By Aaron Naparstek
naparstek@nypress.com

Over the winter, International Speedway Corporation bought the biggest remaining block of undeveloped land in New York City, a 686-acre industrial site on the west side of Staten Island, for about $110 million. ISC plans to have a three-quarter-mile speedway and big box retail center up and running by the end of the decade.

At first glance, what could be more wrong than a Nascar speedway in New York City? Most New Yorkers don't even own a car. And though Nascar claims 75 million fans worldwide, four million of them here in the tri-state region, I myself have never met one. Like many New Yorkers, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to watch cars covered bumper to bumper in corporate logos drive around in a circle for four hours. If I wanted to see fearless and insane drivers doing bump-and-run maneuvers at high speed, I could just hang out on Queens Boulevard at rush hour.

Yet, when you compare the development that ISC is planning for Staten Island to the sports-venue mega-projects that the Bloomberg Administration is trying to push through at Hudson and Atlantic Yards, the rednecks come out way ahead. Put aside for a moment the question of whether New York City truly needs any of these projects. When you line up the three plans side by side, the Nascar track is in many ways the most innovative, thoughtful and urban-friendly. The planners of the other two projects could learn a lot.

Most impressive is the sophisticated transportation-management plan that ISC is proposing for the 80,000-seat racetrack. To limit the amount of traffic choking Staten Island's four overworked bridges and local roads, ISC is limiting parking at the site to 8400 vehicles and giving Staten Islanders first dibs on the spaces. According to Michael Printupp, ISC Director of Corporate Development, there will be three race events a year and only about a quarter of the fans will come by car. Everyone else must take a ferry or bus to the site. Because every ticket is linked directly to a specific mode of transportation, it will be impossible for a race-goer to drive in, park for free on a neighborhood street and gain admission to the track. Ê

Kate Slevin, co-chair of Tri-State Transportation Campaign and a reliable critic of anything that creates more sprawl or traffic in the region, calls ISC's transportation plan "innovative." In sharp contrast to what's happening at the Hudson and Atlantic Yards, she credits ISC for "planning ahead, thinking about how people are going to travel to the site, and dealing with a lot of the transportation impacts prior to getting approval for the plan."

You'd think that it wouldn't be all that difficult for the city to work out similarly innovative transportation management plans for the Hudson and Atlantic Yards projects, seeing as how the MTA owns the land at both sites and would be the beneficiary of any program that compels fans to use mass transit rather than drive. But this kind of creative planning has been nonexistent in both projects.

ISC is also showing far more sensitivity to its local environment and future neighbors than the Jets and Nets. They have committed to preserving and enhancing the 250 acres of environmentally sensitive wetlands on their property. During most of the year, a large portion of the site will be given to the community for use as sports fields, and nonprofit organizations can host charity events at the track for free. Printupp also says that ISC is open to figuring out a way to allow its ferry docks to be used year-round for daily commuter service.

The biggest contrast of all is in the financing of the projects. Whereas the Jets and Nets are asking for hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies, the entire $550 to $600 million cost of the speedway is being paid for privately. The racetrack is expected to generate $45 million a year for the city and state, not including all of the additional revenues earned off of money spent on hotels, fried Twinkies and 9/11 memorabilia.

Don't get me wrong. A speedway and another big box retail store are the last things the city needs. Installing a transportation management system and saving some wetlands doesn't suddenly make Nascar the world's most progressive corporate citizen. Nascar is still one of the clearest manifestations of a deeply misguided culture, a celebration of the very thing that's killing us. So what does it say about the state of New York City urban planning and development that the toothless, beer-bellied rubes of Nascar are doing a better job of caring for the city than we are?

On this page in the May 11 issue of New York Press, a photo of NYPD assistant chief Bruce Smolka was accidentally misattributed to Times-up.org. The photograph was taken by Antrim Caskey. We regret the error.