Scoop

September 24, 2006
Queasy Rider
By STEVEN KURUTZ

PAUL FORD, a soft-spoken, sturdily built 32-year-old who works as an editor at Harper’s Magazine, sometimes describes his commute between his apartment in Gowanus, Brooklyn, and his office on Broadway near Bond Street as feeling “like a video game, except you can get killed.”

And in fact, watching Mr. Ford weave through the city’s traffic-clogged streets one recent morning, pedaling steadily atop his black and gray Fuji Sanibel cruiser, called to mind a two-wheeled, life-and-death version of the 80’s arcade game Frogger.

At 7:40 a.m., wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, Mr. Ford set out from his apartment near the Gowanus Canal and was soon moving briskly down Third Avenue in Boerum Hill. Mr. Ford is a physical presence on the road, a big guy atop a seven-speed bike, a shiny black helmet covering his short brown hair. But the motorists whizzing by pay him little mind.

Near Third Avenue and Douglass Street, he slowed and hugged the curb to avoid a delivery truck passing on his left. Pulling onto the street again, it was in the firm but cautious way a person might wade into a fast-moving river. Or, as Mr. Ford put it: “You’re fragile out here in traffic. Nothing bad comes from being paranoid.”

Mr. Ford is among an estimated 120,000 regular cyclists in New York, 40,000 of whom commute to work by bike. And increasingly, these cyclists are waging an ever more ferocious turf war with the city.

Like Mr. Ford, the majority of these commuters do daily battle on the city’s 6,000 miles of often jam-packed roadways. At the same time, a small number of cycling advocates lobby City Hall with almost religious fervor, seeking everything from more bike racks to legislation requiring office building owners to install storage space for bikes.

The most public lobbying efforts are the Critical Mass rides in Manhattan, consciousness-raising events that take place on the last Friday of every month — the next one is Friday — and resemble nothing so much as 1960’s political rallies. Before the most recent ride, a bleached-blond hipster preacher named Reverend Billy recited the First Amendment through a bullhorn. Later, police officers issued 65 moving violations and made one arrest.

Despite the obstacles, this may be an ideal moment for seeking a bike-friendlier New York. With issues like global warming and high gas prices at the forefront of public consciousness, many advocates say that after years of struggle, they finally have the political capital to make cycling a top priority in the city.

“This is absolutely a moment of opportunity,” said Walter Hook, executive director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, a New York-based organization that designs mass transit in developing countries. “The mayor stood up and took a bold stance and banned smoking. The next step is to stop the air pollution coming out of the tailpipe.”

The Path Less Traveled

Mr. Ford had left home early, hoping to beat the morning rush, but five minutes into his commute, cars were already lined up bumper to bumper at a red light on Third Avenue. Knifing through traffic, he hung a left onto Bergen Street in Boerum Hill, where he could enjoy a sliver of comfort in the form of a five-foot-wide bike lane, designated by two painted white lines. A few cyclists overtook him, pedaling furiously on expensive-looking machines.

Mr. Ford began biking to work two months ago because he wanted to lose weight but didn’t feel like going to the gym. While his legs and lungs are stronger now, he by no means regards his ride as a test run for the Tour de France. “I’m just a chubby guy on a bike,” he joked as he made a right onto Smith Street and scooted across Atlantic Avenue.

New York is arguably the most challenging city in the country in which to ride a bike. The streets are crowded, the pace is furious and danger lurks everywhere, from crater-size potholes to car doors that snap open. When Mr. Ford began biking to his office, he was filled with the sense that he was an irrelevancy to motorists, a moving abstraction. Even now, he feels dangerously exposed. “Everyone is your enemy,” he said. “You don’t want to get killed, and you don’t want to kill anyone.”

Mr. Ford has yet to suffer any injuries on his daily commute, but he is fatalistic. “It’s only a matter of time until I have one of those near-death experiences that everyone who bikes in the city has had,” he said.

According to the latest figures provided by the city, 109 cyclists were killed from 2000 through 2005. During the same period, there were 21,484 bicycle injuries recorded.

This June, in a grim reminder of the perils of urban cycling, three riders were killed in a three-week period. A 23-year-old aspiring filmmaker was pinned beneath a tractor-trailer on Houston Street in Manhattan on a weekday morning. A 41-year-old woman was hit by a truck on Rockaway Parkway in Brooklyn in the evening. And a 56-year-old doctor collided with a Police Department tow truck while taking a midnight ride on the Hudson River Greenway in Manhattan.

On June 29, in response to the deaths, about 75 cyclists staged a rally on the steps of City Hall. Standing in front of a “ghost bike” painted white to honor the fallen, Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, the advocacy group that organized the rally, described the city’s streets as “out of control.” A week later, Andrew Vesselinovitch, resigned as director of the Bicycle Program of the city’s Department of Transportation after five years in the job, saying he planned to return to school. In leaving his position, he criticized the Department of Transportation for not making New York safer for cyclists and for creating less than 20 miles of new bike lanes in the past two years.

The numbers seemed all the more striking given the fact that Chicago, with a population of nearly three million, announced a plan this year to put every resident within a half-mile of a bike path. And Chicago’s program seems paltry in comparison with that of Davis, Calif., a city of 60,000 that Bicycling magazine said “has cycling in its veins.” Among Davis’s features are a $7.4 million bike tunnel and a network of bike paths so comprehensive and safe that the city has eliminated its public school buses.

Shifting Gears

As Mr. Ford pedaled along Jay Street, cut across a traffic tie-up at Tillary Street and squeezed precariously through a two-foot gap between a delivery truck and a concrete barrier to get onto the Manhattan Bridge, it was clear that orchestrating the flow of traffic is much more challenging in a city like New York than in a laid-back college town like Davis.

By some measures, New York is doing reasonably well for a large city. In May, a bike lane was built along Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, and, more significant, in 2001 the Hudson River Greenway, an 11.5-mile stretch that runs from Inwood to Battery Park City, was completed. With as many as 10,000 cyclists on the busiest days, Transportation Alternatives says, it ranks as the nation’s busiest bike path.

Two weeks ago, the Department of Transportation announced a plan to build 200 more miles of bike lanes over the next three years, at a cost of nearly $9 million. That would bring the city’s total to more than 600 miles.

The Parks Department also has several projects under way toward its long-term goal of a greenway all along the waterfront in the five boroughs. Bike paths beside every mile of Manhattan waterfront may be completed as soon as the end of 2008, according to Carli Smith, a department spokeswoman.

And this year, Bicycling magazine ranked New York the country’s third-best city for cycling among cities with population of more than one million, just behind San Diego and Chicago.

“New York is by no means a laggard,” said Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, a lobbying group in Washington that issues an annual list of what it calls Bicycle Friendly Communities. “New York is better than Los Angeles, and certainly better than Houston or Dallas.”

But many advocates say the city is making progress too slowly and is not fully committed to bicycling.

“We did 100 miles of bike paths and lanes in the past five years,” said Mr. Vesselinovitch, the former director of the Bicycle Program. “I think we could have doubled it. At D.O.T., we would support bicycling as long as it didn’t interfere with anything else.”

Iris Weinshall, the transportation commissioner, declined to respond specifically to Mr. Vesselinovitch’s comments. “I don’t want to look back,” she said. “I want to look forward.” She then said the city had made progress over the past five years; she cited the Manhattan Bridge bike lane, which was refurbished in 2001 and is used by an average of 840 riders a day.

As Mr. Ford made his way across that lane the other day, isolated from traffic and free to finally experience what he described as “a closer sense of the city,” he was enjoying the one truly peaceful moment of his commute. Halfway through his ride, his pace slackened. The morning air was crisp. The view from the bridge, which took in the entire East Side of Manhattan, was breathtaking. The moment was tempered only by a quarter-mile uphill grade, which left him breathing hard.

“With the subway,” Mr. Ford said, “you’re literally in a tunnel. When I bike, I see faces. I see storefronts. I’ll stop to visit someone. I’m engaged in the city.”

Imagining Bike Heaven

Up to this point, Mr. Ford’s ride had been a journey of extremes. He had passed through a leafy neighborhood of brownstones in Boerum Hill, plunged into the traffic-clogged heart of Downtown Brooklyn and been cosseted high above the East River. Now, with a light sheen of sweat on his face, he cruised off the bridge onto Canal Street into the pedestrian bustle of Chinatown.

The one constant of Mr. Ford’s ride was the persistent feeling that he was carving out a space for himself as a biker on streets where in many cases no such space existed. Except for the Manhattan Bridge, he hadn’t been on a bike lane since Bergen Street. If he were the city’s bike czar, he would change this.

“Cars are here to stay,” he said. “I don’t expect New York City to become bike utopia. But more share-the-road signs would be great, more bike lanes, more places to lock your bike.” All in all, “a little more room here and there.”

The city’s plan to add 200 miles of bike lanes would undoubtedly create much more room for cyclists like Mr. Ford. The new lanes, from Claremont Village in the Bronx to Downtown Brooklyn, would be a sort of interstate highway system for bikes throughout the five boroughs. Responding to safety concerns, the city is also installing five miles of protected lanes, in which riders are shielded from car traffic by barriers like concrete curbs.

But while cycling advocates have applauded the idea of protected lanes, their goals are far more ambitious.

“We’d like to see bike facilities on all the major arterials in the five boroughs, like Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn and Houston Street,” said Mr. White, of Transportation Alternatives. “We’d also like to ban private vehicular traffic altogether on some streets.”

Mr. Hook, of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, heartily endorses the idea. “If you did something radical,’’ he said, “like taking Broadway out of the street grid and making it a greenway, not only would you create a north-south bike facility, but you would create a soul to the city and entirely change the feel of the place.”

When it was suggested that such a plan might produce havoc for Midtown drivers and stores relying on truck deliveries, Mr. Hook responded, “We could do what a hundred European cities do, which is allow trucks in during certain times of the day — say, between 8 and 10 a.m.”

But even more modest solutions far from Midtown can pit cyclists against nearly everybody else. That is the situation on Houston Street, which has become a prime point of contention between bike advocates and the Department of Transportation. The cyclists want a bike lane installed along Houston; the department, at least so far, has not concluded that this is a good idea.

In recent years, many cycling advocates have said that while the city officially supports biking, its decisions routinely favor drivers.

“When the city decides whether or not to put a bike lane on Houston Street, they think, ‘Well, we’re going to lose traffic volume,’ ” Mr. White said. “That’s the tradeoff that isn’t going our way, time and again.”

Ms. Weinshall, the transportation commissioner, would be the first to agree that the issue is complicated. “You have to parcel out the real estate to all of these different users,” she said. “Does it make sense to put a bike lane along Houston Street? Would we have to widen the sidewalks? These are things you consider. Bike riding is not made for everybody.”

The Home Stretch

Just a couple of minutes from the front door of his office, Mr. Ford was poised on Chrystie Street, considering a wide, loping left turn onto Houston Street that would deliver him into one of the busiest roadways in the city. “Two months ago I was terrified to make this turn,” he said as he merged with traffic and headed west on Houston toward Broadway. “But now it’s no big deal. You get used to it.”

Still, not everyone is so intrepid. Even if the necessary infrastructure like widespread bike lanes were in place, there would remain the question of how many New Yorkers would commute by bike, given practical concerns like safety, weather and health issues.

“I’ll bet not one person out of 20 would think to ride a bike to work,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a professor of history at Columbia University who for years has led a bike ride around the city for his students. The ride takes place after midnight, the time Mr. Jackson most feels safe navigating around the city.

There is another issue, even apart from safety, that has to do with how biking in the city is perceived. “We take pride in our use of mass transit and the fact that we walk,” Professor Jackson said, “but somehow cycling doesn’t complete the trinity. It doesn’t seem normal.”

In addition, there is no consensus on whether an increase in cyclists would do much to help improve the city’s environment. City Councilman John Liu, of Flushing, Queens, chairman of the Council’s Transportation Committee, argues that subways and buses are the answer. “The use of cycles has a place,’’ Mr. Liu said. “But it doesn’t come anywhere near the capability of mass transit in making our city greener.”

For Mr. Ford, however, biking to work offers him a satisfaction that riding the subway or a bus does not. “There’s something great about getting to work under my own mode of power,” he said.

After making a right on Lafayette Street and a left on Bond, Mr. Ford was finally in the home stretch of his commute. He pulled up to the door of his office, dismounted and peeled off his helmet, sweaty but contented. “The hardest part of my day is already over,” he said. His four-mile commute had taken 32 minutes, about as long as it would have taken him on the R train.

Dual Track
Affordable-Housing Empire Fuels Developer's Upscale Aims
Master of Tax-Credit Deals, Stephen Ross Sets Sights On Pennsylvania Station
By ALEX FRANGOS
August 22, 2006; Page A1
Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK -- Stephen M. Ross erected the $1.7 billion Time Warner Center, twin 80-story towers stuffed with offices, shops, a hotel and expensive apartments overlooking Central Park. He is planning to transform downtown Los Angeles with a more-than-$2.5 billion retail and residential complex, and with a partner, to rebuild a chunk of central Manhattan, replacing both Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden.

Behind his soaring ambitions and colossal budgets is something unusual in the world of commercial real estate: a financial engine based on government-subsidized housing that funds these risky endeavors.

The Ocean Park apartment complex in working-class Far Rockaway, Queens, is one cog in his machine. The twin brick-and-concrete towers, perched atop a parking garage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, are typically drab affordable housing from the 1970s. Mr. Ross's real-estate firm, closely-held Related Cos., owns the buildings and collects just $848 a month for each two-bedroom apartment -- below-market rates that are set by the New York State Housing Finance Agency. Mr. Ross turns a profit because he has mastered the complex business of tax credits that help finance the nation's low-income housing.

Ninety percent of the 37,700 apartments Related owns in 16 states are government-subsidized units. And Mr. Ross's involvement in low- and moderate-income housing extends far beyond that. He founded and is the chairman of CharterMac, a publicly traded finance company that sells tax credits to investors and invests in tax-exempt bonds that also help to finance low-income housing. CharterMac has financed more than 400,000 apartments.

This massive low-income housing operation throws off a river of cash for Related that runs fairly steadily through real-estate boom and bust. It helps Mr. Ross bankroll some of the nation's ritziest -- and riskiest -- commercial developments.

"The consistent stream of fee income from the affordable side enables us to take on larger scale market-oriented projects," explains William Witte, president of Related's California operation. For the planned Los Angeles project, for example, Related beat out competing developers in part by plunking down a nonrefundable $50 million deposit.

Mixing high-end and low has turned Mr. Ross, 66 years old, into a wealthy man. Through Related, he controls $11.5 billion worth of property, although Related does not disclose how much debt those properties carry. He lives in a Time Warner Center penthouse and is a major philanthropist. In 2003, he gave $100 million to the University of Michigan Business School, which bears his name.

These days, with the luxury-condominium market cooling, Mr. Ross's high-low strategy may be put to the test. In June, a much-hyped, $3 billion Related condo project in Las Vegas in which actor George Clooney planned to invest was scrapped before it got off ground. Related blamed rising construction costs.

Nevertheless, Mr. Ross is forging ahead with preparations for his two most ambitious and expensive projects ever. In its Los Angeles project, Related is leading the planned redevelopment of a dilapidated stretch of Grand Avenue in the downtown area into a mixed-use neighborhood of condominiums, hotels, stores and parks.

And in New York, Related is working with Vornado Realty Trust, a real-estate investment trust, on plans to rebuild Madison Square Garden one block to the west, then raze the current home of the sports and entertainment arena. In the process, Pennsylvania Station, Manhattan's underground railroad hub, would become two connected stations, one of them within the historic building that now serves as the city central post office. In addition, there would be tall office buildings, condominiums and retail space. All told, it could cost more than $7 billion. "I've never been involved with anything that would have that much impact," says Mr. Ross.

Trained as a tax lawyer, Mr. Ross realized years ago there was money to be made though tax incentives created by the federal government to produce affordable housing. Although the details of government programs have changed over the years, their premise has stayed the same: private developers will build and preserve affordable rental housing if they are given adequate tax breaks.

Currently, the federal government distributes $5 billion in affordable-housing tax credits each year to private developers who agree to keep rents artificially low for periods ranging from 15 to 40 years. The housing is reserved for tenants earning no more than 60% of an area's median income. State housing agencies administer the credits.

The developers, however, typically don't use the credits to offset their own taxes. They sell them to syndicators, who bundle them and sell them to investors looking to offset their own tax bills. Syndicators charge fees to these investors, who are mostly large financial institutions. Developers use the money from selling the credits to build or renovate the low-income housing.

The tax-credit business is sufficiently complex that few real-estate developers handle it themselves, and few syndicators, for their part, build apartments. "Most syndicators don't want to get their feet muddied tromping around on bare dirt," notes John McIlwain, senior resident fellow at the real-estate trade group Urban Land Institute, who spent 20 years as a lawyer in the tax-credit world. "By the time you figure out the tax-syndication business you deserve free psychiatric care."

Mr. Ross, however, does both. Related builds affordable housing, buys and renovates existing buildings, and manages the properties. CharterMac, which is 14%-owned by Related, invests in such housing to secure tax credits, generates fees by syndicating the credits to investors, and invests in tax-exempt bonds sold to finance such housing. CharterMac also provides mortgages on both affordable and market-rate apartment projects. In 2005, it reported net income of $59 million on $295 million in revenue.

Mr. Ross grew up middle-class in Detroit and Florida. His uncle, the late Max M. Fisher, a billionaire oil and real-estate investor, paid his college tuition. After completing law school, Mr. Ross went to work on Wall Street as a finance executive. While working at Bear Stearns Cos., he says, he put together a business plan for what he envisioned as an affordable-housing company that would both build apartments and handle tax-credit financing. The finance side would generate steady income, he explains, but "the big picture was in development."

Bear Stearns declined to fund his plan, so in 1972, Mr. Ross started Related Housing Co. By the early 1980s, he had built 15,000 apartments and was a leading syndicator of tax credits. He spun his profits into more-lucrative commercial developments. In suburban New York, he built offices for CA Inc., International Paper Co. and Nestlé SA.

He expanded his affordable-housing business to Florida, starting Related Group of Florida with housing entrepreneur Jorge Pérez. Today, that company, which is majority-owned by Mr. Pérez, is the largest developer of apartments in the state. Messrs. Ross and Pérez are also partners in Related investments in Las Vegas and California.

Mr. Ross pushed employees hard. After a 1982 skiing accident left his leg in a cast for nine months, he barked at underlings from a couch in his office. One evening a few years later, he emerged from a meeting to find the office apparently empty. "If anyone is still here, I'll give you $500," he shouted, according to both Mr. Ross and an employee. Dozens of heads popped up from the cubicles. "It cost me," he recalls.

In the 1980s, Mr. Ross began to combine affordable and luxury units in the same buildings, utilizing a new federal program known as 80/20. In exchange for reserving 20% of apartments for low-income tenants, Related was allowed to sell tax-exempt bonds. Mr. Ross's first such building, on the fringe of New York's Upper East Side, rented quickly and remains nearly 100% occupied.

He discovered that luxury projects were considerably riskier and more difficult. He spent the 1980s trying unsuccessfully to build an apartment complex called Riverwalk on piers in Manhattan's East River. Eventually, the city canceled his permit.

When commercial real-estate markets collapsed in the early 1990s, Mr. Ross had $120 million in loans outstanding on speculative projects. Banks began calling for repayment, and Mr. Ross canceled several condominium projects. If the loan problems had become public, investors might have steered clear of Related's tax-exempt deals, threatening its otherwise stable affordable-housing operations, according to two people familiar with the matter.

"How did we survive?" says Mr. Ross. "I had the other sources of income coming in from my financial-services business, the syndication doing all these tax-credit deals." It paid Related's overhead while he looked for additional money to keep the banks at bay. Eventually, he got a large cash infusion from several investors, including his wealthy uncle, Mr. Fisher, and he restructured the loans.

"My whole philosophy is totally different since then," says Mr. Ross. "We generate enough cash flow to put in to the projects internally from our profits...I control my destiny." He says Related now carries no debt other than short-term construction loans and nonrecourse mortgages, secured only by specific properties and not by Related's other assets or by Mr. Ross personally.

In order to obtain such financing, developers must put up significant equity. For the mammoth Time Warner Center, Related relied on more than the profits of its affordable-housing operations and other businesses. Mr. Ross tapped Apollo Real Estate Partners as an equity partner.

Income from the subsidized-housing business plays a vital role in the large-scale developments. "We've been working on large projects in and around L.A. for three years," says Mr. Witte, who heads Related's California unit. "We've had to carry the staff that are working on those. We have the financial capacity to do that in large part because of the success we have on the affordable side...All this comes into play when negotiating with lenders."

Following Related's near collapse, the commercial real-estate market once again boomed. Much of Related's projects since then have been high-end, including CityPlace in West Palm Beach, a massive mixed-use complex; Time Warner Center, and dozens of luxury condominium towers around the country. In recent years, these luxury projects have contributed a significant portion of Related's profits.

On the affordable-housing side, Mr. Ross was confronted with a separate set of problems. Related had begun selling tax-exempt bonds to investors through Prudential Securities. In a class-action suit filed in Manhattan federal court, investors accused Prudential, Related, and several other companies that sold limited partnerships of improperly characterizing bonds as more liquid than they in fact were. To settle the suit in 1997, Related paid $2 million and agreed to take its bond funds public so that investors could sell their investments more easily.

But that didn't end the problems. Related began collecting fees as outside manager of the newly public company, which became CharterMac. Investors didn't like that either. They were wary of having a private company manage a public one, which they saw as a conflict of interest, according to a 2002 CharterMac filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A second restructuring ensued, which shifted the management of CharterMac from Related to CharterMac itself. In exchange for the lost revenues, Mr. Ross received $50 million and CharterMac stock then valued at $181 million. Four other Related executives received $83 million of stock.

Before the deal was put to a shareholder vote, some shareholders sued in New York state court, claiming the deal amounted to Mr. Ross -- as both the principal owner of Related and the chairman of CharterMac -- negotiating with himself. CharterMac's independent directors had handled the negotiations for that company. One of those directors, Arthur Fisch, says the deal resulted from a "brutal negotiation." He insists that Mr. Ross "did not have any undo sway, certainly not over me." To settle the suit, Mr. Ross and his four Related partners agreed to vote the same way as the majority of outside shareholders. Those shareholders voted in favor of the deal.

These days, Related receives about $24 million a year in dividends -- most of it tax-free -- from its CharterMac stock holdings. But that is only part of the income it squeezes out of its investments in glamourless buildings such as the Ocean Park apartment complex.

In June 2005, Related agreed to buy Ocean Park for $34.5 million from Cord Meyer LLC, a small Queens real-estate company. In exchange for its promise to keep the apartments affordable for 40 years, Related received $11 million in federal tax credits, which it then sold to CharterMac. To raise the rest of the money needed to buy and renovate the building, Related received authorization from the New York State Housing Authority to sell $38 million in tax-exempt bonds.

Related and CharterMac earned money from the deal in several ways. Related took $2.2 million of the money it raised as a fee to manage the renovation of the property.

A CharterMac spokeswoman declines to say what the company's fee was for selling the Ocean Park tax credits to investors, but says it typically takes around 4% to 5% on such deals. CharterMac charges investors a separate fee to guarantee the tax credits if something bad happens to the property.

During the past year, Ocean Park tenants got new windows, stoves and refrigerators. Mark Carbone, president of Related's affordable-housing unit, says the property "will just purr along" for the 40 years Related has pledged to keep it affordable. And when that commitment runs out, the two buildings overlooking the Atlantic may turn into even more lucrative beachfront property.

How New York Should Solve the Traffic Problem

From Times Select
September 13, 2006
Talking Points

Hey! Hey! I'm Walking Here! - How New York (and Other Big Cities) Should Solve the Traffic Problem

By CAROLYN CURIEL

If there's one thing New Yorkers, and people from the New York metropolitan area, like to talk about more than the weather, it's traffic. Traffic is the bane of workers, residents and visitors to the city.

New York traffic is slow. If you've ever walked four miles an hour on the treadmill - a pace that barely breaks a sweat for most people- you've matched or bettered typical speeds for vehicles navigating much of Manhattan. New York traffic is also costly. For business, and indeed for anyone who counts time lost as spent revenue, traffic congestion is a clear and present threat to the bottom line. It also spews pollution, wastes energy, and wears down already aging and battered streets. Worst of all, traffic congestion costs lives - primarily the lives of pedestrians and bicyclists.

Yet even as Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken bold steps to improve the other dampers on the quality of life - like crime and smoking in public indoor spaces - he has done little about New York traffic.

There are a few simple steps New York should take. The city has too many cars, and not enough streets and roadways to put them on. There needs to be fewer cars and more cyclists, pedestrians, and mass-transit riders.

One bold way to make this happen is "congestion pricing," an approach that is being tried with success in other large cities around the world.

Congestion pricing systems impose a charge on cars and trucks that enter the most densely trafficked parts of cities. London and Singapore have had success with their versions and more recently a model was tested in Stockholm.

Chicago and Paris have gone another route, concentrating on improving pedestrian walkways and cycling lanes, reducing car usage for short trips.

For New York, a city planned mostly on a grid and built to be walker-friendly, a combination of the two approaches might work. Several economic and business groups want a closer look at one congestion-pricing proposal, which would charge a fee to drivers in the central business district, the area below 60th Street in Manhattan.

As with most things involving transportation in and around the city, however, it's the getting there that is the biggest challenge. The politics of putting a price on anything that has been free poses a particularly onerous roadblock.

City leaders, who have been quietly but earnestly studying how to ensure New York's economic future, have not placed congestion pricing on their agenda. But that may have to change.

The city continues to grow, with its population projected to reach nine million in the next quarter century. New office towers being planned and built now put an even bigger burden on the city's badly overburdened streets. Now is the time to draw up a workable plan that prevents New York from being immobilized by its own spectacular success.

I. I'm Walking (or Pedaling or Driving or Skating) Here!

Stand on any corner in Times Square - if you can find an unclaimed piece of pavement - and your senses quickly become as overloaded as the streets. There are few other places where so many objects compete so exquisitely just to move. Lanes are jammed with taxis, private automobiles and buses from all across the city and New Jersey. Delivery trucks barrel by. Bicyclists and drivers of pedi-cab (three-wheel cycles that carry passengers) bravely, sometimes brazenly, fight for their share of the street. The occasional skateboarder, rollerblader or scooter-rider zips through the mix.

Add in ambulances and fire trucks and the growing number of double-decker sight-seeing buses and novelty recreational rides, like the lane-wide, circular, seven-seater cycles that tourists seem to delight in, and the risks quickly multiply.

Pedestrians, meanwhile, frustrated that they cannot move down sidewalks clogged with guidebook-toting gawkers and vendors of everything from used books to t-shirts, turn the nearest lane of the street into a makeshift walkway.

This scene is not only chaotic - it's dangerous. The city has come a long, deadly way since the first pedestrian was killed, by an electric taxicab, as he stepped off a street car on Central Park West in 1899.

Last year more than 150 pedestrians and nearly two dozen cyclists died in traffic.

In recent years, pedestrians have been killed by tour buses, vans and countless automobiles. Transportation Alternatives, a non-profit organization promoting ways to get around without the automobile, keeps a grim list of fatalities - along with information on the dangers caused by S.U.V.'s, drivers talking on cell phones, and other particular menaces. The law is on the pedestrians' side. New York law requires drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, even if they are not in the driver's lane. But you wouldn't know it standing at a typical New York crosswalk.

Of course, car drivers are not the only ones flouting the law. Cyclists fly through red lights, pedestrians jaywalk, scoffing at a turn-only signal as they cut off a chain of cars and unregulated jitney buses at 42nd and 8th. A law of the urban jungle prevails, since drivers, cyclists and pedestrians know that their chances of being ticketed hover in the neighborhood of zero. Manhattan below 59th Street, encompassing Midtown and the Financial District, is the densest and most diverse part of this traffic soup. Some 840,000 vehicles enter the central business district daily. From a 6 a.m. pre-rush hour, when the surge begins to build, through morning, midday and evening rush hours, until dinnertime begins to thin traffic around 8 p.m., these motorists rule the streets.

Traffic jams are at their worst in Manhattan, but they can extend for miles into the other boroughs, especially Brooklyn and Queens. For commuters from farther east or the west, a short drive can turn into an extended stay on the Long Island Expressway or in a Hudson River tunnel.

No part of the city is immune. In his last State of the City speech, Mayor Bloomberg singled out the traffic problem in Staten Island - where the roadways have become anything but bucolic. A half century ago, the borough was nearly rural, with fewer than 200,000 residents, but thanks in large measure to the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964, it has grown to nearly half a million. All but about 18 percent of the borough's households own cars. Mayor Bloomberg announced several traffic-easing initiatives last March, including reopening rail lines for freight, but Staten Island's traffic problem isn't going away. An effort by NASCAR to bring a car-racing franchise to the island is foundering on the fact that - ironically - Staten Island's roads cannot handle all the cars filled with people who would drive to see the car races.

The same seems to go for Queens, where just one-third of households are carless. In Queens, the biggest problem is truck traffic, especially in Flushing, which has some of the worst truck congestion in the city.

The city has come up with modest proposals so far, including limiting hours for truck deliveries and more clearly marking truck routes.

In the Bronx and Manhattan, where traffic tends to move slowest, and drivers are especially quick to slam down on the horn, traffic noise is an especially acute problem.

In Brooklyn, where a major residential, office and sports arena development is planned for the Atlantic Yards near downtown, a main complaint has been about adding to already backed-up traffic - much of it headed to Manhattan.

Across the city, car and truck exhaust is a major problem. In a poll by the Tri-State Campaign, a nonprofit group, half of surveyed residents citywide cited concerns over pollution from traffic. They right to be concerned. Exhaust fumes, particularly from diesel fuel, contain pollutants and particulates that contribute to a wide variety of illnesses, including asthma, and have been linked to lung and other cancers. The risk is especially serious for children.

There has to be a better way.

II. The Commuters' Lament

The one truth that workers in the city know is that there are no secret routes or real short cuts to getting to their daily bread. Everyone else has thought of them, and those routes are crowded, too.

Some commuters have taken to setting out from home earlier and leaving work later, just to beat the crowds and shave a few minutes off their time in traffic.

But the only way to really beat the traffic may be to avoid it altogether - either by living within walking distance of work, or by telecommuting. Most people can't afford, or wouldn't want, to live where they work. And while more businesses are allowing telecommuting, it isn't an option for most employees. That means that most of us still have to get out of our pajamas and make our way to a workplace five days a week.

New Yorkers, though, commute differently than the rest of the country.

Commuters in the New York metropolitan area represent about 40 percent of the nation's total public transit users, according to the Census report. Nationally, almost 9 of 10 workers travel by private car. The average duration of a local commute, each way, is 34.2 minutes, about 9 minutes more than the national average, and the second longest in the nation. In a year, the average commuter here spends well over 100 hours in transit.

The time invested in commuting, daunting as it may already be, will surely expand, and soon. With median home prices in the metro area approaching $400,000, and median monthly rent for a studio in Manhattan near $2,000, the term "affordable housing" is fast becoming an oxymoron.

For lower-wage workers, who face the severest housing crisis, the commute is especially painful.

We are living in the age of the extreme commute - those taking 90 minutes or longer each way - and it seems to be here for good. Census data show that some 18,000 workers in the region - many of them home health care and other service providers - make such commutes to jobs paying less than $25,000 a year. But workers in all but perhaps the highest income levels are finding residences farther away from their jobs in the city.

Meanwhile, large, vertically ambitious office space development is being planned wherever there is a plot of land to be claimed, from the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan and the Hudson Yards west of Midtown. The stage is being set for new and larger streams of commuters to the city and there will be a need for transportation that can handle them.

The good news buried in New York's challenging commuting picture is that commuting statistics indicate a mindset open to reliance on public transit. That is true not only in the city, but in surrounding counties, where public transportation ridership has been steadily on the rise.

Any sane plan for handling commuting in the future will take advantage of New York area commuters' receptiveness to public transportation, and persuade as many as possible to abandon doing bumper-to-fender battle on their own.

III. The Case Against Cars

Every day, 3.6 million people - half of them workers - pour into Manhattan south of 60th Street. People rightly complain most vehemently about trucks, which are the loudest, most menacing, and most exhaust-spewing traffic. Still, trucks account for just about 14 percent of the traffic. According to a study this year by Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant, 60 percent of the trips are made by personal autos, and most of these trips could have been accomplished by mass transit. That makes cars the heart of the problem.

Whether by design or not, the city enables many of these self-indulgent commuters. It has provided free parking - or inexpensive metered parking - on even the narrowest of streets. Even so, cars frequently double park or occupy loading zones for trucks, who then must block streets to do their jobs. Heftier charges for parking, and a new focus on parking enforcement would help discourage unnecessary driving, and ease the resulting bottlenecks.

New York should also rethink free parking. Much of the parking in the city is free, even for non-residents - which is not the case in many parts of the country, where residents get special parking permits. New York also hands out parking permits to many municipal employees which they use like entitled diplomats with immunity. Limiting such passes would immediately help to make streets passable, especially in Lower Manhattan, where many municipal offices are located.

The fact is, for many who drive into the city, the act has become an almost mindless choice. In the Schaller study, which was commissioned by Transportation Alternatives, fully 90 percent of commuters who drove were found to have access to public transportation. Without penalty, drivers need only consider the personal cost they incur - for parking, the rare toll and gasoline. Even at $3 a gallon, convenience and comfort may seem a fair tradeoff for many motorists. Some who own mileage-efficient or hybrid vehicles may even convince themselves that they are being responsible.

But as every car contributes to the problem, every car removed can add to the solution. The Partnership for New York City, a leading business group, is conducting its own study on the expense of congestion. But a three-year-old mobility report from Texas Transportation Institute, which examined national traffic trends, already offers compelling reasons for economic concern. It found serious traffic in New York for 70 percent of trips during peak hours; 200 million gallons of wasted fuel, and the spewing of 166,000 tons of airborne pollutants. The price for the time lost was significant: the congestion cost each commuter $670 annually and resulted in some $6.8 billion in lost productivity.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out choking on fumes and being stuck in traffic isn't a good deal for anyone.

IV. Keeping New York on the Move

New York's approach to transportation - like most cities - has been described as first making sure that "all the cars are happy." That should change.

The priority should be making sure that New Yorkers, and the people who spend their days here, have a safe, clean, and efficient environment for going about their business and recreation. If that means burdening cars, that's what should be done.

Transportation Alternatives has set out an array of very sensible suggestions, many of which come under the rubric of what it calls "traffic calming."

Among the proposals: longer walking signals, speed bumps along pedestrian crossings and jay-walking barriers.

These changes were implemented on Queens Boulevard, and dramatically improved conditions on a road that was notorious as the "Boulevard of Death." Before the changes, an average of 10 pedestrians a year were killed trying to cross the road. Fatalities now are rare.

As for cyclists, danger could be reduced with more dedicated bicycle lanes and stricter enforcement of traffic laws - speeding taxis and trucks are an urban cyclist's worst enemy.

The city could also do cyclists a favor by cracking down on the scofflaws among their ranks. It has been suggested that cyclists be required to get licenses, like automobile drivers. That might not be necessary (although it would ensure, at the very least, that cyclists learn basic safety rules), but sloppy or overly aggressive cycling is a hazard waiting for a crackdown. Bicycle riders who weave through traffic and race through red lights are endangering themselves (as well as pedestrians and automobile drivers and passengers.)

The larger goal, though, has to be developing and implementing a congestion-busting plan that gets as many vehicles as possible off the streets.

The long-sought Cross Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel, which would bring goods to the city by freight rail could take many trucks off the streets.

Improved, and better funded, public transit, could convince more drivers to abandon their cars. There need to be better rapid bus lines, increased subway and commuter rail capacity and smarter use of the great resource surrounding the city: waterways. While Staten Islanders enjoy free ferry service to Lower Manhattan, they are alone in being so coddled. Ferry service across the region needs should be expanded and subsidized.

The boldest step of all would be imposing serious fees on people who bring cars into the bottom third of Manhattan. Elected leaders seem to equate uttering the word "toll" with saying Rumpelstiltskin. In addition to the wrath they incur with drivers who vote, and garage owners who covet the business that comes with traffic, tolls have a history that seems to warn off even the brave. Mayor John Lindsay wanted to ban traffic in parts of Midtown in 1971. Two years later Governor Nelson Rockefeller proposed East River Bridge tolls. As concern over traffic congestion and air quality mounted, Mayor Ed Koch further pressed for bridge tolls in 1986. Then consideration of tolls took a fiscal turn.

Mayor David Dinkins, grasping at every way to pull the city out of financial crisis, looked to toll the bridges. Mayor Bloomberg hoped for the same as he faced a multibillion-dollar budget gap in 2002.

All of these efforts, one after the other, were abandoned, for a variety of reasons: political heat mounted, federal air standards were eased or other economic solutions were found. Tolls may not be good politics, and they may not even be especially powerful revenue generators. But as traffic managers, they merit a hard look.

That is also the main rationale for charging a fee to enter the most traffic-jammed streets.

The congestion pricing model most cited is London, which charges $14 to most drivers on its busiest streets. The British did not rush their plan. Before the charge took effect, they built up public transportation and continue to do so, using money collected from the surcharge. Drivers are charged by the day, with cameras capturing license plate numbers for billing. Under the plan, traffic is down more than 20 percent and moves

37 percent faster.

Sweden tried a more flexible and variable plan in Stockholm, with charges based on time of day and sector. Initial reports are promising and the city will decide whether to keep the system in a referendum later this month (September 17). Whether it could be made palatable in New York, though, is a looming question. Before then, there is bound to be a lot of kicking and screaming.

One study, produced by the chamber of commerce in car-happy Queens, concluded that congestion pricing is a financial loser that would cost the city $2.7 billion in economic activity. Others have charged that it would finally and utterly hand Manhattan to the very rich, and might hurt Broadway theaters and other nightlife. Of course, any pricing scheme could limit the hit, by adjusting fees by time of day and location.

The Bloomberg administration, which did a brilliant job in selling the smoking ban as the cure for an occupational health hazard, could certainly justify congestion pricing in some form as a health issue - curbing emissions to lengthen and strengthen lives. There are questions about whether the city even has the jurisdiction to collect a road fee.

Most issues of taxation and transportation fall to the state. But with the winds of change sweeping through Albany this year, this is as auspicious a time as any to get the city the authority it needs.

Clearly, New York needs a traffic strategy.

The Bloomberg administration should listen to the ideas being generated by the Citywide Coalition for Traffic Relief, which includes Transportation Alternatives, Citizens for NYC, NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. The coalition has been working for the last year to garner broad support from community organizations for several reasonable measures that could get things rolling.

It recommends cleaner and more frequent subway trains, stepped up plans for rapid bus transit, and more and better lanes for cyclists and pedestrians. In addition, it proposes the city work harder to enforce truck rules and routes and expand "traffic calming" measures, including restricted turning and lower residential street speeds. It also calls on the city to make parking more of a luxury by pricing it at Midtown rates in commercial districts throughout the five boroughs.

The coalition also urges the city to begin studying congestion pricing, which, if adopted, could change the face of New York City for years to come.

Mayor Bloomberg has made it clear that he wants to leave a big mark on the city before his second term is over. He has tended to think about a legacy with bold building projects, like the proposed West Side Stadium.

By coming up with a bold plan for changing traffic patterns in New York, he could make the city safer, cleaner, and more livable - and New Yorkers would be thanking him for many years to come.

Lela Moore contributed research for this article.

The New York Times
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June 25, 2006
Modern Love
What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage
By AMY SUTHERLAND

AS I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, my husband paces behind me, irritated. "Have you seen my keys?" he snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Dixie, at his heels, anxious over her favorite human's upset.

In the past I would have been right behind Dixie. I would have turned off the faucet and joined the hunt while trying to soothe my husband with bromides like, "Don't worry, they'll turn up." But that only made him angrier, and a simple case of missing keys soon would become a full-blown angst-ridden drama starring the two of us and our poor nervous dog.

Now, I focus on the wet dish in my hands. I don't turn around. I don't say a word. I'm using a technique I learned from a dolphin trainer.

I love my husband. He's well read, adventurous and does a hysterical rendition of a northern Vermont accent that still cracks me up after 12 years of marriage.

But he also tends to be forgetful, and is often tardy and mercurial. He hovers around me in the kitchen asking if I read this or that piece in The New Yorker when I'm trying to concentrate on the simmering pans. He leaves wadded tissues in his wake. He suffers from serious bouts of spousal deafness but never fails to hear me when I mutter to myself on the other side of the house. "What did you say?" he'll shout.

These minor annoyances are not the stuff of separation and divorce, but in sum they began to dull my love for Scott. I wanted — needed — to nudge him a little closer to perfect, to make him into a mate who might annoy me a little less, who wouldn't keep me waiting at restaurants, a mate who would be easier to love.

So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

We went to a counselor to smooth the edges off our marriage. She didn't understand what we were doing there and complimented us repeatedly on how well we communicated. I gave up. I guessed she was right — our union was better than most — and resigned myself to stretches of slow-boil resentment and occasional sarcasm.

Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

I also began to analyze my husband the way a trainer considers an exotic animal. Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn't. For example, an elephant is a herd animal, so it responds to hierarchy. It cannot jump, but can stand on its head. It is a vegetarian.

The exotic animal known as Scott is a loner, but an alpha male. So hierarchy matters, but being in a group doesn't so much. He has the balance of a gymnast, but moves slowly, especially when getting dressed. Skiing comes naturally, but being on time does not. He's an omnivore, and what a trainer would call food-driven.

Once I started thinking this way, I couldn't stop. At the school in California, I'd be scribbling notes on how to walk an emu or have a wolf accept you as a pack member, but I'd be thinking, "I can't wait to try this on Scott."

On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an "incompatible behavior," a simple but brilliant concept.

Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn't alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.

At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I'd set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I'd done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked.

I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.

In the margins of my notes I wrote, "Try on Scott!"

It was only a matter of time before he was again tearing around the house searching for his keys, at which point I said nothing and kept at what I was doing. It took a lot of discipline to maintain my calm, but results were immediate and stunning. His temper fell far shy of its usual pitch and then waned like a fast-moving storm. I felt as if I should throw him a mackerel.

Now he's at it again; I hear him banging a closet door shut, rustling through papers on a chest in the front hall and thumping upstairs. At the sink, I hold steady. Then, sure enough, all goes quiet. A moment later, he walks into the kitchen, keys in hand, and says calmly, "Found them."

Without turning, I call out, "Great, see you later."

Off he goes with our much-calmed pup.

After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love. I used to take his faults personally; his dirty clothes on the floor were an affront, a symbol of how he didn't care enough about me. But thinking of my husband as an exotic species gave me the distance I needed to consider our differences more objectively.

I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.

PROFESSIONALS talk of animals that understand training so well they eventually use it back on the trainer. My animal did the same. When the training techniques worked so beautifully, I couldn't resist telling my husband what I was up to. He wasn't offended, just amused. As I explained the techniques and terminology, he soaked it up. Far more than I realized.

Last fall, firmly in middle age, I learned that I needed braces. They were not only humiliating, but also excruciating. For weeks my gums, teeth, jaw and sinuses throbbed. I complained frequently and loudly. Scott assured me that I would become used to all the metal in my mouth. I did not.

One morning, as I launched into yet another tirade about how uncomfortable I was, Scott just looked at me blankly. He didn't say a word or acknowledge my rant in any way, not even with a nod.

I quickly ran out of steam and started to walk away. Then I realized what was happening, and I turned and asked, "Are you giving me an L. R. S.?" Silence. "You are, aren't you?"

He finally smiled, but his L. R. S. has already done the trick. He'd begun to train me, the American wife.

Amy Sutherland is the author of "Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers" (Viking, June 2006). She lives in Boston and in Portland, Me.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company