🚌 MTA & NYPD Quiet About Improving the Franklin and Fulton Bus Stop

🌟 Author’s Note

Hello and welcome to the 3 new subscribers of the Better Block Project, bringing our total group to 102 members working to improve Brooklyn. In early June, this group was only 39 people, so we’ve more than doubled in the past 4 months. It’s promising to see the engagement from everyone here 🥳

📣 Reminder: Mapping for Equity Event on Saturday, November 15th @ Herbert Von King Park

As we shared in our update last week, we’re 3 weeks away from our Mapping for Equity event with BetaNYC. The full details to register are here, hope to see you there!

🚌 MTA & NYPD Quiet About Improving the Franklin and Fulton Bus Stop

Last Sunday, I called the NYPD community officers to check in on progress of the lights at the Franklin and Fulton bus stop, as a way to deter illicit activity. If you remember, in our meeting with public officials and NYPD on September 3rd, almost 2 months ago, we were promised the lights would go up later that week. The lights are still not there, so I called again to check in on the status. I received a voicemail and left a message, understandably because it was a Sunday. I called again on Monday, and also received a voicemail and left another message. I called again Thursday and once more Friday. Unfortunately, I still haven’t heard back on next steps.

Separately, when we did our original walk, our elected officials offered to reach out to the MTA to see if they could take down or modify the bus stop on Franklin and Fulton. We heard back that the MTA was evaluating the situation, and would get back to us with a decision. Over a month later, we haven’t received a decision or update from the MTA on what they plan to do. I followed up again with City Council this week, but did not receive a reply to my email. I walked by the bus stop twice in the last week, and the situation is similar to how it has always been. The MTA still has storage in front of the bus stop, permitted through the end of November. I peaked inside to see what they were using the space for, but it is largely empty and there is trash accumulating around the location from lack of maintenance.

It’s disappointing there has been limited progress on the bus stop, especially since we had more than 15 city and state officials observe the problem and promise action almost 2 months ago. However, for those who have followed Better Block, you’ll know this is somewhat of the norm when interacting with New York City government. Most of my outreach goes without a reply, and only after many persistent follow ups and sometimes chasing people down in person, are you able to get any results.

🧑‍⚖️ What Does this Mean for NYC Government’s Ability to Solve Problems?

It’s made me reflect on the ability of our New York City government to actually solve these problems in our community. In the case of the bus stop, despite active engagement from elected officials and promises from city agencies, the problem today remains unsolved. It’s a similar story with the vacant property we’ve tried to improve on 1105 Fulton. It’s been more than a year and a half since we started to advocate to improve the property, and I walked by on Saturday to check in on the progress. The demolition that was ordered has not happened yet and there was a wealth of trash under the scaffolding on the property. Despite good intentions and many follow ups, the property still remains a blight in the neighborhood.

I don’t think this means our city government is doing nothing. If you look at a longer time scale and focus purely on public safety, New York is safer than it was 25 years ago. See below a snapshot of citywide crime data that NYPD publishes here.

I will note, it’s odd they publish this data in 3 and 5 year increments in the 1990s, but then leave a 24 year gap in the 2000s 🫠. It suggests there is a story they are trying to tell with this information of significant progress, when in reality actually very limited progress has happened recently.

I think the core takeaway is that for the city to solve a problem, at least with our current leadership, it takes many years for it to be solved. If I compare that to our efforts to remove a Wasp Nest from a city tree, when we decided to take the initiative to solve the problem ourselves, we were able to get it resolved in less than 1 day. For Better Block, the implication is we’re going to aim to get creative to try to address more of these issues ourselves, where possible, to see progress faster. In the long term, it’s important to us that we advocate for smarter policies to address issues, and for the city government to be more functional to address issues in our community faster. However, in the short term, for me it’s more important that we drive outcomes and just improve our neighborhood.

⏳ Progress on the other problems we’re working on

• 🏠️ Improving Vacant Buildings on Fulton, Jefferson and Macon: Our primary focus is advocating with city officials to develop policy to ensure better compliance from landlords and developers on maintenance of their properties. We’re in active discussions with multiple City Council offices and will report back as we make progress

• 🧹 Cleaning up Trash on Fulton Street: For our budget request to improve the street, we’re aiming to focus on increased containerization on Fulton Street through more large city bins. Given this is a one time expense, we think it’s attainable to get the budget for this and we believe it will truly solve the issue. We’re following up with the Bed Stuy BID to work with them on this request

That’s all for this week’s update. As always, if you like what we’re doing here at the Better Block Project, forward this to someone else you know who wants to do more work in the community!

See you next week,

David