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Four Lessons for 14th Street From Toronto’s Transit-First King Street

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/...t-king-street/

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- City officials are saying their “busway” plan for 14th Street was inspired by the success of a similar project on Toronto’s King Street. But New York ain’t Canada. In Toronto, city officials (and the city’s then-transit boss Andy Byford) saw the same problem that New York is now confronting: A key east-west artery and transit route was mired in congestion that was causing public transit to crawl and ridership to plummet. — So Toronto went bold, banning cars and trucks from the byway, except for quick deliveries. All delivery vehicles were required to make the next legal turn a solution that clear the congested roadway for transit (in this case a streetcar).

- Where Toronto put dedicated loading zones, taxi stands, and 18 pedestrian plazas along its route, New York will use extra space for lanes with legal 30-minute parking a near-guarantee of double-parking in a city already rife with scofflaw drivers. — And New York’s Department of Transportation will allow trucks to share the roadway with buses, a concession to West Village residents who were concerned that trucks would use more residential roads to get across town. — Select Bus Service and the accompanying transit priority restrictions won’t launch on 14th Street until June or so.

- New York officials caved to organized opposition on Manhattan’s West Side by allowing trucks to share an already limited roadway with buses. Streetsblog asked DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg about that on Wednesday, when the plan was first revealed. — “[On] King Street you had a pretty big commercial corridor and then a couple of somewhat large commercial corridors on the adjoining streets,” Trottenberg said. “Here, particularly over in the West Village, there was a lot of concern and we didn’t want to discount it that trucks would go … onto smaller more residential streets.”

- On King Street, for-hire vehicles are only permitted between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. — and that’s simply too much access even in a city with parallel commercial streets: On Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, streetcar trip times are actually 30 percent longer — an ominous sign for NYC’s current plan to allow for-hire vehicles at all times. — New York will allow cabs all day and night albeit for dropoffs and pickups only. Not even Trottenberg is certain that can work. “We’ve done a lot of traffic modeling and the good news is, there isn’t a lot of pickup and drop-off activity,” Trottenberg claimed. “We have looked at taxi data and other things.”

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