Metro Focus interviews the CEO of the East River Ferry:
Ridership last week saw 1,500 riders per day. You use the word drop only in comparison to a robust level of ridership over the summer. It’s interesting how people choose to characterize the numbers. We are very impressed with how commuter ridership has grown through the winter.
Ridership is certainly down from the summer (duh), but it would be interesting to know how it compares with projections before the winter. Anecdotally, there are a lot more people riding the East River Ferry in the winter than ever rode the Water Taxi (which had fewer stops and much more limited schedule). But the East River Ferry is also caught in a bit of a catch-22 – they have reduced the number of boats in the winter months, so service is only hourly during the day, and half-hourly during parts of the morning and evening rush. That makes it much harder to just “jump on the ferry” to get somewhere.
As to the perks on the horizon – beer. You heard it here first:
The Brooklyn Paper reports that the city’s proposed bike share program omits “bike kiosks east of Bushwick Avenue and McGuinness Boulevard, where an estimated 30,000 of transit-starved residents live”. Despite the typically breathless Brooklyn Paper headline, this is not news. In fact, the plan all along (as shown in the map at right) has been to limit the pilot program to lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn and parts of North Brooklyn.
October 2011 map of bike-sharing phase in
Source: The Atlantic Cities
So yes, transit-starved residents of East Williamsburg and the eastern reaches of Greenpoint will not have access to bike sharing on their block until phase 2 of the program. Nor will residents of the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, the Bronx, Queens, Red Hook, Sunset Park, Crown Heights, Flatbush, the South Slope, Bushwick, East New York and one or two other neighborhoods.
It’s not clear if the phasing is driven by the vendor (Alta) or the city, but it does seem to be a factor of the initial number of bikes in the program – 10,000 bikes – and a 2009 City Planning study that determined the optimal number of bike slots per station – 24. With 10,000 bikes, there is only capacity for 600 stations.
The constant weekend shutdowns needed to upgrade subway signals on the L line is taking its toll on the blossoming Williamsburg bar scene — with hipster hangouts reporting huge drops in profits.
Weekend closures are a problem if you have a business located near one of the City’s busiest stations on weekends.
Lepoldo Hernandez, 57, was struck and killed by two vans at the intersection of Borinquen and Keap yesterday morning. This is a particularly pedestrian-unfriendly intersection, in the pre-dawn hours, with a (allegedly) speeding van. DNA Info (which is new to the neighborhood beat) includes a set of heart-wrenching on-the-scene photos.
The East River Ferry giveth, and the East River Ferry (maybe) taketh away.
NY Waterway has released an app that lets you but tickets on the iPhone/iPad (no word on apps for Android or other mobile devices). The app free, though obviously the tickets aren’t. In addition to buying tickets and checking schedules, the app will let you uptown commuters check the whereabouts of the next shuttle bus too. All very nice stuff.
On the flip side, starting on Monday the ferry might be adding a $2 surcharge for passengers who buy tickets on the boat. Tickets bought through the ticket kiosks will still be $4 (or $140 for a monthly pass). But, if you are like me and are running late for the boat with no ticket in hand, you might get hit with a surcharge (luckily, there’s an app for that!).
This, at least, is what the attendants on the boat were telling customers. However, Metro is reporting that the surcharge is not happening, and the PR rep for the East River Ferry told Metro that “there are no changes to the fare structure at this time”.
UPDATE: Via Twitter, East River Ferry confirms that there is no surcharge. And, via comments, Withers confirms the existence (and greatness) of an Android app too. Last, I tried out the ticket purchase on the iPhone tonight, and it too is great.
The City is promising to install bike lanes on the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge – upsetting some but cheering others:
“Greenpoint Avenue is not fun to ride on,” said Ryan Kuonen, a community organizer at north Brooklyn’s Neighbors Allied for Good Growth and an avid cyclist [and also a Community Board member]. “It really needs a redesign.”
Avid business owners along Greenpoint Avenue (who stand lose parking) are opposed to the project. Unnamed avid motorists are also opposed to the project. No word on how avid pedestrians view it.
Moses Gates took WNYC on a tour of some “ghost” subways sites in the city’s transit system.
The piece includes this cool interactive map of the system’s once-planned routes and abandoned stations. Most of the abandoned stations were taken out of service over time – the exception is the South 4th Street station, which was never completed. A few clicks around the interactive map show how different the Southside might have been if the Depression hadn’t stopped this major expansion (the 6th Avenue (F) and 8th Avenue (C?) lines both would have come out to Williamsburg, where they would have hooked up with Crosstown (G) service).
NY Magazine’s annual list of reasons to love NY include two of my favorite things about Williamsburg –
Katherine Yun, 25 years old, was killed by a city sanitation truck while crossing Broadway at Driggs last night.
