By Joe Kusters
Jon Orcutt has been involved in policy advocacy in New York for more than years, working for and with groups such as Transportation Alternatives, Reinvent Albany, Bike New York, and Transit Center. He served as Director of Policy at the New York City Department of Transportation from 2007 to 2014, where he oversaw the development of a new NYC DOT strategic plan, led programs for street redesigns, and managed the creation of the Citi Bike system.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
UR: Thanks for agreeing to do this Jon! To start off, do you want to briefly tell me about what your background is, what brought you to New York in the first place?
Orcutt: I grew up in the Boston area, went to college in Maine. I came here to go to grad school and I was studying a mix of things, like economics, history, and I was looking at the history of social movements. At the same time, I got involved with Transportation Alternatives (TA), which was kind of redeveloping itself after a decade in the wilderness and that was just much more interesting to me than studying social movements. So I got involved with that and bailed on grad school. I started working there part time in 1988 and worked there for about five or six years. Helped to launch the Tri-State Transportation campaign which got involved in fighting highways around the region and fighting for transit versus highway budgets, and worked there for quite a while and saw some interesting stuff, and some nascent changes. And got to know Janette Sadik-Khan through both of those jobs, and in the various places she worked including City Hall and the Clinton Administration in the US DOT.
Then when she became the commissioner in 2007, we had been in close touch, so she hired me to come into DOT and my job was Policy Director. I worked for Janette until (NYC Mayor Michael) Bloomberg left office in 2013 and then stayed around for six or seven months under (Mayor Bill) de Blasio. I was kind of tired by then so (I) decided it was time to get out. So I’ve been doing different things. I worked for Transit Center which is a foundation which is trying to bring back some sense of momentum to transit policy in the US which is at a pretty low ebb compared to the rest of the world. I’ve done some consulting between things here and there, I worked for Bike New York running advocacy practice and I’m working for Reinvent Albany on state and regional city transportation things. After DOT I did some stuff around the country and the world. After the Bloomberg admin we were kind of in demand.
UR: What was in demand after the Bloomberg admin?
Orcutt: Even while we were there, pedestrianizing Time Square was a huge global story. We didn’t have anything like the parking protected bike lanes that are all over NY like we do now until we did it on Ninth Ave in 2007. To the extent we were doing anything on bikes before 2007 it was very much advocacy led and very begrudging by the city. It flipped very much to be the official policy and government led.
UR: When you say it was flipped to being official policy, how much of that was Janette’s work and her putting people in who wanted to do this work?
Orcutt: It was a thousand percent that. Having people who wanted to try things and who want to innovate, and who realize how far behind we are on so much of this stuff from the rest of the world makes all the difference.
UR: How much in the Transportation Alternatives and Transit Center stuff is the focus on multi-modal? How much of the things that you have been focusing on are more than just finishing the network but looking at last mile stuff, like Citi Bike as a last mile connector?
Orcutt: I think one of the other great things about a city like New York, which attracts great people and is really big, is that we have a really good ecosystem of people talking about this stuff. So TA has had a very multi-sided agenda for a very long time and different groups fill different niches. The group Open Plans has some of the best thinkers about public space right now, which is something that got lost in the de Blasio’s admin overwhelming focus on safety, and you can engineer safety but that doesn’t mean it will be a great place. With Janette and in the Bloomberg years we really tried to put all those things together.
When I was at TA, it was like the dark ages out on the streets, and one of the reasons it got turned around was because we got organized and looked at data and publicized stuff. This city was killing 700 people a year on its streets in 1990, an insane number; 364 pedestrians got killed in 1990, one a day. It’s not great now but it was horrific then. Just starting to point that out and starting to get press themes like the “Boulevard of Death” applied to Queen’s Boulevard, which was just a massive set of crash clusters back then because of the way it had been set up. It had been allowed to become a highway in dense neighborhoods. But we started to see the (Mayor David) Dinkins administration respond and say “yeah this is not okay” and started driving traffic deaths down by finding low hanging fruit they could fix.
They started introducing new ideas like traffic calming and they started planning the first new bike lane in Manhattan since the Ed Koch debacle around Sixth Avenue back in 1980. It was finally implemented on Lafayette Street by the (Mayor Rudy) Giuliani admin but the Dinkins people developed it, and then you know Giuliani got elected. And the whole work became very different, it became less like trying to get city government to try something and much more agenda building until we got an opening again, which wouldn’t be for eight years, or even longer because when Bloomberg got elected the overwhelming focus would be on rebuilding Lower Manhattan after 9/11.
UR: When you think of the advocacy work you’ve done and are continuing to do, how much of it is trying to persuade the people currently in power versus getting set up and ready for when someone you actually want in power is in power?
Orcutt: Depends where you are in the cycle of things. I had a lot of meetings with (Mayor Eric) Adams’ transition people, and there was a bit of that Nixon to China hope, where here’s a guy who’s a cyclist and a former police officer, could we start getting some law enforcement back on city streets? Turns out the answer is no. He’s not going to tell the cops to do anything they don’t want to do. So you know, you try. I’ve asked the DOT and even the MTA to develop a new program around biking to transit, because a) we need to rebuild transit ridership, and b) there’s a lot when you get further out in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx where the subway station is a ways away from a lot of people, and we have a bike program and we have a big transit system, and you know a lot of places plan them together because that’s the ultimate sustainable transportation. You get the door to door beauty of biking and the speed of rail transit, it’s not terribly difficult. But so far we haven’t seen that, and I want to see that become a program, the way Select Bus is a joint DOT-MTA program.
UR: That program being something like Citi Bike being used for last mile trips?
Orcutt: Yeah, I mean Citi Bike is kind of the way the city’s done actual good work on that. You don’t always have a Citi Bike at hand the second you step out of the subway but they’re pretty close to most subways. And to the extent that they’re not, it’s because the pedestrian volume is such that you can’t just stick it on the sidewalk. But no, I’m talking more about like further out in Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx where there is no Citi Bike, or where you don’t necessarily need a Citi Bike to ride once per day to the train station like the Port Washington line in Queens, or from the eastern and southern ends of the Canarsie Line or the A train. You could do big bike and ride stations there, and we do have good examples of stations like that here in the US, just not in New York.
UR: If you could go back and tell yourself as you were just starting in advocacy and reform, what would be your top pieces of advice for yourself all the way back then?
Orcutt: I don’t know, that’s a good question. A lot of this ability to think about logically or in frameworks comes in hindsight. We were just kind of throwing ourselves at the wheel in the late 80s and early 90s. We developed a pretty good repertoire, where we laid out an agenda, TA still has this document called the Bicycle Blueprint, published in 1993, and if you look in there, a lot of this stuff has gotten down on city streets which is very cool. And we had a vision for what the city should be, but we picked off a lot of issues that were winnable at a very small scale, and the amount of stuff that was winnable then expanded in time by making noise about it and learning how to use the ecosystem of elected officials, and the media, and the administration. But I think it’s that. You need to understand where you are.
Joe Kusters is pursuing a Master’s of Urban Planning at Hunter College, focusing on transportation. After having spent the previous several years working in and studying aerospace engineering, his love of walkability has brought him to New York. He currently works at MTA Metro North as a Control Systems Engineer.
