Andrew Salkin uses 311 to report a broken traffic signal

Making traffic in Lower Manhattan run smoothly is no easy job, but Andrew Salkin is excited to give it a shot. Salkin is the commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation's Lower Manhattan bureau, created in February 2002 to respond to the area's needs in the wake of 9/11. His previous experience as borough commissioner for all of Manhattan primed him for his current position, where he's responsible for the two most scrutinized square miles of streets in the city.

In his year and half at the helm, Salkin has helped clean up rush-hour bus congestion, complete major street reconstructions on Murray and Rector Streets, and resurface Canal Street -- all while keeping the local community updated with the latest roadwork details and traffic adjustments.

LowerManhattan.info recently took a walk with Salkin around his downtown stomping ground to hear his thoughts on everything from rebuilding goals to favorite intersections. We set out from his office on West Broadway and Worth Street, where Salkin began with the story of how his DOT office came to be.

Broadway's huge traffic volume means more DOT pothole maintenance

"Our mission in our office -- to say it very broadly -- is to make Lower Manhattan work. We re-think Lower Manhattan from a transportation standpoint and find places where there are inefficiencies ... I sort of see it as though we're the 'defenders of no future traffic jams.'"

As we turn down Hudson Street, Salkin sees a traffic signal with a malfunctioning red light. Without pause he calls 311, the city's information and service hotline, to report the outage. "I'm using 311 because I want to help keep the whole process working. I can call directly into the DOT control room, or I can call 311, where I'll get to talk to a DOT specialist who will type it into the same system anyway," he explains. "Either way, the contractor who's responsible for signals will have this repaired within two hours -- it's built into his contract."

Heading south towards Ground Zero gets Salkin thinking about the differences between the area before 9/11 compared with its future, and how his team is going to handle the heavy flow of pedestrians, buses, and construction traffic. 

"Basically, whatever transportation you look at -- from pedestrians, to subway and bus riders, to trucks, to taxis, to individual drivers -- using Lower Manhattan before 9/11 was awful. There seemed to be this attitude of 'Oh, if you're going to be in New York, you're going to be stuck in traffic.' The buses were unreliable and inconsistent. Driving and deliveries were unreliable and inconsistent.

"Looking ahead, we know that we want to make Lower Manhattan a retail destination -- something that it wasn't before. It was a retail location, but now we want to create a retail infrastructure that supports a 24-hour community. This is a chief strategy outlined by Mayor Bloomberg in his vision for downtown.  
 

Salkin wants to make construction quicker and less disruptive

"You add each one of these things up, and it's really significant -- it's enough to stress out a regular system, and this system was already stressed before. As we add all this new stuff, like housing and commercial space and new activity, we're going to need greater capacity."

As we reach the World Trade Center site, Salkin explains some of the proposals at hand for keeping Lower Manhattan moving.

"When you look at the problems we're faced with, you have to think about how to get more out of the system that's here. Not every street is used to its full capacity, so we're figuring out how to garner more from an average street so it can help the whole system.

"So as we think toward the future of Lower Manhattan, there are a lot of streets where we can change what they need to be. There's a need to protect main north-south streets, and a need to define those east-west connector streets that can help pull traffic in the right direction. For example, Fulton Street going through the [WTC] site is a major opportunity to connect from Water Street all the way over to the West Side Highway.

Downtown's aged, narrow streets require extra care

Along Church Street, Salkin points out the bus-only access schedule his office created a year ago to alleviate rush-hour congestion. "We knew Church has a lot of bus activity, so we thought, 'Let's make it really easy for buses to get onto this street, and hard for all other cars to get onto it during the times that buses want to be here.' So from 6 to 10 a.m. [and 3 to 7 p.m.], it's a bus-way. It's significantly lowered the volume of vehicles and allowed this free flow of buses that's made service reliable and predictable and consistent."

Turning the corner, Salkin points out vehicles parked on the curb of Dey Street, which he calls a "backdoor street" because it's the primary loading area for Century 21 and the Millenium Hotel. Streets like Dey put Salkin in a tough position. He believes "backdoors" are fundamental to New York -- a city dependent on commerce and the exchange of goods -- but he also wants to prevent illegal parking and street use.

Illegal double-parking is a sign that better street engineering is needed

We turn the corner and soon reach the five-pointed intersection of Broadway, Park Row, and Ann Street, where Salkin revels in the timing of the traffic signals, watching as each green light successfully clears each lane of traffic. "One of my favorite things is that right now, this very moment, the city DOT is telling New Yorkers to do something they don't want to do. The people who are in that car, they want to go through that intersection, and we're telling them they can't, and we're doing it with a red light. And they're not doing it!

"This is what I like: Everyone uses DOT. You're walking down the sidewalk, you're in a car, you're on a bike -- you're our client. And that means we're in charge of how you experience New York. Now, we do it really well in some places, and in some places it's really challenging. But what we're always asking is, 'What does this street need today and what will it need tomorrow?' I think we do a fair job. We can always do more, but at least we're at the table examining the city's needs in a fair way."

For more information on Lower Manhattan transportation, visit the  Get There and Get Around section of Lower Manhattan.info where you can get the latest news, traffic alerts, bus, subway and ferry information, take a virtual tour of Lower Manhattan, and more.