Article: City's Credibility on Transport Ebbs

The prior weekend, responding to Transportation Alternatives' rally that presented 100,000 pebreastion signatures in favor of a ban on cars from Central Park's loop drive, city transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall told the Daily News that the park drive is a "critical transportation link for commuters." That is patently not the case. The number of cars using the park drive is a miniscule fraction of total vehicles moving north or south in Manhattan on all avenue and highway lane during commuter hours. According to Transportation Alternatives, only one-half of one percent of the people entering New York's Central Business District on an average workday rely on the park drives.

In the one case, the NYC DOT is making false global policy claims to defend a private developer's irrational insistence on building thousands of parking spaces it doesn't need, and in the other, the agency is making up reasons to defend the turf of a park roadway the DOT doesn't want to have to remove from its automobile flow schemes.

As commentator Aaron Naparstek has written, "The most disappointing thing about Weinshall's public statement on Central Park is that it backs her into a corner. To make the park car-free, the mayor will now have to contradict her and set policy that goes against this idea that the Central Park Drives are a vital commuter link. Through misinformation, Weinshall has made it that much harder for a car-free park to happen during the Bloomberg Administration."

The city DOT is free to make such pronouncements largely because the city has no operative transportation policy or goals. Unlike San Francisco's "transit first" agenda or European cities' even more aggressive steps to reduce driving, New York's approach is to muddle through and prevent dramatic crises even while trends like mushrooming truck traffic in neighborhoods overtake it.

In an era when urban shrinkage has given way to booming growth, that's no longer acceptable or workable for the city. The city needs policies that make traffic calming the rule, not the exception, for its streetscapes, that prioritizes bus travel on avenues, that considers the transportation consequences of huge development complexes at the beginning of the siting process, not as something to be explained away in environmental documents, and it needs to become more closely involved in setting priorities for MTA capital projects as growth strains the transit system's capacity and alters travel patterns.

It's not clear the city's transportation insbreastutions are up to these tasks. NYC DOT in particular has shown great difficulty in delivering policy initiatives -- faltering or taking forever just with the study stages of truck route enforcement, traffic calming in Brooklyn, safe routes to schools, bus rapid transit and downtown Brooklyn transportation capacity projects. Whether the urgency to innovate and policy purview of the DOT can be modernized through a top-to-bottom reconstruction of the agency, or whether it should be consigned to a pot-holes and traffic signals department with a new, robust urban "smart growth" and transportation planning located elsewhere is a debate New York needs to begin.