The passing and signing of the Infrastructure bill sent spasms of greed and delight flashing across the country. Urban planners and the contractors that erect their dreams are aflutter with delight over the prospects ahead. And in New York politicians are girding their loins for the battles over whose urban dreams will come to reality. Because of the nature of the legislation, the fiercest wars, will be fought in the trenches of traffic and transportation. And they will be bloody.
New York City’s traffic problems and the lien they put on the tri-state area’s crumbling transportation infrastructure have been a home to chaos for over fifty years. The problem is, and has always been, the demand for immediate solutions to problems that demand long-term outlooks. So when a recent mayor decided that riding a bicycle was healthy but at the same time unsafe, he dove into the problem by converting traffic lanes all over the city to bike lanes, thereby creating killer lanes where bikers could run traffic lights and mow down pedestrians at will. It also created less space for the non-shrinking volume of cars, trucks and buses, thereby slowing traffic and dramatically and increasing the time needed to get from one point to another in the city.
And if you’re thinking, “What’s the big deal?” It’s not just the frustration of time wasted, but the money it costs in the loss of productivity from that wasted time. And that is true of all the half thought out solutions to all the myriad problems that have emerged over the last half-century, problems that have resulted in the most nauseating mess in the history of getting from here to there almost anywhere in the world.
One of the biggest causes of our traffic and transportation problems is our political proclivity for trying to make every solution to every problem also raise money.
The real solutions to our traffic problems will cost, not raise, money to pay for other aspects of city life.
Bloomberg and de Blasio set in motion and perpetuated programs that reduced road space drastically, especially in Manhattan. First, by allocating road space for new mini-parks and then by adding bike lanes where there was really no space for them. This was exacerbated by the COVID pandemic when restaurants were able to erect pergolas on the little remaining street space. Main roads were reduced from 4 and 5 lanes to one. The result, catastrophic!
Of course the question must go back to do we really need all these roads and do we want to encourage auto traffic to come into the city at all. Maybe we don’t want to encourage it, but there is a certain amount of auto traffic that demands entry to Manhattan from the outer boroughs, New Jersey, Westchester and Connecticut and it appears that no amount of additional cost and inconvenience will deter it. That becomes a traffic problem once it arrives in the city but it’s a transportation problem until it gets here. Manhattan is serviced by any number of bridges, tunnels and highways, most originally designed for horse and carriage trade. Probably the only ones that are even moderately functional for modern traffic are the George Washington Bridge which is now 90 years old and the Henry Hudson Bridge which was built as a WPA project and opened in 1935 and has actually been under re-construction ever since and the Verrazano Bridge to Statin Island where no one goes. The bridges going from Manhattan to Brooklyn and the Bronx are all falling down and the tunnels to New Jersey are in worse shape. The BQE and the Cross Bronx Expressway are disasters waiting to happen and the West Side Highway and FDR are so overcrowded that there are traffic jams at 2:00 AM.
And still the cars continue to come. Bridge and tunnel fares approach $20 bucks a throw while parking in private Manhattan garages can reach $1,500 a month. And still they come and will continue to come, wasting money and time until someone comes up with a solution that is both cost efficient and practically convenient.
But you can’t do that in a week or a month and it will definitely break any budget you have waiting in the wings.
It starts outside the city, in the transportation part of the problem. Right now there are any number of rail systems that feed the city. A few of them enter right into Manhattan and deposit passengers at Grand Central or Penn Station from which commuters can take a cab or a subway to their final destination. Right now they are overcrowded and need to be expanded, as does the Jersey City terminus of that state’s commuter lines. The proposed new rail tunnel would be a good start. Unfortunately, like all the other functional solutions this will take too long to help the election campaign of any politician who supports it.
Once this tidal wave of cars, trucks and buses enters the city the problem turns to traffic. The old part of the city, the area below 14th St. is a warren of narrow streets and narrower sidewalks and still there are attempts to install bike lanes and even mini-parks. This is sheer insanity but no one ever said New York politicians weren’t insane. Part of the problem is that NYC planners never bothered to learn anything from anyone else. Probably the biggest traffic problem is caused by deliveries. Truck drivers have no desire to haul their loads from a legitimate space a block away, to a store without parking facilities that is receiving their deliveries, so they just double park where the delivery is to be made. One double-parked truck kills a traffic lane for a whole block. A perfect example of the kind of problem that develops is lower Broadway from 14th Street to Canal St. Once a five-lane thoroughfare that took less than two minutes to traverse, it has had one lane disappear to parking, one converted to a bike lane, another to a “bus only” lane and a forth to double-parked delivery trucks. So this once easily navigable express street is now reduced to a one-lane disaster on which a single vehicle attempting to make a turn into a clogged side street brings traffic to a complete halt for blocks.
And before we leave this litany of thus far unsolved traffic problems let’s take a look at the city’s latest disaster in waiting; Congestion Pricing. Once again, the city fathers have lost sight of the problem in a greedy shot at raising money to supplement the tax base. They want to charge drivers for coming into mid-town Manhattan and the appeal of all that extra money has greedy politicians drooling all over their ties. The problem isn’t too many cars in the city; the problem is too little available street space and almost no off-street parking. It’s a problem that has existed almost forever, but there is a solution and I will get into it in the second segment of this blog.
Well done DeSetsa. As usual. Admiration and love to all.