Comments on: Battery Park City: An Opportunity for Innovative Street Design

By: Aaron Naparstek

Aaron Naparstek — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:06:57 +0000

Whoops. I fixed that.

By: jk

jk — Mon, 21 May 2007 20:51:35 +0000

Aaron

Do you mean the opposite --- that they made neighborhood streets "unappealing?"

You wrote in #4

"So, they made the neighborhood streets really appealing to through-traffic alongside many of the new BRT routes."

By: Aaron Naparstek

Aaron Naparstek — Fri, 18 May 2007 23:19:16 +0000

In Paris they call them Quartiers Verts. Greened Neighborhoods. QV's are neighborhoods that have been traffic-calmed and necked down and basically made unappealing to through-traffic. Many of them were recently established as part of Paris's Bus Rapid Transit "Mobilien" initiative. Eric Britton of New Mobility Agenda explained to me that neighborhoods were concerned that Le Mobilien would compel motorists to look for short cuts on neighborhood streets. So, they made the neighborhood streets really unappealing to through-traffic alongside many of the new BRT routes.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:37:57 +0000

"Woonerf" is a pretty cool word, but it might be easier to get acceptance for the idea if we used its English equivalent -- Home Zone. The Brits have enacted rules to govern the creation of home zones, and apparently some are in place. Some American cities, including West Palm Beach, of all places, have used the concept of "shared space" -- kind of a less-radical version of the woonerf -- to calm traffic. Battery Park City would probably be an excellent place for New York to experiment with these ideas.

By: Comentz

Comentz — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:06:36 +0000

It's about time the term "woonerf" enters the lexicon of city government. I was involved in one project at a city government agency until very recently where I was asked to remove any mention of successful concepts that were likely to be knocked down by CDOT staff.

By: Charles Siegel

Charles Siegel — Fri, 18 May 2007 17:58:17 +0000

Removing traffic controls to make drivers and pedestrians more conscious that they need to look for each other works in dense European cities, and it could work in dense neighborhoods like Battery Park City, but it would not work in most American cities, where there are so few pedestrians that many drivers don't look for them at all.

Even in Berkeley (which is relatively dense and has a relatively large number of pedestrians), I have had drivers almost run me down while I am crossed in the crosswalk at a green light. They go through the red light and crosswalk at high speed, just looking to their left to see whether any cars on the cross street would stop them from making a right turn on the red light, totally oblivious to the fact that there might be a pedestrian in the crosswalk. If you removed the red light and crosswalk in places like this, more drivers would do the same.

It gives new meaning to Woody Allen's statement that the one cultural advantage of living in California is being able to make a right turn on a red light.