Because Of Course You Take The Bus To IKEA . . .

There’s a reason you wait until the last minute to publicly address traffic and parking concerns:

IKEA officials yesterday revealed plans for how they plan to pacify Red Hook, Brooklyn once thousands of shoppers start heading there daily on June 18 when the Swedish home-furniture giant opens its first New York City store on the Beard Street waterfront.

Highlighting the transportation improvements arranged specifically for the new IKEA is free water-taxi service to and from lower Manhattan.

The service, to be provided by New York Water Taxi, will run every 40 minutes during store hours, said store manager Mike Baker. Water taxis will dock along a 6.5-acre public esplanade that IKEA had to build behind the store to help garner elected officials’ support for the controversial $100 million project.

Other transit improvements will include beefed-up bus service and free shuttle service connecting to the three closest subway stops, which are still over a mile away.

. . .

Red Hook itself is fenced off from the rest of the borough by the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and even the nearest highway entrance on the BQE is over a mile away from the 346,000-square-foot store.

IKEA is offering 1,400 parking spots, although the project’s environmental impact statement estimates about 14,000 cars arriving on Saturdays. [Red Hook Civic Alliance co-chair John] McGettrick says he believes it will actually be 20,000.

But IKEA spokesman Joseph Roth said he expects most New Yorkers to leave their cars home and use the new transit options.

For example, IKEA is offering free shuttle service every ten minutes from three subway stations: Borough Hall/Court Street in Downtown Brooklyn, Smith/9th Street in Carroll Gardens, and 4th Avenue/9th Street in Gowanus.

And the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is extending the B61 and B77 bus routes to stop directly in front of the store.

Yes, People Really Live Like This

And some of them might even be your friends:

Living in a top-floor walk-up in New York City is a mixed blessing.

Sure there are those stairs; all those stairs. There is the moment of dread when you look up the stairs and contemplate the trek up, up and up, carrying groceries, children, luggage, furniture, whatever.

But that’s not all there is. In the current real estate market, top-floor walk-ups may well be the best deals. They can also be quiet spaces that are flooded with light and that have open views of the city, especially if they peek out above their surrounding neighbors. In some cases, they also have a deck or terrace that can become an outdoor living room with the twinkling night sky as a backdrop.

. . .

Since 1968, the city has generally required builders to install elevators in all new residential buildings that have five or more stories. But under certain zoning provisions, a five-story building can be built without an elevator.

Brokers say there are some developers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, who have gotten approval to build five-story walk-ups by setting the top floor back from the front of the building and by keeping ceiling height under eight feet.

At five stories, “having an elevator would mean pretty significant common charges,” said Roberto Gonzalez, an agent at Bond New York. “Developers will do walk-ups because they want to be competitive, and they want to use as much of the footprint as they can for living space as opposed to an elevator shaft.”

David Kazemi, a vice president at Bond New York, said that walk-ups don’t seem to bother many of the young professionals looking to buy in Williamsburg. “A lot of people prefer it actually because they don’t want the luxury high-rise lifestyle,” he said. “That’s not the point of living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.”

. . .

People who live in top-floor walk-ups say they have a variety of coping mechanisms that help them deal with the daily hike up the stairs.

Ms. Stern said she learned very quickly not to focus on the number of steps. She counted and knew the exact number at one point. “But that was discouraging because then I found myself counting every time I went up,” she said. “It was much better when I stayed focused on the mission and the goal of just getting home.”

Big shopping trips to the grocery store are replaced by more frequent and smaller purchases, and heavy items like kitty litter might be put on the Fresh Direct order, along with a generous tip to the delivery man.

Mr. Gonzalez, the Bond agent, recently bought a fifth-floor walk-up for himself in Williamsburg, and he said that he had learned to become more organized to avoid having to run up and down the stairs several times a day to retrieve forgotten items. “Before I leave the house now I have a little saying: ‘Money, keys, phone. Money, keys, phone. Money, keys, phone,'” he said. “Because if I forget one of them, that’s when I regret the top floor.”

Mr. Nguyen, the owner in Inwood, said the one thing that he takes special care with is the trash and recycling. “I make sure it’s well secured for the trip down because I don’t want it breaking,” he said.

Also, after spending a week personally gutting and renovating the apartment’s kitchen with a friend, he said, “If I’d known what all we had to go through, I’d have probably hired somebody else to do it.”

He and his friend hauled up 15 kitchen cabinets, two 7-foot-tall storage units, countless bags of grout, boxes of tile and piles of new floorboards. “We sort of had to do a lot of maneuvering and we had to shimmy a lot of things around corners on the stairs to make it fit,” he said. “But it’s amazing what you can do with sheer will and determination.”

How Do You Make Community Boards Even Less Relevant?

Allow 16- and 17-year-old representatives to vote:

State law does not allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote on community boards. State and city bills introduced last month would allow 16- and 17-year olds to vote on the boards, which have advisory responsibilities.

Francine Baras, executive director of Future Voters of America, a nonprofit group, described the effort as a compromise stemming from an earlier effort to lower the voting age in city elections that met considerable opposition.

“It’s funny,” said Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who introduced the bill calling for a lowered age limit in the City Council. “People are nervous about 16- and 17-year-olds.”

Ms. Brewer’s resolution lists some things 16- and 17-year-old state residents can already do: obtain a learner’s permit to drive, be tried and charged as adults in criminal matters, obtain a marriage license with parental consent, hold a job and pay taxes. In the language of her bill, imposing these responsibilities yet denying members of this age group the right to take part in their city government leaves them “disenfranchised” and “second-class citizens.”

Supporters say that 16- and 17-year-olds would bring a unique perspective to local government, especially with regard to issues involving schools and youth services, and suggest that youthful enthusiasm that has been evident in national politics in recent months can fuel involvement at the local level.

Think about the irony of allowing underage members to approve liquor licenses . . . in an advisory capacity only, of course. Brilliant!

Possible Settlement Terms Include Changing The Name To “A Moderate Amount Of Luck, And A Little Bit Of Stupidity”

Maybe we can finally get a legal definition of “luck”:

The New York Lottery’s impish “Little Bit of Luck” character is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, according to a Staten Island woman who’s suing the state and shopkeepers, alleging fraud and racketeering.

The class-action lawsuit, filed on behalf of a woman identified only as M. McKee, accuses the New York State Division of Lottery and vendors of teaming up to dupe countless consumers into playing Take Five based on ads that exaggerate the odds of winning.

Players who plunk down hard-earned cash day after day actually believe in the slogans, “All you need is a little bit of luck” and “There’s a hundred thousand winners every day,” according to the suit, filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court.

The ads put the chances of winning at 1 in 9, but McKee’s lawyer Craig Lanza said consumers need only look at the state Lottery’s Web site to see this is “patently false.”

Because If They Can Spend $3 Billion On A Water Filtration Plant . . .

Let’s see — drag racing at a high rate of speed, being ejected from the back seat . . . so what were those concrete bollards doing there anyway? You tell me:

A drag race on a Charleston service road led to the crash that killed an Annadale teenager, prosecutors contend.

But the father of the victim, Michelle Arout, is seeking to spread the blame to the city and a number of its agencies.

John Arout maintains that two concrete-filled steel stanchions, or bollards, guarding a fire hydrant at the crash site negated the hydrant’s built-in “breakaway” design feature and figured in his daughter’s death.

The 2003 Honda in which Miss Arout was riding collided at a high rate of speed with a Ford Mustang, then slammed into one or both bollards and split in two.

The 17-year-old was ejected from the back seat and suffered fatal injuries in the July 23 crash on Veterans Road West near Bricktown Centre.

Arout, who is administrator of his daughter’s estate, seeks unspecified monetary damages in the civil action, recently filed in state Supreme Court, St. George.

Named as defendants are the city and its Environmental Protection, Transportation and Fire departments. . . .