeal funding strategy. The New York Observer reported: "One official involved with the project called this approach moving beyond 'the Big Bang theory,' the method of executing everything at once, which has failed so many times before."
The current iteration of the Moynihan station project is expected to cost between $1.1 billion and $1.5 billion. There is already more than $200 million in federal funding earmarked for the project and on September 15, the state applied for nearly $100 million for necessary below-ground work through a stimulus-bill backed program called Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery or TIGER, a discretionary grant directly overseen by the Obama administration.
In addition, "[State] officials are planning a second application for a to-be-determined amount of money from the $8 billion set aside in the stimulus for high-speed rail projects," the Observer reported. It cited a preliminary application that the Paterson administration put forward earlier this year seeking nearly $400 million of those high-speed rail dollars.
Of course, given the current economic situation and the money's relatively well-publicized availability, there is stiff competition between state transportation departments all around the country for both the TIGER and high-speed rail funds.
At this point, it seems like if any those dollars make it to New York, it will be on a wing and a prayer, which, given all that has been written about Moynihan Station, is perhaps fitting.