Community drives dialogue of new No. 1 concern: Traffic

By Chris Lombardi

On Wednesday night, Dee Demuse sat in the third row of seats at the Church of the Holy Cross on 42nd St., prepared to speak her mind about one thing in particular: not getting run over by charter buses.

“They’re everywhere,” Demuse told Chelsea Now as city Department of Transportation staff, members of Community Board 4 and the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition (CHEKPEDS) all huddled into the room for a transportation forum. “And those bus drivers are shameless. One of them told me, ‘I can park in any MTA bus stop I want!’” Demuse, a veteran gadfly and co-chair of the 300 West 43rd Street Tenants’ Association, waved to Manhattan Borough Commissioner Margie Forgione as the crowd quieted down. “I’m determined to be heard,” she said. “It’s like the old saying: ‘In silence, you consent.’ I won’t do that.”

The event at Holy Cross was one of three this week held by the DOT for local community members, in the face of rampant development and new pledges by the city to include the public in creating “sustainable streets.”

Such inclusion is key to DOT’s new strategic plan of the same name, and DOT staff were certainly in attendance at this week’s meetings. On Tuesday, members of Community Boards 4, 5 and 6 gathered at the O. Henry Learning Center on West 17th St. to pore over plans for new bus lanes on 34th St., billed as a “short-term project to improve safety and bus mobility.” And on Thursday, after Chelsea Now went to press, Hudson Guild was to host a “Panel Discussion on Transportation Issues” featuring DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and moderated by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

“Much of the work we do on transportation issues in Chelsea is in response to input we get directly from the community,” Quinn said on Wednesday, in am e-mail statement to Chelsea Now. “My office is in constant contact not just with formal advocacy groups, but also community boards, block and tenant associations, and individual constituents.”

This intensive discussion on traffic, a week after Earth Day, was consistent with a recent study by the Citizens Committee for New York, which found that of all the problems cited by New Yorkers as most in need of solving, number one was the city’s congested streets and sidewalks.

The Citizens Committee study, which asked 3,000 New Yorkers to name the most pressing problems in their neighborhoods, had some results that once would have seemed surprising. Crime, long top among New Yorkers’ concerns, ranked at No. 14 in Manhattan. It fell below “noisy neighbors” and “lack of organized activities for youth,” and way below the concerns often expressed at Board 4 and 5 meetings: “street noise” (No. 3), “lack of affordable housing” (No. 4) and “too much growth, overbuilding” (No. 8). Above them all, at Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, were “traffic congestion” and “dangerous intersections or street crossings.”

To Peter Kostmayer, director of the Citizens Committee, the results show a public newly focused on traffic, “partly because the mayor has been focusing on traffic during the debate over congestion pricing.” In addition, he added, the 15-year decline in crime has meant that “people have the luxury to think about these quality-of-life issues—and to think we can solve these problems. We can ban smoking in bars, we can have a stronger noise code. People are thinking about solutions.” In Kostmayer’s case, that means numerous meetings since the failure of congestion pricing, exploring issues like abolishing free parking while issuing residential permits. In Chelsea and Clinton, it’s been about planning for a future set to receive thousands more people on already congested streets.

On Tuesday, DOT met with community members concerned about the future of 34th St. As part of a scheduled street repaving, the DOT will be installing more standard lane widths and improved/expanded bus lanes, while moving from a six lane road to a five lane road.

Wednesday’s meeting was an outgrowth of the work of the Ninth Avenue Renaissance, a partnership between of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association (HKNA), CHEKPEDS, the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. After a series of public forums starting in September 2006, PPS developed a final report that includes suggestions for bike lanes, bus lanes and changes in traffic signals to make Ninth Ave. more neighborhood-friendly. Last summer, HKNA and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council secured $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Transportation for a two-year study on traffic issues relating to the Lincoln Tunnel entrances.

Wednesday’s meeting at Holy Cross was the first such public forum regarding the study. DOT’s Forgione joined Deputy Borough President Rose Pierre Louis and DOT project manager Andrew Lenton in praising CHEKPEDS. Louis called the effect of the group “truly transformative” adding, “In all this, CHEKPEDS is really leading the way. Thanks to all of you, there is still an opportunity to create a city that is walkable.”

Then Lenton began to explain the nitty-gritty of the study, which covers the area between 29th and 55th Sts. between Eighth and 12th Aves. “Our goal is a comprehensive plan which will do it all: relieve current congestion, improve travel conditions and safety, and do it in a way consistent with PlaNYC 2030,” Lenton said. As an example of successful planning, Lenton held up a copy of CHEKPEDS’s 2007 report, “Less Traffic, Better Streets: A Community Vision for Ninth Avenue.”

Well-known urban planner and Daily News traffic columnist Samuel Schwartz, who had helped develop that report, reminded the group of similar alliances between DOT and City Planning, showing quick images of green, pedestrian-friendly walkways and bike lanes at Gansevoort and Canal Sts. Then he showed a slide with images of the current 10th Avenue, streaming with buses and construction debris, and slowly removed the images until all that was left was a few smudges signifying open streets.

“I want you to dream 36th Street and Ninth Avenue now,” Schwartz said. “Take a ‘tabula rasa’ approach, and tell us all your ideas.”

Later, community participants stood up and gathered at long tables, each representing one of five problem areas: Lincoln Tunnel Access, Pedestrian Mobility and Safety, Charter/Tour Buses and Transit, Truck Loading, Parking, Bicycles, and Traffic Congestion. With one or two DOT staffers at each table, they pointed to maps and photographs to make suggestions.

“Right at that spot, no driver can actually see a bicyclist or a pedestrian, because their view is blocked,” said one young man in the “Bicycles” group. “My solution is: remove all the phone booths on that side of Ninth Avenue!” At the Charter Bus table, Demuse and others physically blocked corners on the maps, to indicate when, in their estimation, it is impossible to cross the street. More quietly, community members at the Truck Loading tables made suggestions for what should go into DOT’s memos to local trucking companies, to help avoid future crises.

After about 90 minutes, the groups came back together, each offering five suggestions to be included in the study as it goes ahead. Before any changes are implemented, the DOT plans to conduct a “walk-through” of the affected areas to evaluate all the suggestions, and still more community hearings to see if the solutions they choose make sense on a local level.

“In order for DOT to undertake a comprehensive traffic study, it is imperative that we hear directly from the community,” DOT spokesperson Scott Gastel told Chelsea Now. “The Neighborhood Workshop in Hell’s Kitchen produced a number of issues that we will be looking at as the traffic study moves forward.”

Sadik-Khan herself was set to answer questions at Thursday night’s citywide forum at the Hudson Guild, which was set right after the January release of “Sustainable Streets.” Unlike the Tuesday and Wednesday meetings, Thursday’s event is billed as a “Citywide Pedestrian Safety Forum” designed to address a fuller range of transit issues. That includes the recently established bicycle lane on lower Ninth Ave., which has caused some ripples among community members who felt they weren’t adequately consulted before it went in. Ever since, Quinn said via email, “we’ve been working closely with Community Board 4, Fulton Houses and other local elected officials.”

That’s why the spate of public meetings is now interwoven into the process itself, from the scoping documents for the Ninth Avenue study to the final section of DOT’s strategic plan itself. They’re the stuff of actual change, Board 4 chairperson Jean-Daniel Noland told the group on Wednesday night,

“Grand gestures like congestion pricing, they come and go,” Noland added. “This—this is where the work gets done.”