Patrick McGeehan

Hoboken was the first city in New Jersey to allow riders to rent motorized, two-wheeled scooters, joining a long list of cities that have embraced them in the past few years, including San Francisco, Chicago, Paris, Sydney and Barcelona, Spain.

The scooters have been a big hit in many places because they offer an inexpensive alternative on congested streets and can be picked up and dropped off on almost any block.

But they have also drawn increasing criticism about the recklessness of some riders. And there have been complaints that the scooters are carelessly tossed aside on sidewalks, parks, plazas and even lawns.

In Hoboken, the problem has gotten so bad that the city has had to hire two officers whose job is to police unruly riders. Some riders have even been caught scootering while drunk.

“The rollout in some cities has been rocky,” said Steven Pedigo, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. “We’ve had safety issues. We’ve had too many scooters in some cities.”

But if managed well, he added, scooter-sharing programs can reduce car traffic and help solve the “mobility crisis” that many cities are facing.

In Hoboken, the scooters are so coveted that commuters line up to claim them on weekday evenings. Residents returning from work in Manhattan simply point their smartphones at a scooter to unlock it, hop on and slip into street traffic at speeds of up to 18 mph. Each ride costs $1 plus 15 cents a minute.

But not all of the riders obey the rules. The scooters are intended to be parked out of the way of pedestrians and other traffic, but can be left practically anywhere. Some users break the rules by riding on sidewalks or after patronizing the bars and clubs that make Hoboken a hot spot for nighttime revelers.

On a recent weekend, the Hoboken police charged a 34-year-old woman from Jersey City with scootering while intoxicated. A few days before that, they arrested a 26-year-old scooter rider after she collided with a car and fell to the ground. A breath test showed that her blood-alcohol content was twice the legal limit, police said.

That was the third time the Hoboken Police Department had arrested someone for riding a scooter while drunk, Chief Kenneth F. Ferrante said, adding that offenders “face the same penalties as if they were operating a car.”

To take some of the burden off police, Hoboken hired two “micromobility code enforcement officers” who can ticket scooter riders for failing to obey traffic laws, said Ryan Sharp, the city’s director of transportation and parking.

The money to pay the officers will come from a revenue-sharing deal the city struck this summer with Lime, the company operating the scooter system.

Hoboken authorized the scooters as a six-month pilot program. The city has hired a consultant to assess the program, which ends in late November.

“Over the next four weeks or so, we’ll be figuring out how we want to proceed,” Sharp said. “All options are on the table.”

Hoboken is an ideal candidate for a scooter program, Sharp said, because 60% of its residents commute to work, mostly by train or ferry from Hoboken Terminal. Practically all of them live within one and a half miles of the terminal.

But Janna Chernetz, the deputy director of Tri-State Transportation Campaign, says many cities are suitable for scooters if their residents and elected officials see them as a legitimate form of transportation, not just vehicles for joy rides. “It’s a cultural mind-set change that you need to share the road,” Chernetz said.

Lime, which has scooters in cities around the world, is the exclusive provider in Hoboken. The pilot program started with a second provider, Ojo, but the city dropped it in September after a 13-year-old boy crashed one of the company’s scooters into a woman who was pushing her 3-month-old son in a stroller on a sidewalk.

The woman, Kate Cohen, testified at a City Council meeting that neither she nor her baby was seriously injured. “I am so lucky that this wasn’t more serious, but I am haunted by the potential risk that remains,” she said.

Cohen did not call for a ban on the scooters, but said the city needed to do more to enforce the rules, including a prohibition against riders under the age of 18.

At that meeting, the council voted to ban the scooters from parks and the Hudson River waterfront, limiting their use to roadways and bike lanes.

In some cities, the reaction to scooters has been more drastic. In June, Nashville’s mayor abruptly ended a pilot program that involved Lime and several other scooter providers, including the ride-sharing companies Uber and Lyft, after a rider who had been drinking was killed in a collision with a car.

In an August letter to the Metropolitan Council, the legislative body for the consolidated city-county government in Nashville, Mayor David Briley, a Democrat, wrote that the safety of residents, workers and visitors “remains at risk with more than 2,000 scooters still zipping through our streets and littered across our sidewalks.” But the council voted against banning scooters altogether, deciding instead to reduce each company’s fleet by half.

In New York, lawmakers in Albany passed a bill this year that would legalize electric-powered bikes and scooters, with one notable exception. The bill singled out Manhattan as the only place in the state where scooters would not be legal. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has not yet signed it into law, so New York City has not yet authorized their use in any of its other four boroughs.

“New York City is one of the places that, without the prohibition, the companies would have launched in long ago,” said Juan Matute, the deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “It has density, the ability to pay, a preponderance of short trips. And people are looking for an alternative to the subway.”

In the meantime, New Yorkers who want to try a rental scooter would have to cross the Hudson to Hoboken, Asbury Park or one of a few other places in New Jersey where they are available.

Despite the accidents and arrests in Hoboken, the scooters have been firmly embraced. On a recent weeknight, commuters leaving the PATH train station at the south end of the city waited impatiently as two young men unloaded 73 Lime scooters from a packed van. Within minutes, all but a few were gone.

Phil Jones, a senior director for government relations at Lime, said more than 30,000 users had taken a total of more than 500,000 rides on the company’s scooters in Hoboken in five months. Lime started out with 250 scooters there in May and now has more than 300 in Hoboken, a compact city with about 50,000 residents.

Jones said Lime had canceled the accounts of more than 500 people for violations of its rules, such as allowing children to ride or carrying passengers. Others have been warned or fined for lesser offenses, he said.

“We try to give everyone a chance to correct their behavior,” he said.

One regular rider, David Polinchock, said he was annoyed when he saw others riding scooters on the sidewalks.

“What Hoboken did really, really well for us is they put in the bike lanes first,” Polinchock said. “I get frustrated when I see people zipping down the sidewalk next to the bike lane.”

A former Brooklyn resident who used to bike to work in Manhattan, Polinchock said riding scooters in Hoboken was low-risk by comparison. “I got doored, I got cut off, there were potholes galore,” he said, rattling off the hazards of biking on the streets of New York.

Now living in Bloomfield, New Jersey, he rides the scooters between Hoboken Terminal and his office on the border of Jersey City, an inexpensive way to shorten his daily commute.

But, he added, not every city can handle them.

Polinchock described the harrowing scooter rides he took this summer while he was in downtown Los Angeles for a conference, and said he couldn’t imagine the vehicles ever making sense in Manhattan.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said of the notion.

This article originally appeared in

Riding While Drunk and Other Dangers of the Electric Scooter Craze

A new state law may soon bring electric scooters to the streets of New York City. But a mile away in New Jersey, Hoboken already offers a test case of the promises and the perils of the electric vehicles, which have taken hold across the world.

Their train, New Jersey Coast Line 2606, which is supposed to depart at 7:06 a.m., had been canceled. Again.

This time — the 18th cancellation of the year — the official explanation was “equipment availability resulting from a mechanical issue.” But these aggrieved riders in Middletown did not seem to care. They had heard all the excuses the railroad had to offer. All that really mattered was that they were not getting to work on time. Again.

This is the plight of the hundreds of people who depend on what just may be the worst commuter train in America. The railroad they ride, New Jersey Transit, has been plagued for the last two years by a rash of cancellations.

While a few other trains New Jersey Transit operates were canceled more often during the first six months of the year, they were either evening trains or morning trains on busier lines. Those riders had better alternatives.

The regulars on the 2606 had no such luck.

The next train making the same trip would reach Hoboken Terminal almost an hour later, an eternity in the grinding, daily race to work. By then, it would be 9:17 a.m., at best, and all hope of making the morning meeting or being ready when the financial markets opened would be lost.

Instead, many of them would catch the first train that came and transfer somewhere — maybe in two places — to get close to their destinations as early as possible.

Nick Giovine knows that drill. He lives in Middletown and dreams of being a regular on the 2606 to get to his job. But he lost faith many months ago.

After New Jersey Transit started canceling trains with frustrating frequency last year, Giovine persuaded his boss to let him skip the commute one day a week — and quit giving $317 to the railroad 12 times a year.

“I’ve stopped buying a monthly pass because the service is so unreliable,” Giovine, 31, said. “Luckily, my boss is allowing me to work from home once a week to help with the stress of commuting.”

Another rider from Middletown, Kelly Farmer, said this week that she had abandoned the 2606 for a later train, in part because it had been so unreliable. Her new train, which leaves an hour later, has “definitely been more reliable,” Farmer said. “Though, I hope I didn’t just jinx it.”

Reliability is supposed to be the hallmark of commuter railroads. They may not offer the comforts of an Amtrak cross-country excursion, but they are expected to perform the prosaic duty of transporting people to work and home again.

For a couple years now, New Jersey Transit has consistently failed in that mission. It has been plagued by cancellations and suspensions of service, most of which its executives blamed on a rush to install safety equipment and a shortage of engineers to drive trains.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy has promised to fix the railroad since before he was elected in 2017. But in the first six months of 2019, New Jersey Transit canceled more than 1,300 trains — more than 50 a week — according to a New York Times analysis of the agency’s reports on social media.

The disruption has been spread across the railroad’s 12 lines, but it has not been spread evenly. The Times’ analysis found that six different trains were canceled at least 15 times from January through June.

Other major commuter railroads did not approach such a level of futility. Neither Metro-North Railroad, which serves the suburbs north of New York, or the Long Island Rail Road canceled a train more than eight times during the first six months of the year, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Metra, another large commuter railroad that serves Chicago, had only one train canceled as many as five times in the same period, said Michael Gillis, a spokesman for Metra. And most cancellations there are caused by winter weather, he said.

Giovine, 31, and his fellow travelers on the 2606 arguably have suffered the most. The 2606 was only the third most-canceled on the Coast Line, which runs along the New Jersey Shore. But the top two, Trains 3513 and 3514, are evening trains.

As most regular commuters would testify, having your evening train canceled — particularly if it departs from busy Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan as the 3513 does — is not comparable to having your morning train canceled.

When New Jersey Transit cancels the 3513, which is scheduled to depart Penn Station at 5:25 p.m., it often directs passengers to a train leaving just eight minutes later. The delay is less of a headache than the crowding of two trainfuls of passengers onto one.

Middletown, a coastal suburb about a 45-mile drive from New York City, has thousands of residents who commute to Manhattan and North Jersey, many of whom work in finance and other white-collar industries.

George Dugan, who has lived in Middletown, New Jersey, for 20 years, pays $450 a month to commute to his finance job in Manhattan. But he has no expectation of reliable service.

“My sense is that New Jersey Transit is doing the best that they can,” Dugan said one evening in August as he ate a slice of plain pizza at Don Pepi’s in Penn Station while he waited for his train home. “I’m kind of resigned to it.”

Dugan said he was not usually in any hurry to get home. He usually eats dinner (Penn Station pizza) and breakfast (a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) on the trains.

Amanda DeWan does not have that sort of leeway. She has to pick her children up by 6 p.m. or pay a caretaker penalty of $1 per minute, she said.

“I would look way more stressed than this if my train was canceled on the way home,” DeWan said as she coped with the cancellation of the 2606 she had intended to ride to a 9:15 a.m. meeting in lower Manhattan.

Instead, she boarded the next train at 7:27 a.m. and rode it as far as Secaucus, where she had to cross over to another platform to catch a train to Hoboken. From there, she planned to hop on a ferry to reach her destination near the World Trade Center.

By then, it almost surely would be past the scheduled start of her meeting.

New Jersey Transit officials admit that the railroad’s reliability dropped off in May after appearing to be on the rise for a few months. But they said it had improved markedly from last year, when the system was plagued by cancellations even after service was cut back and, in some places, suspended altogether.

The railroad had 28% fewer cancellations from January to July of this year than in the same period last year, said Nancy Snyder, a spokeswoman for New Jersey Transit. She added that nearly 92% of its trains ran on time in August, up from about 90% in August 2018.

“We recognize the impact that canceling just one train has on our customers when it happens to be your train,” Snyder said. “When we have to make the difficult decision to cancel a train for any reason, we strategically select a train that will have the least impact to customers and provides the customer with the best alternative.”

New Jersey Transit’s executive director, Kevin Corbett, has repeatedly joined Murphy in promising that the railroad’s performance will improve dramatically starting in 2020. By then, several classes will have completed training to become engineers, alleviating the shortage of train operators that has caused many of the cancellations, Corbett said.

But what transit officials say they intend to do is of no help to riders dealing with another morning with no 2606 to ride.

One of them, a commuter for 20 years who declined to give his name, was still steaming about two recent cancellations of his usual train home when he got to Middletown to find there would be no 2606 that day.

“If this was running right, I would get in at a quarter to 9,” he said. “Now I get in at 9:30.”

Giovine has been chronicling the cancellations of Train 2606 since last year on Twitter.

Giovine said he had thought the cancellations would abate after New Jersey Transit officials announced that they had met a Dec. 31 deadline to install equipment for an automatic-braking system, known as Positive Train Control, on all of the trains.

But the new year started off even worse. By his count, the 2606 was canceled on the first three workdays of 2019. Then, after reappearing on Monday, Jan. 7, it was canceled every other day that week.

By then, Giovine said, he was checking the New Jersey Transit app on his phone before getting out of bed at 6:10 a.m. Early notice of a cancellation would allow him to consider his options: dashing for an earlier train or preparing for a late arrival at work in Jersey City.

“My boss understands the train issues” and is lenient about arrival time, Giovine said. “She gets it.”

Giovine said he had received no responses from New Jersey Transit to his tweets, but that the service improved and the 2606 ran regularly for a few months.

Then, as summer approached, cancellations came more frequently and perceptions of progress at the railroad crumbled.

“It’s actually gotten worse,” Giovine said of the railroad’s performance since Murphy took office.

Giovine had advice for anybody considering a long train commute aboard New Jersey Transit.

“I’d really think about that long and hard,” he said. Then, he added, “I’d move somewhere closer.”

We Found the Very Worst Commuter Train in America

MIDDLETOWN, N.J. — It was only 7 a.m., but for the commuters stewing inside a Spartan train station in this bedroom community, the day was already off to a predictably bad start.

One of those neonatal intensive care nurses, Shanna Murphy, says she has not forgotten the new mother who got upset when she felt her crying infant was being ignored. Murphy, 28, said she wanted to soothe the baby, but she had her hands full with another patient whose condition had become unstable and required near-constant monitoring.

“I’m often put in a situation where I’m having to choose between patients and not able to fully support my families,” Murphy said. “We have a family-centered care model, but I cannot do that under these current conditions.”

Now, she and more than 10,000 nurses are demanding a sharp increase in their ranks at three of the city’s biggest hospital systems — Mount Sinai, NewYork-Presbyterian and Montefiore. Their union, the New York State Nurses Association, has threatened to strike over staffing levels, an issue that has become an increasing source of contention at hospitals around the country.

Last year, staffing disputes were a central topic when nurses in five states picketed and threatened to strike hospitals operated by HCA, one of the country’s largest health care providers. In Vermont last year, hundreds of nurses walked out while demanding increases in staffing.

“It’s one of those issues that you could get a fistfight started in a room full of nurses around,” said Sean Clarke, executive vice dean of the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing.

Nurses and their unions often cite as a model the rules California adopted 20 years ago, which require hospitals to maintain prescribed ratios of nurses to patients in each treatment unit. No other state has imposed staffing levels, though Massachusetts requires intensive care units to have at least one nurse for every two patients, Clarke said.

Last fall, voters in Massachusetts overwhelmingly rejected a ballot question about placing broader limits on how many patients nurses could be assigned to care for after the hospital industry mounted an intense campaign against it. That was the first statewide vote anywhere on the issue, Clarke said.

In New York, the three hospital systems, negotiating collectively as the New York City Hospital Alliance, have refused to agree to ratios or other limits on nurses’ workloads. Executives of the hospitals prefer a more fluid approach to allocating nurses based on the needs of patients at any given time. The alliance claims that the three systems have added 2,000 nurses over the past four years.

“Our hospitals have been recognized time and again as among the highest-quality institutions in the nation, proving our approach to staffing works,” Linden Zakula, a spokesman for the alliance, said. “Rigid, inflexible staffing ratios are unnecessary and do not work, because they override the professional judgment of our nurses and crowd out other important care team members.”

Negotiators for the hospitals recently offered $50 million toward the hiring of more nurses, a move that spurred the union to postpone a strike date that had been set for Tuesday. Though negotiations have resumed, the two sides remain far apart. The union, however, has not set a new strike date.

Staffing decisions should not be reduced to a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to something as complicated as health care, hospital industry officials said.

“No two hospitals are alike,” said Lorraine Ryan, a senior vice president of the Greater New York Hospital Association. “Staffing decisions need to be made by nursing professionals based on patient acuity, the experiences and competencies of the nursing team delivering direct patient care, and other demands on the care-delivery team.”

But the nurses said the alliance’s offer was far from sufficient to yield enough staff members to provide proper care in all areas of the hospitals. Karine Raymond, a nurse in the cardiac catheterization lab at a Montefiore hospital in the Bronx and a negotiator for the union, said each of the three hospital systems needs at least 300 to 400 additional nurses.

Murphy said the neonatal unit she works in, which is part of the NewYork-Presbyterian system, should have about 30 nurses on duty — one for every newborn whose condition is unstable and one for every two who are “getting ready to go home” — but often has only about 25.

“We’re almost drive-by nursing,” Raymond said, adding that nurses want to “actually sit with our patients and spend time with our patients and their families.”

Anthony Ciampi, a cardiac telemetry nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian and a vice president of the union, said nurses sometimes have to care for as many as 15 patients at a time. “That’s not fair and it makes no sense,” he said.

Patients notice how short-staffed the hospitals are “when they hit the call bell and nobody comes,” Ciampi said.

The union has been campaigning for years for what it calls “safe staffing.” It cites a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2002 that found that the likelihood of a patient dying in a hospital rose by 7 percent when the average number of patients assigned to each nurse there increased by one.

Still, Clarke, who was a co-author of that study, said it remained a matter of debate whether the benefits of minimum staffing levels, unit by unit, are worth the costs to hospitals.

In California, hospitals are allowed to assign nurses as many as four patients in emergency rooms and some units where patients’ illnesses are not so acute, but as few as one or two in operating rooms and intensive care units.

The 2018 ballot question in Massachusetts would have set similar ratios. It was supported by many Democratic officials, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. But it was opposed by the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association, which was armed with an independent study that concluded the changes would add as much as $949 million to health care costs in the state.

The New York State Nurses Association points to the rising income of hospitals in California as proof that the ratios did not bring about the financial doom that some opponents had forecast. No California hospitals went bankrupt or closed because of the mandate, the association said. Higher levels of staffing also reduced nurses’ injuries and burnout, cutting down turnover and the costs associated with replacing experienced nurses, the union added.

Raymond said that after no progress was made on the issue at a recent negotiating session, some nurses felt they had been “hoodwinked” by the alliance. Those nurses argued that the union should have stuck to its threat to strike while continuing to try to reach a deal, she said.

Both sides said neither pay nor benefits were sticking points in the talks.

If the nurses were to walk out, the hospitals would have to bring in thousands of replacements from around the country at a cost of several million dollars. In a letter to their chief executives, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and several other council members urged the hospitals not to let the impasse reach the point of a “reckless and needless shutdown of our hospitals.”

The letter said the staffing agencies that would provide the replacements were “ill-equipped and not competent” to provide adequate care. “More patients will die and more patients will suffer needless adverse health effects,” it concluded.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/nyregion/nyc-nurses-strike.html" id="c6460f71-cd7c-358b-ae4f-c8557bc1b44a">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — At Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in New York City, the 58 tiny beds for sick newborns are almost always filled. But nurses who work there say there are often too few of them to provide all the care the babies, and their worried families, need.

Patients 'Hit the Call Bell and Nobody Comes.' Hospital Nurses Demand 'Safe Staffing' Levels.

But as the seventh hurricane season since then approaches, the city is relying on something more modest as the first line of defense against another inundation of Manhattan: a row of glorified sandbags.

In the next few months, the city’s Office of Emergency Management plans to oversee the installation of 4-foot-tall sacks of soil along the East River esplanade, from Wall Street to just north of the Brooklyn Bridge.

For up to five years, they essentially would form the only barrier to keep water from again rushing into the low-lying neighborhoods around the South Street Seaport.

City officials say they are a temporary step while permanent solutions to New York’s vulnerability to big storms are still being planned and debated.

But the barriers have already provoked derision.

“Six years of studying it and you come up with sandbags? Really?” said Marco Pasanella, whose family owns a 180-year-old building with a wine shop that faces the river on South Street. He said he felt no less vulnerable than he did on the night that Sandy flooded his shop and left the district without power for two weeks.

Along with the doubts about their effectiveness, the barriers have also been panned as unsightly interlopers along a stretch of waterfront popular with pedestrians and bicyclists — one woman called them “atrocities.”

They will cover only about one mile of the waterfront, leaving the area below Wall Street unprotected, possibly for another decade or longer.

Officials have admitted that they do not have a plan for protecting much of the financial district, which is home to about 100,000 people and accounts for one of every 10 jobs in the city.

They have concluded that Lower Manhattan is simply too congested, with 18 subway lines and a tangle of utilities running beneath its warren of narrow streets, for land-based defenses like fences that flip up from the ground.

Instead, they have a more ambitious vision and have begun planning to extend the shoreline of the island into the water to serve as a bulwark against rising sea levels and storm surges.

But making more of Manhattan will take a lot of time and money. In the meantime, the financial district will rely on a combination of commercial products that are typically used as temporary protections against flooding that look like they come from Home Depot: Hesco barriers and plastic tubes known as Tiger Dams.

The barriers are wire-mesh frames that can be filled with sand or gravel and linked together to form a low wall. They have been used to hold back raging rivers in many parts of the country, but emergency management officials said they were not aware of any other city using them in the way New York is.

“We’re in the Wild West of adaptation where it’s like anything goes,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president for energy and environment at the Regional Plan Association. “It comes down to the need to do something soon. Sometimes that looks a little uglier than the visions that are laid out.”

The city installed similar barriers in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn and Astoria in Queens, where they either abut buildings or are tucked against or behind fences.

In Manhattan, however, they would stick up prominently between a busy street and the promenade. After being set up, they would eventually be decorated by artists in a process city officials call “beautification.”

Not everyone who has beheld them agrees.

“I saw the barriers in Red Hook, and they are not attractive,” said Catherine McVay Hughes, a former chairwoman of Community Board 1, which encompasses the financial district and the seaport. “They’re not contextual with the South Street Seaport.”

The barriers would be “atrocities,” said Alice Blank, a Tribeca resident who heard city officials present their plans to the community board at a recent meeting. “I guess what they were saying is, we’re going to put down these unsightly blocks and we’re going to paint them in the fall.”

City officials said the barriers can last up to five years and are worthy stopgap measures. “Our goal is to bridge the gap between the current hazard and permanent mitigation,” said Benjamin Krakauer, an assistant commissioner at the Office of Emergency Management.

While they seem like a makeshift solution to protecting urban centers, New York is not the only city to deploy them — other cities, including New Orleans and Los Angeles, have also used the barriers as temporary fortifications.

They filled gaps in levees in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina approached in 2005. In Los Angeles, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers installed a 3-mile line of them on a bank of the Los Angeles River out of concern about flooding from El Niño storms in 2016.

But after complaints from cyclists and equestrians about the barriers blocking access to a bike path and horse-riding trails, the Corps removed many of them after the El Niño threat had passed.

Other coastal cities facing similar challenges to New York, however, have opted not to use the barriers.

In Charleston, South Carolina, where flood prevention is a top priority, Mayor John J. Tecklenburg said the city plans to raise its sea wall by 3 feet and fit it with tracks for glass plates that could add an additional 2 1/2 feet.

But, the city’s chief resilience officer, Mark Wilbert, said the city had not turned to Hesco barriers because “there’s got to be a start and a stop on them, and where it stops the water will come around.”

In Lower Manhattan, the stopping point will be Wall Street. The barrier wall will start just north of the Brooklyn Bridge at Catherine Slip and extend nearly a mile to Wall Street.

Along the way, there will be about 18 gaps, mostly for pedestrian access to the riverfront. When a storm threatens, the Tiger Dams will be moved from storage in Brooklyn and filled with water to cover the gaps, Krakauer said.

That makeshift wall would not hold back a storm like Sandy, whose surge rose 6 1/2 feet as it swamped the historic Seaport district and destroyed one of its main attractions, Pier 17. But city officials told the community board that there had not been a storm since that would have triggered the deployment of the Tiger Dams.

In other areas of Lower Manhattan, the city’s Economic Development Corp. identified different ways of defending against big storms, at a cost of about $500 million.

Planning is underway for the installation of gates that would flip up along the esplanade north of the Brooklyn Bridge and attach to the underside of the elevated Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Along the Battery and in Battery Park City, esplanades would be raised.

But Elijah Hutchinson, vice president for resilience at the development corporation, said in a recent presentation that for the seaport and the financial district, “we don’t have a plan.”

City officials are embarking on the more sweeping plan of extending the shoreline of Lower Manhattan by as much as 500 feet, a project that Mayor Bill de Blasio said could cost $10 billion and would take at least six years to complete.

The city hopes to hire a team to design that extension by fall. But with no source of funding identified for the project, the plan could involve allowing developers to build on the landfill to help pay for it, city officials said.

Until then, a big section of the Lower Manhattan waterfront will not have so much as a row of big sandbags to protect it, a void that has left downtown residents and merchants feeling vulnerable, Hughes, the former community board chairwoman, said.

“Clearly, this interim plan has a big gap between Wall Street and the Battery,” she said, “and that gap also needs to be addressed.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/nyregion/hurricane-sandy-manhattan-flooding.html" id="f3290fd7-405c-3fa1-a917-9d6e3ce9e39b">The New York Times</a>.

Sandbags Will Be First Line of Defense Against Storm Surges

NEW YORK — After Hurricane Sandy devastated New York in 2012, city officials considered some drastic responses to storm surges, like long concrete sea walls and tall earthen berms.

The company already has been producing some of its most popular shows, including “Orange Is the New Black” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” in Queens and Brooklyn.

The proposed expansion would build on New York’s growing role in the booming business of film and television production. Soundstages have opened up in previously industrial sections of Brooklyn and Queens, and even on Staten Island, fueled in part by the state’s program of production credits, which offers savings on production costs incurred in New York.

“New York has created a film-friendly environment that’s home to some of the best creative and executive talent in the world, and we’re excited to provide a place for them at Netflix with our production hub,” said Jason Hariton, the company’s director of worldwide studio operations and real estate.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in a statement, said Netflix, which has 32 employees in Manhattan, planned to add “127 high-paying executive content, marketing and production development jobs” to that count over the next five years in an expanded executive production office in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. If Netflix creates those jobs and retains them through 2029, it could receive $4 million in Excelsior Jobs Program tax credits through the Empire State Development agency.

The tax incentives offered to Netflix are under the same program that was used to lure Amazon to build a campus in Long Island City, Queens. Amazon, which would have saved roughly $3 billion compared to the $4 million in credits Netflix is eligible to receive, pulled out of the plan earlier this year.

Netflix’s proposed soundstages, which it would lease after they are built in a former warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, could hold “thousands of production crew jobs,” Cuomo said. The site is a 165,500-square-foot warehouse that was once a printing plant, which will be converted into soundstages and operated by Gold Coast Studios.

Netflix, which got its start by delivering movies on CDs by mail, has become a major player in video production. Based in Los Gatos, California, it is known for spending billions to fund new productions and to license original content. But it is still a newcomer to studio operations.

Unlike HBO, Netflix has had to rely on other production companies to create its originals. That changed in October 2018 when the company acquired its first studio, a New Mexico facility that was used to make big-budget films like the blockbuster “The Avengers.”

Last year, the streaming giant spent more than $8 billion on content, and it plans to spend more than $10 billion this year. A few years ago, Netflix made no original movies. As of 2019, it will make at least 55 original films annually — about twice as many as the most prolific of the traditional studios — including some with budgets as high as $200 million.

Exclusive films and TV series have become critical to fending off new competitors. AT&amp;T;, the Walt Disney Co., Apple, Amazon and even Facebook are spending more on digital video, the new battleground for audiences and advertising.

Netflix has historically relied on outside suppliers. For example, Lionsgate produces “Orange Is the New Black.” But now Netflix has shifted to making more of its own content, which requires stages. With all the streaming production, a shortage of soundstages exists in Los Angeles, and an under-tapped pool of creative people in New York are happy to fill the gap.

Economics are behind the shift — a lot of big studios are embedded within conglomerates that are ending relationships with Netflix as they funnel shows to their own streaming services. Netflix is also working to source more content from overseas studios.

“We’re proud Netflix chose New York to grow its business and we look forward to the jobs, economic activity and world-class productions this project will bring,” Cuomo said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/nyregion/netflix-new-york-brooklyn.html" id="16bb86b7-f63d-3bcc-ab8b-e97b58b87ad1">The New York Times</a>.

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The rush-hour collision occurred near the Westbury station, about 30 miles east of Manhattan, setting off fires that terrified passengers before they could escape. The authorities said that at least seven people on the trains were injured; the three people who were killed were in the car.

After the driver of the vehicle went around the gates, an eastbound train pulling out of the station struck the car, according to Phillip Eng, the president of the railroad.

Another train, traveling westbound, then crashed into the vehicle and pushed it down the tracks before the front two cars of the train derailed and collided with the concrete platform.

By late into the night, the westbound train still lay against the Westbury station’s platform, part of which had been knocked over.

On Wednesday, the LIRR continued to have extensive delays because of the crash. In an early-morning report, officials said the collision damaged 200 feet of third rail, as well as the platform at the Westbury station.

The two trains were together carrying about 900 passengers, and some offered a harrowing account of what happened.

“It was like a bad movie,” said Michelle Asprer of Hicksville, New York, a passenger in the second-to-last car on the eastbound train. “It was so scary.”

She said her train stopped after Westbury without explanation. “There was a whole line of cars” at the grade-level crossing where the train stopped, she said.

She said she heard a westbound train approaching and “making a funny noise.”

“It hit us,” she said. “It hit the last car” of the eastbound train, she said. “The people from the last car were running up, saying ‘Move up, move up because the last car is on fire.'”

A passenger on the westbound train, Mike Picarella, 36, was in the back of the train when, around 7:20 p.m., he heard “a little thump.” He said he didn’t think much of it, but seconds later, there was a second, bigger thump, he said.

“You knew something happened,” Picarella said. “The train stopped.”

Realizing their train had hit something, the passengers stood up and then looked out the window, where they saw another train. At first many wondered if they had hit it.

But there was a fire was raging, too, flames knifing up from underneath the train, halfway up the windows. On the ground below was half of a crumpled vehicle.

Within a minute of stopping, the train started filling up with smoke, Picarella said, and passengers were quickly moved to the front. Eventually, the doors were opened to let the smoke out, he said, and passengers could then see that a train car had peeled off the tracks.

Picarella, who is a maintenance manager for New York City Transit, praised the response of local emergency responders and police, who he said arrived within minutes of the crash and got people off the train quickly.

Rescuers could not immediately identify the vehicle or its passengers because the car was damaged so severely, said Commissioner Patrick Ryder of the Nassau County Police.

Eng said that the authorities often warned drivers about the dangers of trying to cross ahead of trains.

“You’re not only taking your own life into your hands, but you’re taking the lives of others into your own hands: our engineers, our conductors, our customers and anyone else along the local road. It’s unfortunate,” Eng said.

Eng added that Wednesday morning service would undoubtedly be affected.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a statement calling for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the State Police, local law enforcement and the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate the crash.

“As we continue to gather information surrounding the incident, my heart goes out to the victims and their loved ones,” Cuomo said.

Crashes at railroad crossings have occurred with surprising regularity in the New York region over the past decade, federal data show.

At the same time, the number of accidents and fatalities at these crossings has fallen nationally, as grade crossings have been eliminated and safety improvements made, according to safety groups.

In 2015, a crowded Metro-North train passing through Westchester County at the height of the evening rush slammed into a sport utility vehicle on the tracks at a crossing, killing seven people.

The crash in Westbury was the second fatal encounter on the railroad on Tuesday. At about 3:45 p.m., a westbound train struck and killed a pedestrian between the stations in Baldwin and Freeport, said Chris McKniff, a spokesman for the LIRR. That accident caused long delays for commuters who were trying to get home from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.

McKniff said service had been restored around 5:45 p.m., about an hour before the crash in Westbury.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/nyregion/lirr-train-collision-accident.html" id="1955bb82-1bac-3680-a92d-2019ed5f0174">The New York Times</a>.

LIRR Collision: 3 Killed as 2 Trains Crash Into Car in Westbury

NEW YORK — A railroad crossing in Nassau County turned into a chaotic disaster scene Tuesday night when two Long Island Rail Road trains traveling in opposite directions struck a car that had swerved around lowered gates and onto the tracks, killing three people.

Patrick McGeehan

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