Posts Tagged ‘New York’
Book Review: The Game Café
Stories of New York City in Covid Time
by Eleanor Lerman
I got an advance reader copy in my mailbox. A collection of nine short stories of people who live in New York – or who are travelling there – in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
So this is a thin book, just under 160 pages. none of the stories actually feels complete. These are people, mostly single, all out of their regular occupations, but hanging on in a city that many have abandoned. Just as you are getting to know them the story ends and a new one begins. There are some common themes: women with long black hair and a taste for goth makeup. People suffering from severe back pain at a time when normal health services are no longer available. The author of the stories has black hair. Quite possibly she has a back ache too. She knows New York. People are attracted to the Village and Washington Square Park. But often find themselves in the less desirable outer limits of the subway service – but they are still in the City.
The epidemic is not over now. Not yet. But the mood has changed from when this book was written. People have stopped wearing masks – mostly. Travel has restarted but gets disrupted. Restaurants have reopened and people are using transit again, but in lower numbers. Management would like everyone to be back in the office but has to reluctantly accept that remote work is what a lot want to continue. Especially in places where the cost of living is high and rising. In the stories the idea that prices have dropped for desirable places pops up now and again but that is not what is happening now. These stories are of a rare time and a unique space. There is something special about New York City. And that magic – dead at the time of these stories – seems to be reviving now.
The pandemic is now far worse in China, which is where it started, and where lockdowns are still being enforced. Other places were not actually in formal lockdown, thought it might have felt like that. Cruise ships are sailing again. The planes are no longer just flying to reserve their spots at the terminals. But the chaos of lost baggage, delays and confusion are more to do with the impacts of climate – no longer “change” but “crisis”. Huge backlogs of cancellations and missed connections. A whole different set of stories, rather than the folks who managed to hang on in the City even if they no longer had their former well paid jobs, in the stories scraping by wondering what happens next while we readers are in what happens next, which is nowhere like “business as usual” no matter how much business wishes it was.
In terms of overloaded emergency rooms, and rising death rates, plus increasing numbers of people who have had multiple infections or who suffer from “long Covid” the pandemic is nearly as bad as it was at the earlier peaks, but now a high percentage have had multiple vaccinations which work – at least for a few months – but deteriorate rapidly afterwards. Public Health officials are still on the defensive. Simple ideas like hand washing and being kind don’t seem to have a lot of impact on an airborne virus that has the ability to produce a continuous series of variations, each being nastier and more virulent than the one before. We would like to think that we can learn to live with it, just as we have with the flu, the common cold and HIV – but that does seem to be an illusion. Nevertheless, there are indoor parties, the theatres and concert halls are open and the tourism industry seems to be back with bang. There is not a shred of this new reality in these short fictions, where time seems to have stopped. We do not mask very much. There are still many open schools that have no modern ventilation or even box fans surrounded by HEPA filters. Kids are getting sick – and not just with covid but all the other childhood diseases which have resurfaced thanks to a combination of political opportunism and vaccine “hesitancy”. Plus, of course, plenty of deliberate misinformation.
I am not sure that this reviewer can actually recommend this book. Some of the stories have already appeared in magazines and would have been timely then. Now? I am not so sure. Actually I wonder if there needs to be the sequels to some of these stories, so we know how these stories work out. If they did. Certainly good writing.
The following is extracted from the press materials that came with the book. I had not read this before I wrote the review above.
“For award-winning author and poet Eleanor Lerman, New York
City remains the most vibrant and important urban center in the
world. The idea that it would never recover from the pandemic was
an affront not only to New York but to cities everywhere struggling
to deal with the effects of coronavirus.
A lifelong New Yorker, Lerman was disturbed by pontifications that
the city was “dead,” that everyone was leaving, that it would never
regain its place of prominence in American life or be able to offer
the remarkable range of experiences that only a city with a diverse
population and a storied history of welcoming immigrants, artists,
workers, and dreamers, both gay and straight, could provide.
As writers do, she turned her feelings into inspiration.
The Game Café: Stories of New York
City in Covid Time by Eleanor Lerman
Mayapple Press
Paperback; December 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952781-13-1
$22.95; 6 x 9; 160 pages
Drive Time
I was staggered by the subtitle of this New Yorker essay by Ian Frazier “The surprising pleasures of driving in New York“. It seemed to me unlikely but the claim he makes – that starting with the “improvements” made by Robert Moses “the city has remade itself to favor cars” seems to be borne out by what I read. I have been driven in New York – by taxis and black cars – and the experience has been generally unremarkable. Especially as the flight times for planes leaving New York for Vancouver tend to be very early. But he also describes a multi-car pile-up in a passage that started giving me flashbacks.
Of course I have also ridden the crosstown bus – and the bike share. From what I read on Twitter from @StreetsblogNYC (a walking biking transit advocacy) I am lucky not to have had to deal with NYPD.
But my intention was mostly to direct you to read the article – and I will throw in a few photos from my flickr stream for good measure. All are locations mentioned in the article
The Williamsburg Bridge
59th St – Ed Koch – Queensborough Bridge
FDR Drive
Brooklyn Bridge
Cities in motion: transport is as key to urban character as buildings or accents
I have been very pleased to see the Guardian add a section on Cities, and I am finding the articles posted there very informative. For instance Alex Steffen writing about affordability and his prescription – build lots of houses. This morning there is a wide reaching review of how transportation defines cities which is written by Colin Marshall who hails from Seattle and thinks London is defined by The Tube. It is an easy mistake for an American to make, and is about as misguided as a Londoner thinking that New York is defined by its subway. He does have a very interesting overview and a wide range of samples, and makes some good points. But both London (and New York) rely very heavily on a much wider network than their inner urban mass transit systems.
The tube, in London, serves mostly the northwestern quadrant – as is apparent from Harry Beck’s geographically distorted diagram. This is the original from the 1930’s. Bank Station – at the centre of the City is over to the right. Note the position of the Thames relative to most of the network. The District Line through East London is not shown as a line, merely a list of stations.
The historical reason for this is that the mainline railway that served this quadrant was initially not very interested in operating suburban services as it made much more money from long distance trains. Including boat trains to Liverpool that connected to liners to New York, as well as the premium Scottish expresses. The tube was originally built by entrepreneurs looking to make money, and what they found was that the short lines under the central area were not long enough to be profitable and cost a great deal to construct. The companies became profitable when they extended out into the fields which could then be built over with houses for commuters. The first underground line (The Metropolitan Railway) was extended in tunnels to Wembley and then out to Amersham and beyond on the surface. Many of the connections into Central London were made by tacking existing branch lines onto the tube. In Beck’s map above the Central Line stops at Liverpool Street. The service now goes out far into Essex on former GE branch lines – and a new tube under Wanstead built just before the war and uncompleted in 1939 which became a factory until hostilities ceased.
There is only one tube line through South London (the Northern Line). That is because the Southern Railway and its antecedents had much less long distance traffic but were early adopters of electrification for the dense network of lines that radiate out from the series of terminals built to serve both the City (to the East) and the West End. The even built their own tube to connect Waterloo to the City (known as the drain and only relatively recently incorporated into the Underground network).
The main line railways were not allowed to build into the City itself, and were kept in a ring along City Road (under which the Met was built). For the Great Eastern (the same company that built what became to be BC Rail) the need for a larger terminal nearer the City meant they wanted to redevelop a notorious slum called the Jago. As a condition of being allowed to demolish that warren of extremely dense – and very unhealthy – housing, they had to provide workmen’s fares at low cost to allow the displaced to relocate to new suburbs in places like Walthamstow and Leytonstone.
London began to sprawl long before there were motorcars. Development stretched out into the country along the railway lines, railway stations became the centre of towns that grew up around them. In the interwar period with the construction of new faster roads for cars and as unemployment relief – the Great West Road, Eastern Avenue – this development started filling in. Instead of the “beads on a string” pattern of the railway towns, there was “ribbon development’. In the period when people were tasked with thinking out what would happen to London after the Luftwaffe were stopped from flattening so much of it, the idea was to prevent this continuous urban area by specifying a Green Belt. The current boundary of Greater London lies within that Green Belt, which marks the limits of how far the ribbons of sprawl had reached by 1939. Post war there were to have been New Towns, that would be both free standing and self sufficient – providing employment to reduce the need for commuting. That did not work out. Basically the suburbs leapt over the Green Belt and kept on going. Boxmoor (see below) is in Hemel Hempstead – near the station – and has a very fast service into Euston that I used to commute on just before I left for Toronto.
One of the stupidest decisions made by the self serving Governor of New Jersey was cancelling the railway tunnel that would have relieved congestion between New Jersey and midtown Manhattan. Penn Station (now hidden beneath Madison Square Garden) is not just the busiest in New York – it is one of busiest passenger terminals in North America. Grand Central is not far behind. Manhattan lies at the heart of a huge megalopolis and depends on railway services to the surrounding region. It would be impossible for the downtown towers to work as employment centres if those people all tried to drive to work. Though Robert Moses did his best to try and accomplish that.
FDR Drive midtown Manhattan
my picture on flickr
In both Central London and Manhattan most of the people there during the day got there on trains. In the case of London those trains come from an ever widening ring of urban areas – as train speeds have been increased and services improved. I used to think that getting a seat for a 25minute ride into Waterloo so that I could read on my commute was about optimal. Many others travel further and longer. Lord Olivier famously commuted from Brighton (about an hour – and at one time you could get kippers for breakfast on a Pullman train). Those commuters might need to add a short tube ride from a terminal like Paddington (as you will need to if you decide to use Heathrow Express to get into town from the airport) or Liverpool Street. The current construction of CrossRail is designed to reduce the congestion on that route.
For many people the tube is something to avoid. You do not have to suffer from claustrophobia to find the crowding and depth of the station platforms a deterrent. Fortunately there are always alternatives. In fact in Central London it is nearly always quicker to walk than travel between adjacent stations – or even three or four stops. Especially if a change of lines is needed. The need for a rapid increase in transit capacity created by the congestion charge lead to a huge improvement in bus services. For visitors, I would recommend that using a combination of Boris Bikes, buses and walking is going to be a much nicer experience than the tube – especially at Rush Hour (actually several hours).
When I wrote this I had not seen this article in The Independent ” twice as many people ride the bus each day as the Tube” by the Labour spokesperson on infrastructure.
The Bicycle Dairies Episode 10
It has been a while since I have written anything under this heading. We just returned from a trip to New York. Given all the press attention it has received, we could hardly ignore the new bike sharing system known there as citibikes after its sponsor. (In London people refer to them as “Boris Bikes” rather than “Barclays Bikes”). I visit New York quite a bit as my son lives there, and have got to know my way about Manhattan. I have also now visited Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island too: the Bronx I am saving for later. As with Paris, my first instinct was to try and get everywhere by subway, but I soon learned its limitations. “The only way to get across town is to be born there.” Like most visitors, there’s a lot of walking – and “flaneuring” – too.
A lot of people got very upset when these stations started appearing. I think they are neat and tidy, but what they seemed to do was take away that precious commodity – on street parking spaces. In fact, very few people can actually use on street spaces, since there are so few of them and much of the curb space is needed for deliveries. All over Manhattan much space is taken by large black limousines and SUVs waiting for passengers (livery cars are an important part of the transportation system but are not taxis). The price of off street parking is of course ridiculous – and much traffic is simply circling looking for an on street spot.
I am writing about my experience and this is not intended as a detailed critique of the system. There is plenty on line about how to use the system, but as usual the PR folks have made the process look a lot easier than it is in practice. It is not just a question of sliding in your credit card. There are a number of screens that you have to go through and on line forms to fill in. One good thing is that the screen accepts CA as the country code in default of a zip code. That is not possible at other terminals, like ticket vending machines at subway stations – or self serve gas pumps. My partner found that after going through the entire process it simply failed – something we also experienced in Paris. I managed to use two different credit cards for two separate bikes: I think you can register more than one bike at a time, but this seemed easier if we wanted to use them at a docking station later.
Getting the bike is simple. Having completed the registration process, you get a five digit code to punch into a dock – the buttons are on the left hand side – and a green light comes on to tell you to take the bike. This is time limited. Returning is equally simple. Push the front wheel into the dock until the green light comes on.
As you might expect, there are times when the stations are full of bikes – which makes it easy to rent hard to return. Equally we would have used the bikes more often but either the station was empty or not co-operating. We saw one man with a citibike key fob that he could put into the dock, but it refused to give up its bke. And that would have left only one for the two of us. I did not feel like using my card in a system that was behaving like that, but maybe the bike had been reported damaged. Yes, you can do that (“notify us by pushing the white wrench button on the top of the dock”) I do not recall seeing that very useful tool in Paris.
I strongly recommend the use of a smart phone or tablet to find bikes and stations. Like car2go it is not exactly essential but makes life a lot easier. I would also, like car2go too, not rely on the system exclusively. You will still need a Metrocard, and do not neglect the ferry system either. The Staten Island ferry is free, and the East River ferry only $4, which is still great value.
Contrary to the instructions, these bikes were simply left while the people who had rented them went and looked at the carousel in Central Park. If they had been stolen while they were in there, it would have cost them plenty. Even citibike say that for protracted periods, conventional bike rentals are a better deal. Since it costs $9.95 for a 24 hour pass, it is actually cheaper to rent if you do not intend to make a large number of trips. The first thirty minutes do not incur an extra fee so you can keep swapping bikes – but then you have t be able to find them when you need them. We would have got much more use out of our membership if bikes had actually been available when and where we needed them.
While we were looking at a bike station near Central Park, we were approached by a sidewalk salesman for one of the bike rental companies, offering a very attractive deal. And, this being New York, you could always try haggling.
DENVER
We also saw bike share in Denver. Interestingly this one is sponsored by Kaiser Pemanente one the larger HMOs
We did not use this. Partly because it was so hot, but also because there is a free bus shuttle through downtown, which we used a lot, and everything we wanted to see in the two days we were there was within walking distance
The weakest component on the Velib bikes in Paris is the seat adjustment. Denver has adopted a much more robust approach
Sustainable Mobility & Cycling in New York
Janette Sadik-Khan
“Learning from New York”
Shifting Gears II series SFU City Program at the Convention Centre, October 19
This was probably the largest audience for one of these lectures that I have seen: somehow everyone managed to get in although that meant a late start at 7:25 due to the length of line up.
Gordon Price opened with his memory of New York in the late seventies when everything looked bleak and dangerous. But New York has now surely earned the title of The Resilient City. No matter how bad things look cities can come back faster and in ways you could never imagine. At the same time as this meeting, the convention centre was also hosting a conference called “Gaining Ground: Resilient Cities”.
Larry Frank introduced the speaker Janette Sadik-Khan
Janette Sadik-Khan
What most impressed her on her first visit here was that we have an integrated transit system, where one ticket allows one to ride on a bus, ferry or SkyTrain. “For ten years I have longed for your “golden ticket””
She said that much of success had depended on her ability to borrow best practices from other places. “We have to do a better job: to restructure our cities [to serve people better]. Cycling is just one component.”
Mayor Bloomberg started with a planning exercise – PlanNYC – a systematic examination to reduce the environmental impact of urban systems. The transportation area is the one that has the most profound impact, and the plan calls for transit expansion as well as cycling and congestion pricing. A plan to introduce a charge of $8 per car entering Manhattan had majority support in the city but was defeated by the state legislators, who did not even vote on it . Only 5% of people drive in NYC. Sustainable streets 2009 is the strategic plan – with benchmarks so that NYC DOT will be held accountable for major goals. The basis is that streets are for people. NYC has 6,000 miles of streets which are valuable public spaces, not just for making cars go as fast as possible. They will become green corridors and are part of a social and economic plan. She noted that people quickly take over these spaces “once the orange barrels are rolled out.” Times Square and Herald Square (both on Broadway) were the first part of a rapid implementation program. The World Class Streets Report was commissioned from Jan Gehl which found that 30% of Broadway [sidewalks] were covered in scaffolding with only 3 outdoor cafes and no seats. “We want to provide seats for New Yorkers.”
Roads are now much safer with the lowest traffic casualty figures since 1910. Children and seniors are over represented in the statistics of fatalities, so NYC is looking at both safer routes to school and for seniors. They targetted 25 focus areas: senior traffic fatalities are down 43% in one year.
The new mobility network is based on selected bus services which now get bus priority lanes with camera enforcement. 98% of riders were satisfied (“This never happens!”) Bus Rapid Transit is much cheaper and faster to deploy than rail. NYC has the largest bus fleet in North America and the slowest bus speeds. “The only way to get across town was to be born there.” [Most subway lines in Manhattan run north-south]
Infrastructure repair has been taken care of and now all of the bridges and most of the roads are in a state of good repair. They have created a network of cycling “backbones” – bike lanes on the four East River bridges and a bike highway on the West Side. There are now 200 miles of bike lanes and they starting to fill in the network. Some of these are innovative such as the bike lanes on the centre median of the Manhattan Bridge, use of advanced boxes at traffic signals and protected bike lanes, an idea imported from Copenhagen where bikes are put inside the parking lane. This uses the parked cars to protect cyclists and reduces collisions with drivers opening doors, but also preserves parking and truck loading/unloading. Crashes are down 50% and cycling is up 50%.
New York City has to accommodate 1m more people by 2030. But she also noted that the average New Yorker has one third of the carbon footprint of the average American – simply because they do not drive so much.
She showed an image of a family on bikes on a new lane that had not been completed. “Families are the indicator species: if you are 7 or 70, you should feel safe on the street.”
These changes are good for business. Bryant Park 20 years ago was an open drug exchange, now is now surrounded by some of the most desirable real estate in the city. They recently completed the “park in the sky” – the High Line – a former elevated railway which has stimulated $50m of investment along its route.
The linear plazas on Broadway mix pedestrians and cyclists but the bike lanes are not for racing at top speed. Cycling is not an extreme sport, which is what it used to be. “It is not alternative, it is fundamental”. The pedestrian space was achieved through lane re-allocation. Broadway is no longer a through street. Broadway is the only diagonal in a the grid, and was always a nightmare for traffic engineers. They have now reconnected the grid and restored the space needed to accommodate the 300,000 or more pedestrians who use it every day. Now that there is enough space, even New Yorkers are enjoying Times Square.
From this experience a new street design manual has emerged through the partnership of 11 agencies, to ensure that the approach continues. NACTO is to develop guidelines to become an alternative to MUTCD.
NYC is also adding bike parking with new designs of bike racks and they have tripled the number of bike racks in the city. David Byrne, author of “Bike Diaries” has been responsible for some of the more innovative designs. The demand for bicycle parking at bus stops has been so great that NYC is now creating bike parking on street at transit stops. Indoor parking for bicycles has also been a huge issue because of the fear of bike theft. They are now creating indoor parking in government buildings and bike access is being legislated for private buildings. All new buildings have to provide bike parking.
Bicycle use increased by 35% in 2008 and is expected to double by 2013. Casualties are declining: there is safety in numbers but also due to an awareness program LOOK
America faces a crisis of obesity and diabetes. New York started summer street closures – 7 miles of Park Ave. “I want to see many yellow checkered bikes” she said that they have been looking at the Montreal bixi system.
All the information she referred to is available on line
Q & A
Gordon Price pointed out that Translink had paid to bring Janette here.
1. What can we most teach each other?
New York should adopt Vancouver’s use of the bike symbol on signs. Vancouver should adopt protected bike lanes
2. There seems to be a cultural debate: The Netherlands uses unregulated shared space to encourage social interaction. We tend to use signs and separation.
But Paris has seen great success with bike lanes and advanced boxes as well as its Velib program. Different cities need different approaches. An unregulated space in a city like New York would become a scrum. “It’s a war out there!” We want to engineer safe streets. She referred to their approach as “urban acupuncture”, applying pointed approaches to specific critical locations and this has been driving down fatalities to a third of what they were.
Q follow up on the scale and speed of changes in NY: what made that possible?
Firstly the umbrella of PlanNYC. There was tremendous buy in, with the recognition of the need for more effective solutions. New York was tired of plans that take 25 years to happen. The rapid implementation was literally painting the outlines. There was not much digging [in sharp contrast, I thought, to what is still not yet complete on Granville Street]. Once we rolled out the orange barrels, people took over. Since Robert Moses paved a lot of NYC we had a lot to play with!
4 You said that your plan was better for business with lots of pedestrians and you referred to property values. That would not be the same for muffler shops. Are you prepared to purchase the businesses that are car dependent?
No
5 Please tell us more about “creative financing” as referred to by Larry Frank
The 7 line extension is using tax increment financing: the increase in property values due to the new facility should go to the agency that provides it. PPPs make sense if the terms are good, but the public sector needs to up its game: the private sector has been better at securing its own interests. They could apply to both port and rail expansions. TIF is a simple idea: zone around the project to identify properties that will benefit (our whole city is TOD) and capture that incremental value. Increases in property tax revenues are then used to service a bond issue.
6 How much is the change in mode share worth in terms of reducing pressure on infrastructure?
We don’t have that data yet: it is a ripe area for research and is an effective way to make the case. We can make the case for transit in terms of the roads and bridges not built.
While there are doubtless significant savings in infrastructure, there are also on major benefits to health side. The lack of active transportation is a public health crisis.
7 – How does this work outside of Manhattan?
There is a huge program in all five boroughs – e.g Bronx hub and extensive BRT. “People can’t be wished onto buses” we have to increase capacity so that the buses are seen as “surface subways”. The population of New York is 8.2m – which effectively means there are 8.2m traffic engineers. We hold 200 meetings a month to listen to the concerns and suggestions. There is a strong appetite for transit and we plan “8 to 10 BRT networks” in the next few years
8 The questioner spoke at length about China and how the use of bikes has declined due to “market forces”. In fact driving is promoted by vested interests who will undermine your program just as they conspired to kill the streetcar. Most of the federal stimulus funds are going to roads and freeways. He also suggested that urban communities should be limited to a maximum of 5,ooo population max . He cited Plato who pointed to the complexity of problems of large cities. In Canada 80% of the population is now in cities and we need to read Lewis Mumford again to deal with this problem.
China is investing heavily in transit – for example in Shanghai. This is a strong sign. We are going back to the cities in the US. There are now over 100 streetcar city projects and an increase in the role of ferries. The world is increasingly urban. People moving back into NYC “We kinda like hanging out”. We can save the planet with cities and make cities work much better by sharing what works.
9 – The questioner liked the idea of changing streets as a better use of resources but said that “in the turf war for asphalt, bikes are getting squeezed out.” He asked are painted curbs safe? New Westminster uses concrete curbs which tend to reduce the overall amount of usable space.
Times Square shared the streets and is curbless, but we had to tread carefully so that bikes don’t race through. We are not at a “cultural tipping point” [I think she was referring to earlier remarks about Dutch “naked streets“.]
10 – Referring to her comment on how congestion pricing was defeated, “we no longer control Translink”. How would you have transportation funded, planned and implemented in an ideal world?
Look at Portland: the regional growth boundary has teeth. The region has therefore a robust transit system with incredible perform of the network. They extended MAX to the airport using a P3.
She also noted that there are three different entities in New York and they don’t have common fare system.
11 – The questioner came from Ladysmith where, he said, no-one rides – they are afraid. How do we get the sceptics to use bikes
The NYC Summer Streets program includes bike teaching and gave away 25,000 helmets. They introduced weekend walks programs. However it is recognized that “etiquette” and “New Yorkers” are not often in the same sentence and traffic signals are treated as suggestions.
12 . Can you speak more about metrics and agencies – 3 Es [effectiveness, efficiency – there seems to be many suggestions for the third] pedestrian safety
“I’m big fan of pilot” – communities know their streets better than anyone else. You can use paint to produce some sidewalk extensions and use potted plants to impose a quick traffic calming scheme. In 1990 it was 365 pedestrian deaths a year. We now make more interesting places which send different cues to drivers that slows them down.
15 – Tell us more about covered bike shelters
The rain in Vancouver is a myth – just like in Portland. It is something you tell people to try and stem the influx. More is better. But also you need to look at connectivity – fill in the network , and protected bike lanes. We both need a bike share program. Each city has to make strategic choices and in our case the is now increasing bike parking in buildings.
City Bus Drivers Say That Fare Beaters Have the Upper Hand in Confrontations
It is with some reluctance that I open up, once again, the can of worms that is fare evasion and transit safety. I would not have done so had not the CBC once sandbagged me on air with an unexpected clip of a New York cop talking about fare evaders as criminals.
Before you comment on this post you are required to click on the the link at the top and read the whole story in the New York times. There are also related links (the NYT understands how to use a web site now: it will take the Aspers years to catch up). It is desperately sad and my deepest sympathy is extended to the family, friends and coworkers of Edwin Thomas, who died trying to do his job.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, acknowledged that while the department’s Transit Bureau has more than 2,000 officers dedicated to the subway system, there are none dedicated to buses except during operations like fare-evasion crackdowns. One such crackdown, which began on Oct. 22, has resulted in 86 arrests and 349 summonses, he said.
That is because there are city police on the streets who can be summoned and get to the scene more quickly.
The point I want to make is that the NY subway system still needs to be subject to “fare evasion crackdowns” even though there are turnstiles at every station. A significant police force is required because the existence of those barriers has not made the NY subway “safe”. There was a lot all over the media yesterday about SkyTrain safety and the gap between public perceptions and reality. And a clip on CBC news of the SkyTrain CEO Doug Kelsey repeating the mantra “perception IS reality”. Most of media decided that the proposed use of dogs made the story newsworthy. (If you want the full meal deal go to the Buzzer blog – and be sure to read the comments)
All kinds of people evade fares for all sorts of reasons. They are not all hardened criminals, and their reasons for evasion range from indigence to an attitude that fare collection is a “game” they can win at. The right wing here likes to cite New York as an example for us to follow. The examples of zero tolerance and the “broken window” strategy are cited approvingly. Yet there are on average 89 assaults on New York bus drivers a year. Edwin Thomas did not seem to get much benefit from these policies. I am far from convinced that they would change much here.
I also remain skeptical that introducing dogs will do much good either. There are plenty of people here who are extremely uncomfortable around dogs, both for cultural reasons and, even more sadly, bitter experience. There are far too many regimes that use police dogs to intimidate the populace in general. Not that I think Translink wants to do that – but (as Kelsey seems to be aware) some people may perceive it that way.
But as always my theme is that barriers on SkyTrain will not do what their proponents claim. They will be an immense waste of money and a continuing drain on the system. Money that could be spent on better transit service, which gets more people on the system. Which is what makes people feel safe. But is also what we need to make this region more livable.
UPDATED Dec 5
Harlem’s 125th Street
Alright, I admit it, it was the picture that caught my eye. Love those streetcars. Note also the complete absence of overhead wires – both for the trams and also no hydro or telephone cables either.
Last year 125th Street was named by the American Planning Association among its list of 10 great streets across America. The judges commented on the street’s ability to “maintain a strong identity through periods of tremendous population growth and infrastructural strain”.
So is it any surprise that this year the City of New York wants to rezone it? The Guardian takes a (rather brief) look at a classic battle developing between developers and locals
Groups set up to fight the rezoning proposals liken the changes looming over the area to ethnic cleansing
Stephen Rees's blog 