#28 - You aptly named yourself: a hater. More appropriate would be: bitter hater; or perhaps: bitter jealous hater. Don't worry. I'll say a little prayer for your tortured and jealous soul.

If you want to paint my fellow noble blog commenters with such a broad brush you should be prepared to defend your SoHo comrades. After all you SoHo old timers manged to become fabulously wealthy by accidentally acquiring property at the right time and successfully getting various laws passed which allowed for a huge run-up in land values. Bravo! Give yourselves a hand. I know it's tough to see the neighborhood change. But Let me assure you that the progressive forces on this blog, whose efforts have helped bring truly great changes to the streets of this city, will continue to win out. There will be more and better bike lanes, more and better public squares and less and less room for you and your car. You can be helpful or you can stand in the way. It's up to you.

What's amusing about you is that you have no idea about what made the Petrosino Square project actually happen.

Change is happening at at Petrosino because of the change that has happened at the New York City DOT (the agency that, I believe, you refer to as the Dept. of Tyranny). Change happened at DOT because of the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign which, very specifically, targetted Petrosino Square as a public space in need of renovation. NYCSR and Project for Public Spaces very consciously and aggressively ensured that the Petrosino project would be prioritized with the new management at DOT. You know nothing about this because you simply were not involved.

If DOT were run as you seem to want it to be run -- as an agency that prioritizes the needs of automobiles over people -- then Georgette and CB2 would still be doing their "incessant lobbying" and Petrosino Square would still be a pathetic, useless public space that it was FOR DECADES before the livable streets movement took root in NYC.

I'm curious: Will you be driving to the Petrosino Square ribbon cutting ceremony when it comes time for the SoHo Alliance to take credit for the improvements there? Or have the evil folks at DOT made parking so difficult in the neighborhood that you will be forced to walk the five blocks?

The notion that streetsblog commenters had anything to do with the improvements currently going on in Petrosino Square in SoHo is spurious .

The credit for that goes unabashedly to one women with vision and determination, Georgette Fleischer, founder of Friends of Petrosino Square and very active member of the Steering Committee of the SoHo Alliance.

She started her efforts ten years ago cleaning the derelict park, then organized annual bulb plantings. She ratcheted her efforts after SoHo Alliance members were involved in installing two Farmers' Markets at Petrosino.

Incessantly lobbying the Parks Dept, CB2 and elected officials Ms. Fleischer succeeded in securing the $1 million funding for the current renovation.

Praise also goes to the Parks Committee chair of CB2 and the various Parks Department officials who supported this project. Thanks guys.

So, to say that the anonymous typists on streetsblog had any effect in this project makes one also question the accuracy of their other claims of successful activism. Perhaps if they had the courage to identify themselves, as Jan and Ian above have, they would gain more credence.

Clearly, everyone on the Lower East Side owns a car. Only Jan Lee complained about negative effects of parking - and then, it wasn't about cars, only city-agency parking.

But Jan is right - if no one here stands up and says "what about the other 80%," then the 20% that are trying to defend their entitlement to lower everyone else's quality of life will prevail. Sadly, I'll miss the scheduled 5/19 meeting at St. Patrick's as I'll be away... someone volunteer to go for me?

Not exactly. This isn't a unique circumstance; drivers of emergency vehicles can be relied upon to oppose all traffic calming measures; from their perspective 'behind the wheel' it's just question of how many seconds more it takes them to get where there going. As a community, we must take into account the larger picture: can the traffic calming save more lives with safer streets than it may cost in a longer ambulance trip? It isn't really an ambulance driver's job to think about that side of the question. And if having predictable transport times of emergency vehicles is an important issue for people, their main concern should be the currently unregulated chaos of our surface streets: it is imperative that we implement tolls, congestion pricing, fair-parking prices, and other mechanisms to prevent this free-for-all and normalize the speed of traffic. And until then, anyone that seriously espouses the 'emergency vehicle' position had better not be driving at any peak traffic time: your street-clogging could be killing an ambulance passenger.

And by the way, you guys may as well get used to these things being reasoned out on the internet the same as they have been in in-person meetings. Everyone having this discussion lives here, or we wouldn't be putting time into it. At all levels of society (business, government, personal), ideas are being exchanged more online; older generations may opt out of this exchange (or opt-in only to rail dismissively against it) but they can't stop it from happening and they can't stop it from being the dominant information medium of the future, after they're gone and we're gone.

Now, if I could just figure out how to pompously sit down at a computer. I shall try throwing my head back, looking around the room, and seating myself very slowly. Perhaps the public will take notice.

In actuality a result that Town Hall was that no longer are Parks Dept. vehicles parking on the sidewalks at Columbus Park.
So you are not accurate when you say there are no "tangible changes".

In addition as a result of that evening a major NYC paper is doing a story on Washington D.C.'s 21st century approach to reigning in government car usage with Zip-car fast-fleet technology and WHY NYC is not on board.
Posters here should be 100% on board with an initiative that calls for full transparency of government used cars and a reduction of the city's own fleet by hundreds of cars.

Still, the people commenting HERE on THIS thread were not there.
What you're speaking about in your post is very selective support of a narrow range of issues, of equal importance is the credence given to community members who are NOT as your posters have portrayed them to be. Unless you ARE an ambulance driver you have to respect that person's OWN eye witness account from behind the wheel. Or was everyone there that evening lying in their testimony?
BUT I guess its MUCH easier to dismiss these events when they provide eyewitness accounts contrary to your D.O.T. rhetoric.
By all means , continue to avoid these meetings.

Any chance this could be extended to all active roads and sidewalks?

Many of the regular commenters here at Streetsblog attend Community Board meetings, speak out in public forums and do political organizing and action. Many of the changes that are now underway in New York City -- Summer Streets, Car-Free Broadway, the new Petrosino Square and the protected bike path on Grand Street to name a few examples -- are the result of the work and activism of people you'll find commenting here on Streetsblog.

Click the "Community" tab above and you'll see some of this activism for yourself.

Bitterness and arrogance is an easier product than hard work.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local&id=6468669

Con Ed worker struck and killed

MANHATTAN (WABC) -- A Con Ed worker was struck and killed while getting into his vehicle.

The accident happened at Hester and Grand Streets in Manhattan around 1:40 Friday afternoon.

Police said the 60-year-old worker was struck by a truck that kept going. The worker suffered head trauma and died at the scene.

Police stopped the truck on Grand Street near the BQE. It appears the driver did not know he had hit someone, investigators said.

The idea that emergency vehicles benefit from more road space is ludcirous, not only will more space for cars NOT produce faster speeds, over time more drivers cause more traffic, not less. If the goal is to allow emergency vehicles to operate safely in NYC then the best thing to do in remove OTHER cars from the road, not allow a greater volume of traffic.

Lives are at risk here, and it's not because people are dying in the back of ambulances so I can ride my bike, it's because cars moving quickly on city streets kill hundreds of people. If you want to make your neighborhood's streets better and safer you need to start advocating for fewer cars. There's just no way to make the city work with ever increasing volumes of traffic that wants to use the streets, regardless of their configuration.