Spring, Traffic, School

A meandering reflection on a weird time in planning

The spring day is an endangered species in New York. As I write, low dew points and temperatures in the mid-70s are making way for shirt-drenching humidity and boiling temperatures because of a meteorological phenomenon known as a Heat Dome. Every year Spring is more fleeting and thus, more precious. This is when the urge to be on and in the street is the highest, and our parks, plazas, and sidewalks overflow with activity. I saw one beautiful example last week at Avenue C Plaza- a bare concrete triangle in the Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn. It happens to sit almost perfectly at the meeting point of Bangla, Mexican, and Hasidic ethnic enclaves. I can’t imagine a more anonymous design, and yet it was totally alive. Around 5:30 a minivan pulled up and unloaded a long plastic table. Women showed up with carts of art supplies and kids in tow. A little craft session broke out until someone started handing the kids, all of them girls, long dresses for folklórico - a type of traditional Mexican dance. The girls practiced their moves swirling their colorful dresses to music from a Bluetooth speaker while traffic rushed by on all three sides of the plaza. The whole thing was a good reminder that you don’t need a fancy design to make a place, you need a party.

This spring feels like an inflection point. Amidst the street scenes like the one at Avenue C came the news that NYC’s congestion pricing program was likely getting canceled. To recap, NYC was set to follow the example of London and charge cars a sliding fee for entering lower Manhattan during peak hours. The estimated 15 billion dollars in revenue from the toll would fund a host of public transit improvements - the extension of the 2nd Ave subway, a new light rail line from Queens to South Brooklyn, ramps and elevators for elderly and disabled riders at every station, signal upgrades, and more. I saw the potential benefits of congestion pricing every time I rode the sparkling Elizabeth Line in London, funded primarily by the city’s congestion tax.

In an unusually potent mix of cowardliness and ineptitude, New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul put the program on “indefinite pause” mere weeks before it was supposed to start and 15 years after it was initially studied and proposed. The Governor’s reasoning was that a new toll would hurt everyday working-class New Yorkers, a line as predictable as it is wrong. Working-class New Yorkers overwhelmingly take public transit. The vast majority of New Yorkers of all classes don’t own cars. 85% of commuters into the congestion zone commute by train or bus. The day after Hochul’s announcement I rode the 7 train into Queens and sat across from an entire row of construction workers, hardhats strapped to their bags, many in various states of dozing off. These are working New Yorkers the Governor doesn’t care for. Can you find working-class people who live in transit deserts and rely on cars to get to work? Absolutely, although the average income of car commuters into the congestion zone is $107k a year. But leadership means making choices that bring the most possible benefit to the most possible people — and on this, the data has been clear for decades. We are the only city in America where most people use public transit. Eventually, the benefits of the tax could have funded transit improvements in the very transit deserts that vocally protested the plan. There is no economic logic of substance to the cancelation. The RPA estimates traffic costs NYC 20 billion dollars a year in lost productivity. Hochul is concerned about pissing off suburban districts for her own re-election campaign.

I don’t want to describe what's been detailed elsewhere, but there are two takeaways I want to highlight. The first is about public space. Much of the focus has been on the hole that Hochul blew in the MTA budget. The MTA had already incorporated congestion pricing revenue in its short and long-term capital plans. There is a lot of understandable handwringing on where that money will come from now and if any of these improvements can actually happen. Somewhat lost in the focus on the MTA budget is the focus on the actual reduction of congestion. The detailed study the MTA produced which was the basis of Federal approval for the plan estimated that it would reduce traffic by as much as 17%. Delete 17/100 cars from Manhattan streets and that’s about 100,000 fewer cars a day. What do you get? You have cleaner air, faster 9-1-1 response times, and less traffic for those who actually need to drive. But you also have a lot more space. This was always the most exciting thing to me, and the thing that somehow seemed to get the least attention— the many more parks, plazas, dance classes, chess games, and block parties that would be possible in a low-traffic Manhattan.

The second takeaway is the growing sense that the US’s biggest city is simply incapable of doing big things. The Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman drew an interesting connection between congestion pricing and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, which had its fair share of critics at the time. The difference is that leaders ignored the vocal minority who thought the bridge was a waste of money and resented the taxes imposed to build it. I can’t remember the last time New York led the world in any large-scale urban project, physical or otherwise. Universal pre-K, the ferry system, NYCID, and Brooklyn Bridge Park are nice feathers in our cap but they’re not quite on the scale of an entirely new subway line and they’re in the past. Weak leadership is also not exclusive to New York City. I lived in London when Rishi Sunak canceled the high-speed rail line from Birmingham to Manchester, another expensive rail project that had spent years in development only to be scrapped as part of a political maneuver. The reaction from my UCL classmates and professors was a resigned shrug. Planners seem increasingly unable to push big ideas beyond the whims of politicians or the skeptical public.

It is possible to situate all these setbacks in a longer decline. The very first reading I was assigned in grad school was Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning by the author Thomas Campanella. There was a time when urban planning was all big ideas — park systems, road networks, neighborhoods from scratch. During the 50s and 60s these projects were almost all directed at crystalizing a car-centric, upper-middle-class view of the metro region. There was a well-deserved backlash against this type of top-down planning led by activists like Jane Jacobs who cut the profession down to size. Campanella asks however if we threw out the baby with the bathwater. Part of Jacobs’ revolution was privileging the grassroots over the technocrat. Plannerly authority and expertise were relegated in favor of “consensus” and “bottom-up” ideas. Obviously, these are good things in many situations, but I think Campanella is right to ask if we’ve over-corrected. The erosion of trust in the expertise of planners means 15 years of careful study on congestion pricing can still be viewed as “wrong,” and thrown out by politicians.

The congestion pricing saga made me somewhat pensive about my chosen profession. I changed careers because I was in a marketing job that made me feel empty and that I suspected was playing a small part in making the world worse. I chose planning because I am genuinely interested in and thrilled by cities but also because I wanted to do some good. Congestion pricing has been the planning effort of my early years in this profession, supported far beyond transit planning circles by public health professionals, street safety advocates, parks and public space advocates, and economic development think thanks. Its sudden cancelation at the whim of a weak Governor brought to life the stunning fragility of the field’s ideas.

When things feel chaotic you look for solid ground, and I found it in northern Queens. The last spring moment I’ll touch on is a speck of sand compared to a seismic issue like congestion pricing but it’s the one that gives me hope. The NYC Department of Transportation runs a program called School Streets where schools can apply to have their surrounding roads closed to traffic. Working with the advocacy group Open Plans, I helped a planner named Sabina run the first day of a school street at PS 129 in College Point Queens. Like anything that changes the status quo in NYC, applying for a school street is a bureaucratic nightmare. Sabina had spent months working with the school’s P.E teacher on permits, and applications, collecting written permission from homeowners on the affected block, and rallying parents and administrators to the effort. She had planned a little block party to celebrate the first day of what would become a weekly occurrence.

I biked to College Point because I really didn’t have any other choice. There is no Subway stop, the bus takes 30 minutes from the end of the 7 line, and Google told me it was quicker to cycle from Brooklyn through industrial Queens than mess with public transit. I got a glimpse of a massive asphalt factory from the Flushing Causeway on my way. Earth movers scooped pebbly piles of aggregate onto conveyor belts to be mixed with recycled asphalt and turned into the pavement mixture which would be sprayed over roads and into potholes around the city. I went past the World’s Fair Marina where if you squint and ignore the 747s taking off from Laguardia across the water you can still see the marshy landscape that used to be northern Queens.

When I arrived at the school class was still in session and the streets were quiet. The Department of Transportation had dropped off four flimsy steel barricades to block off the smallest street adjacent to the school and Sabina and her partners were in the process of setting up some light-touch activities for the kids - sidewalk chalk, games, an area for dancing, and tables of information for parents on the new street arrangement. I posted myself around the corner next to the exit to try and direct kids and parents down the street to our little experiment. At 2:45 a virtual United Nations of children poured out of every door like ants marching out of an anthill. The waiting parents and grandparents greeted them in Mandarin, Bangla, Spanish, English, and many languages I couldn’t identify. Queens is the vision of America that Republicans are afraid of. Ironically, this almost unbelievably diverse school is in a deep red Republican district. College Point is drawn together with some of New York’s last white Republican enclaves in a council district represented by Vicky Paladino, who has been called the Marjorie Taylor-Green of New York.

“I’m glad you’re doing this,” one of the moms told me. “These kids need more room. The people in this neighborhood are crazy with the cars.” This was the last conversation I had about the school street that even mentioned cars. The truth was I didn’t need to work very hard to get the kids and the parents to go around the corner because when the kids heard the music and saw the dancing they simply joined in. Kids are all instinct and impulse. We drill them on where to cross the street and how but before those lessons are totally absorbed they’re instinctive users of public space. If they see an open space they want to run through it, if they see a ledge they climb on it. Around 3:15 there must have been 200 elementary schoolers dancing, drawing, and running on this little block. The school’s P.E. teacher was walking around giddy with excitement. PS. 129 had a woefully undersized gym for its 1,200 kids and she’d been using a converted classroom for many of her classes. She planned to use the street next year for outdoor sports and P.E. The art teacher planned to use it for crafting and drawing. At the very end of the street was the edge of Powell’s Cove and the East River. Sabina suggested that maybe one day the school street would extend right up to the edge of the water and kids could learn about the ecology of our waterways. I worked with some kids filling out the playful “forms” Sabina had developed for the day. Each form asked what the child’s connection to the neighborhood was and why they liked it.

“I like College Point because it’s awesome and calm and I want a place to play.”

“I like College Point because of the park and I want another one.”

“I like College Point because my dog lives here and I want him to be safe.”

The idea was to collect these responses and deliver them to Councilmember Paladino’s office as proof that the school street was a success. That wasn’t totally necessary because she showed up to see it all with her own eyes. I can’t tell you how bizarre it was seeing someone who railed against congestion pricing, bike lanes, and pretty much any transit initiatives beaming in the closed street, playing with children, and praising Sabina and the school staff for their work. Sabina had kept the focus on kids, not cars and she had been able to build a big tent because of it.

Thanks to Ghuncha Shaheed for the photos

If congestion pricing teaches us anything it’s that planning is a persuasion game. The benefits of public space are proven. We don’t need to keep proving we need to start convincing. There was a lesson for me in Sabina’s approach that it’s not about all the benefits of a planning project but the one that speaks best to something human and universally felt. Arming ourselves with crash data and promises to reduce airborne particulate matter is a lot less tangible and motivating than 200 dancing school children. The congestion pricing argument tended to be mostly stick and not enough carrot - “Do this or the MTA will fail!” (which may be true… and frankly should still be motivating). The promised transit improvements felt far off and improbable, and I underestimated the degree to which people would live with the awful status quo of traffic and crumbling infrastructure. Breaking this inertia requires what Campanella calls “the speculative courage and vision that once distinguished this profession.” Had I had more courage and more vision I would have tapped Paladino on the shoulder and said: If our little slice of car-free New York is such a smashing success imagine how much fun this would be if it were bigger?

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