Can 14th Street Save New York?
The L train shutdown could leave 250,000 straphangers stranded, but that’s nothing compared to the gridlock in New York City’s future. Today’s subway problems can help us prepare for tomorrow’s overcrowding or give us a sneak peak at our car-pocalyptic future.
Meet New York’s best path forward: The 14th Street PeopleWay.
Emily, who lives in Greenpoint, has a workday routine: a clock radio set to WNYC wakes her at 7:30 am, she grabs a cup of black coffee on the way to the L train, transfers at 14th Street to the A train and arrives at her job on the Upper West Side at 9 am.
On Emily’s first day back to work after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, that routine went haywire. She found her L train station blocked off with neon plastic tape. Handwritten signs directed her to a bus stop, where hundreds of her neighbors crowded the sidewalk. After a half-hour wait, Emily squeezed onto a bus that sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic over the Williamsburg Bridge, up First Avenue and west on 14th Street to the subway station at 8th Avenue.
Like a lot of TransAlt members, Emily can still remember the chaos caused by the waterlogged L. Now, according to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the L train is about to be shut down again, and this time the delay will last way more than a week.
Whether it’s the L-maggedon or the L-pocalypse, it’s clear that New York City’s already troubled transportation networks are about to face a worst-case scenario. It’s not doomsday, but once you’re stuck in the impending traffic jam, you might as well wish the world would end.
Fear not. Advocates at Transportation Alternatives are floating a proposal that could help New York weather the L train storm, an umbrella of an idea that, if it catches on, could protect the city from a lot of future storms, too. The destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy was a bit unpredictable, but this time New York can be prepared.
The plan is called the 14th Street PeopleWay.
On any given weekday, the Canarsie Tunnel, which connects Brooklyn and Manhattan beneath the East River, hosts a quarter of a million L train passengers; that’s about the population of Jersey City or Buffalo shuttling underground at rush hour every day.
After Hurricane Sandy flooded the tunnel with seven million gallons of saltwater, corrosive and structural damage remained even while the MTA was able to get the L train up and running 11 days later. This spring, the MTA announced that it had let that damaged timebomb tick as long as it could. Major repairs needed to happen in the Canarsie Tunnel, and they needed to happen soon. In 2019, they said, the L train will be shut down from Bedford Avenue to Eighth Avenue for at least 18 months, leaving a small city’s worth of people stuck above ground.
In New York City, gridlock is generally mitigated by the fact that millions of New Yorkers stick to subterranean travel. If every commuter riding the L train during peak weekday hours drove to work instead, 14th Street would need to be a 56-lane highway. The chaos of the L train shutdown will be most keenly felt on the roads and bridges that will have to handle the overflow, namely the routes directly above ground from the L — 14th Street and the Williamsburg Bridge.
Since the MTA announced the end of the world, proposals have been put forth for an inflatable bridge, an aerial gondola, and an unending stream of Uber cars to ease the coming congestion. Beside a few obvious issues pertaining to smog and the laws of physics, the problem with these ideas is that, at best, they bring only a singular solution to the table.
This is New York, where square footage is a hot commodity. Like the fortune teller who rents space next to the tallboys in the back of your bodega, New York need solutions that can multi-task, and that means the best fix for the missing L train will be one that’s still relevant when the L train is back.
Transportation Alternatives’ researchers took a hard look at the L train today and, using ideas that New York and other cities have already put in motion, developed a planned transportation pathway that’s fit for people who walk, roll or ride the bus. It can hold masses of New Yorkers, and better yet, it could be replicable on any major street in the city.
The PeopleWay is a new type of street bred for hyper-efficiency; no private cars, strictly exclusive lanes for buses and bikes, and some of the widest sidewalks that New York’s ever seen. The street is designed to move the most people in the least amount of space by giving priority to the most efficient methods of transportation. The idea could double the capacity of 14th Street.
New York in 2016 is like a subway station without a train; more people keep pushing onto the platform, but overcrowding isn’t changing the fact that the train won’t come. The crossroads is undeniable: average weekday subway ridership is at 5.7 million, its highest since 1948. At 8.5 million people, New York is the nation’s most crowded city and more crowded than it’s ever been in history. Mayor Bill de Blasio is scrambling to catch the city’s housing stock up with its population growth, while climate scientists across the board predict that New York is going to get hotter, smoggier and stormier, with bits of every borough submerged in rising sea levels by 2050.
When we talk about the future of our city in terms of sustainability, we’re talking about more than the natural environment. People will keep moving to the greatest city in the world, and New York needs to adapt to hold more humans. If we’re all going to squeeze into five boroughs, we are going to need to free up some space, and right now the least efficient, most free-loading users of space are the private automobiles that sit parked for free at the edges of our sidewalks and stuck in traffic on our roads, most often only transporting a single person. New York’s future requires weaning off the automobile, and the PeopleWay is how. The L train shutdown is a crisis, sure. It’s also an opportunity to test out an idea that could save the city.
TransAlt advocates have formally presented the 14th Street PeopleWay to City officials, who have hinted that the idea is on the table at least a few notches higher than the inflatable bridge. In the meantime, over 70 small business owners along 14th Street, along with Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, City Council Transportation Chair Ydanis Rodriguez and State Senator Brad Hoylman, have signed on in support.
To see the PeopleWay live on 14th Street will take more than the endorsement of local businesses. Powerful political forces will need to shake hands over typically choppy waters. The City, which controls New York’s streets, will need to decide to restrict private car traffic and redesign 14th Street to accommodate higher volumes of walkers, bikers and bus riders. The State, which controls the MTA, will need to improve bus operations, fund the development of higher-capacity buses and add a few expediting advancements like pre-board fare payment stations. TransAlt members also have a role to play, pushing politicians to rise to the challenge.
As for what the PeopleWay looks like, that remains to be seen, but Transportation Alternatives thinks it should be left up to the people of New York. In September, the L-ternative Visions Design Competition launched, an open-call contest for creative blueprints for the PeopleWay that takes inspiration from the design competitions that envisioned Governors Island, the High Line, and the 2008 CityRacks competition to create the next generation of bike parking for NYC. A collaboration between the newsblog Gothamist and TransAlt, the competition asks urban planners and everyday New Yorkers to envision how the future 14th Street could work and what it would look like.
The 14th Street PeopleWay wouldn’t be the first time New Yorkers took a sour transportation crisis and turned it into some remarkable lemonade. The public plazas that are popping up in outer borough neighborhoods across New York began on Broadway in Times Square, a solution to traffic congestion and pedestrian injuries there. The parking-protected bike lanes that every cyclist wishes would come to their commute started on 9th Avenue where speeding was a problem. The only time New York saw the truly dedicated bus lanes that will be requisite for the PeopleWay was in the days after Hurricane Sandy when the Manhattan Bridge was transformed into a “bus bridge” to replace the sodden tunnels that ran under the East River. So-called “carpool rules” put into effect after 9/11 and during the 2005 transit strike limited private automobile use in Manhattan. These were a forerunner to congestion pricing plans like Move NY, which, though it hasn’t happened yet, is pretty much required to prevent Manhattan from becoming a parking lot.
There are two things we know for sure: there’s an 18-month L train outage on our horizon, and more people are bound for an already crowded New York. Beyond that, the future is indeterminate. It could be an L-pocalypse. Or it could be the moment where we start making room in New York’s future.
