Budgeting for Safer Streets

Background

The NYC Mayor's Office of Management & Budget (OMB) develops and releases the administration's adopted Five Year Capital Budget every year. The plan includes funding for capital projects across all City agencies for the next five fiscal years. Projects that improve the safety of City streets are undertaken by the Department of Transportation (DOT), but are sometimes also managed by the Department of Design & Construction (DDC) when work involves rebuilding water mains or sewers in addition to street construction.

Finding the Right Projects

The City funds thousands of projects in each five year budget, so finding the ones that make our streets safer is a challenge. Luckily, Chris Whong at qri has been able to scrape the detailed PDFs that include important scope and location data and create usable tables. Unfortunately, location data is often difficult to source for these projects because they are often tagged as "Citywide" or as affecting an entire borough when that is actually not true. To mitigate this, I used the Capital Budget knowledge I gained as Supervising Analyst in OMB's DOT Unit and Google to review individual scope information for projects that may impact street safety. After selecting DOT and DDC projects that appear to meet a broad definition of street improvement, I assigned the Community District (or Districts) that seemed most accurate if they were not already listed in the data.

Included Project Types

Bicycle & Pedestrian Improvements

These projects usually involve improving or building bike lanes, pedestrian plazas, and other related infrastructure. After completion, these projects make cycling and walking safer by providing protection and separation from traffic and employ other techniques such as day-lighting at intersections to improve visibility, allowing drivers to see pedestrians and cyclists before making a turn. Bicycle and pedestrian improvements are often linked within the same project scope, so it would be difficult to separate them.

Bus Network Improvements

These projects include bus lanes, queue jumps, and bus bulbs that speed up buses on streets. These improvements have secondary effects similar to many pedestrian and bicycle improvements. In addition to speeding commutes and encouraging more bus ridership, they often improve visibility and calm automobile and truck traffic. In NYC, bus improvements often occur along corridors traversed by Select Bus Service which incorporates many elements of Bus Rapid Transit.

Comprehensive Street Reconstruction

Street reconstruction projects are among DOT's biggest and most complex undertakings. Street reconstruction means that the entire street is being rebuilt from the dirt up, often including utilities, water mains, and sewer lines. This means that these projects are actually often managed by DDC with funding from DOT and other agencies. When streets are rebuilt, they often come with major enhancements that include many of the elements of bicycle, pedestrian, and bus network projects.

What's not included?

While there is no specific breakout, All Projects funding also includes areas such as traffic signals and street lighting which have smaller amounts of capital funding and are often included as elements of larger projects. However, there is funding that is not possible to break out by location and is held as a lump-sum at the City or Borough level. This analysis also does not include expense funding which covers many smaller projects and initiatives that do not meet the City's strict capital eligibility guidelines.