Commercial waste haulers selected to collect trash under the city’s Commercial Waste Zones program, including at least one with a deadly track record, will have to submit crash and driving data under a proposed amendment to the long-awaited reforms — information the city should have been considered before it awarded contracts, the plan’s legislative architect told Streetsblog. Action Carting is one of 18 companies officials chose to service 20 designated waste zones starting this September — despite the company’s involvement in at least five traffic deaths, including that of 27-year-old cyclis ..read more

It’s a good kind of tunnel vision! The city wants to permanently reroute the First Avenue protected bike lane through the underground tunnel between E. 40th Street and E. 49th Street this summer before September’s UN General Assembly, officials revealed Monday. Department of Transportation officials hope to get moving on the project before the General Assembly convenes, but have yet to finalize designs to reconfigure the tunnel’s entrance and exit, they told a Manhattan civic panel. Even then, the underground bikeway concept received the full endorsement of Manhattan Community Board 6’s Transp ..read more

Real estate developer Two Trees’ opposition to the Ashland Place protected bike lanes has yielded one of the most baffling bike lane markings in the city, recently painted by the Department of Transportation. Try to figure out where cyclists should bike based on these lane markings, posted on Twitter by Transportation Alternatives organizer Kathy Park Price: Ridiculous that we have to have these new markings to work around #crashland. Most people won’t understand how to even navigate this, the one critical missing block of protection on Ashland as a result of the political power of parking g ..read more

The rich get richer. Cities and municipalities with larger budgets and staff are more likely to win competitive federal infrastructure grants, and those grants are bigger — a vicious cycle for less-resourced communities seeking to upgrade public transit, a new report shows. According to the Urban Institute report released today, counties with transportation payrolls of just an extra $10 per capita had an 18.1-percent higher likelihood of winning funding from competitive transportation programs. And that can add up to real money: The two main infrastructure bills in 2021 ear ..read more

Another year, another Bronx bus project. The Department of Transportation is at least talking about poor bus service on Tremont Avenue, a critical east-west corridor between University Avenue and the Bronx River Parkway where buses average less than 5 miles per hour in some stretches. In February and March this year, the DOT took the first steps, with presentations to Bronx Community Boards 5 and 6, but stopped well short of offering an actual plan for long-suffering transit users. Memories of the agency’s failure on Fordham Road are still fresh. But this time, at least, a local elected who op ..read more

The city plans to add some minor upgrades to Park Row and some surrounding streets to make the heavily policed area more appealing to residents and visitors to walk or bike.  The Lower Manhattan corridor near NYPD headquarters will have less police clutter and better spaces for cyclists and pedestrians, according to the Department of Transportation — and residents welcomed the changes as a first step toward a larger redesign. “The DOT’s Street Improvement Program is the first, small step in achieving the broader vision of transforming Park Row into a welcoming and safe gateway reconnectin ..read more

Streetsblog joined Transportation Alternatives, the city departments of Health and Transportation and East New York cyclists on Saturday for a ride to Shirley Chisholm State Park via Cozine and Wortman avenues — two streets with brand new bike lanes vilified by local drivers, TV news and the area’s newly elected council member. The two streets saw an average of 80 crashes per year before DOT installed the protected bike lanes in 2023, with the hopes that a narrower space for cars would yield safer driver behavior, yet Council Member Chris Banks has gone so far to call on the agency to remove t ..read more

STOCKHOLM — New York City is about to launch congestion pricing, which means we’re in the so-called “Valley of Political Death,” which means it was time to talk to Jonas Eliasson. Two decades ago, Eliasson — an academic and urban planner — became Stockholm’s point person on implementing this city’s congestion pricing plan, which levies relatively small tolls to enter the center part of this island metropolis by car. The tolls are highest — but still just $3.25 — during the peak times, but drop to as low as $1 during the say. Tolls are capped at around $10 per day. Like New York now ..read more

On Tuesday, Streetsblog’s Kevin Duggan reported on the morass of illegal and dangerous parking and blocked sidewalks and bike lanes in the vicinity of the 100 Centre Street courthouse where former President Donald Trump’s trial has been ongoing since last month. On Thursday, the situation around the courthouse was worse than ever — with the press the worst culprits and police in the area seemingly powerless to make the situation any better. Per Duggan, who visited the area several times on Thursday: The bike and car lanes on Centre Street — the only protected cycling connection north from the ..read more

With less than two months until the planned launch of congestion pricing, Mayor Adams on Thursday finally unveiled a list of bike, bus and pedestrian projects intended to take advantage of the drop in car traffic expected from the tolls — many of them started under his predecessor Bill de Blasio — that critics said fail to meet the moment. MTA officials forecast a 17-percent reduction in car traffic from congestion pricing in the toll zone below 60th Street and a 9-percent reduction regionally. Yet Adams has no plans for any new pedestrian-only streets, with benefits to walking New Yorkers lim ..read more