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Imagine the following: It’s a beautiful Labor Day weekend. Sunny, cloudless, 80 degrees. Backyard barbecues are fired up all over the metropolitan area, and the beaches of New York City, New Jersey and southern Long Island are jam-packed with bathers. The only sign that something unusual is happening is the relatively big waves rolling up on Coney Island. It’s a surfer’s paradise.

Mike Lee isn’t enjoying the long weekend. For the last two weeks, Lee, the Director of Watch Command at New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, has been observing a series of weather systems form off the western coast of Africa, organize themselves into the familiar swirling pattern of tropical storms, and line up like airplanes coming in for a landing on the Caribbean.

One of those storms, a category-4 monster hurricane with sustained winds of 140 m.p.h., is violently churning the ocean 350 nautical miles off the coast of Georgia.

A hurricane like this one can usually be counted on to curve eastward and die a harmless death over the Atlantic. But with a large area of high pressure hovering just off the east coast, the computer models at the National Hurricane Center in Miami are largely in agreement: This one is heading north, tracking a direct hit on New Jersey somewhere north of Atlantic City.

Like the legendary “Long Island Express” of 1938, the fastest-moving hurricane ever recorded, it’s moving quickly. While no human or computer can ever be completely sure what a hurricane is going to do, this is looking like a worst-case scenario for New York City, the kind of scenario ”that gives emergency managers serious gastrointestinal distress,” says Lee. Because of its counter-clockwise rotation, the right side of a hurricane is the most powerful part of the storm.

The right side of this storm is fixing to land a haymaker on New York Harbor. If it makes landfall during high tide, the devastation will be unprecedented.

With the storm expected to hit within 24 hours, Mike Lee is in constant communication with Mike Wyllie, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s New York office in Upton. The OEM’s emergency operations center, meanwhile, is buzzing, while the mayor and his chiefs are hunkered down in the situation room. They have an incredibly difficult decision to make, a decision that has never before been made in New York City. They are preparing to order the evacuation of 900,000 New Yorkers whose homes are in the path of catastrophic flooding in the event of a category-4 hurricane. They will provide shelter for nearly a quarter million.

And while the storm is still far enough away that it could drift off course and miss New York City completely, a full evacuation may take up to 18 hours. They need to decide now. The fact that a mayoral election is only two months away doesn’t make the decision any less complicated. An unnecessary evacuation could be a political catastrophe.

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Though it sounds like science fiction, the above scenario is all too plausible. “Try to tell someone in Sheepshead Bay that they have to evacuate immediately because within the next 24 hours they’ll have 30 feet of storm surge on their neighborhood,” says Mike Lee, before pausing to let you think about three stories of ocean water roiling through your own neighborhood.

“They’ll laugh at you—absolutely laugh at you,” he says. “I mean, I barely even believe it.”

I met Lee at this year’s Long Island/New York City Emergency Management conference and spent some time with him at the OEM “bunker” in Brooklyn. It turns out that the region’s emergency managers aren’t only worrying about terrorism these days. The big topic of discussion at the Melville, Long Island, Hilton was hurricanes. And the strong consensus is that the metropolitan region is due for a big one. Overdue, in fact.

The 1938 Long Island Express, a borderline category-4 hurricane that plowed into West Hampton, causing widespread death and devastation across New York, New Jersey and New England, was the last major hurricane to hit the region. Statistically speaking, “a storm of that magnitude may repeat every 70 to 80 years or so,” Lee says. “So, do the math. Whether it happens this year, next year, or in five years, it’s going to happen.” And with this year’s hurricane season forecasted to be even busier and more dangerous than last year’s record-setter, “It’s just a matter of time,” Lee says.

Though it is rare for big hurricanes to hit the New York metropolitan region, there are a variety of “oceanographic, demographic and geologic characteristics that greatly amplify any hurricane” that comes our way, according to Nicholas Coch, a professor of coastal geology at Queens College. In many ways, Coch explains, “The New York City area is the worst possible place for a hurricane to make a landfall.”

New York’s first vulnerability is psychological. This is a city where children playing in the dirt are told by their mothers to “get up off the floor.” We tend to forget that we have any connection whatsoever to the natural world. The vast majority of the city’s eight million inhabitants simply have no idea that a hurricane can happen here.

“We live in a complacent coastal city,” Lee says. “A lot of people don’t even think that there are beaches here,” never mind 478 miles of coastline. In fact, New York City is behind only Miami and New Orleans on the list of U.S. cities most likely to suffer a major hurricane disaster. Compounding the problem is the fact that many of the New Yorkers who lived through 1985′s Hurricane Gloria believe they’ve experienced the worst of what nature has to offer. “That wasn’t a hurricane,” meteorologist Wyllie says. The storm was billed as a category-2 that weakened before it hit and came in at low tide. “Gloria was nothing.”

New York’s second vulnerability is demographic. During the decades of calm between major hurricanes, the city grows and forgets. During the great hurricane of 1821, only 152,000 people lived in New York City. When the next major, direct hit came in 1893, the city’s population was 2.5 million. At the time of the 1938 storm, Long Island wasn’t a densely populated suburban sprawl; it was a rural home for oyster fishermen, potato farmers and wealthy industrialists. The same storm today would wreak incredible havoc. AIR Worldwide Corporation estimates $11.6 billion in New York losses alone.

More than 20 million people live in the greater metropolitan region. Many live on coastal land, reclaimed swamp and barrier islands. Much of Lower Manhattan is built on landfill. Places like Rockaway, Coney Island and Manhattan Beach “are stretches of land that nature has created to protect the mainland from hurricanes,” Lee says. “In our civilization this is also the most desirable land to develop and build on. We’re not going to undevelop it. So we now have to deal with the threat.”

Coch, the six-foot-seven-and-a-half professor once nicknamed “Dr. Doom” because he was the first scientist to widely publicize New York City’s hurricane history and vulnerabilities, put it more poetically in a 1995 New York Times interview: The only difference between now and then is that “now we have millions of people to offer the God of the Sea.”

New York City’s biggest vulnerability is the most unyielding geology. The New York bight is the right angle formed by Long Island and New Jersey with the city tucked into its apex. “Hurricanes do not like right angles,” Lee says. “[They allow] water to accumulate and pile up.”

Couple this with the fact that New York resides on a very shallow continental shelf, and as a big storm pushes north, New York Harbor “acts as a funnel.” As storm surge forces its way into the harbor and up the rivers, it has nowhere to go but onto land. New York City, it turns out, has some of the highest storm-surge values in the country.

“When we see a category-3 storm making landfall in Florida, it may only have a 12-, 13-foot storm surge,” Lee says. “For us here, a category-1 storm can give us 12 feet of storm surge.”

Storm surge is the dome of seawater that is lifted up and pushed forward in front of a hurricane. It acts almost like a mini-tsunami, causing sea levels to rise rapidly and violently. Most people believe that high winds and rains are the main dangers of a hurricane. In fact, inland flooding caused by storm surge is the big killer. In 1821, stunned New Yorkers recorded sea levels rising as fast as 13 feet in a single hour at the Battery. The East River and Hudson Rivers merged over Lower Manhattan all the way to Canal Street. According to Coch, the fact that the 1821 storm struck at low tide “is the only thing that saved the city.”

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To get a sense of the damage that storm surge can do to New York City, call 311 and ask them to send you a full-color copy of the New York City Hurricane Evacuation Map. It is a truly mind-boggling document. If a storm like the Long Island Express makes a direct hit on the city, everything below Broome Street will be inundated, some parts under as much as 20 and 30 feet of water. Chelsea and Greenwich Village are completely flooded, with the Hudson spilling over all the way to 7th Avenue. Likewise, the East River and East Village become one, with ocean water surging all the way to 1st Avenue. If you haven’t evacuated before the storm, forget it. During the storm, Manhattan’s east- and west-side highways vanish. Tunnels and bridges become unusable.

The outer boroughs also get hit hard. Opposed to that new Ikea being built on the waterfront in Red Hook? Don’t worry. There’s a decent chance it won’t be there after a moderate-size hurricane. Residents of Williamsburg-Greenpoint should seek out a male and female of each species and get in their arks. In a kind of one-two-punch effect, a major hurricane will push ocean water down from the Long Island Sound into the Upper East Side, South Bronx and northern Queens, flooding those areas severely. Vast stretches of southern Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island will be devastated. The map shows Atlantic Ocean storm surge reaching as far inland as Flatbush, just south of Prospect Park, with 31.3 feet of water atop Howard Beach.

“A lot of people say, ‘How can you come up with these numbers? Thirty feet, that’s ridiculous. It’s science fiction.’ Actually,” Lee says, “It’s science fact.” Hurricanes in the southern U.S. have proven the Army Corps of Engineers’ storm-surge calculations to be accurate within a few inches.

For a taste of what will happen to the city’s infrastructure, we can look at the damage wrought by the great nor’easters of the early 1990s. During those storms, the L train had to be backed out as the 14th Street tunnel began filling with water, and the FDR highway was so badly inundated that 50 motorists had to be rescued by dive teams. In the event of a direct hit by a category-3 hurricane, surge maps show that the Holland and Battery Tunnels will be completely filled with sea water, with many subway and railroad tunnels severely flooded as well. The runways of LaGuardia and JFK airports will get flooded by 18.1 and 31.2 feet of water, respectively.

Then there are the winds. The city’s two million trees will be a huge problem.

“New York City’s trees haven’t been stressed in years except for an isolated severe thunderstorm or two,” Wyllie says. They’ve had plenty of time to grow and wrap their roots around underground phone, electric, gas and water lines. As they are uprooted in the heavy winds, a lot of infrastructure both above and below ground is going to get wrecked.

As for skyscrapers, “The impact of catastrophic winds on high-rise buildings is still a little vague,” Lee says. “We don’t feel we have enough data on that.”

We do know that hurricane wind speeds multiply at higher altitudes. At 350 feet, the height of high-rise buildings on the Battery and the towers of the George Washington Bridge, hurricane winds will be twice as fast as they are on the ground. Newer, glass-skinned towers are not likely to do well in those conditions. Neither will human beings caught outside amidst flying debris. To give a sense of the unbelievable force of hurricane winds, Lee shows a photo from one of the four storms that struck Florida last year. It depicts a blunt piece of two-by-four driven straight through the trunk of a palm tree.

“It would be nasty,” Wyllie agrees. “If you get sustained winds going 80 to 90 miles per hour in the city—whoa, you can’t believe the destruction. We’ve never seen that. And as you go up 200, 300 feet,” he considers that for a moment. “That’ll be 100, 110 mph winds. Watch out.”

—

Professor Coch, whose business card reads “forensic hurricanologist,” believes that the best way to understand New York City’s hurricane future is to study its past. He became New York City’s leading hurricane historian virtually by accident.

After the nor’easters of December 1992 and March 1993 devastated Rockaway, Coch sent a group of his coastal-geology undergrads to observe the Army Corps of Engineers replenishing beaches with sand dredged from the sea. The students reported back that “the beach was covered in garbage. Coch remembers telling them, “Get used to it. This is New York City.” But they said, “No, this is funny garbage.” In the dredged-up sand, Coch’s students found hundreds of artifacts – plates, whiskey bottles, teapots, beer mugs, lumps of coal and, what proved to be the most telling clue of all, an old hurricane lamp. Mystified at how a treasure trove of 19th-century objects could have wound up underwater hundreds of feet off the coast of Rockaway, Coch and his students began investigating.

It took them about two years to unravel the mystery of Hog Island: New York City’s version of Atlantis.

It turns out there was once a small, sandy spit of an island off the southern coast of Rockaway. In the years after the Civil War, developers built saloons and bathhouses, and Hog Island became a sort of 1890s version of the Hamptons. During the summers, the city’s Democratic bosses used Hog Island as a kind of outdoor annex of Tammany Hall. That all ended on the night of August 23, 1893, when a terrifying category-2 hurricane rolled up from Norfolk, Virginia, and made landfall on what is now JFK airport.

The storm was a major event. All six front-page columns of the August 25, 1893 New York Times were dedicated to the “unexampled fury” of the “West Indian monster” and the damage it wrought throughout the region. Dozens of boats were sunk, and scores of sailors perished. In Central Park “more than a hundred noble trees were torn up by the roots,” and thousands of sparrows lay dead on the ground. “Gangs of small boys roamed through the Park in the early hours of the morning collecting the dead sparrows and picking their feathers.”

At the brand-new Met Life building at Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, a heavy-iron fence was torn away by the wind, plunging 10 stories and crashing through a stained-glass dome before landing on a mosaic “including quantities of costly Mexican onyx.” In Brooklyn, at Wyckoff and Myrtle Avenues, “the water in the street was up to a man’s waist,” and residents used ladders to get in and out of their houses. Most of the boats moored at the Williamsburg Yacht Club were “sunk, driven ashore or demolished.” The East River rose “until it swept over the sea wall in the Astoria district and submerged the Boulevard.” At Coney Island, 30-foot waves swept 200 yards inland, destroying nearly every man-made structure in its path and wrecking the elevated railroad.

“Hog Island largely disappeared that night,” Coch says. “As far as I know, it is the only incidence of the removal of an entire island by a hurricane.”

Hurricanes, Coch reminds, “operate on a geologic scale.”

—

Will New York City get hit by the Big One this season? It’s impossible to say. But we do know this: The risk of a major hurricane hitting the metropolitan region is significantly greater than it has been in a long time. Meteorologists have observed that Atlantic Ocean hurricanes tend to wax and wane over roughly 20-year cycles. Nineteen ninety-five marked the beginning of a period of above-normal hurricane activity. We are now in the middle of that cycle. The same climate conditions that made last year’s hurricane season so active are in place and even augmented this year. Low wind sheer and sea-surface pressure and a favorable African easterly jet stream all create ideal conditions for Atlantic hurricanes. El Nino, the unusually warm current that appears in the tropical Pacific off the coast of Ecuador every three to seven years, tends to dampen hurricane activity in the Atlantic. This year there is no El Nino.

Additionally, scientists say that man-made global warming is increasing the odds that tropical storms will dump on New York City with greater frequency and intensity. Tropical Atlantic sea-surface temperatures have steadily risen over the last decade. Hurricanes are essentially gigantic steam engines; they gain power from warm seas.

“With global warming there is more moisture in the atmosphere,” says Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “This moisture is the main fuel for hurricanes and tropical storms.” This year, tropical Atlantic sea-surface temperatures are the warmest they have ever been in recorded history, about two degrees Fahrenheit above normal. And while there is debate within the hurricane research community as to how much impact global warming ultimately has, there is no longer any question that global warming is contributing to more extreme weather events around the world.

Whatever the causes, forecasters are confident that 2005 will be a busy hurricane season, busier even than last year’s. Meteorologists are forecasting 15 named storms, eight of them hurricanes, four of them “intense” hurricanes. In an average year, about 10 storms get names, six become hurricanes and two become intense.

New York City’s hurricane season runs from August to October, peaking around September 10. To prepare for a storm, Lee suggests that New Yorkers call 311 or go online, find out what evacuation zone they’re in, and develop a plan. If a storm comes rolling in and the city tells you to evacuate, take heed. “People who decide to ride out a storm need to know that in the middle of it they can’t call 911 and say, ‘All right, come get me. I’m ready,’” Lee says. “We will not be able to come and get them. Once they’ve made the decision to stay, they’ve made that decision for the long haul. That’s a very serious decision.”

If the Big One hits this season, Lee may be taking his own advice. The first OEM “bunker” was located in the World Trade Center—in hindsight, a lousy location. A new OEM building is currently under construction on the bluffs of Brooklyn Heights. Until its completion, the city’s emergency managers are working in a converted warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront.

In the event of a direct hit by a category-3 hurricane, New York City’s Office of Emergency Management will find itself under 22.4 feet of storm surge.

Lee’s not too worried about it, though. The city has a duplicate Office of Emergency Management in an undisclosed location.

This is a story about the Great Bike Backlash of 2011, right? Nope. I’m talking about the Automobile Backlash of 1920.

The tabloid ravings, harsh police tactics and political posturing aimed against bikes and bike lanes may seem intense today. In a historic context, however, the Bike Backlash of 2011 is nothing compared to the battle that took place during the decade after World War I when organized “motordom” carved out its place on New York City streets. (Yes, that’s how the automobile interests actually referred to themselves: They were “motordom.”)

University of Virginia professor Peter Norton details the early history of the car and the city in his wonky but fascinating book, Fighting Traffic. He describes the “blood, grief and anger in the American city” and the “violent revolution in the streets” of New York and other U.S. cities as automobile owners bullied their way on to city streets, literally, leaving a trail of mangled children’s bodies in their wake.

In the 1920s, motor vehicle crashes killed more than 200,000 Americans, a staggering number considering how many fewer cars actually existed in those days. These days, 35,000-or-so Americans are killed in car wrecks annually. Most of the dead are drivers and passengers on highways and in rural places. In the 1920s, most of the dead were kids living in cities. In the first four years after the Armistice of World War I, more Americans were killed in car wrecks than had died in battle in France.

New York City residents of the 1920s, by and large, despised the automobile with a passion that makes today’s bike backlash look like a friendly disagreement. Norton recounts stories of mob attacks on reckless motorists. In 1923, speeding car thieves mowed down and killed a 20-year-old woman, a popular church choir singer, while she was waiting for a streetcar in Philadelphia. A “menacing crowd” of 2,000 citizens surrounded the vehicle and threatened to lynch its occupants. On a single spring day in 1927, eight children were run over and killed by cars in and around New York City and police struggled to rescue one of the drivers after he had been attacked by an angry mob. In more intellectual circles, “critics often called the automobile a pagan idol demanding sacrifice,” according to Norton. Newspaper editorials described the automobile as “a machine age Moloch to which motorists sacrificed generous offerings of child victims.” Cars were a nuisance and intruder on city streets and drivers were seen as “tyrants that deprived others of their freedom.” City streets were places where kids played, pushcart vendors sold goods and a wide variety of vehicles and traffic moved and intermingled mostly at human-scale speeds. New Yorkers and city people all across America “saw the car not just as a menace to life and limb, but also as an aggressor upon their time-honored rights to city streets.”

Yet by 1930, the backlash was largely over. The automobile had secured its place on city streets and motordom had won. Rather than conforming to the demands of the American city, the city began its decades-long process of conforming itself to the needs of the automobile. This is the city we live in today: the automotive city.

In the automotive city, the streets are primarily the domain of motor vehicles. In the automotive city, we design and manage our streets to move cars and trucks as quickly and efficiently as possible. We allow the owners of private motor vehicles to store their massive pieces of personal property for free or, for just a few quarters, in a parking meter. It’s the best deal in town.

The Automobile Backlash of last century turned around with remarkable speed. Though they seemed to hate other people’s automobiles, it turns out that a lot of streetcar commuters viewed themselves as future motorists. While traffic engineering and city planning played a role in getting New Yorkers to accept the automobile (Car lanes? How dare they!), it took decades to retrofit New York City’s infrastructure for the automobile, a project that is only just now winding down thanks to bankrupt state and federal budgets.

Norton argues that the great Automobile Backlash of the 1920s wasn’t so much a fight between different modes of transportation, it was a turf war over New Yorkers’ shared public space: the street. The sudden arrival of large numbers of private automobiles in the 1920s forced New Yorkers to face new questions about who the streets were for and how they were to be shared and used. Today, the sudden arrival of a rapidly growing number of bicycles is forcing New York City to face these questions once again.

Changing a city’s infrastructure takes decades. Changing social mores can happen much faster. “Before the city could be physically reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists unquestionably belonged,” Norton writes. By 1930, that social reconstruction was largely complete. New Yorkers had mostly accepted the automobile in their midst, despite the fact that 10 years earlier, many considered it to be nothing more than street-clogging, exhaust-spewing, horn-honking, child-killer owned and operated by a small number of wealthy elites.

Bikes don’t cause gridlock, pollute the air or make lots of noise. And it’s extraordinarily rare for a cyclist to kill a pedestrian. But if the irrational bike-hate spewing forth from the New York Post and the mansions of Prospect Park West are any guide, the Department of Transportation’s construction of bike infrastructure has gotten ahead of the “social reconstruction” of New York City streets.

Minds will change and the Great Bike Backlash will soon come to an end. Future generations of New Yorkers will look back at this moment with a sense of wonder and amazement at the foolishness of it all. New York City will be a great biking city. It already is. We’re just waiting for the culture to catch up to the infrastructure. 

Aaron Naparstek is teaching a summer course on the politics and planning of sustainable streets at the New School this summer. For more information visitwww.newschool.edu

Mike Lee isn’t enjoying the long weekend. For the last two weeks, Lee, the Director of Watch Command at New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, has been observing a series of weather systems form off the western coast of Africa, organize themselves into the familiar swirling pattern of tropical storms, and line up like airplanes coming in for a landing on the Caribbean.

One of those storms, a category-4 monster hurricane with sustained winds of 140 m.p.h., is violently churning the ocean 350 nautical miles off the coast of Georgia.

A hurricane like this one can usually be counted on to curve eastward and die a harmless death over the Atlantic. But with a large area of high pressure hovering just off the east coast, the computer models at the National Hurricane Center in Miami are largely in agreement: This one is heading north, tracking a direct hit on New Jersey somewhere north of Atlantic City.

Like the legendary “Long Island Express” of 1938, the fastest-moving hurricane ever recorded, it’s moving quickly. While no human or computer can ever be completely sure what a hurricane is going to do, this is looking like a worst-case scenario for New York City, the kind of scenario ”that gives emergency managers serious gastrointestinal distress,” says Lee. Because of its counter-clockwise rotation, the right side of a hurricane is the most powerful part of the storm.

The right side of this storm is fixing to land a haymaker on New York Harbor. If it makes landfall during high tide, the devastation will be unprecedented.

With the storm expected to hit within 24 hours, Mike Lee is in constant communication with Mike Wyllie, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s New York office in Upton. The OEM’s emergency operations center, meanwhile, is buzzing, while the mayor and his chiefs are hunkered down in the situation room. They have an incredibly difficult decision to make, a decision that has never before been made in New York City. They are preparing to order the evacuation of 900,000 New Yorkers whose homes are in the path of catastrophic flooding in the event of a category-4 hurricane. They will provide shelter for nearly a quarter million.

And while the storm is still far enough away that it could drift off course and miss New York City completely, a full evacuation may take up to 18 hours. They need to decide now. The fact that a mayoral election is only two months away doesn’t make the decision any less complicated. An unnecessary evacuation could be a political catastrophe.

—

Though it sounds like science fiction, the above scenario is all too plausible. “Try to tell someone in Sheepshead Bay that they have to evacuate immediately because within the next 24 hours they’ll have 30 feet of storm surge on their neighborhood,” says Mike Lee, before pausing to let you think about three stories of ocean water roiling through your own neighborhood.

“They’ll laugh at you—absolutely laugh at you,” he says. “I mean, I barely even believe it.”

I met Lee at this year’s Long Island/New York City Emergency Management conference and spent some time with him at the OEM “bunker” in Brooklyn. It turns out that the region’s emergency managers aren’t only worrying about terrorism these days. The big topic of discussion at the Melville, Long Island, Hilton was hurricanes. And the strong consensus is that the metropolitan region is due for a big one. Overdue, in fact.

The 1938 Long Island Express, a borderline category-4 hurricane that plowed into West Hampton, causing widespread death and devastation across New York, New Jersey and New England, was the last major hurricane to hit the region. Statistically speaking, “a storm of that magnitude may repeat every 70 to 80 years or so,” Lee says. “So, do the math. Whether it happens this year, next year, or in five years, it’s going to happen.” And with this year’s hurricane season forecasted to be even busier and more dangerous than last year’s record-setter, “It’s just a matter of time,” Lee says.

Though it is rare for big hurricanes to hit the New York metropolitan region, there are a variety of “oceanographic, demographic and geologic characteristics that greatly amplify any hurricane” that comes our way, according to Nicholas Coch, a professor of coastal geology at Queens College. In many ways, Coch explains, “The New York City area is the worst possible place for a hurricane to make a landfall.”

New York’s first vulnerability is psychological. This is a city where children playing in the dirt are told by their mothers to “get up off the floor.” We tend to forget that we have any connection whatsoever to the natural world. The vast majority of the city’s eight million inhabitants simply have no idea that a hurricane can happen here.

“We live in a complacent coastal city,” Lee says. “A lot of people don’t even think that there are beaches here,” never mind 478 miles of coastline. In fact, New York City is behind only Miami and New Orleans on the list of U.S. cities most likely to suffer a major hurricane disaster. Compounding the problem is the fact that many of the New Yorkers who lived through 1985′s Hurricane Gloria believe they’ve experienced the worst of what nature has to offer. “That wasn’t a hurricane,” meteorologist Wyllie says. The storm was billed as a category-2 that weakened before it hit and came in at low tide. “Gloria was nothing.”

New York’s second vulnerability is demographic. During the decades of calm between major hurricanes, the city grows and forgets. During the great hurricane of 1821, only 152,000 people lived in New York City. When the next major, direct hit came in 1893, the city’s population was 2.5 million. At the time of the 1938 storm, Long Island wasn’t a densely populated suburban sprawl; it was a rural home for oyster fishermen, potato farmers and wealthy industrialists. The same storm today would wreak incredible havoc. AIR Worldwide Corporation estimates $11.6 billion in New York losses alone.

More than 20 million people live in the greater metropolitan region. Many live on coastal land, reclaimed swamp and barrier islands. Much of Lower Manhattan is built on landfill. Places like Rockaway, Coney Island and Manhattan Beach “are stretches of land that nature has created to protect the mainland from hurricanes,” Lee says. “In our civilization this is also the most desirable land to develop and build on. We’re not going to undevelop it. So we now have to deal with the threat.”

Coch, the six-foot-seven-and-a-half professor once nicknamed “Dr. Doom” because he was the first scientist to widely publicize New York City’s hurricane history and vulnerabilities, put it more poetically in a 1995 New York Times interview: The only difference between now and then is that “now we have millions of people to offer the God of the Sea.”

New York City’s biggest vulnerability is the most unyielding geology. The New York bight is the right angle formed by Long Island and New Jersey with the city tucked into its apex. “Hurricanes do not like right angles,” Lee says. “[They allow] water to accumulate and pile up.”

Couple this with the fact that New York resides on a very shallow continental shelf, and as a big storm pushes north, New York Harbor “acts as a funnel.” As storm surge forces its way into the harbor and up the rivers, it has nowhere to go but onto land. New York City, it turns out, has some of the highest storm-surge values in the country.

“When we see a category-3 storm making landfall in Florida, it may only have a 12-, 13-foot storm surge,” Lee says. “For us here, a category-1 storm can give us 12 feet of storm surge.”

Storm surge is the dome of seawater that is lifted up and pushed forward in front of a hurricane. It acts almost like a mini-tsunami, causing sea levels to rise rapidly and violently. Most people believe that high winds and rains are the main dangers of a hurricane. In fact, inland flooding caused by storm surge is the big killer. In 1821, stunned New Yorkers recorded sea levels rising as fast as 13 feet in a single hour at the Battery. The East River and Hudson Rivers merged over Lower Manhattan all the way to Canal Street. According to Coch, the fact that the 1821 storm struck at low tide “is the only thing that saved the city.”

—

To get a sense of the damage that storm surge can do to New York City, call 311 and ask them to send you a full-color copy of the New York City Hurricane Evacuation Map. It is a truly mind-boggling document. If a storm like the Long Island Express makes a direct hit on the city, everything below Broome Street will be inundated, some parts under as much as 20 and 30 feet of water. Chelsea and Greenwich Village are completely flooded, with the Hudson spilling over all the way to 7th Avenue. Likewise, the East River and East Village become one, with ocean water surging all the way to 1st Avenue. If you haven’t evacuated before the storm, forget it. During the storm, Manhattan’s east- and west-side highways vanish. Tunnels and bridges become unusable.

The outer boroughs also get hit hard. Opposed to that new Ikea being built on the waterfront in Red Hook? Don’t worry. There’s a decent chance it won’t be there after a moderate-size hurricane. Residents of Williamsburg-Greenpoint should seek out a male and female of each species and get in their arks. In a kind of one-two-punch effect, a major hurricane will push ocean water down from the Long Island Sound into the Upper East Side, South Bronx and northern Queens, flooding those areas severely. Vast stretches of southern Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island will be devastated. The map shows Atlantic Ocean storm surge reaching as far inland as Flatbush, just south of Prospect Park, with 31.3 feet of water atop Howard Beach.

“A lot of people say, ‘How can you come up with these numbers? Thirty feet, that’s ridiculous. It’s science fiction.’ Actually,” Lee says, “It’s science fact.” Hurricanes in the southern U.S. have proven the Army Corps of Engineers’ storm-surge calculations to be accurate within a few inches.

For a taste of what will happen to the city’s infrastructure, we can look at the damage wrought by the great nor’easters of the early 1990s. During those storms, the L train had to be backed out as the 14th Street tunnel began filling with water, and the FDR highway was so badly inundated that 50 motorists had to be rescued by dive teams. In the event of a direct hit by a category-3 hurricane, surge maps show that the Holland and Battery Tunnels will be completely filled with sea water, with many subway and railroad tunnels severely flooded as well. The runways of LaGuardia and JFK airports will get flooded by 18.1 and 31.2 feet of water, respectively.

Then there are the winds. The city’s two million trees will be a huge problem.

“New York City’s trees haven’t been stressed in years except for an isolated severe thunderstorm or two,” Wyllie says. They’ve had plenty of time to grow and wrap their roots around underground phone, electric, gas and water lines. As they are uprooted in the heavy winds, a lot of infrastructure both above and below ground is going to get wrecked.

As for skyscrapers, “The impact of catastrophic winds on high-rise buildings is still a little vague,” Lee says. “We don’t feel we have enough data on that.”

We do know that hurricane wind speeds multiply at higher altitudes. At 350 feet, the height of high-rise buildings on the Battery and the towers of the George Washington Bridge, hurricane winds will be twice as fast as they are on the ground. Newer, glass-skinned towers are not likely to do well in those conditions. Neither will human beings caught outside amidst flying debris. To give a sense of the unbelievable force of hurricane winds, Lee shows a photo from one of the four storms that struck Florida last year. It depicts a blunt piece of two-by-four driven straight through the trunk of a palm tree.

“It would be nasty,” Wyllie agrees. “If you get sustained winds going 80 to 90 miles per hour in the city—whoa, you can’t believe the destruction. We’ve never seen that. And as you go up 200, 300 feet,” he considers that for a moment. “That’ll be 100, 110 mph winds. Watch out.”

—

Professor Coch, whose business card reads “forensic hurricanologist,” believes that the best way to understand New York City’s hurricane future is to study its past. He became New York City’s leading hurricane historian virtually by accident.

After the nor’easters of December 1992 and March 1993 devastated Rockaway, Coch sent a group of his coastal-geology undergrads to observe the Army Corps of Engineers replenishing beaches with sand dredged from the sea. The students reported back that “the beach was covered in garbage. Coch remembers telling them, “Get used to it. This is New York City.” But they said, “No, this is funny garbage.” In the dredged-up sand, Coch’s students found hundreds of artifacts – plates, whiskey bottles, teapots, beer mugs, lumps of coal and, what proved to be the most telling clue of all, an old hurricane lamp. Mystified at how a treasure trove of 19th-century objects could have wound up underwater hundreds of feet off the coast of Rockaway, Coch and his students began investigating.

It took them about two years to unravel the mystery of Hog Island: New York City’s version of Atlantis.

It turns out there was once a small, sandy spit of an island off the southern coast of Rockaway. In the years after the Civil War, developers built saloons and bathhouses, and Hog Island became a sort of 1890s version of the Hamptons. During the summers, the city’s Democratic bosses used Hog Island as a kind of outdoor annex of Tammany Hall. That all ended on the night of August 23, 1893, when a terrifying category-2 hurricane rolled up from Norfolk, Virginia, and made landfall on what is now JFK airport.

The storm was a major event. All six front-page columns of the August 25, 1893 New York Times were dedicated to the “unexampled fury” of the “West Indian monster” and the damage it wrought throughout the region. Dozens of boats were sunk, and scores of sailors perished. In Central Park “more than a hundred noble trees were torn up by the roots,” and thousands of sparrows lay dead on the ground. “Gangs of small boys roamed through the Park in the early hours of the morning collecting the dead sparrows and picking their feathers.”

At the brand-new Met Life building at Madison Avenue and 23rd Street, a heavy-iron fence was torn away by the wind, plunging 10 stories and crashing through a stained-glass dome before landing on a mosaic “including quantities of costly Mexican onyx.” In Brooklyn, at Wyckoff and Myrtle Avenues, “the water in the street was up to a man’s waist,” and residents used ladders to get in and out of their houses. Most of the boats moored at the Williamsburg Yacht Club were “sunk, driven ashore or demolished.” The East River rose “until it swept over the sea wall in the Astoria district and submerged the Boulevard.” At Coney Island, 30-foot waves swept 200 yards inland, destroying nearly every man-made structure in its path and wrecking the elevated railroad.

“Hog Island largely disappeared that night,” Coch says. “As far as I know, it is the only incidence of the removal of an entire island by a hurricane.”

Hurricanes, Coch reminds, “operate on a geologic scale.”

—

Will New York City get hit by the Big One this season? It’s impossible to say. But we do know this: The risk of a major hurricane hitting the metropolitan region is significantly greater than it has been in a long time. Meteorologists have observed that Atlantic Ocean hurricanes tend to wax and wane over roughly 20-year cycles. Nineteen ninety-five marked the beginning of a period of above-normal hurricane activity. We are now in the middle of that cycle. The same climate conditions that made last year’s hurricane season so active are in place and even augmented this year. Low wind sheer and sea-surface pressure and a favorable African easterly jet stream all create ideal conditions for Atlantic hurricanes. El Nino, the unusually warm current that appears in the tropical Pacific off the coast of Ecuador every three to seven years, tends to dampen hurricane activity in the Atlantic. This year there is no El Nino.

Additionally, scientists say that man-made global warming is increasing the odds that tropical storms will dump on New York City with greater frequency and intensity. Tropical Atlantic sea-surface temperatures have steadily risen over the last decade. Hurricanes are essentially gigantic steam engines; they gain power from warm seas.

“With global warming there is more moisture in the atmosphere,” says Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “This moisture is the main fuel for hurricanes and tropical storms.” This year, tropical Atlantic sea-surface temperatures are the warmest they have ever been in recorded history, about two degrees Fahrenheit above normal. And while there is debate within the hurricane research community as to how much impact global warming ultimately has, there is no longer any question that global warming is contributing to more extreme weather events around the world.

Whatever the causes, forecasters are confident that 2005 will be a busy hurricane season, busier even than last year’s. Meteorologists are forecasting 15 named storms, eight of them hurricanes, four of them “intense” hurricanes. In an average year, about 10 storms get names, six become hurricanes and two become intense.

New York City’s hurricane season runs from August to October, peaking around September 10. To prepare for a storm, Lee suggests that New Yorkers call 311 or go online, find out what evacuation zone they’re in, and develop a plan. If a storm comes rolling in and the city tells you to evacuate, take heed. “People who decide to ride out a storm need to know that in the middle of it they can’t call 911 and say, ‘All right, come get me. I’m ready,’” Lee says. “We will not be able to come and get them. Once they’ve made the decision to stay, they’ve made that decision for the long haul. That’s a very serious decision.”

If the Big One hits this season, Lee may be taking his own advice. The first OEM “bunker” was located in the World Trade Center—in hindsight, a lousy location. A new OEM building is currently under construction on the bluffs of Brooklyn Heights. Until its completion, the city’s emergency managers are working in a converted warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront.

In the event of a direct hit by a category-3 hurricane, New York City’s Office of Emergency Management will find itself under 22.4 feet of storm surge.

Lee’s not too worried about it, though. The city has a duplicate Office of Emergency Management in an undisclosed location.

First, on Tuesday, the New York Times splashed Frank Gehry’s latest designs for Atlantic Yards across the front page. Ratner has long been criticized for the cheap, fortress-like architecture of his other Brooklyn projects. Gehry, the celebrity architect renowned for designing buildings that look like crumpled balls of tinfoil, was brought aboard to neutralize that critique and provide aesthetic cover. Yet, Gehry’s designs did what months of petitioning, protesting and public meetings couldn’t. They got sensible, well-heeled, politically connected Brooklynites pissed off, paying attention and preparing to fight. For neighborhood advocates who have been working diligently to get an apathetic public to pay attention to the travesty underway at Atlantic Yards, Gehry’s architectural models were a gift.

Then, on Wednesday, London won the 2012 Olympics bid. Suddenly, it’s no longer unpatriotic to suggest that a 19,000-seat arena at the traffic-choked intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic might be a bad idea. With the Olympics bid and Manhattan stadium debate finally out of the way, New Yorkers are finally examining Ratner’s Atlantic Yards proposal on its own merits. They’re seeing that the project has little to do with the genuine needs of the communities and city around it. Real estate industry insider Peter Slatin reports that the Atlantic Yards project is being driven not by the requirements of the district nor by a compelling urban vision, but rather by the high price, the $300 million, Ratner paid for the New Jersey Nets basketball franchise. According to Slatin, The project ballooned in size under pressure from Ratner’s co-investors on the Nets, who are increasingly concerned that their investment pay off.

The Ratner plan suffered a third blow on Wednesday when a rival real estate developer submitted a surprise bid for the railyards, just under the MTA’s deadline. The Extell Corporation’s bid adheres to most of the urban design recommendations put forward in the Unity Plan, a development proposal generated through community-based design workshops. Unlike the Ratner plan, Extell’s has no arena, it makes a genuine effort to knit together and fit in to the low-rise neighborhoods around it, and, most important, it requires no eminent domain. Extell isn’t asking the government to seize people’s homes and workplaces.
Granted, the odds of the MTA accepting the Extell bid are slim. You’d think the cash-strapped agency would have put real effort into marketing its valuable property. Yet, from the beginning, the MTA treated the bidding process as a mere formality. The Extell offer materialized only because neighborhood advocates took it upon themselves to send out the MTA’s requests for proposal to scores of developers. Regardless of how the MTA treats it, Extell’s bid is a huge win for the community. Extell legitimizes the Unity Plan by putting real money behind it, the competition keeps the Atlantic Yards story in the news, and that ensures light will shine on the sweetheart dealings, lack of democratic process and disregard for community input that have defined the project up to now.

But let’s get back to Gehry’s gift to the Atlantic Yards opposition, the architectural model and sketches he showed Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. The designs are so bad they’re almost funny. Gehry calls the 70-story skyscraper at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Miss Brooklyn, as in, We’ll sure miss Brooklyn if this crap gets built. The arena itself is barely visible beneath Gehry’s delirious pileup of forms. For Ratner and his political supporters, this is a problem. They’d much rather you focus on the return of professional sports to Brooklyn than pay attention to the 21-acre land grab and mountainous landscape of new skyscrapers. To help you do that, Gehry has wrapped an entire city block with a 10-story tall, glowing Nets billboard, complete with, what I believe is a massive Jason Kidd head looming over Flatbush Avenue. Easter Island’s got nothing on the New Brooklyn.

With skyscrapers jutting up at odd angles, Gehry’s design gives an overall impression of towers simply bursting out of the earth like giant crystal formations. Ouroussoff explains to us little people that the design reflects the energy and vitality of today’s Brooklyn. As usual, the master planners and architectural theorists forget that a city’s energy and vitality is generated on its streets and in its neighborhoods, not by a skyline fraught with visual tension. Gehry’s attempt to create an energetic urban metropolis from scratch ends up looking like the New York New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, a cartoon version of a real city. Our city.

The New York City soundscape is utterly defined by the automobile horn. Stop,
close your eyes and listen, even in an ostensibly quiet place like Central Park, and you will find
that the honking of tens of thousands of aggravated motorists is the city’s omnipresent soundtrack.
If man has casually introduced a more useless and destructive technology into the daily life of
the city, I don’t know it.

Like most bad ideas, the horn sprung from good intentions. In the mid-1800s,
as steam carriages became popular in England, public outcry resulted in the 1865 passage of the
“Red Flag Act.” The law specified that all motorized vehicles be preceded by a man on foot carrying
a flag during the day or a lantern at night. Clearly impractical, it was not long before motorists
could choose from a variety of signaling devices including bells, whistles and small hand-squeezed
bulb horns.

As is still the case today, the first New York drivers preferred horn
to brakes. A 1900 New York Tribune item tells the story of a nurse struck and killed by an automobile.
According to the account, the driver didn’t slow down or steer out of the way, but “considered his
responsibility fully discharged by ringing the gong.”

As cars grew in popularity, the futility of honking became increasingly
apparent. After the turn of the century, the bulb horn, popular in France, became the standard in
most American cities. First hailed as being more “novel and penetrating” than a bell, “any usefulness
that the horn had was quickly negated by the fact that people in cities were constantly tooting at
one another,” according to Dr. Eugene Garfield, in his essential 1983 essay, “The Tyranny of the
Horn.”

After 1910, motoring periodicals began calling for more effective
warning devices and manufacturers developed a new generation of ear-shattering noisemakers.
One of the more popular accessories of the teens and 20s was an electrically powered air horn called
the Klaxon, the name derived from the Greek word klaxo, meaning “to shriek.” The technological
forefather of modern honkers, the Klaxon was touted as “the only horn which would instantly move
cows and bullocks.”

Today’s horns are not designed with the crowded canyons of New York City
in mind. They are engineered to travel great distances on fast-moving highways and to penetrate
the increasingly soundproof cockpits of luxury vehicles. The horn is also considered a critical
component of the automotive brand experience. As American vehicles have grown bigger and more
intimidating, so too have their monosyllabic “voices.” Until the mid-1960s, many car horns were
tuned to the musical notes E-flat and C, a combination deemed pleasing to the ear. Most manufacturers
have today moved to discordant combinations like F-sharp and A-sharp. In New York City, the horn
has essentially become a sanctioned form of aggravated aural assault. The predictable results,
of course, are incidents like this:

I pulled my bike up alongside the driver’s- side window and hopped off.
I asked the limo driver who he was honking for. He shrugged and began rolling up his window. I pressed
down on the top edge of the glass. The power window’s motor made a clunking noise. I leaned in and,
at the top of my lungs bellowed, “Hoooonnnk! Honk honk honk!“

Enraged, the limo driver swatted at my face and yanked at his handle as
I continued to honk at him. With all my weight braced against the door, he couldn’t open it. Desperate
to throttle me, he hurled himself against the door until, finally, I let it go. He burst out headlong
but was surprisingly quick and wiry. As he came up at me, I got my hands on either side of his head, reared
back and smashed him in the middle of the face with my forehead.

The crack of bone reverberated so loudly in my head, I thought I broke
my nose. But I was fine. The limo driver collapsed ass-first in the street, hands cupped over his
face, staring up at me in shock. As blood burbled between his fingers his throat released a girlish,
Klaxon-like shriek. I dusted off and picked up my bike as a guy appeared pulling a small suitcase
on wheels.

“Your car is here,” I said.

In the neighborhood, there appear to be two clear reactions to Kozerawski’s
idea. If you’ve lived in Williamsburg for more than 25 years, then chances are you think the idea
is insane. The owner of an old bakery insists that most of his customers drive, and if cars weren’t
allowed on Bedford it would destroy his business. (Where these customers all park is a mystery.)
A hairdresser doesn’t like the idea because she dreams of one day owning a car, and when that day comes
she wants to be able to drive and park on Bedford. A fellow named George, living in the area for 52 years,
has been leaving vitriolic posts on Kozerawski’s online message board. He believes that, “If you
want car-free areas you’re living in the wrong city.” George wouldn’t say, however, where he thinks
one should go to live their car-free life. Long Island? New Jersey? Los Angeles?

The second reaction comes from the new generation of young Williamsburgers.
Between N. 4th and N. 9th, the stretch that Kozerawski wants to make car-free, this group appears
to be the majority. Their opinion is neatly summed up by a real estate agent sitting on a bench in front
of The Read Caf. “I’d love to see it happen,” she says. “But it’s never going to happen. Have
you ever been to a community board meeting?” Kozerawski is clearly a notch less pessimistic than
his peers. With a nearly imperceptible sigh he goes on to explain, yet again, the benefits and possibilities
of a pedestrianized Bedford.

Regardless of whether Community Board crustaceans and DOT traffic
movers take Car-Free Bedford seriously, his idea is clearly worth looking at. Car-free streets
can work well in New York City. The proof is Stone Street, one of those ancient, crooked alleys at
the very southern end of Manhattan. Built by the Dutch, Stone Street is said to have been the first
paved street in the New World. But by the early 1990s, it had become blighted. Stores were shuttered
and buildings empty, cars were parked all over the sidewalk, and petty drug dealing was the only
activity on the block.

In the mid 1990s, Lower Manhattan’s business improvement group the
Downtown Alliance got together with the city’s Landmarks Commission, hired consultants, and
began putting together a new master plan for Stone Street. Despite the protests of building owners,
the Alliance managed to get Stone Street designated a historic landmarks district. This enabled
the Landmarks Commission to apply for $800,000 in federal transportation dollars. The Alliance
chipped in another $150,000 and the city paid the rest.

Ultimately, the car-free public space they envisioned took five years,
$1.8 million and a ton of perseverance and political willpower to become reality. Stone Street
has been car-free since 2000; today, it is thriving.

“It’s a miracle. It’s beautiful really,” says Harry Poulakakis, the
owner of Ulysses and a few of the other restaurants on the block. Having owned restaurants on and
around Stone Street for 32 years, Poulakakis knows as well as anyone how beneficial the changes
have been. “The big thing is not to have cars. People feel they have nothing to worry about. They sit
outside. It makes them happy.”

As Kozerawski has by now discovered in Williamsburg, when you talk about
the idea of car-free streets in New York, entrenched interests jump up and scream that restricting
automobiles will create economic and transportation meltdowns. Needless to say, these catastrophes
haven’t materialized in Lower Manhattan. Stone Street has successfully “created a backdrop for
economic development,” says Suzanne O’Keefe, vice president of design for the Downtown Alliance.
“Owners of other buildings are now saying we want a Stone Street.” The $1.8 million investment in
a thoughtfully designed, car-free public space is paying big dividends. Williamsburg wants a
Stone Street, too.

On Monday, Feb. 9 at
3:30 p.m., Juan Estrada and Victor Flores, fifth-graders at P.S. 124 in Park
Slope, were crushed to death by a gravel-filled landscaping truck while walking
home from school. The boys were crossing 3rd Ave. at 9th St., a busy but familiar
intersection, less than a block from their homes. They were killed in the crosswalk
with the pedestrian signal indicating they had the right-of-way.

Like most
Brooklyn intersections, the pedestrian and traffic signals at 3rd and 9th light
up at exactly the same time. Pedestrians and vehicles begin moving simultaneously.
In this case, the truck began making a right turn just as Juan and Victor started
into the crosswalk. The driver, John Olson, says he never saw the boys in his
big truck’s blind spot. In fact, he didn’t even know he had crushed
them beneath his wheels until bystanders flagged him down. Olson received only
minor summonses, and the boys’ families are suing the city for $70 million.

We’ve
been trained in this country to call automobile killings "accidents."
But it’s hard to write this one off so easily. A simple traffic-calming
device called a "leading pedestrian interval," or LPI, almost certainly
would have prevented this tragedy. An LPI lights up the pedestrian signal about
three seconds before vehicular traffic gets the green. This gives pedestrians
a head start into the intersection and forces turning vehicles to be less aggressive
as they drive through the crosswalk. LPIs might have prevented the type of "right
turn conflict" that killed Juan and Victor. The downside of an LPI is that
a few less vehicles may be able to move through the intersection at each cycle
of the light.

About two
and a half years ago, an experimental LPI was installed at Atlantic Ave. and
Clinton St. in Cobble Hill as part of an initiative called the Downtown Brooklyn
Traffic Calming Project. The LPI has been a "smashing success" according
to Community Board 6 District Manager Craig Hammerman and many others. So, why
don’t we have an LPI at 3rd and 9th, and what does it take to get the New
York City Dept. of Transportation to install one?

DOT’s
public affairs office refused to make any of their "highly qualified engineers"
available to answer these questions. But one former DOT director of planning,
under condition of anonymity, explained to me how it works. There are no formal
"warrants" or requirements for installing LPIs in New York City. The
decision is made based on "engineering judgment." He said that when
traffic engineers analyze an intersection like 3rd and 9th, "they are primarily
looking to see that an LPI won’t degrade vehicular ‘level of service.’
DOT’s attitude is, ‘We will do pedestrian safety, but only when it
doesn’t come at the expense of the flow of traffic.’"

To the traffic
engineers, "it’s all about big maps and traffic counts." Their
"engineering judgment" is not likely to take into account the two
schools, major subway station, big grocery store, churches, small businesses
and working-class Mexican immigrant neighborhood within a few blocks’ walking
distance of 3rd and 9th. All the traffic engineers know is that 3rd Ave. and
9th St. are truck routes. Ninth St. exists in this world "for the purpose
of pumping morning rush hour traffic through to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel."
The avenue is a great place to put vehicles when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway
gets full.

"It’s
just the way the system works," the former DOT planner continued. "Guys
in Lexuses stuck in traffic jams are simply more important than Mexicans crossing
the street."

DOT says
it is "disingenuous" for anyone to claim that the agency’s traffic
engineers could have done anything to prevent Juan and Victor’s deaths.
Spokesmen say "budget constraints" have made it impossible to put
together the "extensive geometric engineering review and substantial capital"
that would be required to make 3rd and 9th safer.

But that’s
simply not true. DOT’s failure to implement traffic calming measures at
3rd and 9th has little to do with budget constraints or geometric gobbledygook.
The recommendation to install an LPI at this particular intersection has been
sitting on a shelf in the DOT Brooklyn Borough Commissioner’s office since,
at least, November 2001. That’s when Arup, an internationally respected
engineering firm, issued its first draft of the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming
Plan, and it doesn’t take two years to install an LPI.

This particular
traffic-calming device is so inexpensive and easy to set up, DOT doesn’t
even bother to put a dollar figure next to it in their budget estimates. All
the traffic engineers have to do is make a slight adjustment in the timing of
an intersection’s signals. Not only that, if the LPI causes problems, the
traffic engineers can simply change the signal back to the way it was. No concrete
gets poured. No work crews dig up the street.

The real
reason there is no LPI at the intersection where Juan and Victor died is because
the traffic engineers who control and run New York City’s Dept. of Transportation
fundamentally disagree with the entire concept of traffic calming. In the world
of the traffic engineers, taking away five seconds of green time from trucks
heading west to the Battery Tunnel is a serious risk. It’s a major sacrifice.

"Unfortunately,"
says DOT spokesman Keith Kalb, "Not all accidents can be prevented with
engineering."

Just
as the U.S. Dept. of Defense was once more-honestly called the Dept. of
War, the New York City Dept. of Transportation was formerly the Dept. of Traffic.
Though the name has changed since the days when the all-powerful public works
czar Robert Moses flattened vibrant neighborhoods and decimated mass transit
to make the city more convenient for motorists, DOT still reflects his cars-first
values. We may as well call DOT the "Dept. of Traffic"–as many
agency old-timers do–because traffic is what they continue to make. It’s
their product. It’s what they are all about.

The way
that DOT operates is scandalous. But the scandal is not so much about incompetence
or corruption. The DOT is controlled and run by an insular and widely discredited
group of professionals called "traffic engineers." The more effectively
the traffic engineers do what they perceive to be their job, the more choked
and immobilized New York City’s streets become.

The real
crime at DOT isn’t so much that the agency is doing a bad job, but that
it’s doing the wrong job.

Former DOT
Traffic Commissioner and Chief Engineer Sam Schwartz is, himself, a traffic
engineer. Best known by his nickname, Gridlock Sam, Schwartz started his career
behind the wheel of a New York City taxi and, perhaps, because of that, tends
to have a more holistic view of transportation than your typical engineer.

"Traffic
engineers have failed," Schwartz says. "If you compare the accomplishments
of our profession [in this country] over the last 50 years to the medical profession,
our performance is equivalent to millions of people still dying of polio, influenza
and other minor bacterial diseases that have been cured."

While London,
Paris and municipalities all across Northern Europe are, with great success,
developing ways to make their dense central districts less convenient, accessible
and free to automobiles, American traffic engineers are still focused on figuring
out how to shove more motor vehicles through our nation’s roadways. The
traffic engineers’ solution for congestion is to add a lane or build a
new road, which in Schwartz’s words is like "telling an obese person
that the way to get healthy is to buy a bigger pair of pants and a longer belt."

For Schwartz,
the fact that "the interior of our cars have become like our living rooms
and offices"–with DVD players, email access, cup holders and beverages
and snacks designed specifically to fit in those cup holders–indicates
his brethren’s failure. "People know they’ll be spending so much
time stuck in traffic they’re equipped to live in their cars."

Whether
they know it or not, DOT’s traffic engineers are deeply ideological. Their
-ism is motorism; they believe in the primacy of the automobile. One former
DOT employee says the agency’s prime directive is "to move the most
traffic possible. They always try to maximize the street’s capacity and
increase the flow of traffic. The traffic- engineering profession believes that
streets are for moving the most amount of vehicular traffic possible. Period."

Although
the majority of New Yorkers does not own automobiles, the majority of the city’s
public space–the streets–has been annexed for the primary use of motor
vehicles. Considering that few things are as valuable in New York City as space,
this giveaway may amount to the single biggest government entitlement program
we have. As the agency that controls and maintains the city’s streets,
DOT runs this program.

The fact
that DOT is oriented around moving traffic and maxing out roadway capacity is
not a big secret to anyone except, perhaps, the agency’s public affairs
office. Spokesman Keith Kalb insists the department’s "primary focus
is pedestrian safety." Yet, Kalb’s boss, Commissioner Iris Weinshall
is often heard to say that her job is "to keep the traffic moving."

It may be
that Kalb and Weinshall haven’t read their agency’s mission statement
lately. In fact, the job of DOT is "to provide for the safe, efficient
and environmentally responsible movement of people and goods in the City of
New York." Unless we as a society have decided that tinted-window Cadillac
Escalades with pumping sound systems are the safest, most efficient and environmentally
responsible way to move people and goods through the city, DOT simply isn’t
fulfilling its mission.

At first
glance, the commissioner’s goal to "keep the traffic moving"
sounds like a good thing (or, at least an innocuous thing). Urban planners around
the world, however, have learned otherwise. In fact, the ultimate result of
traffic engineers’ quest for maximum capacity is maximum congestion.

John Kaehny,
executive director of Transportation Alternatives, explains: "If you build
it, they will come. If you increase the supply of road space, motor vehicles
will fill it up. If you reduce the supply, traffic will diminish." Transport
for London, the British version of the DOT, studied this phenomenon in the late
90s. They looked at about 50 cases where big roads were suddenly taken out of
service by natural disasters and other events–the collapses of San Francisco’s
Embarcadero Freeway in 1989 and New York City’s West Side Highway in 1973.
In virtually every case, traffic engineers predicted that the reduction in road
capacity would create total chaos. They assumed that if 50,000 vehicles per
day were using the road that had been taken offline, then almost every one of
those vehicles would now travel over surface streets.

This doesn’t
happen. The British study found that in every case a significant amount of vehicular
traffic simply "disappeared." When it wasn’t convenient to drive
anymore, commuters took a different mode of transit, traveled at a different
time of day or made fewer, more efficient trips. They concluded that if you
tighten roadway capacity and make a city less accessible to the automobile–particularly
a city that offers good transit options–there will be less traffic congestion,
higher quality of life and significant economic benefits.

In February
2003, London’s mayor Ken Livingstone began charging motorists 5 ($7.50)
every time they drove through an eight-square-mile section of Central London.
The tolling is automated, so motorists don’t have to slow down or stop
at toll booths to pay, and the enforcement is carried out by traffic cameras.
Violators are mailed 120 ($180) fines. The initiative is projected to raise
$200 million a year, all of which will be used to improve London’s mass
transit, pedestrian and cycling facilities.

According
to the most recent analysis, congestion pricing has been a major success. Traffic
is down by 30 percent, average trip speeds are at their highest since the 1960s
and travel times are more reliable. London is now considering an expansion of
the congestion-pricing zone.

Meanwhile,
the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, has promised to "fight, with all
the means at my disposal, against the harmful, ever-increasing and unacceptable
hegemony of the automobile." After establishing a number of measures to
improve public transportation, in the summer of 2001, Delanoe began closing
two and a half miles of the Pompidou Expressway. He then turned Paris’
busiest artery into a public beach and park, complete with sand, grass, palm
trees and vendors. On opening day, the usual 200,000 motor vehicles were replaced
by 600,000 revelers.

Here in
New York City, when Mayor Bloomberg floated the idea of congestion pricing for
the East River bridges in his 2003 preliminary budget, the plan was shouted
down by Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and a cadre of outer-borough
councilmembers. Even Manhattan councilmembers whose constituents would most
clearly benefit from congestion pricing remained mostly silent.

Take
a walk through Downtown Brooklyn at about 10 on a weekday morning.
In the likely event that the BQE is choked with traffic, many motorists will
have decided to try their luck on the neighborhood streets. On the narrow sidewalks
of Court St., pedestrians are jostled off the curb as buses and double-parked
trucks turn the air brown with diesel. It’s not difficult to imagine Court
St. a vibrant pedestrian mall–except for the fact that DOT traffic engineers
believe its purpose in this world is to inject motor vehicles into southern
Brooklyn as rapidly as possible.

One block
over, Clinton St. is occupied by an armored column of yellow cabs and SUVs horn-blasting
their way to the Brooklyn Bridge. One can imagine this tree-lined street of
classic brownstones peaceful and pleasant, but traffic engineers see Clinton
St. as an on-ramp to the East River bridges and BQE. It is also their personal
parking lot. On weekdays, street parking down here is confiscated by government
employees with bogus, photocopied parking permits on their dashboards.

Meanwhile,
down by the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, traffic may be so light that, as Schwartz
says, "you can roll a bowling ball to Manhattan." Because the tunnel
is tolled, motorists avoid it in favor of downtown’s Brooklyn’s free
bridges.

Ever since
Robert Moses began plowing the BQE through Brooklyn’s working-class immigrant
neighborhoods in 1945, the area’s traffic problems have steadily worsened.
Things reached a boiling point in 1986 when, as a gift to his Republican constituents
on Staten Island, Senator Alfonse D’Amato helped get rid of the eastbound
tolls on the Verrazano Bridge.

"This
was the moment when people really started to feel like Brooklyn was being unfairly
overrun," recalls local activist and architect Jane McGroarty.

One-way
tolls on the Verrazano made political sense, but from an urban-planning perspective
they’re a disaster. Rather than driving into Manhattan via the New Jersey
Turnpike, Schwartz points out that the current system "encourages truckers
to barrel down the rickety BQE and downtown Brooklyn’s neighborhood streets,
bounce across the creaky Manhattan Bridge, thunder over choked Canal St., and
leave the city via the Holland Tunnel" which is also free going westbound.
Using this circuitous route, New Jersey and Staten Island truckers and commuters
can save as much as $40 a day in tolls.

In 1997,
the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Brooklyn got fed up enough to take to
the streets. No wild-eyed anarchists, these: In a series of early morning protests,
doctors, lawyers and stroller-pushing mothers put their bodies in front of rush
hour traffic to demand that the city do something about the vehicular chaos.
In the midst of a reelection campaign, Mayor Giuliani was compelled to respond.
The protests began what would become known as the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic
Calming Project (DBTC).

Traffic
calming is said to have started in the Dutch city of Delft in the late 1960s
when a band of residents, sick of vehicles cutting through their neighborhood,
grabbed shovels and pick-axes and reconfigured their street into a serpentine
pattern that forced motorists to drive more slowly. Today, it’s an engineering
specialty.

But the
DOT’s drive to maximize capacity conflicts with the concept of traffic
calming. Over the course of the DBTC’s five-year study, DOT engineers steadily
dragged their feet and undermined the community’s wishes and Arup’s
recommendations. For example, on Hicks St., known to locals as the "fifth
lane of the BQE," when Arup said raised crosswalks had to be four inches
tall to be effective, DOT insisted they only be two inches. When, as expected,
the shorter raised crosswalks proved worse than useless, DOT deemed them a failure
and eliminated them from further consideration.

In June
2003, the stakeholders involved in the DBTC gathered at Brooklyn Borough Hall
for the presentation of Arup’s final recommendations. After the consultant’s
lengthy presentation, DOT Deputy Commissioner for Traffic Operations Mike Primeggia
announced that the agency would not implement any of the recommendations from
the Arup’s 130-page report until 2009–at the earliest.

Sandy Balboza,
president of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association recalls: "Primeggia
told us that before they’d do anything, DOT needed to re-study every one
of the plan’s suggestions. Well, we just spent five years and $1.2 million
studying it." To throw a bone to the community, DOT promised to fast-track
a set of 30 traffic-signal timing, bike-lane and parking improvements.

DOT was
too "timid and conservative" says Community Board 6’s Hammerman.
"The whole point of hiring a consultant was to have them think outside
the box. But DOT grabbed the Traffic Calming Plan and put it right back in."

Kaehny believes
that "DOT never wanted to be at the table. They were forced to do this
by city hall. Once Giuliani was gone, it was revenge of the traffic engineers."

For its
part, DOT says: "DBTC is ongoing. We’re evaluating the suggestions
of the consultants. We don’t know when the final report will be issued."
If, as DOT claims, pedestrian safety is its "primary focus," the Downtown
Brooklyn Traffic Calming Project was a perfect opportunity to prove it.

"They
could have hit it out of the park," Kaehny says. "They didn’t
even swing at it. That’s the power of DOT."

To be fair,
DOT does some things right, and New York City’s increasingly broken and
dysfunctional car-centered transportation system is not entirely the fault of
traffic engineers. The agency is managing near record-levels of vehicular traffic
with less and less resources. After a difficult and demoralizing eight-year
period during which DOT weathered six different commissioners, massive cuts
in budget and operations and a concerted effort to abolish the agency altogether,
there has returned to the organization a measure of stability and pride.

Steve Weber,
Deputy Commissioner for DOT’s Lower Manhattan office, credits Mayor Bloomberg
and Commissioner Weinshall for "unleashing the expertise of the people
who were already in the agency and attracting creative and innovative new people."
He says his bosses urge the staff to "develop effective solutions to problems
that have seemed unsolvable for decades."

He points
to midtown Manhattan’s Thru Streets program as an example of this new spirit.
By eliminating turns on certain streets, the administration says Thru Streets
has improved pedestrian safety and increased average cross-town automobile speeds
from 4.0 mph to 6.1 mph. And though it took decades of community pressure and
hundreds of casualties to get DOT to act, the agency has recently made big improvements
to pedestrian death-traps like Herald Square, Queens Blvd. and the Grand Concourse.

A former
DOT engineer points out that the steady decline in pedestrian fatalities and
injuries over the last decade may just as well be attributed to the surge in
traffic congestion during the same period. "Pedestrian fatalities have
a lot to do with vehicular speed, and vehicular speed in much of Manhattan is
negligible."

Though
DOT has a lot of power to fix what’s broken about New York City transportation,
the agency works within a much larger context of dysfunction, a culture that
loves its cars and a city that has little political will to tackle major transportation
issues. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the city has no real control over
its subways, buses and tolled bridges and tunnels. These are all run by the
Metropolitan Transit Authority, which is controlled by the state and the governor.
Over the last decade, Republican legislators have increasingly steered MTA resources
away from the city and toward the suburbs.

As Kaehny
says, "the MTA dwarfs DOT in budget, planning resources and political [power].
The fact that our city’s transit agency is completely separate from the
agency that owns and controls the city’s streets is a serious problem."

Then there’s
the outer boroughs’ car culture, a powerful force despite New York City’s
46-percent car ownership–the lowest percentage in the nation. At Brooklyn
community meetings, it’s not uncommon to hear people complain in one breath
about all the traffic in their neighborhood and then demand more parking space
for their own cars.

"They
don’t want other people to drive through their neighborhood," says
Cobble Hill president Roy Sloane, a grizzled veteran of neighborhood transportation
battles. "Yet they want to be able to drive around freely and have a parking
space when they get there."

Much of
New York’s transportation problem is cultural. "This is a city of
immigrants," John Kaehny says. "The car is seen as a fundamental totem
of making it in the middle class. In Queens, for example, if you tried to charge
more for parking on Steinway St. in Astoria you’d be lynched."

Come election
time, one of former City Council Speaker Peter Vallone’s favorite things
to do was roll back parking fees. "All that got the people of Queens was
a lot of double parking and choked traffic." It also helped Vallone get
reelected each year.

Perhaps
the biggest problem of all, however, is the lack of political will to deal with
the city’s transportation issues. There is no transportation vision or
leadership coming from City Hall right now.

"Transportation,"
says Kaehny, "simply isn’t considered a top tier political issue.
In New York City it’s all about crime, jobs, schools and the budget. Transportation
does not make the cut as a mayoral priority."

Sloane sees
DOT traffic engineers as innocent implementers. If traffic engineers are acting
as the city’s de facto urban planners, it’s only because they are
filling a void left by the politicians. "What’s required is a political
commitment to solve these problems. The political decision has to be: We are
not looking for maximum vehicular capacity and traffic flow. We are looking
for maximum quality of life."

McGroarty
notes that "politicians simply don’t want to attack traffic. It’s
a no-win situation for elected officials. No matter what they do, they’re
going to make somebody unhappy. When you try to reduce someone’s ability
to drive their car, they just go ballistic."

When Mayor
Bloomberg briefly brought up the idea of tolling the East River Bridges in 2002,
he spoke of it only as a revenue-raising measure. Many urban planners and transportation
experts see congestion pricing as the best, easiest and most sensible way for
New York City to fix its broken transportation system. As one former DOT planner
says, the main reason DOT is dysfunctional is simple economics.

"If
the cost of something is zero," he explains, "there’s always
going to be lots of demand. If ConEd gave electricity away for free then they’d
always be installing new wires and infrastructure. Driving is essentially free."
DOT can’t keep up with the needs of the city’s pedestrians, cyclists
and transit users because they have to maintain the infrastructure for this
huge, expensive, entitlement–the ability for New Yorkers to drive a car
wherever and whenever they want.

Schwartz
wants the mayor and governor to completely revamp the tolling systems in and
around New York City and implement congestion pricing for spots with traffic
congestion and good mass transit service. Tolling motorists over the Cross Bay,
Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges doesn’t make a lot of sense, he notes,
but those "diving right into the heart of Midtown Manhattan at rush hour"
should pay.

"If
you want to drive by and show your kids the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree
from the window of your SUV, I’ll charge you $25 for the pleasure of doing
that. Want to drive through Central or Prospect Parks? I’ll charge you
for it."

The technology
exists to do his kind of tolling. Schwartz says that London-style congestion
pricing could raise close to a billion dollars and significantly improve the
city’s transit systems and overall quality of life.

"If the mayor pulled
off the creation of a Dept. of Education," Schwartz says, "he can
accomplish this.