Dr. Garrick once told me that he never particularly liked New York City. In school when we were learning about city planning and city infrastructure and preparing to do our research projects we looked at various cities around the US and the world both statistically and qualitatively. Looking at NYC quantitatively and trying to analyze it from an urbanist point of view it looks good. It has the highest transit user-ship, the highest density in the US and the numbers are almost at European city levels. Some of us asked Dr. Garrick why NYC was not one of the cities we could pick for our projects(some of our choices were Amsterdam, Washington DC, Curitiba Brazil, Portland OR, and London). All he had to say was that he did not feel it had much to offer in terms of the types of urban forms that we should study. I did not fully understand this until recently. Do not get me wrong here, I love New York City. I think it is an absolutely wonderful place with so much culture and diversity. The problem is that transportation policy for years has been backwards for decades but it looks like that is beginning to change now.
Beep beep beep Yeah!
If we take a look only at Manhattan this is what we are dealing with. Just over 10% of trips in Manhattan are in personal automobiles, another 15% are by taxis, and then transit which includes buses and subway are account for about 40% and walking and bicycling about 30%. Now what do people think of when they think of Transportation in NYC. Taxi cabs! Now this should not come as any surprise because that is what you see when you are in Manhattan. Most of the public surface space is dedicated to automobiles when in reality they provide less than 30% of the transportation in Manhattan. New York city takes all the advantages of the dense population and public transportation while literally pushing it underground. This is an entirely different subject that volumes can and have been dedicated entirely to.
The idea of new urbanism is not only efficiency of moving people but creating safe communities that are built on a more human scale. All up and down Manhattan you have six lanes of motor vehicle traffic on the Avenues. Surface Transit is given a bus only lane in some places but it is rarely enforced and turns into a parking lane more often then not. On the avenues sidewalks are generally narrow(less than twelve feet in most places). The sort of things that NYC needs are streets that are more friendly to people and priority given to pedestrians, bikes, and surface transit. I would love to see two streetcars going in each direction on all the avenues in Manhattan or at least true Bus Rapid Transit that mimics streetcars.
This brings to the other major point I am trying to make, taxi cabs. Taxis pose a complex issue, they are given far to great a share of space and priority in NYC which I believe could stand to do with far fewer cabs but at the same time their service creates many jobs for New Yorkers. Every transportation issue in NYC has to take this into account and avoids things that will harm the taxi business. Personally I would like to see less taxis on the road but certainly do not want all those drivers to be put out of work and lose all the movement of capital they produce.
Secondary benifit, WAY LESS NOISE!
I have a radical concept for dealing with this. It is a very abstract idea but seemed appealing in philosophical exercise. If Manhattan changed the streetscape to accommodate more surface transit thus reducing the amount of taxis and personal automobiles I would set up some sort of corporation weather public or private or maybe just use tax incentives of some sort but the idea would be to make sure that any cab driver who lost their job would be offered a job as a pedicab driver. You would have to adjust the fares for both taxis and pedicabs so that drivers are getting competitive wages. I think the pedicab fares should remain below taxi cab fares but this should not be a problem. Pedicab drivers have much lower work related expenses compared to taxi drivers. The no longer need to pay for gas or to maintenance.
Now this is not a nearly perfect solution and not every taxi driver would take a job as a pedicab driver but I think it has some sort of potential or at the very least is effective as a theoretical exercise.
