The updates from his staff were one of many ways Bloomberg tried to make certain his press releases weren’t simply a politician’s airy promises. Where are we? he would ask. What’s been done about, you name it? And if it wasn’t already clear that Bloomberg didn’t want anybody to waste a minute of that second term, which was expected to be his last, there was the new countdown clock. Installed within view of everybody who worked in Bloomberg’s open office, the clock began ticking on January 1, 2006. That meant the mayor and his people thought they had until December 31, 2009, or 1,460 days, counting weekends and holidays and long, long workdays. It was a chance to refine and reform and complete the 349 promises made four years earlier—unless, of course, he could find a way to add extra time as mayor.
21
A CITY ON THE MOVE
“It takes a special type of cowardice for elected officials to refuse to stand up and vote their conscience . . .”
—Bloomberg, furious at Albany legislators refusing to vote on congestion pricing
A massive orange ferry named after Andrew Barberi, a respected high school football coach, churned through the Hudson River from downtown Manhattan toward its usual docking site on Staten Island. It was the afternoon of October 15, 2003, and many of the 1,500 passengers were waiting along the ferry ramps, anxious to get home. Instead of slowing down and sliding into its usual berth, the ferry suddenly turned off course and slammed into a maintenance pier. The huge splinters from the wooden and concrete pier sliced through the ferry, killing eleven people and injuring dozens of others. One law enforcement official reported that bodies had been ripped apart as the pier and the ferry collided.1
When the Bloomberg transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, got to the site, even she, a veteran of almost fifteen years in top city jobs, was shaken by the apocalyptic scene. Police and transit officials began relaying details, including the bizarre news that the pilot of the ferry had run home and tried (unsuccessfully) to kill himself with a pellet gun.
Mayor Bloomberg, who was making a requisite appearance at a Yankees game, quickly commandeered a helicopter and came to the terminal. He saw a pale Weinshall, who told friends she had expected to be called before the cameras and fired instantly. Instead, the mayor said quietly, “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” He listened, somber, and then when she was apologizing and agonizing, he said, “Well, hey, at least I got to leave the Yankee game.” It was a classic Bloomberg attempt to relieve her distress with a weak joke, in this case by mentioning a well-known personal quirk—he was never really comfortable sitting and passively watching much of anything, be it opera or an awards ceremony or, as a born-and-bred Boston Red Sox fan, another Yankees game.
At about 2:00 a.m. the next morning, as Weinshall waited at the Staten Island terminal for federal investigators, her cell phone rang. “This is Mike,” the mayor said. “Do me a favor. After they come, I want you to go home, have a stiff scotch, go to sleep and tomorrow morning we’ll start fresh and deal with whatever we’ve got to deal with.”2
There would be plenty to deal with. The law required two pilots in the wheelhouse for docking, but only the cocaptain, Richard Smith, was at the wheel that day, and he was short on sleep and running on painkillers when he blacked out at the fateful moment. Both he and Patrick Ryan, the ferry supervisor, were sentenced to just over a year in jail for manslaughter.3 And the city would pay out nearly $100 million to victims and their families. One family member testified that her brother “was so mangled and maimed that we could not see his body.”4
Reports on the tragedy blamed the pilots and ferry operations, as well as the transportation commissioner. But Bloomberg supported Weinshall for four more years when she reorganized the department including new, tougher rules for piloting the Staten Island ferries. And when she resigned in January 2007, he praised her “extraordinary seven year tenure.”5
Some of her critics thought “extraordinary” was a loaded word; she was, after all, the wife of U.S. Senator Charles Schumer. But Weinshall saw it as support and fierce public loyalty to his staff. The ferry crash was a powerful example of how Bloomberg could be a solid mensch, she figured, good on his promise to let people work and to back them, publicly at least, when they failed. Or, as she knew firsthand, when something went terribly wrong.6
* * *
Things easily go wrong in a city with 8,000 miles of streets (about a quarter of the landmass of the entire city),7 12,750 miles of sidewalks,8 and more than 250,000 streetlights.9 The Staten Island Ferry, normally a boon to commuters and once the favorite way for the young Bloomberg to entertain dates on the cheap, carried about 65,000 passengers a day, or 22 million every year, across the Hudson between downtown Manhattan and Staten Island.
On average, the streets and bridges carried nearly two million private cars—fortunately most of the city’s commuters take the bus or subway. Trucks brought in 400 million tons of freight each year, so much that advocates for more public transit began referring to congestion caused by these big rigs as the city’s constant “clustertruck.”10
There were 13,300 yellow taxis in Bloomberg’s day and nearly 8,000 apple-green cab licenses were allowed for the outer boroughs. Uber soon cut into taxi fares with 25,000 vehicles every week, and eventually 5,000 more provided by Lyft. More than 5,700 city buses bounced along the city streets, and nearly 8,000 bigger, sleeker buses brought in commuters from the suburbs.
Crossing the street was still a risk. There were 187 pedestrian deaths in 2002 and 184 in 2013 before Bloomberg’s successor made it an issue and cut the number to 148 in 2016.11 There were more than 36,000 private bikers and 5,670 of Bloomberg’s Citi Bikes for sharing by 2013, plus 1,461 licensed pedicab drivers mostly looking for clueless tourists with fat pockets. From the sky, the whole manic city could look like a panicked ant colony with every critter on some urgent, death-defying mission.12
Over twelve years, Bloomberg and his team touched almost every aspect of transit, warning that without some progress this “most critical” network could create “the greatest single barrier” to the region’s growth.13 To make getting around the city easier, they improved pedestrian signals at crosswalks. (The city even painted eyes on busy sidewalks to help tourists know which way to look before crossing the street.) They added bike lanes and green taxis for the outer boroughs and vehicles called by app. They reordered bus routes and extended a subway line, normally a state matter. And mostly they revolutionized the use of the city’s streets. They were no longer lanes reserved for motorized vehicles. They became “complete streets” shared by cars, trucks, buses, bikes, and people. “The Bloomberg people simply changed the way the streets in the city were managed and used,”14 said Mitchell Moss, professor of urban planning and director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University and an occasional consultant to Bloomberg.
For any city, such a catalog of changes would be a big deal. For New Yorkers, it was another seismic development brought on by Bloomberg’s innovators. But it would take the mayor quite a while to figure out exactly what he wanted for the streets and waterways in his city.
* * *
In his first days in office, Bloomberg was like most public officials who saw easing city traffic as the main transportation problem. For that early Mayor Bloomberg, Weinshall was a good fit. She had been transportation commissioner under Rudy Giuliani, and some of the mayor’s advisers told him that it was a mistake for her to stay on because she was married to such a powerful politician. Never hire somebody you can’t fire, one Bloomberg aide kept muttering.15 Weinshall worked hard to make the city traffic run smoothly, and Bloomberg also clearly loved watching the complex transportation patterns in his city. He pestered Weinshall and her experts with questions about how the streets worked, how the stoplights were timed. Finally, Weinshall and her team took him on a tour of the traffic control center in Queens, where traffic engineers manipulated the timing for red lights and flashing pedestrian walk signs—all on a bank of blinkin
g computers. A small group of transit experts watched as their sixty-year-old boss, their mayor, suddenly morphed into a kid transfixed as if by a new Lionel train set. This was his element, computers tracking what was going on much like the Bloomberg Terminals back at his company. He kept asking questions, kept saying he, too, was a trained engineer, until a nervous press aide finally coaxed him to his next scheduled event.
Near the end of his first term, however, the press began criticizing him for failing to think creatively about transportation, not that such criticism mattered, as he would let you know quickly, if asked.
“The mayor doesn’t have a large-scale transportation accomplishment to point to, but rather a collection of smaller, but worthwhile initiatives,” Jon Orcutt, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a public transit advocacy group, said in 2005.16 That was an election year and Bloomberg wasn’t a man satisfied with “smaller, but worthwhile initiatives.”
It was time to bring in big-change agents, especially since his team of environmentalists predicted another million people in the city by 2030. Would they live in one, big dirty traffic snarl? A permanent gridlock?
* * *
Bloomberg’s most surprising move was to appoint Janette Sadik-Khan, the kind of transportation renegade who would “disrupt,” to put it in a businessman’s jargon, the way New York commuters moved around their city. Sadik-Khan had solid credentials. She was born in California but spent some of her youth in the city (her mother was a reporter for the old New York Post).17A graduate of Occidental College, majoring in political science, she earned a law degree at Columbia, worked with Mayor David Dinkins, then moved to the Federal Transit Administration in D.C. under President Clinton. Finally, she was working in the transit section at Parsons Brinckerhoff, an international transportation engineering and design firm, when the city beckoned again.18
Few people would forget meeting Janette Sadik-Khan. She was physically striking, a biker herself who was slim, athletic, and often animated. She was also a powerful saleswoman—that last trait being the key to anybody’s success, as Bloomberg often said. Streets, buses, boring old infrastructure issues—she could make it all sound sexy.
When she came to make her pitch for the job in early 2007, Bloomberg sat quietly—so quietly Sadik-Khan thought she had talked herself out of a position she wanted badly. She seemed unafraid to shatter the old way of doing things. She did not talk about how to ease traffic jams. That was the old way, she said. She wanted to “calm” traffic in order to make it safer for people on foot and on bicycles as well as those in cars and trucks. (“Calming” traffic seemed to be the preferred term for slowing it down, a concept that was not always popular with drivers.)
She even wanted to limit traffic coming into Manhattan the way London and Stockholm had done so successfully. (Using what was called “congestion pricing,” London had charged more to enter the city center, cut traffic by 15 percent and made it easier to get from here to there more quickly.)19 Make it cost more, she advised. People will take the bus. She also proposed a bike-sharing program being tried in other cities, plus dedicated lanes on city streets for bikes and buses.
These were still difficult ideas for New Yorkers perpetually stalled in traffic or stuck in the subway, but Bloomberg saw his kind of agitator, and he recognized her high-energy marketing skills. Sadik-Khan was also more like his health commissioner, Tom Frieden, or his education chancellor, Joel Klein—high energy, high impact. Bloomberg hired her a short while later at a breakfast of “burned toast and coffee” at Viand, his favorite diner on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, as she remembered.20
It turned out that Sadik-Kahn’s proposals were many of the same ideas that Bloomberg and his staff had been quietly circling for their massive environmental agenda, PlaNYC 2030. That plan, announced a short while later,21 would call for all kinds of environmental changes, including those aimed at curbing city traffic or promoting ways to cut down on contaminated air by improving mass transit or making bikes more convenient. The plan noted that without such changes, “by 2030, virtually every road, subway and rail line will be pushed beyond its capacity limits.”22
Sadik-Khan would quickly take on two issues that would define Bloomberg’s transportation policy and stir controversies for years to come. One was the addition of pedestrian plazas, first in Times Square—forcing cars to share the streets with tourists and buskers dressed up as characters like Elmo and Dora the Explorer. The other was making room on more streets for more bicycles. During her time, cyclists began with a little over 500 miles of bike routes, which doubled to more than 1,100 by the time she and Bloomberg left office. She made New York into a cycling city with 45,000 New Yorkers biking to work in 2015, compared to about 16,000 when Sadik-Khan took the job. 23
Bloomberg said he was often skeptical about Sadik-Khan’s ideas, at least in the beginning. Closing traffic lanes in Times Square was clearly a radical move. “My first thought was that it was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard,” Bloomberg said. “Ten minutes later, she had convinced me.”24
Sadik-Khan wanted to get around the normal systems for tampering with city streets. If she had to wait for the community to approve her new designs, the traffic pattern would almost certainly stay put for years. She decided to try it as a pilot project with orange traffic cones and cheap patio chairs to make the plazas pedestrian friendly. (They were so friendly that at one point somebody set up an outdoor bedroom with a rug, lamp, and a small cot—some New Yorker’s very brief attempt to comment on the city’s housing crisis.)
Sadik-Khan would take her pitch to anybody who would listen. When she came to the Times to promote more room for people, not cars, in these plazas along Broadway and in Times Square, Andrew Rosenthal, then the editorial page editor, was a car man who tended to be skeptical about sharing more of the streets with pedestrians. Remove pavement for sidewalks and you add problems for cars, he argued. After Sadik-Khan made her pitch that plazas would be better for people and cars, he bristled, then softened, then relented and allowed a piece to run in favor of the new public spaces.
Bloomberg’s transportation saleswoman was also unafraid of entering the combat zone between people who ride bikes and almost everybody else. In New York City, you could easily start a shouting match about whether bikers were a menace or they deserved a bigger share of the road.
Sadik-Khan began adding bike lanes,25 but it was not always easy. During an anti-bike lane protest near Prospect Park in Brooklyn in 2010, several dozen residents were on the streets to challenge a bike path that had become, in the words of one local columnist, “the most controversial slab of cement outside the Gaza Strip.”26 If that seemed a bit over the top, Sadik-Khan quickly countered by convincing about two hundred pro–bike lane advocates to show up and support her new cement slab for cyclists. Sadik-Khan claimed that her protestors had created “likely one of the largest public demonstrations regarding a single transportation project since Jane Jacobs held the line against Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway half a century earlier.”27 Bloomberg had to deal with the outrage (even his former commissioner Weinshall and her powerful husband were reportedly unhappy with the bike lane in their Brooklyn neighborhood). But the mayor did little more than listen, and Sadik-Khan got her way.
A real key to the city’s bike revolution was Citi Bike—New York’s version of bike sharing that had worked for commuters in Paris, London, and Washington, D.C. At the debut of Citi Bike, Sadik-Khan declared that she and Bloomberg were launching “a new public transportation system for New York City.”28 It was not cheap—Citibank contributed $41 million29 for the first five years, and in 2013, bikers would each cough up $95 plus tax for a year’s worth of unlimited forty-five-minute rides.30 There had been repeated delays before the first six thousand bikes became available in Bloomberg’s last year in office, some stalled because of a faulty system, another time because of flooding with Hurricane Sandy in 2012.31 But soon the bikes were spotted across Lower Manhattan and
midtown, plus a few parts of Brooklyn, and the number of bikes would more than double and spread into other areas with more than 140,000 paying members by 2019.
Mike Bloomberg seemed to relish the controversies stirred by his transportation guru. He clearly admired her energetic style, but more than that, he approved of the goal to open city streets for more than trucks and cars. Did he ever ride a Citi Bike? He sat on one, at least once, according to his staff.32
* * *
As for taxis, Bloomberg was an airplane (or helicopter) guy who rode in chauffered SUVs. Sometimes those SUVs took him to the subway, and the billionaire mayor often boasted that he used his senior MetroCard that gave cut-rate fares for anyone over sixty-five.
Bloomberg also knew that the taxi system needed fixing, and he did indeed make dramatic changes. Riders had more choices at the end of his dozen years, but his administration’s efforts to make the city money by selling taxi medallions that are needed to operate a cab contributed to the plight of unsuspecting taxi drivers, who were essentially tricked by unscrupulous private lenders into taking out predatory loans. Like other mayors, Bloomberg counted on the profits from selling these medallions, which became like any bubble, with prices soaring to more than $1 million, and then, deflating as the taxi industry changed. City officials argued that federal regulators were supposed to catch these scams, but immigrant drivers who had taken out loans they could not pay back were destroyed financially in the process.33
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 27