Belated NYC reflections
Couple weeks ago, took an extended weekend trip to Manhattan. With three of us, it actually made sense to drive to and park in Manhattan for 3 days, rather than using more public transportation options.[1] The experience was surprisingly trauma-free -- driving into the City, parking (with the invaluable assistance of http://nyc.bestparking.com/ ), even driving across lower Manhattan (glimpsed the High Line from afar) and navigating the BQE...the worst we saw was 25-mph congestion and one guy who wouldn't let us into his lane! lcohen makes a good copilot.
Shoup would have a conniption: in an environment where the cheapest parking is $15/day, on-street parking is free? That's simply insane. It turns into a subsidy for the luckiest of the locals, and an incentive to never actually use your car other than to move it for street cleaning -- the goal should be to have fewer cars, use them more efficiently, and use valuable street real estate for green space, bicycle accomodations, or even more buildings. How can we get residents/voters to let go of their "birthright" for free on-street parking?
The sheer density of taxis was overwhelming. How many miles are run a day without fares? Is there even enough space for every taxi in the city to park at once? My mind still boggles. Are there feasible ways to reduce taxi usage, and therefore free up, what, half? of the street capacity? I'd love it if NYC Bikeshare led to a virtuous cycle of increased bicycle use, reductions in roadway space occupied by 24x7 taxis, and easier fights to reallocate street space to bicycles.
I've been reading about common-sense yet daring changes in NYC road space for a while. Even if these changes are microscopic on an overall citywide scale, it was great to see how they are changing Manhattan, and vice versa. I think their pavement markings to show a bike lane crossing a busy intersection -- a >>>>>> across the street -- does a much better job of saying "there's a bike where you're trying to turn" than the extra set of dashed = = = = = that Boston uses. It was great to see random chairs and table pop up unexpectedly in out-of-the-way parts of needlessly large intersections! Overall, I saw fewer people using these new facilities than I expected, but then I wasn't looking either during rush hours (for the bike lanes) or lunchtime (for the retaken slip lanes).
Roadway space changes may have been the hardest-fought, but what captured my imagination the most were the really well-executed signage, at the right height, size, and placement, to help cyclists find their way between streets and bike paths. I don't know New York streets, and I instantly understood how or why I might use a particular route to a particular bridge, and signage seemed frequent and well thought out enough to not have been an afterthought to the bikeway designations. Can we have wayfinding in Boston? How much more signage and effort would be required for our cowpaths?
Speaking of wayfinding... I made myself a mental model of how the subway worked based on the map (only shows B,C next to our local stop on Central Park West) and how things worked during our first couple weekdays. This failed spectacularly for late night/weekend travel. Only the A train, local at that hour (and maybe the D too, don't know) was running to our stop. It probably would have helped if the cropped subway map I printed had included the legend text "The map depicts morning to evening weekday service." And I think my primary mistake was thinking I understood the system as an object when it was really a continuously changing puzzle. That is, I thought of it as having fixed lines, when really it's more like a jitney bus route -- it'll probably get to the destination at the end, but you'll keep sharp to figure out how it's getting there. When I'm next in NYC, I may just always ask the booth attendant on entry when it's after weekday "evenings."
Is a single paper map simple incapable of representing the the MTA subway system's complexity, even excluding weekend repair work?
Circling back to psychology of NYC: the length of an acceptable commute seems insane. I know plenty of New York area folks who spend an hour just on the train. And someone I talked to a Christopher Street bar says she drives (!) 90 minutes each way to Connecticut for work. These numbers never line up with official statistics (which show NYC as the metro area with the longest commute: 35 minutes each way, just 10 minutes more than the national average), which I don't get.
Finally: we chose our hotel by location, afraid that Priceline might put us too far away. Mobility truly makes the everywhere close to everywhere else, so maybe next time I'll give them a shot. Paying less than we did, and/or sleeping on less uncomfortable mattresses, would be great!
[1] Now if full prices were charged for petroleum and environmental costs, our calculations would change...but then so would the whole landscape, and I'd rather not start a dissertation here :-)
Shoup would have a conniption: in an environment where the cheapest parking is $15/day, on-street parking is free? That's simply insane. It turns into a subsidy for the luckiest of the locals, and an incentive to never actually use your car other than to move it for street cleaning -- the goal should be to have fewer cars, use them more efficiently, and use valuable street real estate for green space, bicycle accomodations, or even more buildings. How can we get residents/voters to let go of their "birthright" for free on-street parking?
The sheer density of taxis was overwhelming. How many miles are run a day without fares? Is there even enough space for every taxi in the city to park at once? My mind still boggles. Are there feasible ways to reduce taxi usage, and therefore free up, what, half? of the street capacity? I'd love it if NYC Bikeshare led to a virtuous cycle of increased bicycle use, reductions in roadway space occupied by 24x7 taxis, and easier fights to reallocate street space to bicycles.
I've been reading about common-sense yet daring changes in NYC road space for a while. Even if these changes are microscopic on an overall citywide scale, it was great to see how they are changing Manhattan, and vice versa. I think their pavement markings to show a bike lane crossing a busy intersection -- a >>>>>> across the street -- does a much better job of saying "there's a bike where you're trying to turn" than the extra set of dashed = = = = = that Boston uses. It was great to see random chairs and table pop up unexpectedly in out-of-the-way parts of needlessly large intersections! Overall, I saw fewer people using these new facilities than I expected, but then I wasn't looking either during rush hours (for the bike lanes) or lunchtime (for the retaken slip lanes).
Roadway space changes may have been the hardest-fought, but what captured my imagination the most were the really well-executed signage, at the right height, size, and placement, to help cyclists find their way between streets and bike paths. I don't know New York streets, and I instantly understood how or why I might use a particular route to a particular bridge, and signage seemed frequent and well thought out enough to not have been an afterthought to the bikeway designations. Can we have wayfinding in Boston? How much more signage and effort would be required for our cowpaths?
Speaking of wayfinding... I made myself a mental model of how the subway worked based on the map (only shows B,C next to our local stop on Central Park West) and how things worked during our first couple weekdays. This failed spectacularly for late night/weekend travel. Only the A train, local at that hour (and maybe the D too, don't know) was running to our stop. It probably would have helped if the cropped subway map I printed had included the legend text "The map depicts morning to evening weekday service." And I think my primary mistake was thinking I understood the system as an object when it was really a continuously changing puzzle. That is, I thought of it as having fixed lines, when really it's more like a jitney bus route -- it'll probably get to the destination at the end, but you'll keep sharp to figure out how it's getting there. When I'm next in NYC, I may just always ask the booth attendant on entry when it's after weekday "evenings."
Is a single paper map simple incapable of representing the the MTA subway system's complexity, even excluding weekend repair work?
Circling back to psychology of NYC: the length of an acceptable commute seems insane. I know plenty of New York area folks who spend an hour just on the train. And someone I talked to a Christopher Street bar says she drives (!) 90 minutes each way to Connecticut for work. These numbers never line up with official statistics (which show NYC as the metro area with the longest commute: 35 minutes each way, just 10 minutes more than the national average), which I don't get.
Finally: we chose our hotel by location, afraid that Priceline might put us too far away. Mobility truly makes the everywhere close to everywhere else, so maybe next time I'll give them a shot. Paying less than we did, and/or sleeping on less uncomfortable mattresses, would be great!
[1] Now if full prices were charged for petroleum and environmental costs, our calculations would change...but then so would the whole landscape, and I'd rather not start a dissertation here :-)