Publications

Social media networks allow transportation providers to reach large numbers of people simultaneously and without a fee, essential factors for the millions of commuters and leisure travelers moving through the New York region every day. This report, based on earlier findings (from Part 1), which analyzed local transportation providers’ use of social media, and a seminar on the subject in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, recommends social media policies for transportation providers seeking to inform, engage and motivate their customers.

The goals of social media in transportation are to inform (alert riders of a situation), motivate (to opt for an alternate route), and engage (amplify the message to their friends and neighbors). To accomplish these goals, transportation providers should be:

- Accessible: Easily discovered through multiple channels and targeted information campaigns

- Informative: Disseminating service information at rush hour and with longer-form discussions on blogs as needed

- Engaging: Responding directly to customers, marketing new services, and building community

- Responsive: Soliciting and internalizing feedback and self-evaluating in a continuous cycle

Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the strengths and limits of the transportation
infrastructure in New York City and the surrounding region. As a result of the
timely and thorough preparations by New York City and the MTA, along with
the actions of city residents and emergency workers to evacuate and adapt, the
storm wrought far fewer casualties than might have occurred otherwise.

This report evaluates storm preparation and response by New York City and the MTA, discusses New Yorkers' ingenuity in work continuity, and recommends infrastructure and policy improvements.

Getting Started with Open Data is a guide for transportation agencies that would like to release their schedule data and administrative records to the public, and need an introduction to the practice. This guide is intended to result in streamlined use of transportation services and promote a productive dialogue between agencies and their constituents. It is being released as a living document, intended for input from both transportation data owners and users, to result in the most complete open transportation data guide possible.

We cannot understand Manhattan in the 21st century by relying on conventional measures of urban activity. Simply put, Manhattan consists of much more than its residential population and daily workforce. This island, measuring just 22.96 square miles, serves approximately 4 million people on a typical weekday, 2.9 million on a weekend day, and a weekday night population of 2.05 million. Manhattan, with a residential population of 1.6 million more than doubles its daytime population as a result of the complex network of tunnels, bridges, railroad lines, subways, commuter rail, ferry systems, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian walkways that link Manhattan to the surrounding counties, cities and towns.

This transportation infrastructure, largely built during the twentieth century, is operated by the City of New York, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. The infrastructure network generates a constant flow of people who are responsible for Manhattan's emergence as a world capital for finance, media, fashion, and the arts.

The residential population count does not include the 1.6 million commuters who enter Manhattan every weekday, or the hundreds of thousands of visitors who use Manhattan's tourist attractions, hospitals, universities, and nightclubs. This report analyzes the volume of people flowing in and out of Manhattan during a 24-hour period; we provide an upper estimate of the actual number of people in Manhattan during a typical work day.

This report demonstrates that New York City has successfully achieved almost all of the key elements in the NYC2012 Olympic Plan, despite the fact that it was not chosen to host the 2012 Games. For New York City, planning for the 2012 Olympics provided the framework to shape the future of the city, through new mass transit, rezoning, and investment in parks, recreational facilities, and housing throughout the city. Long neglected and underused industrial areas have been transformed as a result of the NYC2012 Plan, including the far west side of Manhattan, which will soon be linked to the rest of the city through an extension of the #7 subway line. This report describes how many projects, long the subject of public discussion and civic debate, were able to be carried out as a result of the NYC2012 Olympic Plan.

The purpose of this effort has been to foster a dialogue among peers at transportation and planning agencies about their experiences with promoting public transit and, in particular, the challenges they face related to bus rapid transit (BRT) projects, as well as the solutions that they have developed in response. Agencies from dozens of large cities around the United States participated at three (3) peer-to-peer exchanges in New York City, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. The facilitated discussions were structure to address the unique barriers to BRT implementation on the streets of dense and/or highly congested large urban centers. Three major themes were the focus of the workshops: Network, Route and Street Design, Traffic Operations, and BRT as a Driver of Economic Development; Building Political, Interagency and Stakeholder Support. The results of the workshops make clear that better public transportation in general and BRT in particular can be cost-effective and useful tools for improving transportation, the environment and for restoring the livability of America‘s large cities.

Space and time are joined, pronounced Einstein at the start of the 20th Century, detonating a revolution in physics that still reverberates.

Nowadays, drivers connect space and time a bit differently: they discover daily that taking up space takes away time. On any heavily-trafficked road, your car steals time from me by slowing me down, just as my car slows you and takes your time. Totaled across the millions of cars and drivers in New York and other cities, this mutual theft of time attains staggering dimensions.

In some respects, the story of the first century of urban traffic was one futile effort after another to stop time theft. Again and again, the seemingly commonsensical solution of widening existing roads and building new ones ran afoul of "induced traffic" - the phenomenon by which the ability to travel faster on the new highway lanes engendered new and longer trips. Almost invariably, the initial trickle of attracted trips became a flood that filled up the increased capacity all over again, recreating gridlock over a larger area.

The same fate has also befallen localized efforts to tame traffic. Synchronized signalization, "crackdowns" on double-parking, even provision of transit service all tend to attract new vehicle trips that soon exhaust the increase.

Stopping time theft requires a radically different approach. To grasp what that might be, we undertook an analysis that has rarely if ever been attempted: quantifying time theft at the level of one individual trip.

The popular literature on traffic is overflowing with estimates of time lost in congested traffic across an entire city or region. These "macro" figures help convey the scope of the problem. But they don't point toward solutions. For that, we need to grasp the extent to which one additional trip slows down all other vehicles on the road. As we show below, estimating this figure can lead to a radically new perspective on urban traffic and put society on a path to fixing it once and for all.

Canada is the United State's strongest trading partner, exceeding trade with Mexico and with the European Union. On land, this trade flows through 22 principal border crossings between the United States and Canada, with 90% of the value and three-quarters of the tonnage and truck trips originating in or destined for locations beyond the border states. Three of the six crossings are in New York State. However, up to one-half of the trips originate in or are destined for locations beyond the border states. Thus, while they generate economic value nationally, the burdens they bring are concentrated in border states. Recognizing the significance of the border states and the need for transportation corridors throughout the country to facilitate the projected growth in trade, Congress established the Coordinated Border Infrastructure Program and the National Corridor Planning and Development Program in 1998. However, these programs have fallen short of their goals, principally as a result of under-funding and earmarking. If the current funding levels and practices of the Borders and Corridors Program continue, there is concern that freight volume at the key crossings in New York will continue to grow without the ability to effectively and efficiently service it. This study assesses the implications for New York State and for the country if New York's border and corridor needs are unmet.

Issued in June, 2002, the report discusses major sources of mercury and methylmercury to the Harbor. It identifies pathways of mercury into the harbor, discusses environmentally sound and economically feasible strategies to avoid this pollution, and identifies the key players in implementing these strategies.