The following has been reprinted from a letter by Dennis Markatos-Soriano, Michael Oliva, and Eric Weis of the East Coast Greenway:
Dear Friends:
 The requested trail would add off-road trail in an area that is unsafe for cyclists (in fact, the Greenway currently recommends that cyclists take the PATH train between Jersey City and Newark given the lack of suitable infrastructure). Click to view a map showing the surrounding area. The East Coast Greenway, the developing 3,000-mile bike route connecting cities from Maine to Florida, has long seen the Meadowlands crossing [in northern New Jersey] as the most difficult nut to crack along the entire route. But for the first time, we see a possible opening.
NJ Transit is building 2 new rail bridges across the Hackensack River (a “north” span and a “south” span adjacent to the current Portal Bridge, which will be put out of commission), and taking 2.5 acres of parkland from Hudson County to build a new rail facility. By law, they must give back to the County. State law mandates that NJ Transit must compensate Hudson County by providing one of the following: either (1) double the acreage being taken, (2) double the dollar value of the taken land, or (3) a combination of replacement land and financial compensation. We want that mitigation to take the form of 2 miles of Greenway trail in Hudson County, including a bike & pedestrian path on the new southern Hackensack River bridge, to bring the Greenway off-road from Belleville Turnpike in Kearny to West Side Avenue in Jersey City, adjacent to Hudson Generating Station. Two miles of trail, in a 20’ wide corridor, comes to 5 acres: that’s double the area of the land being taken, meeting the letter of the law.
But to accomplish this, we need your help. On Wednesday, February 10, from 6 to 8:30 pm, there will be a critical public hearing at Secaucus Public Library (1379 Paterson Plank Rd; map here). We urge your attendance. If there is a strong show of support for a bike-ped facility, we can get the NJ Department of Environmental Protection and Hudson County on our side. Public support is imperative; without it, success is unlikely.
In the 18 years since the East Coast Greenway was conceived, this is the best opportunity we’ve seen to build part of the ECG across the Meadowlands. Can we count on your support? Please contact mike@greenway.org if you have questions, or to let us know that you’ll be there.
[Note: The hearing location is a 4-minute walk from a stop on NJ Transit's 190 bus route, which runs between Paterson and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.]
Image: From East Coast Greenway.
 A before-and-after rendering of a proposed design for the Nostrand Avenue bus line, at Empire Boulevard. The federal government’s fiscal year 2011 budget, released this week, has good news for Connecticut’s Hartford-New Britain Busway and New York City’s Nostrand Avenue Select Bus Service. Both were recommended for funds from the Federal Transit Administration’s New Starts and Small Starts program in the upcoming year.
For ConnDOT Commissioner Joe Marie, this is a triumph. Connecticut is now poised to win a “full funding grant agreement” from the FTA, a multi-year agreement that will guarantee hundreds of millions of federal dollars for the busway. ConnDOT’s application seeks $275.3 million, with the federal budget recommending an award of $45 million towards that amount this year. ConnDOT intends to use this grant and other federal funds to cover about 80% of the cost of the $570 million project. If Connecticut does win the grant agreement, expected in the spring, Marie will have turned around not one, but two transit projects that had been stalled for years. The New Haven-Springfield Rail Line received money from the federal high-speed rail program last month.
New York City will receive $28 million for a new Select Bus Service route on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn that will connect nine subway lines and the LIRR. As TSTC’s Kate Slevin told Streetsblog earlier this week, this is another reason for local officials to get behind the project. “We’re living in a time where money for all services, including transit, is scarce,” she said. “Elected officials along the corridor should not look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Image: From NYCDOT presentation to Nostrand Avenue Community Advisory Committee.
 Transit riders across the country are facing higher fares and reduced service. More voices are calling on Congress to increase federal support for transit agencies that continue to grapple with fare hikes and service cuts. The Community Transportation Association of America, which represents small transit agencies across the country, and the Amalgamated Transit Union recently announced a new national coalition called The Alliance for Transit Operating Assistance, focused on this cause.
Currently, only transit agencies in urban areas with less than 200,000 in population may use any federal funds for operating purposes. All other metropolitan areas may use their federal transit funds only for capital projects (a policy which dates back only to the 1990s, as MTR has previously described).
The Alliance is supporting H.R. 2746, introduced by Congressman Russ Carnahan of Missouri and co-sponsored by 85 members of Congress, which would allow transit systems in areas above 200,000 in population to use some federal transit funds for operations. (Smaller systems would get more flexibility, and systems could “flex” transit funds to operations only if state or local governments increased transit operating aid to match.) According to the Alliance, more than 2,100 public transportation workers in at least 20 cities were laid off in 2009.
The effort may most immediately make an impact on the “jobs bill,” which President Obama identified as a priority in his State of the Union address. The House version of the bill (H.R. 2847), passed last year, would provide $8.4 billion for transit and allow transit agencies to use up to 10% of some types of funding received under the bill for operating aid. The Alliance is urging the Senate, which has not passed its version of the bill, to increase the percentage of funds available for transit operating assistance to 20%.
In New York, Pressure on MTA Builds
To minimize the economic hurt of service cuts and fare hikes, the MTA must take advantage of the flexibility federal lawmakers added to the stimulus and redirect 10% of its stimulus funds ($90 million) from construction projects to the operating budget, the Tri-State Campaign and a group of elected officials, transit advocates, and unions said at a rally at the Broad Street subway station this morning. The agency should also keep $50 million in operating funds in the operating budget instead of using it for construction as planned, they said.
“Using stimulus funds to stop service cuts will certainly not solve the MTA’s longer‐term financial problems,” said TSTC’s Kate Slevin, “but this onetime solution will save riders money and buy lawmakers more time to find more permanent and sustainable revenue options.”
Participants included:
- City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca, City Councilmember Margaret Chin, and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio;
- State Senators Martin Dilan, Bill Perkins, and Diane Savino and State Assemblypersons Jose Peralta and Catherine Nolan;
- Transport Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelsen, Norman Brown of the International Association of Machinists, and representatives from Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1056, DC37, Teamsters Local 808, and SEIU NCFO;
- and representatives from the Straphangers Campaign, Tri-State Transportation Campaign, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Transportation Alternatives, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, and the NYC Transit Riders, LIRR Commuters, and Metro-North Commuters Councils.
MTA board members Doreen Frasca and Allen Cappelli have also said that these steps are warranted. The need for emergency measures grew even stronger yesterday, when New York State revealed worsening budget projections that mean the MTA’s budget gap has grown by another $400 million.
Rally participants are organizing a lobbying trip to Washington, DC to advocate for increased federal support for transit operations, and have invited MTA Chairman Jay Walder to join them.
[Story updated 4:11 pm.]
 The proposed plan for 100 College Street would replace highway right-of-way with an office/research building with ground-floor retail and a parking garage. It is the first part of a plan to replace New Haven's Route 34 with development and a connected street grid. (Click to enlarge.) New Haven is sprinting towards gold in the Highway Removal Olympics. In his State of the City address earlier this week, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said that 100 College Street, the initial phase of a project to replace Route 34 with development and a street grid, would be underway by late this year or early 2011. The mayor said this first phase would create 900 permanent jobs and start to reconnect downtown New Haven with the Hill neighborhood that was separated by Route 34 — also known, ironically, as the Oak Street Connector — during the city’s urban renewal phase in the 1950s and 1960s.
 The location of the 100 College Street project. 100 College Street, pictured above, will be built and paid for by a private developer in the Route 34 right-of-way near the Air Rights Garage. The City will complement the development by closing two highway ramps and redoing the frontage roads to add street parking, improved sidewalks, a bike lane (on North Frontage), and turning lanes. The City will use $5 million of a previous allocation from the federal government and is applying for $40 million in stimulus funds to pay for the change, with Mayor DeStefano promising to “find the resources” if stimulus money does not come in.
Tri-State has long supported the project, which envisions a mix of commercial, residential and retail uses along a boulevard-type roadway, and held an urban highway removal symposium in April 2008 to support the City’s first steps towards enactment. The drumbeat for removal and for safer streets grew louder when medical student Mila Rainof was killed near Route 34, only a month after the symposium.
While plans for the western portion of the Route 34 “disconnector” are still being discussed by the City and local neighborhood and safe streets groups, 100 College Street has more broad support among key stakeholders and hopefully will move forward quickly.
Image: From the City of New Haven’s “Downtown Crossing” TIGER grant application.
 The new Speedway Elementary School was built near two busy roads and the Garden State Parkway. As previously reported in MTR, the new Speedway Elementary School was built along two very busy roadways and near ramps for the Garden State Parkway, without a playground or safe access to a large park across the street. The new building will house K-5 in its first year of operation, with pre-kindergarten and middle school students moving in during the 2011-12 school year.
Officials from the Schools Development Authority, NJDOT, NJ State Senate, Essex County and the City of Newark have been invited to help the community address concerns before children move into the new building. The agenda will cover the lack of crossing guards and the need for traffic calming near the school, the lack of a permanent certificate of occupancy, the lack of a security plan to deal with the troubled public housing development next door, the lack of a playground, and lack of outside space for children in case of a fire or other emergency.
On Wednesday, February 3, the parents and community of Speedway Elementary School in Newark will meet at 6:30pm at the old Speedway school (26 Speedway Ave.) on these issues. The meeting is hosted by Councilman Ron Rice, in conjunction with the school’s Parent Liaison, the Speedway PTA, One Newark Education Coalition, and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.
Image: Google Maps.
 Traffic deaths of all kinds have fallen since 2001, but pedestrian deaths now make up most of the total. Mayor Bloomberg and NYCDOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan announced on Wednesday that 2009 saw a record low number of traffic fatalities — down to 256 from about 290 in 2008, a decline of 12 percent over the year, and a 35 percent decline since 2001 when 392 people were killed on New York City streets.
Unfortunately, even as motorist and bicyclist deaths dropped, pedestrian fatalities rose slightly in 2009, to 155. Pedestrians now comprise 60 percent of NYC’s traffic deaths, a statistic that makes it clear that the city needs to continue making walking safer.
Commissioner Sadik-Khan recognized this in her remarks, saying, “We will continue to engineer safer streets, but the fact is that too many accidents are preventable, involving inattention, speeding, drunk driving and motorists who simply fail to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. Working with NYPD, we will work to keep New Yorkers safe from reckless motorists who put everyone on the road in jeopardy.”
TSTC Pedestrian Report Continues to Draw Attention to Safety Needs
Tri-State’s Most Dangerous Roads for Walking report has continued to spur insightful media coverage and government action three weeks after it was released earlier this month. Last weekend, the New York Times‘ metropolitan section took a close look at the deadliest road in the region, Nassau County’s Hempstead Turnpike. One Long Island academic summed up the problems with the road’s design as follows:
“I can’t think of a single redeeming feature about Hempstead Turnpike,” said Lee Koppelman, a director of the Center for Regional Policy Studies at Stony Brook University. He declared the road “another of these state-maintained archaic arterials with uncontrolled commercial development on each side, no shoulder, no real median, where every driveway into every parking lot is in effect an intersection. A disaster waiting to happen.”
Those who work near the road echoed that assessment:
Robert Quinn, [manager of a Levittown flower shop], said that the traffic was more deadly than ever. He pointed west, toward a roadside shrine on a telephone pole at the intersection with Loring Road, right beside the “Welcome to Levittown” sign. The shrine is wrapped with artificial flowers, stuffed animals, a “poem from Heaven” and pictures of a smiling teenager: Lauren Emily Davis, who was 18 on Dec. 30, 2008, when she was killed as she tried to cross.
“I used to go across the street to the luncheonette, but these days I stay on this side,” Mr. Quinn said. “Why tempt fate?”
In the article, Nassau County officials said they were considering adding red-light cameras to six intersections on the road, and NYSDOT plans to improve six other intersections.
Image: TSTC graphic using data from NYCDOT. “All other” fatalities include vehicle drivers, passengers, and motorcyclists.
The New Haven-Hartford-Springfield Rail line is closer than ever to fruition, now that the project has won $40 million from the federal government’s high-speed rail initiative. Thanks to Gov. Jodi Rell, ConnDOT Commissioner Joe Marie, CT House Speaker Chris Donovan, US Sen. Chris Dodd, and advocates, tracks will soon be on the ground for a transit project that had been on the drawing board for nearly a decade and appeared stuck in limbo just two years ago.
The announcement comes after months of advocacy by Tri-State and Connecticut groups that recognized, after President Obama announced last April that the federal government would fund high-speed rail, that this funding could put momentum behind the New Haven-Springfield project. In August, TSTC and 21 New England groups sent a joint letter of support for the project to the Federal Rail Administration, and through the winter Tri-State called on state leaders to make the down payment needed to show the federal government that it was serious about the project. They did so earlier this month.
The rail funds will pay for just a small portion of a project that is expected to cost $880 million to complete. But more could be on the way if Connecticut officials maintain the pace. As the Transport Politic points out, another $2.5 billion for high-speed rail is available in the federal government’s fiscal 2010 budget, with an additional $1 billion per year proposed for the next five years. Last December, ConnDOT Commissioner Marie said the agency had fast-tracked the project’s remaining environmental and engineering studies so that the state will be able to apply for a grant much larger than the $62 million it requested for this round. Tri-State and others had recommended that the agency do this in 2008.
Other Awards in the Region
New York will receive $151 million in rail funds, with most of it going towards the Albany-Schenectady Empire Corridor. New Jersey is receiving funds for improvements to the Northeast Corridor. The full list of awards is available here (PDF file).
 Gillibrand (pictured on the subway in Washington, D.C.). Over the last week, federal lawmakers from New York floated two proposals having to do with transit stimulus funds. One would put transit riders in danger of further cuts, while the other might be the best hope for the MTA’s near-term stability.
Five U.S. Representatives from the Hudson Valley have asked Gov. Paterson to support a truly irresponsible plan. Reps. Hall, Hinchey, Murphy, Lowey, and Engel would cut, by $110 million, the payroll tax passed over the summer to fund the MTA. They would replace it with $110 million in stimulus funds which the agency is allowed to use for day-to-day operations (but currently plans to use for construction projects). This would blow a hole in future MTA budgets, since it would replace yearly tax revenues with one-year stimulus funds. It would also eliminate the MTA’s ability to use this money to reduce planned service cuts, which Tri-State and the Straphangers Campaign have said the MTA should do. The cuts would save $129 million annually.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a wiser idea: devoting $15 billion to transit in the federal “jobs bill” being discussed in Washington, of which 10% could be used towards operating expenses. Assuming this was distributed to agencies according to the formulas used for the stimulus, the MTA could receive $2.1 billion, of which $210 million would be available for operating expenses. This would go a long way towards closing an MTA budget gap that now appears to be in the $500 million range.
Image: Mario Tama/Getty Images.
 TSTC made frequent appearances in Albany last year, but will have a full-time presence for the first time in the years to come. New York’s transportation woes are numerous, and many of them can be traced back to one source. A lack of money for transit, bridge, and road projects; the inability of cities to use cameras to keep cars out of bus lanes; and a missing state smart growth philosophy are all problems that can only be solved by Gov. Paterson, legislative and agency leaders, and other officials in the state capital. So that’s where TSTC is heading. For the first time, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign is hiring a full-time staff member based in Albany.
The staff member will advance key legislative issues and expand our partnerships in Albany. Candidates should be articulate, dynamic, and assertive and have experience working with elected officials and with community organizing campaigns. They must have a dedication to and passion for environmental issues, strong writing and journalistic skills, and a willingness to work in an advocacy environment. Specific knowledge of transportation-related issues is a strong plus and familiarity with NYS geography is preferred.
Responsibilities will include:
- Pushing existing legislation to improve transportation planning and transit systems such as bus camera lane enforcement and complete streets;
- Pushing for traffic safety legislation (speed cameras, expansion of red light cameras, “vulnerable users” legislation, etc.);
- Advocating for increased, sustainable, and balanced funding sources for transit;
- Watchdogging state Department of Transportation projects and programs and conducting meetings with department staff;
- Writing a weekly “Albany Report” for MTR and another publication;
- Managing a state candidate issue survey.
Other responsibilities may include press outreach, public presentations, blog and report writing. This is a one-year position with the possibility of extension. It is based in Albany, with some travel to our main office in New York City and around the state required.
Three years of work experience required. The candidate must be politically savvy, energetic, flexible, and have excellent analytical, research and writing skills. Masters in urban planning, environmental policy, nonprofit management, or related field preferred.
To apply or for more information, send an e-mail to the attention of Associate Director Veronica Vanterpool at tstc[at]tstc.org.
Image: TSTC’s Kate Slevin (center) at a press conference of the Empire State Transportation Alliance in Albany, January 2009. Photo via the Straphangers Campaign.
Pedestrian crashes are the leading cause of injury hospitalizations at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, Dr. Jamie Ullman told audience members at the second annual New York City Summit on Pedestrian Injury last week. In 2009, 256 people were treated at the hospital for a pedestrian injury. Though the vast majority of those treated recovered from their injuries, the average hospital stay came to 10 days.
 Dr. Ullman. Held at the hospital, the summit brought together state and city officials, doctors, advocates, and representatives from law enforcement and emergency response agencies to discuss the persistent problem of pedestrian injury and death in New York City. City pedestrian fatalities hover at a stubborn 150 per year.
Perhaps the most exciting presentation came from NYCDOT’s Robin Kenton, who announced the forthcoming kick-off of a new social marketing campaign targeting speeding and reckless drivers. NYCDOT’s “Look” campaign for bicyclist safety was well-received by advocates and the public, and this new campaign will likely follow that model.
The city has made progress, implementing traffic calming, street closures and other engineering and design improvements throughout the five boroughs. But enforcement continues to lag, and NYPD’s representatives at the summit did nothing to dispel the conventional wisdom that the agency cares more about moving cars than protecting pedestrians. Joseph Ellis of the NYPD’s Transportation Bureau warned against “slowing down vehicular traffic to speed up pedestrian traffic — you can’t just do that. The motorists are unhappy.”
Representatives from Nassau County also attended the event, where Tri-State’s Michelle Ernst gave a presentation reviewing the Campaign’s recent Most Dangerous Roads for Walking report. Given that the report identified Hempstead Turnpike as the most dangerous road in the region, their participation was an encouraging sign. They clearly recognized the importance of pedestrian safety and promised that they were working to address it.
Image: Screengrab from a NY1 segment on the summit.
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Masthead Mobilizing the Region is published by the staff of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.
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