Patrick McGeehan

Hoboken was the first city in New Jersey to allow riders to rent motorized, two-wheeled scooters, joining a long list of cities that have embraced them in the past few years, including San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Sydney and Barcelona, Spain.

The scooters have been a big hit in many places because they offer an inexpensive alternative on congested streets and can be picked up and dropped off on almost any block.

But they have also drawn increasing criticism about the recklessness of some riders. And there have been complaints that the scooters are carelessly tossed aside on sidewalks, parks, plazas and even lawns.

In Hoboken, the problem has gotten so bad that the city has had to hire two officers whose job is to police unruly riders. Some riders have even been caught scootering while drunk.

“The rollout in some cities has been rocky,” said Steven Pedigo, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. “We’ve had safety issues. We’ve had too many scooters in some cities.”

But if managed well, he added, scooter-sharing programs can reduce car traffic and help solve the “mobility crisis” that many cities are facing.

In Hoboken, the scooters are so coveted that commuters line up to claim them on weekday evenings. Residents returning from work in Manhattan simply point their smartphones at a scooter to unlock it, hop on and slip into street traffic at speeds of up to 18 mph. Each ride costs $1 plus 15 cents a minute.

But not all of the riders obey the rules. The scooters are intended to be parked out of the way of pedestrians and other traffic, but can be left practically anywhere. Some users break the rules by riding on sidewalks or after patronizing the bars and clubs that make Hoboken a hot spot for nighttime revelers.

On a recent weekend, the Hoboken police charged a 34-year-old woman from Jersey City with scootering while intoxicated. A few days before that, they arrested a 26-year-old scooter rider after she collided with a car and fell to the ground. A breath test showed that her blood-alcohol content was twice the legal limit, police said.

That was the third time the Hoboken Police Department had arrested someone for riding a scooter while drunk, Chief Kenneth F. Ferrante said, adding that offenders “face the same penalties as if they were operating a car.”

To take some of the burden off police, Hoboken hired two “micromobility code enforcement officers” who can ticket scooter riders for failing to obey traffic laws, said Ryan Sharp, the city’s director of transportation and parking.

The money to pay the officers will come from a revenue-sharing deal the city struck this summer with Lime, the company operating the scooter system.

Hoboken authorized the scooters as a six-month pilot program. The city has hired a consultant to assess the program, which ends in late November.

“Over the next four weeks or so, we’ll be figuring out how we want to proceed,” Sharp said. “All options are on the table.”

Hoboken is an ideal candidate for a scooter program, Sharp said, because 60% of its residents commute to work, mostly by train or ferry from Hoboken Terminal. Practically all of them live within one and a half miles of the terminal.

But Janna Chernetz, the deputy director of Tri-State Transportation Campaign, says many cities are suitable for scooters if their residents and elected officials see them as a legitimate form of transportation, not just vehicles for joy rides. “It’s a cultural mind-set change that you need to share the road,” Chernetz said.

Lime, which has scooters in cities around the world, is the exclusive provider in Hoboken. The pilot program started with a second provider, Ojo, but the city dropped it in September after a 13-year-old boy crashed one of the company’s scooters into a woman who was pushing her 3-month-old son in a stroller on a sidewalk.

The woman, Kate Cohen, testified at a City Council meeting that neither she nor her baby was seriously injured. “I am so lucky that this wasn’t more serious, but I am haunted by the potential risk that remains,” she said.

Cohen did not call for a ban on the scooters, but said the city needed to do more to enforce the rules, including a prohibition against riders under the age of 18.

At that meeting, the council voted to ban the scooters from parks and the Hudson River waterfront, limiting their use to roadways and bike lanes.

In some cities, the reaction to scooters has been more drastic. In June, Nashville’s mayor abruptly ended a pilot program that involved Lime and several other scooter providers, including the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft, after a rider who had been drinking was killed in a collision with a car.

In an August letter to the Metropolitan Council, the legislative body for the consolidated city-county government in Nashville, Mayor David Briley, a Democrat, wrote that the safety of residents, workers and visitors “remains at risk with more than 2,000 scooters still zipping through our streets and littered across our sidewalks.” But the council voted against banning scooters altogether, deciding instead to reduce each company’s fleet by half.

In New York, lawmakers in Albany passed a bill this year that would legalize electric-powered bikes and scooters, with one notable exception. The bill singled out Manhattan as the only place in the state where scooters would not be legal. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has not yet signed it into law, so New York City has not yet authorized their use in any of its other four boroughs.

“New York City is one of the places that, without the prohibition, the companies would have launched in long ago,” said Juan Matute, the deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “It has density, the ability to pay, a preponderance of short trips. And people are looking for an alternative to the subway.”

In the meantime, New Yorkers who want to try a rental scooter would have to cross the Hudson to Hoboken, Asbury Park or one of a few other places in New Jersey where they are available.

Despite the accidents and arrests in Hoboken, the scooters have been firmly embraced. On a recent weeknight, commuters leaving the PATH train station at the south end of the city waited impatiently as two young men unloaded 73 Lime scooters from a packed van. Within minutes, all but a few were gone.

Phil Jones, a senior director for government relations at Lime, said more than 30,000 users had taken a total of more than 500,000 rides on the company’s scooters in Hoboken in five months. Lime started out with 250 scooters there in May and now has more than 300 in Hoboken, a compact city with about 50,000 residents.

Jones said Lime had canceled the accounts of more than 500 people for violations of its rules, such as allowing children to ride or carrying passengers. Others have been warned or fined for lesser offenses, he said.

“We try to give everyone a chance to correct their behavior,” he said.

One regular rider, David Polinchock, said he was annoyed when he saw others riding scooters on the sidewalks.

“What Hoboken did really, really well for us is they put in the bike lanes first,” Polinchock said. “I get frustrated when I see people zipping down the sidewalk next to the bike lane.”

A former Brooklyn resident who used to bike to work in Manhattan, Polinchock said riding scooters in Hoboken was low-risk by comparison. “I got doored, I got cut off, there were potholes galore,” he said, rattling off the hazards of biking on the streets of New York.

Now living in Bloomfield, New Jersey, he rides the scooters between Hoboken Terminal and his office on the border of Jersey City, an inexpensive way to shorten his daily commute.

But, he added, not every city can handle them.

Polinchock described the harrowing scooter rides he took this summer while he was in downtown Los Angeles for a conference, and said he couldn’t imagine the vehicles ever making sense in Manhattan.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said of the notion.

This article originally appeared in

Riding While Drunk and Other Dangers of the Electric Scooter Craze

A new state law may soon bring electric scooters to the streets of New York City. But a mile away in New Jersey, Hoboken already offers a test case of the promises and the perils of the electric vehicles, which have taken hold across the world.

Their train, New Jersey Coast Line 2606, which is supposed to depart at 7:06 a.m., had been canceled. Again.

This time — the 18th cancellation of the year — the official explanation was “equipment availability resulting from a mechanical issue.” But these aggrieved riders in Middletown did not seem to care. They had heard all the excuses the railroad had to offer. All that really mattered was that they were not getting to work on time. Again.

This is the plight of the hundreds of people who depend on what just may be the worst commuter train in America. The railroad they ride, New Jersey Transit, has been plagued for the last two years by a rash of cancellations.

While a few other trains New Jersey Transit operates were canceled more often during the first six months of the year, they were either evening trains or morning trains on busier lines. Those riders had better alternatives.

The regulars on the 2606 had no such luck.

The next train making the same trip would reach Hoboken Terminal almost an hour later, an eternity in the grinding, daily race to work. By then, it would be 9:17 a.m., at best, and all hope of making the morning meeting or being ready when the financial markets opened would be lost.

Instead, many of them would catch the first train that came and transfer somewhere — maybe in two places — to get close to their destinations as early as possible.

Nick Giovine knows that drill. He lives in Middletown and dreams of being a regular on the 2606 to get to his job. But he lost faith many months ago.

After New Jersey Transit started canceling trains with frustrating frequency last year, Giovine persuaded his boss to let him skip the commute one day a week — and quit giving $317 to the railroad 12 times a year.

“I’ve stopped buying a monthly pass because the service is so unreliable,” Giovine, 31, said. “Luckily, my boss is allowing me to work from home once a week to help with the stress of commuting.”

Another rider from Middletown, Kelly Farmer, said this week that she had abandoned the 2606 for a later train, in part because it had been so unreliable. Her new train, which leaves an hour later, has “definitely been more reliable,” Farmer said. “Though, I hope I didn’t just jinx it.”

Reliability is supposed to be the hallmark of commuter railroads. They may not offer the comforts of an Amtrak cross-country excursion, but they are expected to perform the prosaic duty of transporting people to work and home again.

For a couple years now, New Jersey Transit has consistently failed in that mission. It has been plagued by cancellations and suspensions of service, most of which its executives blamed on a rush to install safety equipment and a shortage of engineers to drive trains.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy has promised to fix the railroad since before he was elected in 2017. But in the first six months of 2019, New Jersey Transit canceled more than 1,300 trains — more than 50 a week — according to a New York Times analysis of the agency’s reports on social media.

The disruption has been spread across the railroad’s 12 lines, but it has not been spread evenly. The Times’ analysis found that six different trains were canceled at least 15 times from January through June.

Other major commuter railroads did not approach such a level of futility. Neither Metro-North Railroad, which serves the suburbs north of New York, or the Long Island Rail Road canceled a train more than eight times during the first six months of the year, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Metra, another large commuter railroad that serves Chicago, had only one train canceled as many as five times in the same period, said Michael Gillis, a spokesman for Metra. And most cancellations there are caused by winter weather, he said.

Giovine, 31, and his fellow travelers on the 2606 arguably have suffered the most. The 2606 was only the third most-canceled on the Coast Line, which runs along the New Jersey Shore. But the top two, Trains 3513 and 3514, are evening trains.

As most regular commuters would testify, having your evening train canceled — particularly if it departs from busy Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan as the 3513 does — is not comparable to having your morning train canceled.

When New Jersey Transit cancels the 3513, which is scheduled to depart Penn Station at 5:25 p.m., it often directs passengers to a train leaving just eight minutes later. The delay is less of a headache than the crowding of two trainfuls of passengers onto one.

Middletown, a coastal suburb about a 45-mile drive from New York City, has thousands of residents who commute to Manhattan and North Jersey, many of whom work in finance and other white-collar industries.

George Dugan, who has lived in Middletown, New Jersey, for 20 years, pays $450 a month to commute to his finance job in Manhattan. But he has no expectation of reliable service.

“My sense is that New Jersey Transit is doing the best that they can,” Dugan said one evening in August as he ate a slice of plain pizza at Don Pepi’s in Penn Station while he waited for his train home. “I’m kind of resigned to it.”

Dugan said he was not usually in any hurry to get home. He usually eats dinner (Penn Station pizza) and breakfast (a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) on the trains.

Amanda DeWan does not have that sort of leeway. She has to pick her children up by 6 p.m. or pay a caretaker penalty of $1 per minute, she said.

“I would look way more stressed than this if my train was canceled on the way home,” DeWan said as she coped with the cancellation of the 2606 she had intended to ride to a 9:15 a.m. meeting in lower Manhattan.

Instead, she boarded the next train at 7:27 a.m. and rode it as far as Secaucus, where she had to cross over to another platform to catch a train to Hoboken. From there, she planned to hop on a ferry to reach her destination near the World Trade Center.

By then, it almost surely would be past the scheduled start of her meeting.

New Jersey Transit officials admit that the railroad’s reliability dropped off in May after appearing to be on the rise for a few months. But they said it had improved markedly from last year, when the system was plagued by cancellations even after service was cut back and, in some places, suspended altogether.

The railroad had 28% fewer cancellations from January to July of this year than in the same period last year, said Nancy Snyder, a spokeswoman for New Jersey Transit. She added that nearly 92% of its trains ran on time in August, up from about 90% in August 2018.

“We recognize the impact that canceling just one train has on our customers when it happens to be your train,” Snyder said. “When we have to make the difficult decision to cancel a train for any reason, we strategically select a train that will have the least impact to customers and provides the customer with the best alternative.”

New Jersey Transit’s executive director, Kevin Corbett, has repeatedly joined Murphy in promising that the railroad’s performance will improve dramatically starting in 2020. By then, several classes will have completed training to become engineers, alleviating the shortage of train operators that has caused many of the cancellations, Corbett said.

But what transit officials say they intend to do is of no help to riders dealing with another morning with no 2606 to ride.

One of them, a commuter for 20 years who declined to give his name, was still steaming about two recent cancellations of his usual train home when he got to Middletown to find there would be no 2606 that day.

“If this was running right, I would get in at a quarter to 9,” he said. “Now I get in at 9:30.”

Giovine has been chronicling the cancellations of Train 2606 since last year on Twitter.

Giovine said he had thought the cancellations would abate after New Jersey Transit officials announced that they had met a Dec. 31 deadline to install equipment for an automatic-braking system, known as Positive Train Control, on all of the trains.

But the new year started off even worse. By his count, the 2606 was canceled on the first three workdays of 2019. Then, after reappearing on Monday, Jan. 7, it was canceled every other day that week.

By then, Giovine said, he was checking the New Jersey Transit app on his phone before getting out of bed at 6:10 a.m. Early notice of a cancellation would allow him to consider his options: dashing for an earlier train or preparing for a late arrival at work in Jersey City.

“My boss understands the train issues” and is lenient about arrival time, Giovine said. “She gets it.”

Giovine said he had received no responses from New Jersey Transit to his tweets, but that the service improved and the 2606 ran regularly for a few months.

Then, as summer approached, cancellations came more frequently and perceptions of progress at the railroad crumbled.

“It’s actually gotten worse,” Giovine said of the railroad’s performance since Murphy took office.

Giovine had advice for anybody considering a long train commute aboard New Jersey Transit.

“I’d really think about that long and hard,” he said. Then, he added, “I’d move somewhere closer.”

We Found the Very Worst Commuter Train in America

MIDDLETOWN, N.J. — It was only 7 a.m., but for the commuters stewing inside a Spartan train station in this bedroom community, the day was already off to a predictably bad start.

<h1>NEW YORK — New York City is home to thousands of acres of rooftop, some of the most expensive electricity in the country and progressive leadership that has embraced efforts to combat climate change.</h1>

Yet New York has been slower than other big cities in tapping into one constant source of clean energy: the sun.

Now though, with both state and city leaders making sweeping promises about swearing off using fossil fuels, some of the biggest expanses of flat roof in New York are being turned into sources of cheap and green electricity.

This year, the corporate owner of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan completed the installation of the country’s largest array of solar panels on an apartment complex. And soon, the Bronx could have an even larger one, at the massive Co-Op City complex.

These broad-scale, privately funded projects could help New York catch up with big cities like Los Angeles and San Diego, which are national leaders in the solar power movement.

Building owners are taking advantage of subsidies offered by the state as part of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s campaign to wean New York off fossil fuels. Cuomo and New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, each have a “green New Deal” that calls for a radical shift to primarily renewable sources of power, like solar and wind, in the next few decades.

In June, the state said that it aimed for 70% of its power to be generated from renewable sources by 2030. Two months before, the New York City Council passed an ordinance that will require most new buildings to be topped with solar panels or roofs covered in grass or other vegetation.

“We’re seeing some really robust solar activity in New York City and I think we’re going to see a lot more solar going in in Manhattan,” said Noah Ginsburg, director of the Here Comes Solar project at Solar One, a nonprofit that promotes solar energy.

The project at StuyTown, as the complex is known, incorporated more than 9,000 solar panels onto 56 rooftops, making it by far the biggest in Manhattan. It effectively doubled the borough’s solar capacity, adding 3.9 megawatts, or enough to power more than 1,100 apartments, Ginsburg said.

StuyTown’s owner, the Blackstone Group, said it spent close to $10 million on the project. Nearly a quarter of that — $2.3 million — was offset by incentives provided by the New York State Energy Research &amp; Development Authority, through its $1 billion NY-Sun program, according to David Sandbank, the program’s director.

The Blackstone Group would not say how much money they would save by adding the solar panels, which would generate enough energy to power only a fraction of the complex. StuyTown comprises the postwar buildings of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, which sprawl over 80 acres of Lower Manhattan and contain 11,200 apartments.

The city and state have driven much of the investment in solar power by providing tax breaks and other incentives to homeowners and landlords. The state incentives began in 2014 with a goal of creating 3 gigawatts — 3,000 megawatts — of solar capacity statewide by 2023. This year, Cuomo doubled that target to 6 gigawatts, though he did not specify how that would be achieved.

Ginsburg said he is working with the managers of Co-op City, one of the largest, private housing complexes in the country, on a plan to install solar panels over its parking garages. That project, expected to go out for bids next month, could produce more than 5 megawatts, enough to power 1,500 homes, he said. Co-Op City has more than 15,000 apartments in 35 buildings.

Still, the projects illustrate the limitations so far of solar power, given that they would produce only a fraction of the electricity consumed on their own sites.

The 27,000 residents at StuyTown are not receiving a direct benefit from the installation because they do not pay separately for their power consumption. Their monthly rent covers electricity and water, said Susan Steinberg, president of the tenants association there.

Steinberg said her neighbors generally were aware of the project only because of the cranes and work crews that were present during the yearlong installation. The management company, StuyTown Property Services, announced earlier this year that the complex had received a LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.

“They’re very proud of it and, I think, rightly so,” Steinberg said of the complex’s management.

Rick Hayduk, StuyTown’s general manager, said that although the savings would flow to the management company, there could be intangible benefits for residents. He said residents have told him they got a good feeling from “living in a community where their landlord placed such an emphasis on doing the right thing.”

StuyTown pumps the energy it collects from the panels back into the power grid and receives credit from the local utility, Consolidated Edison, against its electric bills, Hayduk said.

Even though not enough energy is generated to power all of the complex, the solar energy will take pressure off the power distribution network on hot summer days when demand from Con Edison’s customers is peaking, said Damian Sciano, the utility’s director of distribution planning.

“Of all the areas we have in Con Ed, Manhattan has been the toughest area to get a good amount of solar in,” Sciano said.

Throughout Con Edison’s service area in New York City and part of suburban Westchester County, there are about 250 megawatts of solar power from all sources, Sciano said. That is a small fraction of the utility’s forecast peak demand of about 13,400 megawatts.

Solar power accounts for only about 2% of all the electricity generated in the country, said Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. Hopper said the industry hopes to increase that share to 20% by 2030.

Nationally, Hopper said, most solar power comes not from rooftop panels but from utility-scale installations that essentially are power plants. Most of them are in western and southwestern states that tend to have abundant sun.

New York now ranks sixth among American cities in the capacity of its installed solar panels, according to Environment America, an advocacy group. Still, its total of about 200 megawatts is less than half of the capacity in Los Angeles, which has the highest capacity of any city in the country.

Manhattan and the Bronx have lagged behind the city’s other boroughs in the adoption of solar power, according to statistics compiled by the City University of New York. Many of the early adopters were homeowners who installed panels on their roofs to reduce their electric bills.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/nyregion/nyc-solar-power.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Now though, with both state and city leaders making sweeping promises about swearing off using fossil fuels, some of the biggest expanses of flat roof in New York are being turned into sources of cheap and green electricity.

Rooftops mark city's foray into solar

<h1>New Jersey Transit, the country’s third-busiest commuter railroad and an essential link to New York City, is not running out of excuses for failing to run its trains. It’s recycling them.</h1>

Last week, the railroad canceled more than 60 trains, many of them during the morning or evening rush hours, leaving thousands of commuters scrambling to find other ways of getting to work or home.

In fact, canceled trains have become a near daily occurrence, and many frustrated riders wonder if they will ever be able to depend on the service.

In many cases, New Jersey Transit has blamed the failures on a persistent shortage of crews to operate the trains. In most others, the problem is what officials call “equipment availability,” which means the railroad did not have all the trains available it needed to carry riders.

If those explanations sound familiar to regular riders, that is because New Jersey Transit has used them before. They were often cited last year when the agency struggled to maintain its schedule after paring it back and suspending service on two rail lines for several months. The new week got off to a poor start with New Jersey Transit canceling at least 15 trains on Monday, citing “equipment availability” in several cases and personnel shortage in a couple of others.)

But New Jersey’s governor, Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, and his appointees have been promising since early 2018 that they would solve New Jersey Transit’s problems through increased funding and better management.

They say they have made big strides, but commuters remain unconvinced.

“I haven’t noticed anything improving,” said Emma Zielinski, who said her usual train home was canceled all three times she tried to ride it last week. “Commuting with N.J. Transit is a disorganized, chaotic nightmare.”

The first, last Monday, was caused by a fire in an Amtrak work train that suspended some evening service on the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor line, New Jersey Transit said. Her train failed to make its run south from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan the next two nights because of “equipment availability,” the agency said.

Zielinski, 31, said she had no viable alternative for commuting to her home in Princeton, New Jersey. She already abandoned a two-stop rail shuttle, known as the Dinky, that connects Princeton and Princeton Junction, where riders can take the train to New York.

She rode the shuttle for a couple of years until New Jersey Transit suspended the service last summer. Now she drives to the Princeton Junction station and pays to park there.

“It just became too much to rely on both trains to be on time and actually working,” she said.

Citing a lack of crew members or trains as a reason for failing to fulfill its schedule is not typical for commuter railroads. The other major commuter railroads in the New York City region, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad, rarely provide those explanations.

On Metro-North, the country’s second-busiest commuter railroad, just 73 of more than 95,000 trains — fewer than 0.1% — were canceled in the first five months of this year. And the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter rail in the nation, had 356 cancellations through May.

Neither railroad keeps track of either “equipment availability” or crew shortages.

New Jersey Transit officials insist the problem is not an actual shortage of trains, just difficulties getting trains in place because of a lack of engineers.

They emphasize that cancellations have been less frequent this year than last and that the railroad’s performance appears to be improving. In the past few months, its trains have been running on time more often than last year, when performance sank.

Last year truly was an annus horribilis for New Jersey Transit.

On top of its crew shortage, it was saddled with a pressing deadline to equip all its locomotives with the technology for an automatic braking system known as Positive Train Control. The need to take those engines out of service for the installation forced the railroad to reduce its schedule, including the suspension of service on the Atlantic City Line and the Dinky.

At the end of the year, though, New Jersey Transit was sending out news releases announcing that it had completed that part of the installation. In May, it restored the suspended service.

By late June, Murphy was proclaiming that the agency had made “enormous progress,” fueled in part by a large increase in direct funding from the state. At a news conference, the governor promised, “You’ll see a quantum increase, I think, by the fourth quarter of this year.”

Kevin Corbett, who runs New Jersey Transit, was more measured in his optimism. Corbett pegged significant improvement to the recruitment and training of more engineers to drive the trains. The railroad has about 330 engineers and aims to add more than 50 by early next year.

A class of 12 trainees finished in May, and 11 of them are now working as engineers, said Nancy Snyder, a spokeswoman for the agency. Three more classes are scheduled to complete training by January.

“When we get into next year, we’ll be at the level we need to be to provide all service and have an ample bench,” Corbett said.

That may not be soon enough for riders.

On Twitter, one rider who comments regularly about frustrations with New Jersey Transit wrote last Wednesday that most of her trips had been overcrowded, forcing her to “stand, smashed like a sardine, for FIVE of these commutes, most of which were not my normal trains because of cancellations or lateness.”

“In what world is this ok!?” she added.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/nyregion/nj-transit-train-cancellations.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

For N.J. transit riders, canceled trains are part of daily commute

In fact, canceled trains have become a near daily occurrence, and many frustrated riders wonder if they will ever be able to depend on the service.

<h1>NEW YORK — A truck plummeted over a railing and crashed on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel on Wednesday afternoon, injuring a dozen people and disrupting the preholiday travel plans for thousands of riders.</h1>

The crash was startling, with the vehicle, an orange garbage truck, landing nose-first on the westbound lanes of Route 495, which carries traffic flowing out of Manhattan.

The accident came at the worst possible time of the holiday week, snarling traffic across many Manhattan streets as drivers struggled to reach other tunnels and bridges and leaving hordes of commuters fuming in long lines to board packed trains or wait out the accident cleanup.

The Union City, New Jersey, municipal truck partially blocked the road, and forced a shutdown of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the busiest in the country, for several hours.

Twelve people were injured and taken to three local hospitals, according to the Hudson County Prosecutors Office.

An official of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the terminal, said the terminal reopened for limited outbound service shortly before 5 p.m. Eastern time, but cars bound for New Jersey were being diverted to the Holland Tunnel or the George Washington Bridge. The agency advised commuters to find other ways of reaching their destinations.

During the disruption, bus tickets were being accepted for rides on New Jersey Transit and PATH trains and on New York Waterway ferries. At least one company, Lakeland Bus Lines, had diverted its commuter buses to a train station in Secaucus, New Jersey, to begin westbound runs.

Travelers who arrived at the bus terminal on Wednesday afternoon were greeted with signs telling them that all bus service was “suspended until further notice.” Police officers with bullhorns reinforced the message.

Standing in front of the terminal’s entrance on Eighth Avenue, Debbie Gould, 38, listened as Port Authority employees told commuters to find another way home.

“This is typical, not that the Lincoln Tunnel is closed, but that there is disruption on my way home,” said Gould, who was trying to return home to Union City. “I don’t have any other option than to wait this out. I mean, what can I do?”

Ryan McCarthy, a 20-year-old bank intern in Manhattan, was standing with a packed bag and a friend in front of the Port Authority doors.

“I was looking forward to seeing my family and my girlfriend for the holiday weekend,” he said.

“We’re thinking of maybe renting a car, but that would be a whole ordeal, too,” said McCarthy, who was trying to get to Avalon, New Jersey, down the Jersey Shore.

“I just want to get out of here and get my weekend started,” he said, turning to stare at the growing crowd.

By 7:30 p.m. ET, all service had been restored, and commuters reported that the traffic was moving swiftly.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/nyregion/port-authority-closed-crash.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Wild crash near Lincoln tunnel stalls rush hour

The crash was startling, with the vehicle, an orange garbage truck, landing nose-first on the westbound lanes of Route 495, which carries traffic flowing out of Manhattan.

<h1>NEW YORK — Drivers bound for New York City already pay some of the highest bridge and tunnel tolls in the country. After next year they will also have to pay a congestion fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan.</h1>

But even before that fee goes into effect, the cost of traveling into and around New York may go up as part of a plan by the agency that operates the main airports in the region and the bridges and tunnels that connect New York and New Jersey.

Those new or increased charges would come ahead of — and possibly in addition to — New York’s congestion pricing plan.

The agency, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is proposing increases in tolls and fares and wants to introduce a new fee: $4 per ride for airport trips in taxis and other for-hire vehicles.

The toll for the George Washington Bridge, the world’s busiest bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel and other crossings into the city from New Jersey would rise by at least $1 per car. And the fare for the airport AirTrains that link airline terminals with public transit would jump by more than $2 to $7.75.

The projected revenue from those charges — about $235 million a year — would help pay for the Port Authority’s spending spree on improvements to the airports and other transportation infrastructure in the region, agency officials said. The agency plans to ask its board of commissioners Thursday to approve a $4.8 billion increase in its 10-year spending plan.

The additional spending — an increase of 15% over the agency’s existing $32.2 billion capital budget — would go toward a long list of upgrades to the three aging airports that serve the city.

The board would have to approve the proposed increases in revenue from tolls and fares, most likely at its monthly meeting in September.

“At a time of the Port Authority’s unprecedented investment in our region’s infrastructure to upgrade Port Authority facilities to 21st-century standards, we must be prepared to provide needed funding,” said Rick Cotton, the agency’s executive director. “These recommended increases in tolls and fares are both needed and measured.”

The proposal to add a $4 fee to every ride to and from the airports by Uber drivers and other for-hire vehicles and to every pickup at the airports by taxis would be in line with existing fees at airports in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and San Francisco, according to agency officials.

But representatives of ride-share drivers said the proposal was unfair to app-based drivers who struggle to earn a living.

“It is patently unfair to tax Uber and Lyft trips in both directions while taxing taxis in only one direction,” said Brendan Sexton, executive director of the Independent Drivers Guild.

Harry Hartfield, a spokesman for Uber, which already pays the city of Newark, New Jersey, $1 million a year for access to Newark Liberty, said, “We want to continue to work with the Port Authority, but riders deserve to know that the tens of millions of dollars in new fees the authority has proposed won’t be wasted.”

Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, said in a statement: “Drivers are in crisis but the Port Authority underestimates our resolve. If they want a fight, they got one. Drivers: get ready to shut down the airports.”

At the start of next year, the cash toll at six bridges and tunnels that connect New Jersey to the city would rise to $16, from $15, and the discount for using the E-ZPass electronic tolling system would shrink. The agency also is proposing eliminating discounts for E-ZPass devices that are registered in states other than New York or New Jersey.

The toll increases would be the first since 2015.

Nick Sifuentes, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an advocacy group, said he worried that toll increases might raise opposition to congestion pricing, which he said is needed to fund subway repairs. “We need to make sure that if we’re increasing tolls, that it’s for something that has a tangible, regular benefit for commuters,” Sifuentes said.

The Port Authority is in the midst of overhauling La Guardia Airport, planning major changes at Kennedy International Airport and building a new terminal at Newark Liberty International Airport. It also wants to add an AirTrain to connect La Guardia to the subway and rail network and to replace the troubled AirTrain at Newark Liberty.

The agency’s estimate of the cost of building the AirTrain to La Guardia, a pet project of New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has risen to $2.05 billion from $1.5 billion. That is the same amount the agency wants to spend on replacing Newark’s AirTrain, which New Jersey’s governor, Philip D. Murphy, has said was a priority.

The two governors share control of the Port Authority, which is tasked with moving people and freight efficiently around the metropolitan region. Traditionally, governors for the two states have divided up the agency’s steady stream of cash from tolls, fares and fees.

Much of that money has gone to rebuild the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and to make up for the heavy annual losses of the PATH commuter train system, both of which are owned and operated by the agency.

As a result, the agency’s three big airports and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan have fallen into steep decline.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/nyregion/bridge-tunnel-toll-increase.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

On top of congestion pricing, tolls into New York may increase

Those new or increased charges would come ahead of — and possibly in addition to — New York’s congestion pricing plan.

<h1>It already had four floors of living space, but he wanted to make it even bigger and add an elevator and other modern luxuries, leaving little intact behind the red brick facade.</h1>

His plan set off the latest battle over the character of some of New York City’s most expensive neighborhoods, pitting affluent buyers who believe they have every right to remake the urban landscape, just as others have done for generations, against preservationists who contend that things have gone too far.

In the Chelsea neighborhood, where the row house sits, residents banded together in protest, fearing that they were being targeted by a wave of speculation that would turn some of the oldest houses in the city into much larger, modern mansions for wealthy interlopers.

A local community board had tried in vain to stop a similar expansion just seven doors away, in a home that is considered the oldest dwelling in Chelsea.

But in this second case they prevailed: The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is charged with protecting significant buildings, rejected the expansion of the home on West 20th Street as too “overwhelming” for neighbors.

The new owner, David Lesser, a Long Island-based real estate investor, did not respond to requests for comment.

The clashes in Chelsea are symbolic of a widening rift in the city between everyday residents and developers looking to create luxurious enclaves that only the elite can afford.

“The history of real estate in New York is all about speculative construction,” said Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University. “But I have always felt that what makes a dynamic city is the mix of the old and the new.”

David Holowka, a retired architect who led the opposition in Chelsea, worried that the block could become another “billionaire’s row” — the nickname for the ultraexpensive apartment towers sprouting near Central Park.

Sandwiched between Greenwich Village and the new Hudson Yards mega-development, Chelsea had long been a diverse neighborhood filled with working-class and middle-class residents. But it has gentrified rapidly in the decade since the High Line elevated railway was transformed into a public park — now a top tourist draw.

Google, which already has a large footprint in the neighborhood, has been buying more buildings as it continues to expand its East Coast base of operations.

But Holowka said he does not believe Google employees are the ones interested in Chelsea’s row houses.

Patrick McGeehan

Articles written by the author

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