Source: ZAG Daily

Dawn Miller, Senior Advisor to New York City’s Chief Climate Officer, has shared insights into how the city has achieved a 57% sustainable transport mode share, with residents relying on public transport, walking or cycling.

NYC’s achievements in enhancing uptake of sustainable transport are partly attributable to the city’s density, and the foundations already laid by previous generations through investments in public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure.

The role of policy and planning

Dawn expanded on policy decisions which take residents’ transport options and habits into consideration: “Like many large cities, we’re facing a housing crisis. Something our Department of City Planning spearheaded was a new zoning text amendment that allows more housing to be built in transit-rich areas. In certain neighbourhoods, we’ve eliminated or reduced the requirement to build a certain amount of car parking so now developers can build it if they want, or they can choose to build more housing units instead of the parking spaces. The plan is to concentrate housing growth in areas that enable people to easily use sustainable transport.”

Cycling and e-biking

Cycling has a key part to play in the city’s daily transport landscape, with over 600,000 trips made each day, and the number of trips having doubled between 2012 and 2022. Dawn delves into some of the reasons for this: “E-bikes have made cycling an incredibly efficient way to get around, especially for people who aren’t athletes but want to ride, and riders delivering goods in congested cities like NYC. You don’t have to deal with as much traffic and parking is easier than in a car. For businesses, cycling has opened up a workforce that doesn’t hold a driving license, but can complete the job on an e-bike or cargo bike. So the growth in e-commerce and the service economy has certainly fuelled the shift in attitude towards sustainable transport.”

Microhubs and battery swapping

As the service economy has shifted to greater numbers of deliveries, NYC is increasing microhub locations – areas where trucks can be offloaded to more sustainable, congestion-busing transport options such as cargo bikes and hand carts. This helps to not only reduce numbers of motor vehicles on the road, but avoids incidents of double-parking, which can impede not only traffic but also pedestrians and cyclists.

Dawn also outlined a battery swapping scheme. “We’ve also supported companies piloting and deploying safe charging and battery swapping stations for e-bike delivery riders. This was a reaction to battery fires across the city which gives delivery workers access to safe, certified batteries. It’s fundamentally a safety programme, but it also makes workers’ lives easier, and we’re very proud of this. The pilot went extremely well and now the companies involved are looking to expand across the city and scale the impact.”

Sustainable goods transport

Dawn expands on the wider sustainable transport plan. “We’re placing great focus on the sustainable movement of goods. One of the goals in our climate plan is simple: get polluting trucks off NYC streets. There’s often been more attention paid to passenger transport but freight is such a huge part of our economy and the transportation system. There’s also the Blue Highways programme we’re working on which aims to alleviate traffic by reopening the waterfront. NYC is a city of islands. We’ve increased the number of passenger ferries and are making land available to create docking facilities for freight so logistics companies don’t need to drive trucks through Manhattan or Staten Island. Instead, they can bring their goods via water.”

Read the full interview with New York City’s Senior Advisor to its Chief Climate Officer here.