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It has been a longstanding joke among transit advocates that New York City would see a Second Avenue subway before it saw the first Bus Rapid Transit line. Well, that cruel

prediction has at last been laid to rest. With much fanfare the Fordham Road Bx12 route, dubbed the “salsarengue bus” by virtue of the Hispanic neighborhoods it serves, was announced in March. Under its official mon-iker, Select Bus Service, the first BRT route will feature painted shoulder lanes, limited stops and articulated buses to carry more pas-sengers.

Over the past two years, the MTA and DOT have whittled fifteen possible BRT routes down to a handful of short-term proj-ects to be implemented by 2009. In addition to Fordham Road, the agencies are working to roll out Select Bus Service on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, First and Second Avenue in Manhattan and Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island. A new river to river bus right of way is also in the works for 34th Street, one of the City’s pokiest cross-town routes. There was initially one additional route under devel-opment on Queens’ Merrick Boulevard, but DOT put those plans on hold in the face of local opposition to removing car parking spaces to make way for the thousands of bus riders in a dedicated bus lane. (Note to read-ers: Turnout at public workshops matters!)

over the past year, the mta and City Dot have been testing BRt components on new York City streets. these features include:

l Bus bulbs on lower Broadway that extend the sidewalk out one lane so that buses do not have to pull in and out of traffic to pick up pas-sengers

l Red-pigmented bus lanes on 57th Street to discourage other vehicles from violating bus lanes

l Bus traffic signal priority on Victory Boule-vard to hold green lights for buses and help them stay on schedule

l Real time bus information on 1st Avenue to let riders know when to expect the next bus

The most significant plan under develop-ment is an MTA and City pre-board fare pay-ment experiment that will speed boarding. Since passengers must ordinarily dip their MetroCard when getting on the bus, all bus riders must use the front door and wait a few seconds for each rider to pay. With pre-board payment, bus riders get on the bus through any door as passengers do on the subway. Because so much travel time is spent board-ing and alighting, this is a necessary part of

any strategy to reduce delays.T.A. and other advocates

are also pushing the DOT to dig deeper into the BRT tool-box and implement physically separated bus lanes to finally unstick buses from the traffic that regularly parks and drives in bus lanes. The most success-ful BRT systems around the world—Los Angeles, Bogotá, Paris, Jakarta—all use physical barriers to keep lanes clear. Like “subways on the surface,” these lanes whisk tens of thousands of riders to their destinations each day.

While painted lanes offer some deterrent, they by no means prevent drivers from violating a bus right of way. On avenues choked with rush hour traffic, bus lanes are all too tempting for drivers. A T.A. and Campaign for New York’s Future poll of 2,300 bus riders found that 85% of riders think

traffic congestion delays their commute. The addition of bus lane enforcement cameras, a measure requiring Albany’s stamp of approv-al, would also help ensure traffic-free lanes to move bus commuters with subway-like speed and reliability. Time will tell if the State will do right by the 2.7 million New Yorkers who ride the bus each day and approve the use of bus lane enforcement cameras that would automatically issue summonses to people who drive and park in bus lanes and stops.

While the loss of congestion pricing has opened up a $100 million funding gap in the BRT budget, this most-promising of transit initiatives is too important to stay on the drawing board indefinitely. Over the last year, grassroots and environmental jus-tice organizations like Communities United for Transportation Equity (COMM.U.T.E!) and the Pratt Center for Community Devel-opment have joined the host of transit and environmental boosters and called for quicker implementation and additional BRT routes. Their efforts have galvanized a new group of elected officials representing communities of color underserved by public transit who have themselves become BRT proponents.

Speaking at the first-ever BRT Symposium this April, DOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan appraised the City’s progress. “We’re not Curitiba and we’re not Bogotá,” she conceded. “But we’re getting there.” o

BRTMakesitsOverdueNYCDebut

SelectBuseswereshowcasedattheBRTSymposium,butlanedesignwilleventuallyprovemorecriticalthananyvehicle.

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WhatWeGainedintheCampaignforCongestionPricing

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When Mayor Bloomberg first announced plans for congestion pricing on Earth Day 2007, he turned a century of car-centric planning on its head. New Yorkers had long come to regard traffic in the same way they did the weather: something to com-

plain about, but utterly outside their power to change. Frustratingly powerless, each generation of New Yorkers has handed their children a city afflicted with worse traffic than the one they themselves inher-ited.

Over the dizzying course of the past year, the congestion pricing debate woke New York City out if its recurring traffic nightmare. The costs of traffic—to our lungs, our planet and our sanity—have never been better understood by elected officials and the public. And a third rail in NYC politics, charging motorists for the harms they impose on everyone else, has at last been broached.

T.A. went to the mat for congestion pricing, devoting thousands of staff and volunteer hours to the campaign. Had our efforts been directed solely at passing a single piece of legislation, the loss of con-gestion pricing would have been all the more devastating. But the advocacy work T.A. invested on pricing’s behalf has left us far from empty-handed. The campaign was as much about education as poli-tics, and as much about the broader goal of traffic relief as about pric-ing. And because of these efforts, even if the immediate passage of pricing eluded us, we now live in a much different city than we did a year ago.

ATabooLiftedThe MTA was founded on a 1968 compromise that used revenue from the flush Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to help finance the perpetually cash-strapped NYC Transit Authority. But in the genera-tion since, the principle of charging drivers for the sake of transit has never regained broad political traction. If ever a policy amounted to a four-let-ter word, congestion pricing was it.

As recently as early 2007, no elected official wanted their name uttered in the same sentence as pricing. Mayor Bloomberg shunned it during his first term and for the first year and half of his second. There were even res-olutions proposed in City Council to preemptively ban pricing before any official proposal was announced.

Things couldn’t be more different today. The Mayor made it a sig-nature initiative of his second term. 30 City Council Members stood up to support pricing when it counted. And community boards, Busi-ness Improvement Districts, civic organizations, the editorial boards of all major newspapers and political clubs from every borough have joined the cause. And for each of these officials and within each of these groups, an intense debate about congestion pricing has unfold-ed—the first real debate linking traffic and transit in a generation.

That drivers should pay for the congestion and environmental harms they impose on their fellow New Yorkers has gained broad approval. In the last poll conducted before its legislative demise, 67% of NYC voters supported congestion pricing when its revenue is tied to transit enhancements.

TrafficRedefinedBarely two yeas ago, it was the City’s stated position that traffic con-gestion was the byproduct of a robust economy (never mind that $13 billion annually drains out of the regional economy owing to conges-

tion). As bizarre as it sounds today, it was widely held that snarled traffic was proof positive of the city’s economic vitality. Not only has Mayor Bloomberg changed his tune, but New Yorkers have followed suit. 89% of New York City voters say traffic congestion is a “very seri-ous” or “somewhat serious” problem in the city, according to a Quin-nipiac poll last March. The costs of traffic on our health, environment, public space and sanity have never been more widely accepted.

The core purpose of congestion pricing was to shift trips from driving to transit. As the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission studied pricing and other alternatives, and reducing the number of car miles driven in NYC became the yardstick by which the City and State measured pricing, even opponents of congestion pricing crafted their counterproposals in terms of reducing vehicle miles traveled. With the problem and goal at last defined, initiatives like complete streets legislation, Bus Rapid Transit and parking reform can be inte-grated into a cohesive auto-reduction package.

TheNewParkingPolicyConsensusParking is the Trojan horse of urban planning. It enters the neighbor-hood unnoticed, even appreciated, but as time goes on and more cars appear, it begins to steal valuable street space, encourage double and triple parking and create traffic tie-ups because drivers are cruising for those elusive free spaces. The impact of parking on traffic conges-tion is, at best, misunderstood. Many residents and businesses fiercely protect the status quo for fear that things will only get worse. But as congestion pricing eased the mental gridlock surrounding traffic con-gestion, it advanced parking reform right along with it. The solutions that T.A. has proffered for years—reducing government-issued park-ing placards, reforming off-street parking and adjusting metered rates to manage demand at the curb—have now become the most promis-

ing traffic relief measures at hand, gaining support from all sides of the pricing debate. With the 30 pro-congestion pricing votes on City Council, a host of parking reforms are within reach that will simulta-neously ease traffic and fund alternative modes.

LivableStreetsinWritingWhen the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission issued its final recommendations in January, bike and pedestrian advocates found their eyes glued to a single passage earmarking revenue from increased parking rates to “transit, pedestrian, bicycle, and parking management improvements, including, but not limited to, expanded ferry service, bus signalization, BRT investments, bicycle facilities, and pedestrian enhancements.” In that seemingly general phrase was the makings of a lockbox for the sort of initiatives T.A. has been pushing since its inception.

This wording may have fallen through with congestion pricing, but as advocates rally around parking reform as pricing’s heir apparent, there will soon be another opportunity to earmark the revenue gener-ated by drivers to reforms that benefit biking, walking, ferries and transit.

With the 30 pro-pricing votes in City Council, parking reform is within reach.

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ANewCoalitionT.A. has worked with big transit coalitions before, as with the 2005 Transportation Bond Act, but those campaigns were quick to break the huddle once a campaign concluded. Not so with congestion pric-ing. Exactly one week after congestion pricing fizzled in Albany, the steering committee of the Campaign for New York’s Future (of which T.A. is a member) met to take stock of the legislative defeat. On what

was expected to be a somber morning of back-patting and cathartic finger-pointing at the legislature, more than twenty staffers represent-ing every major partner in the coalition came ready to tackle Plan B. The same week, T.A.’s allies in the Empire State Transportation Alli-ance echoed the call to move forward.

The infusion of new organizations has breathed new energy into T.A.’s traffic relief efforts. Along with the Straphangers Campaign, Tri-State Transportation Campaign and Citizens Committee for NYC, T.A. assembled the five-borough Citywide Coalition for Traffic Relief in 2006. The Campaign for New York’s future has enlarged the tent, bringing in natural allies like the New York Environmental Jus-tice Alliance, Sunset Park’s UPROSE and WEACT from Harlem, and labor unions like the Teamsters and General Contactors Association. In pinning traffic relief to transit funding, pricing brought together (and is holding together) an unprecedented coalition with strong allies in Albany and City Council.

The knitting together of all these groups behind a unified trans-portation agenda encompassing MTA funding, traffic relief and more robust alternative modes is a milestone in the movement towards more livable streets.

TransitTurnsaCornerTo the extent that New York City subway and bus service has expand-ed over the last twenty-five years, a great deal of the improvement can be credited to billions of dollars in MTA debt. Those rickety finances, the product of neglect by the City and State, are fast approaching a tipping point. Just as a major compromise cobbled together the MTA operating budget from taxes on gasoline and real estate a generation

ago, another big brokerage is needed today.

The education efforts put into the pricing campaign have fundamentally strengthened the hand of NYC transit riders politically. The most frequently cited statistic of the campaign, that

95% of New Yorkers do not drive to work in the Manhattan Cen-tral Business District, has finally taken root. District by district fact sheets, produced by the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and the Pratt Center, have busted long-held myths about who drives to work from where. Transit riders have finally been revealed as the City’s silent supermajority, and the mobilization that began with conges-tion pricing has awakened them to their influence. As Albany tackles the MTA five year capital plan’s $17.5 billion shortfall, the emerging political force of transit riders may prove decisive in securing a far-reaching compromise to sustainably fund new projects.

New York City hasn’t seen the end of congestion pricing. The ground-work laid in the 2007-2008 campaign will ensure that elected officials and advocates are prepared to win the next round. And in the year or two or five it takes New York to fully embrace pricing, the ripples from the pricing debate will shape NYC streets. With pricing sup-porters still primed to tackle the transportation crisis and the desire of pricing opponents to burnish their own green credentials, there is an unprecedented opening for the rest of T.A.’s agenda to surge ahead. o

transit riders have finally been revealed as the City’s silent supermajority.

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