Street Chaos

It was a bright crisp day when the tone alarm went off at the firehouse. The company was

dispatched uptown for a reported building collapse. In an instant members started to slide the pole and pour out of the kitchen onto the apparatus floor. It took seconds for all of us to jump into our bunker gear and hop on the rig. The door rolled open and the rig hit the apron making a right turn on to West 10th Street heading for 6th Avenue, lights and sirens blaring. We continued down the block and made a left onto 6th avenue to go uptown and we were stopped dead in our tracks....GRIDLOCK, nothing but a solid wall of traffic. Two lanes of traffic had been removed to create a protected bike lane and the volume of traffic had not decreased, a recipe for disaster. I worked both my feet hitting the siren and the horn pedals trying to clear a path to no avail. The chauffeur and I looked up the avenue and all we could see was a sea of stalled vehicles clear to Central Park. At this point I got on the loudspeaker to implore drivers to pull to their vehicles to the left and right. It was the only thing I had left in the arsenal to clear the path.

From my vantage point, high above the cars, I could see drivers desperately trying to clear

the emergency lane but there was nowhere to go. Not only was the avenue completely

blocked the side streets were too. Motorists had no where to turn in the immediate area. We

weaved in and out of traffic as best we could. It felt like a lifetime by the time we reached the

corner. We turned left again onto the side street hoping to make our way over to 8th Avenue, perhaps that was clear. It was start and stop across to 8th, but at least there was some movement. We turned right onto 8th Avenue and once again a complete stop, traffic

everywhere. The chauffeur and I threw up our hands, “What the hell?”

I made a quick transmission to the dispatcher that we would be severely delayed due to

gridlock. At that moment my chauffeur spied the bike lane running along the left hand side of 8th Avenue. “Can we fit?’ he asked. “Let’s give it a go,” I said, “Be careful.” “Everyone, eyes up,” I called to the guys in the back. We needed everyone to look for unsuspecting

pedestrians as we squeezed into the segregated lane, the only free route. We fit, and we were finally moving in the right direction but we were not where we should be.

During the Bloomberg administration there was a very big and quick push to restructure the

street grid to include bicycle lanes and pedestrian plazas as well as to remove streets from the grid all together in the administrations desire to attract capitol to this city.

Janette Khan, the DOT Commissioner appointed by Michael Bloomberg, made a trip to

Copenhagen to study their street scape. According to an interview in vox.com from

September 12, 2018, she looked at the bike lane, her Chief Traffic Engineer got down on his

knee with a measuring tape and measured the lane. After measuring the roadway he looked

up at her. She asked him if it could be done in NYC and he reportedly said yes. Copenhagen is a city of 602,481 residents,132,200 cars and 69.42 square miles. NY is a city of 8.5 million (counted) residents, 2,077,000 cars, that are registered in the state, and 300 square miles. No formal extensive study, just a tape measure. Ms. Khan thought Copenhagen a good parallel.

Ms. Khan admitted to using quick guerrilla tactics for taking over traffic lanes and parking

spaces, putting obstructions such as planters, tables and chairs in the roadbed. Ms. Khan

would later justify this process by saying if there were any problems, the obstructions would be removed. There were problems and the structures were not removed. They were replaced with Proper safety studies and procedures had not been done according to the DOT’s own KeithBray. One need only look at Jay Street in Brooklyn to understand the lack of study, and the seemingly slapdash method of restructuring a major artery.

There is a bicycle lane at the curb. Private automobiles are then parked in a traveling lane

to protect the bicycle drivers. The bus, with numerous blind spots, has to then cross the

bicycle lane to get to the curb in order to let passengers out. That is only after the bus has to

make a perilous turn from the Metro tech tunnel to the middle lane of traffic, trying to avoid the parked vehicles, now being used as a bike barrier, and the oncoming traffic. It is a disaster and yet it remains.

It is questionable that the only response you get from DOT is that they have secured

permission to move forward on whatever project they are questioned about. I find it hard to

believe that any traffic engineer with any experience would have given the Jay Street

restructuring a thumbs up. It’s a litigator’s dream, and a pedestrian’s nightmare. Helen Keller

could have done a better job.

Specifics on what the DOT cites as permission, from which agency it comes from, or in

what form it takes, are never given. What is more disturbing is that whenever DOT presents a

project to the public no other city agencies are present to inform the public of how the

projected changes will affect the emergency and essential response to their homes, a question taxpayers have a right to have answered in real time.

Emergency line units (fire trucks, ambulances, squad cars etc.) were given no

instructions, no protocols to follow for this city wide street restructuring when it started to be

rolled out. We were not prepared by DOT as to how to handle this new world or even what it

would look like. There was no finished plan submitted to line units to show us how traffic and

emergency routes would be affected, everything was a surprise. An officer within the FDNY

was assigned as the fire department’s liaison to the DOT. His expertise was structural

engineering, but had no experience as a traffic engineer. This officer did not have the rank to go head to head with a commissioner or anyone in a position of appointed power, the position was low level advisory only. It appeared that NYC DOT was going to implement what it wanted when it wanted. Line units, and city residents were going to have to deal with the fallout regardless of what that was.

If the protected bike lanes were, at their inception, made wide enough for emergency

vehicles to use then why were line units never informed of this? Was the plan to make

protected bike lanes as wide as possible to take out as many of the traffic lanes as possible,

and then seeing the need for emergency vehicle access due to crippling congestion, the DOT adopted the explanation that they were made that wide to accommodate emergency vehicles?

Route cards can be found in every firehouse. Route cards document the fastest way to

every address in the district for that company. By not informing emergency services of the

scale of DOT’s restructuring plan or presenting a well thought out plan before it was

implemented, the DOT effectively severed response routes and caused confusion for fire

vehicles responding to emergencies. It is interesting that NYU is now teaming with the FDNY to try to use artificial intelligence to move emergency vehicles through crippling congestion.

Considering it is the DOT’s go to move to tell city residents that DOT has permission to

implement changes, why would the fire department need to employ artificial intelligence?

Problems such as these are hashed out before implementation not as a result of poor planning.

There is a very real need to move emergency vehicles quickly through the streets of this city.

What we have seen is response times now clocked as high as 9 minutes. Eliminating streets

from the grid and narrowing lanes are very real causes of congestion in a city this large with a

finite land mass, and an over abundance of people.

There has always been traffic congestion in this city. It was usually at rush hour, or pegged

to some special event such as the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center or a

parade. Emergency and essential units were always well informed of theses events, as were

drivers and pedestrians. Emergency and essential agencies would preplan the fastest alternate routes so as not be too impeded with their response patterns. If an access route was cut off for example 5th Avenue for a parade, units are staged on either side of the avenue in order to dispatch from that side so as to not have to cross the avenue, or the marchers, thereby slowing down response.

I spent 26 years serving the citizens of New York City as a firefighter retiring in March 2023.

New York has always been a city of many challenges not easily solved. Throughout history a

delicate dance with labor, citizen input and government policy have enabled this city to

navigate just about everything including the cusp of bankruptcy. We have made it through, all the while buoyed by the consistency and strength of long time residents, and the constant influx of new residents from all over the globe who, with their sheer resilience, find a place and a way, and make this city their own.

The thing one learns living here is that there is no magic bullet, no great solution that will

wipe away all the problems and certainly no cure-all for the long haul. This is not a city where

extreme points of view or a final and all-encompassing solution find refuge. It is a city of the

long slog, day after day, year after year, constantly adjusting to the new while holding on to that which has been tried and true, always questioning, researching, and attempting for a better way for all. It gets messy sometimes but we are still here. It is time to go back to the drawing board on how and where to implement bicycle lanes in this city for the protection and safety of everyone.

We finally made it to the collapse location that day. I apologized to the chief for our delay

and let him know we were stuck in traffic. He was well aware. I did not tell him what route we

took, and he didn’t ask. It was very lucky for all involved that that particular incident was minor. The same cannot be said for so many other incidents I responded to.