Op-Ed Letters to The Editor
As Transportation Alternatives protested outside his Village home
two weeks ago, Arthur Schwartz offered pastries. The crowd demanded
he “drop the lawsuit!” against the 14th St. busway pilot program.
An absurd attack
To The Editor:
Re “A power broker’s legacy;
Schwartz pulls a Moses” (op-ed, by
Quinn Raymond, Aug. 22):
I fi nd it hard to fathom how, as a lawyer
for the Transport Workers Union
for almost 20 years, someone can call
me an opponent of mass transit.
I am not fi ghting to keep cars on
14th St. I am fi ghting to keep them off
residential side streets, the very streets
Jane Jacobs helped preserve. Jane, like
me, would say, “Get rid of the cars,
don’t just shift them around.”
The statistics from the busway’s fi rst
month, with cars on 14th St., show bus
speed increasing by 25 percent during
rush hour, which was the target! Local
people are far more astute than distant
bureaucrats in City Hall.
By the way, I not only fought for
the M8 (Eighth St. crosstown), I was
in court seeking to stop the closure
of that line and a dozen others back
in 2010, trying to save the jobs of the
largely black and Hispanic bus drivers
and keep them from being laid off. I
didn’t win, but that same lawsuit succeeded
in stopping the closure of more
than 100 token booths and the laying
off of 500 station agents.
I am proud of my legacy.
Arthur Schwartz
End car favoritism
To The Editor:
Re “A power broker’s legacy;
Schwartz pulls a Moses” (op-ed, by
Quinn Raymond, Aug. 22):
Seventy-seven percent of Manhattan
households are car-free, and households
that own cars have a median
income nearly double those who don’t,
according to 2015 U.S. Census data.
It’s insane how much of our public
streets are given over to private car users
.T
PHOTO BY ALEJANDRA O’CONNELL-DOMENECH
he M14 average speed is 4.3 mph,
slowest in the city. Here in Brooklyn,
Fulton St. has been bus-only for years
and the buses move much faster.
Most New Yorkers suffer slower transit,
increased pollution and increased
risk of injury every day because of the
dominance of infrastructure for cars.
Tony Melone
Put back M14 stops
To The Editor:
Re “Wheely mad: TransAlt rages at
attorney” (news article, Aug. 15):
I have been a volunteer for Visiting
Neighbors, escorting many frail senior
citizens who live at home to doctors
and dentists appointments, physical
therapy and other services. These seniors
depend on readily available bus
service, not routes where they must
walk several blocks to reach a stop.
Buses are the only public transportation
available to Lower East Siders living
on Avenues A, B or D or south.
As a resident of E. 10th St. between
Second and Third Aves., I am a regular
rider on the M14 and am well aware of
the traffi c delays. But priority of such
service should be given to elderly and
disabled residents, most of whom are
not wealthy and rely on this bus. I hope
the M.T.A. reconsiders its decision to
remove bus stops on these routes.
Katharine Wolpe
E-mail letters, not longer than 250
words in length, to news@thevillager.
com or fax to 212-229-2790 or mail
to The Villager, Letters to the Editor,
1 MetroTech North, 10th fl oor, Brooklyn,
NY 11201. Please include phone
number for confi rmation purposes.
The Villager reserves the right to edit
letters for space, grammar, clarity and
libel. Anonymous letters will not be
published.
In 14th St. suit, we’re
continuing Jane’s fi ght
BY ARTHUR SCHWARTZ
The fi ght over the 14th St. busway
is a fi ght of our community.
A community of people who
live here, including residents of Fulton
Houses (a New York City Housing
Authority development), people who
have disabilities and who are elderly,
and who are bus users.
Our communities, Greenwich Village
and Chelsea, are the great places
they are because, 60 years ago, Jane
Jacobs led a fi ght against another Department
of Transportation commissioner,
Robert Moses, who wanted to
run a highway down Fifth Ave. Jane
believed in community-based planning.
In her classic book about city planning,
“The Death and Life of Great
American Cities,” she says: “We shall
have something solid to chew on if we
think of city neighborhoods as mundane
organs of self-government.”
Then she addressed the diffi culty in
standing up to City Hall: “It is not easy
for uncredentialed people to stand up
to the credentialed, even when the socalled
expertise is grounded in ignorance
and folly.”
She continues: “Sometimes the city
is not the potential helper, but the
antagonist of a street, and again, unless
the street contains extraordinarily
infl uential citizens, it is usually helpless
alone… We needed power to back
up our pipsqueak protest. The power
came from our district — Greenwich
Village. Without the possibility of
such support, most city streets hardly
try to fi ght back.”
This fi ght today is about our millennial
version of Robert Moses, a hopeless
incompetent named Polly Trottenberg,
who has allowed 100,000
for-hire vehicles to clog our streets.
We stand here today, six weeks after
Polly’s aborted launch date, and 14th
St. seems to be moving quite rapidly,
and side streets, from 12th to 20th,
have bad traffi c, but are not overrun
with cars, as Polly would have it.
We are here because of an extraordinary
coalition of local residents,
working through democratic, streetlevel
organizations called block associations,
whose activists are generally
longtime residents, who generally live
in rent-regulated apartments, or who
bought a co-op in the 1970s when
a two-bedroom cost $25,000. The
block associations have turned out
hundreds of residents to meeting after
meeting, town hall after town hall,
where Commissioner Trottenberg has
sat rolling her eyes. And it is to protect
these residents’ communities that the
courts have recognized our use of the
environmental laws as appropriate.
This fi ght is no longer about how
to make buses faster. D.O.T. and the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority
have made numerous changes to
14th St., which have eliminated most,
if not all, bottlenecks that slowed
down traffi c and buses. There are no
left turns allowed. There is no turn
onto 14th St. from Fourth Ave. There
are no turns allowed onto Broadway.
University Place has been reversed.
Union Square West has been closed to
traffi c. Bus lanes have been painted.
Select Bus Service has been instituted,
allowing off-bus ticketing.
The fi ght now is about an unneeded
car ban that would have thrown 500
extra cars an hour (D.O.T.’s number),
and untold numbers of vans and trucks
down residential streets, not designed
to be traffi c thoroughfares. These cars
would ruin the residential character
of our historic districts. They would
spew exhaust, make noise, send vibrations
through historic structures and
fragile streets, and make crossing, for
the elderly and people with children,
far more dangerous.
Trottenberg and the mayor now
want this to happen simply because
they want to show that they can impose
their will on communities.
In their quest for speed, the M.T.A.
and New York City Transit, in their
usual manner, have once again forgotten
the needs of people with disabilities
and the elderly. They cut out
12 bus stops when they launched SBS
service. And they have ripped down
most bus shelters along the route.
Those 12 stops were a critical part of
the transportation activities of people
with disabilities, and older people who
use the bus. Their needs are supposed
to be accommodated under the city’s
Human Rights Law.
Accommodation can be done easily,
as is done on all other SBS lines, by
overlaying SBS service on top of local
service. The elderly and the disabled
are the real users of the M14 bus —
not some zealots who live in other
communities, and who claim to speak
for local bus users.
Schwartz is Democratic district
leader for Greenwich Village, president
of Advocates for Justice, and the
attorney on the 14th St. lawsuits on
the busway and removed bus stops.
Schneps Media TVG August 29, 2019 13
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