Three specific proposals to reduce New York City's ever-increasing traffic congestion emerged from a highly anticipated Manhattan Institute forum this morning. One seeks variable prices on cars driving in to central Manhattan, with express toll lanes and higher parking fees to keep things moving. Another seeks to get rid of tolls on less-congested bridges in car-friendly parts of town and replace them with congestion charging technology in gridlocked, transit-friendly sections of the city. A third plan relies entirely on enforcement of existing parking laws.

The forum, organized by the Manhattan Institute's Center for Rethinking Development, opened with Partnership for New York City president Kathryn Wylde setting a collegial but urgent tone two days after releasing a report that put a $13 billion price tag on New York City's traffic congestion. The Partnership's analysis, she said, found that 48 percent of all motor vehicle traffic delay is "excess traffic congestion, beyond what we ought to put up with."

"Why do you think construction prices are going up one percent a month?" Wylde asked. It takes crews too long to get to job sites, and once they get there they spend valuable work time waiting for deliveries. "Manufacturing, an industry we have been hemorrhaging" is leaving New York City, in part, because of the difficulty in moving people, supplies and products, Wylde said. "A person who might go to a restaurant" in Manhattan will skip the trip if she's staring at brake lights.

The problem Wylde says, is "How do you attack traffic without making commercial deliveries or taxis suffer?" London achieved a 15 percent "mode shift" moving approxmately 60,000 commuters from cars to other forms of transportation with its congestion charge. How can New York achieve similar results?

Bruce Schaller, who released a major new study on New York City traffic congestion this morning, presented the first and most detailed answer to that question. He proposed a combined system of congestion charges, highway express lanes and parking reform, emphasizing that the plan can't just be about getting rid of cars or punishing motorists. It has to be about "making New York the kind of city that New Yorkers want."

Schaller pointed to the results of a Tri-State Transportation Campaign survey showing that 44 percent of New Yorkers feel that congestion pricing is "a good idea" versus 45 percent against. It is worth noting that congestion charging starts with much higher approval ratings in New York City than it had in either London or Stockholm.

Schaller ran focus groups to test three ideas: London-style congestion charging, highway express lanes with tolls, and increased parking fees. He found that New Yorkers, in fact, are quite sophisticated in their thinking about the city's traffic congestion problem and possible solutions.

Schaller found that there are six factors that drive public reaction to congestion pricing and other solution ideas:

1. Will reduce traffic congestion
2. Will solve my transportation problems
3. Enhances my transportation choices
4. Fair and equitable
5. Works as intended
6. Is supported and complemented by non-pricing policies

In other words, New York City's auto dealership-supported tabloid media may not be accurately reflecting New Yorkers' apparently intelligent and nuanced thinking on local transportation issues when it blares "Traffic Tax!" headlines and reports knee-jerk opposition to congestion charging and other traffic relief measures.

Schaller's plan combines three elements: Selective road pricing, new highway express lanes, and more tightly managed and higher priced curbside parking.

Schaller's traffic relief charges would apply to anyone crossing the Hudson River, East River or 60th Street boundary into Lower Manhattan. On weekday mornings he would charge $4 to any vehicle entering the zone between 6:30 and 10:00 am. During mid-day, from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, all vehicles traveling in or out of the zone would pay $4. Then from 4 pm to 6:30 pm vehicles traveling out of the zone would pay the $4.

Schaller's highway express lanes would be open to buses, vehicles carrying three or more passengers and any motorist willing to pay a fee. Times and fees would vary depending on congestion and also the State Department of Transportation's identification of "feasible corridors."

Schaller's parking plan would apply to commercial districts and selected parking spaces. To show skeptics that usage fees can influence drivers' behavior, he suggests setting up a pilot project to increase curbside parking rates with, perhaps, rates rising incrementally each hour a car occupies a spot.

To make these ideas politically palatable, Schaller added, all revenues generated by these new plans would need to be plowed back into public transport - especially in underserved areas like Staten Island, Eastern Queens and the Upper East Side.

Next up was transportation guru "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz, a former city transportation commissioner. Gridlock Sam immediately went to the root: "Our road pricing stinks." He lamented a regime in which "we toll people going from Queens to Queens or from Staten Island to anywhere" but let drivers "drive across the Queensboro Bridge" without paying tolls (and without funding upkeep on that bridge). His solution: Eliminate all tolls on bridges outside the central business district and impose charges "only where there is congestion and good public transit." This approach could work politically, he said, if it is demonstrably "revenue neutral."

Schwartz also argued that Brooklyn and Queens drivers would benefit from this approach. "People from Brooklyn and Queens would have five river crossings with no tolls. If you go over the Brooklyn Bridge, up the FDR and across the Willis Avenue Bridge, you didn't set rubber in midtown Manhattan" and so you should pay no tolls, he reckoned. To make any traffic reform effective, Schwartz counseled, "we have to give Brooklyn and Queens a lot." And short of extending subway lines to Maspeth or Gerritsen Beach, the idea of a tight area for fees presumably leaves residents of those areas some latitude.

Councilmember David Weprin, who represents eastern Queens disagreed with Schaller and Schwartz. Since most people who live east of Kew Gardens or north of Forest Hills have to drive at least a mile to get to the subway, he noted, more frequent express bus service would have to complement any changes that made driving into Manhattan more expensive. He warned the audience to consider people who count on driving for their business and cited a statistic: "In London, 62 percent of businesses reported a drop in customers" after congestion charging. What Weprin didn't say, however, is that the start of congestion charging in London coincided with a nationwide economic recession and a massive Tube construction project that shut down subway service in Central London.

The political gap between Weprin and Schaller seemed large, especially when a former Queens City Council member named Walter McCaffrey, now a lobbyist heading up a newly formed group called the Coalition to Keep New York City Congestion Tax Free, rose from the audience to declare: "A tax is a tax is a tax." But there may be more room for compromise than such rhetoric might suggest. Council member John Liu, who represents Flushing and chairs the Transportation Committee, told me that he would like to see more express bus service in his district. "Nobody wants to pay new charges for anything," he said. "But if, in return, they get something like more express buses." He left the forum at about 9:50 to conduct a hearing at City Hall on express bus service.

So wheels are in motion. Mayor Bloomberg will deliver a major speech within a week outlining his sustainability plan for the city, and advisers say traffic congestion issues will be front and center. Stephen Hammer of Columbia University challenged the panel to push the New York City metro region into a broader conversation about encouraging walking, bicycling and living near mass transit. Road pricing, clearly, is just one cog in the machinery New Yorkers will have to build to make the city livable.

"As this city is booming, it's not moving," lamented City Councilmember Gale Brewer outside City Hall yesterday. But with support from 125 civic groups in five boroughs, the Citywide Coalition for Traffic Relief assembled behind her and outlined an agenda that could change that condition. The coalition, which formed around a year ago, calls for a 15% reduction of traffic by 2009. The plan calls for a serious study of congestion pricing, strict enforcement of parking regulations, and more room on the sidewalks for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Upper West Side City Councilmember Gale Brewer announced that the council will hold hearings next year on Intro 199, legislation that she has introduced to compel DOT to put in place a more meaningful set of performance measures and specific targets for traffic reductions. She also said she would schedule hearings on a DOT study due in 2007 that will count vehicles, violations and pedestrians on Manhattan's west side, from Central Park to the Hudson River and between 57^th Street and 86^th Street.

Gorman Reilly of Civitas Citizens called for "more improved bus service." Sandra Garcia, a member of the community-based organization Sustainable South Bronx urged reducing truck traffic and reconceiving the little-used Sheridan Expressway as a waterfront greenway. Transportation Alternatives executive director Paul Steely White told the crowd that 22 percent of all car trips in the city last less than a mile and that one in ten drivers in Manhattan's core are cruising for parking space.

The coalition plans to work with elected officials and within its network to promote sensible reform. As Transportation Alternatives' Matthew Roth told the crowd, "New York is a city of pedestrians." With 125 members, the coalition is pressing the city's officials to bring the law into step with the facts.

Planning a city around transit doesn't mean you have to cluster everything inside the core business district. Copenhagen, whose thoughtful bike network we've explored elsewhere, recently commissioned Chelsea-based architect Steven Holl to design T-Husene, a place for living and working outside the core city. The architect's renderings, released November 2, fit into a town that fits into a local rail line and a regional rail network extending as far as Sweden.

It's an inspiring blend of striking architecture and compact planning. Imagine: roughly 54,000 square feet of apartments on top of 37,500 square feet of retail, with a large allotment of open space. Holl's design shows how tall structures, plenty of natural light and strategic use of grass can deliver a sense of exploration without sprawl. Says Holl: "It is a sharp contrast to the American urban sprawl which is characterised by highways and endless seas of houses."

It also takes the wind out of the argument that only car-centric urban design can satisfy a yearning for individual expression. This is no Soviet-style block. Again, the architect: "We wanted to create a sense of autonomy, individuation, and particularity for each apartment and tower. One of the failures of modern housing comes from the lack of individualization." Ditto for one of the failures of modern sprawl.

Here are some images:

The Copenhagen government chose a strategic site for the project. It sits on a site with a ten-minute rail link to downtown Copenhagen and a direct rail connection to Malmo, a Swedish city. It's tempting to imagine such lovely forms in the South Bronx, eastern Queens or even New Jersey, with links to airports and office-park suburbs, but it's hard to move this image beyond fantasy until the city gets serious about concentrating new development near transit hubs in under-built areas.

That won't be easy. The MTA controls most of the transit infrastructure and other entities own most of the land. But there's a new team in Albany and a new drumbeat for walkable neighborhoods inside and around New York City. Such developments can't be generic. But as these images show, they can be intriguing -- and beautiful.

While former Bogota Mayor Enrique Peñalosa and DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall got most of the attention for their keynote speeches at last week's transportation policy conference, much of the day's real intellectual ferment took place in the five separate breakout sessions that convened before lunch. The groups were organized as follows:

• Subways and Commuter Rail moderated by Gene Russianoff
• Cars and Buses with Bruce Schaller
• Underutilized Modes with Paul Steely White
• Pedestrians and Sidewalks with Ethel Sheffer
• Comprehensive Planning and Policy with Ernest Tollerson and Bob Yaro

The goal of each workshop, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said, was to generate lists of specific short-term and long-term priorities. After lunch, the moderators returned to the stage to present each workshop's findings.

Interestingly, a few key issues bubbled up in all five groups, regardless of the specific topic:

• The five groups all expressed a deep and strongly-felt desire for a better quality of life on Manhattan's sidewalks, streets and non-park public spaces.
• All called for a greater ability for people on the neighborhood-level to test new ideas on their own streets and share urban design best practices with other civic groups.
• Each group called for better collaboration within city government and said that there needs to be improvement in the way that city officials work together across agency lines.

That last point emerged as the day's elephant-in-the-room. Tollerson and Yaro put the question this way: Can city agencies each working "in their own separate silos" nurture the flexible, collaborative processes necessary to create the needed change in New York City's transportation and public space policy? There were some serious heavy-hitters in the Planning and Policy workshop including Buz Paaswell, Director of CUNY's Transportation Research Center, and the general feeling in that breakout group was, "No." It is time for the post-Word War II structure of agencies and authorities responsible for New York City's vast transportation and public space infrastructure to be re-thought and reformed.

After her session on Pedestrians and Sidewalks Sheffer reported, "Many said it was important that communities have more of a role in trying to determine furniture, signage, and width of sidewalks." She also said, "a real concern is that there is not enough coordination on pedestrian and street issues" between city agencies. During the session neighborhood leaders said City Hall downplayed aesthetic priorities that weren't part of big development projects or well-funded retail districts. Wellington Chan of the Chinatown Partnership summed up the mood when he explained how hard it is to procure resources for something like new street furniture:

"Anything that's not dull gray concrete is not acceptable to the Department of Transportation. They'll say, "You have to design in accordance with DOT standards or you're liable for the cost. So, to put up a nice planter, you need to be a business improvement district or a local development corporation."

Sheffer said that many of the participants in her workshop are ready to take it upon themselves to foster a new proactive culture. They want to design their own principles for managing street vendors, for instance, and to build coalitions among different civic groups. Sheffer's Pedestrians and Sidewalks group wanted to:

• Ease the conflict between pedestrians and turning cars.
• Increase the number of pedestrian ramps throughout Manhattan.
• Promote exclusive crossing periods for pedestrians at crazy intersections.
• Seek "better access to the waterfront," with money and staff to promote innovative design and public amenities.

In general, Sheffer said, the group wants to help the city cater to pedestrians' shifting needs and "enable them to traverse the borough with some degree of pleasantness."

Bruce Schaller's session on Cars and Buses spent a lot of its time focused on parking. He reported that there was a "division in the group about whether adding parking spaces eases the parking problem or adds more cars." Like Sheffer's session, Schaller's yielded a call for smarter government. He said the city should "coordinate agencies" on teams to manage big new developments or zoning changes. If the city does that, he said, experts in transportation and health and planning could evaluate a project's total impact on neighborhoods.

Schaller's group called for strong measures to solve Manhattan's congestion problem:

• "Selective congestion pricing" via a phasing-in of charges on drivers where traffic "is most acute."
• This pricing should come with and, perhaps, help to fund more and more frequent bus service.
• The city should "rationalize" its parking policy to balance the needs of all street users.

Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives, whose group discussed underutilized transportation modes, also called for balance. "There's just not room enough to walk and bike in Manhattan," he said. His workshop proposed these steps:

• Extend crosswalk time on busy streets
• Improve connections between subway stations and bike lanes
• Improve cyclists' access to ferries
• More bike parking outside and in private buildings as well.
• Tighten enforcement of existing bike lanes and cyclist-protection laws.

White's group also discussed parking, noting that 15 bikes can fit in the same street space used to store one motor vehicle. The group consensus was that bike parking clogged neighborhoods with big numbers of cyclists like the East Village and Williamsburg would do well to set aside some street space for bike parking, particularly around subway stops.

Those who discussed subway service produced the day's most tailored suggestions. Activist Gene Russianoff, who heads the Straphangers Campaign for the New York Public Interest Research Group, said he had urged his group to "focus on things that could happen or are on the drawing boards." He reported support for the MTA's plan to install electronic real-time information on the 1, 6 and L lines in the next year. Looking farther ahead, Russianoff's group also pushed for cross-agency policies to make the subway better serve the streets above it. These would include:

• Completion of the 2nd Ave subway, ideally with a link to Brooklyn.
• A "green component across the system," building on the success of the solar panels at the Coney Island-Stilwell Avenue station.
• Expanding elevator access and other services to people who use wheelchairs.

Participants acknowledged the gap between what New Yorkers really want and what is currently politically popular. Russianoff rated outgoing Governor George Pataki's pet project, a link from Penn Station to Grand Central, "middle priority" and gave Mayor Bloomberg's plan to extend the 7 line to 11th Avenue and 34th Street "very low priority." Yet, "at the moment seems most likely to go ahead in the real world," Russianoff said.

How to narrow the gap between the real world and the ideal? That was the focus of Tollerson and Yaro's panel.  Tollerson's group called for sensible (i.e., radical) changes to guide future laws and rules. They want to see the City:

• Prioritize projects through inter-agency collaboration
• Create 24/7 live-work neighborhoods around transit hubs (without closing streets or building new towers that warp neighborhood scale)
• Use the zoning code to promote mass-transit oriented strategies.

Sounds like a tall order? For one day, at least, it all felt entirely possible.

While we're seeking great streets, we've found an exemplary store in Manhattan's Build a Green Bakery. This tiny East Village shop sells organic pastries, coffee and tea in an all-sustainable setting. The owner, City Bakery's Maury Rubin, made the space an environmentalists' showroom. He chose walls of wheat and sunflower husks and colored them with a milk-based paint. His floor is cork and his tabletop is responsibly-harvested bamboo, with recycled denim under the display counter. And get this: If you transport yourself to the store by bicycle, you get a 50% discount.

Discounts based on mode of transportation: Adorable quirk or serious public policy model? 

Bottom line: There is no better chocolate chip cookie in Manhattan and you'll need the bicycle to burn off the calories. Build a Green Bakery, 223 First Avenue, Manhattan, (no phone), birdbath@thecitybakery.com.

Whatever you think of the idea of a highrise cluster in Downtown Brooklyn, you have to worry that the sponsors of the Atlantic Yards project suggest that creating jobs and housing justifies the kind of planning that discourages street life. Among the lowlights of the marathon August 23 "public hearing" on the draft Environmental Impact Statement covering the Atlantic Yards, consider these signs:

Project supporters invoked jobs, healthcare facilities and affordable housing. One said she'd accept skyscraper shadows to get social services and affordable apartments where they're lacking. But what kind of urban environment will the Forest City Ratner plan create?

You heard nothing from supporters about sidewalks, cool retail sites or places for kids to play ball. You heard project opponents warning that the site would close Pacific Street and keep open space between towers, functionally making it into a backyard for condo owners. And you heard no agreement between the camps that you could create jobs and affordable housing while, simultaneously, creating a great public realm. Indeed, the discussion of quality of life hinged on the question of how tall the buildings could get. Even if the buildings in Ratner's proposal all get a ten-story haircut, project opponents warned, this area could become more attractive to gaze at from a terrace than to walk around after a game. Consider:

The plan, in tallying open space near the site, includes Grand Army Plaza, which one testifier called one of the "least accessible and least used" open spaces in the country. (Of course, some people are trying to change that.) It also includes an indoor "urban room" that the developer envisions as a glassed-in atrium with a ticket window.

The plan would close a piece of Pacific Street, making the already lonely walk from Fort Greene to Park Slope even more of a moonscape.

The plan ignores rush-hour traffic, projecting a peak car volume in the first hour of NBA games rather than in the hour before they start.

And it envisions a limo-dropoff lane on Flatbush Avenue which, according to civic groups, would clash with the MTA's potential use of Bus Rapid Transit on that street.

Overall, the plan justifies desolate streets by promising jobs and affordable housing. Isn't that like justifying a team that can't pass by promising lots of slam dunks? And does anybody remember how Team USA did with that strategy in the 2004 Olympics?

Whatever happens from here, project opponents and project supporters will have to share these streets.

The Shape of Things to Come: View City in the Year 2026

At the Museum of the City of New York, Vincent Cianni's bracing photos show how a group of teens on Williamsburg's south side organized to get a skate park built in the shadowy wasteland beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. If these kids can persuade City Hall to let them shape their own terrain, imagine what five boroughs'-worth of block associations, business improvement districts and Livable Streets advocates can accomplish. Check out the show, We Skate Hardcore, and get the wheels turning. It closes August 6. 

The death of Derek Lake, killed one month ago at age 23 when his bicycle tripped a metal plate on Houston Street, hints at a tragedy shared by all New Yorkers: City Hall’s continued insistence that the ultimate goal of a New York City street is to move as many cars and trucks each day as physically possible.

Houston Street, from its ramps onto East River Park to its flow into kayak launches at the Hudson, is undergoing a $30 million reconstruction project. When it ends by 2008, it will add five left-turn bays for cars and slightly widen a few sidewalks where street vendors work the edge of SoHo. Transportation spokesperson Chris Gilbride says the project will cut a lane of traffic from some blocks and not eliminate any pedestrian refuge areas.

But Livable Streets advocates say the DOT’s approach to the project misses a historic opportunity to transform Houston into a truly great urban boulevard, designed not just to move motor vehicles, but to create space for pedestrians, bikes, buses, cafe tables, merchants and the full diversity of New York City street life.

Community members and former city officials say the Department of Transportation alternated between bullying and ignoring neighborhood pleas for bike and pedestrian safety during the reconstruction project. "The community expressed outrage repeatedly," says Dirk McCall, who headed City Councilmember Alan J. Gerson’s staff during meetings on the Houston Street project in 2001. "They wanted more crosswalks."

Charle de Cafiero, a former member of Community Board 2 who lives near the busy corner of Houston and Lafayette, echoes this. He says his neighbors’ insistence that Houston Street serves as a local "Main Street" and not just a regional truck conduit met scorn from DOT officials, prompting them to deride the community’s ideas as "anti-car." De Cafiero says the non-collaborative atmosphere poisoned hopes for innovations that could have made Houston a model "Livable Street."

There’s no lack of vision or precedent for how a "Livable" Houston Street could look.

"I would try to eliminate any turning movement that we can live without and see if we can recapture more space for a different mode of transportation," says Andy Wiley-Schwartz, an executive with Project for Public Spaces. The land uses are pretty good, but it needs some help in terms of getting safer to walk or bike along."

De Cafiero cites a suite of low-cost improvements, from markings or colors on crosswalks to finding signs for confusing subway changes, which the city could have considered. Transportation Alternatives executive director Paul Steely White imagines a more energetic bus schedule, widened sidewalks and a physically-separated bike lane. DOT also could have considered traffic calming measures to discourage and slow traffic turning off of Houston Street onto local, neighborhood streets.

Instead, says de Cafiero, DOT officials "worked off a 1950’s traffic engineering model" and killed community input. "[Commissioner] Iris [Weinshall] compared [the addition of turning bays] to work she had done in her own neighborhood, and people tried to explain that Prospect Park is different from Houston Street" recalls McCall. "Alan and [current City Council speaker] Christine Quinn wrote a letter [expressing these concerns] and Weinshall wrote back probably the most offensive letter I’ve seen a commissioner write." McCall termed the project "a travesty."

Others describe it as a missed opportunity.

"The city has a big list of reconstruction projects, which are known years in advance," notes John Kaehny, former head of Transportation Alternatives. "Political jockeying goes on. As far back as 1993, it was known that Houston would be reconstructed. Yet the final design involves turning bays which are extremely negative for pedestrians. It’s a traffic capacity increase in two of the ZIP codes that have some of the lowest car ownership in the US."

This ad hoc, embittering story could infuse street reconstructions across the boroughs. To avoid future mistakes, White urges the mayor’s office to promulgate citywide street design standards that would make it "a matter of course" to widen pedestrian and bike paths in any makeover. Instead, he says, the city has a hodgepodge of approaches that ultimately tend to favor the movement of motor vehicles.

"What they did on Queens Boulevard in terms of safety provisions is not what they’re doing on Houston," notes White. "Safety standards should be non-negotiable, but DOT will defer to community boards when it suits their purpose. And right now their purpose is more cars and trucks."

White takes heart that the mayor’s office seems to be "asking the right questions" about how streets can absorb the million new residents New York expects. And de Cafiero trusts the mayor to "read the riot act" to commissioners who show reluctance to collaborate. Such steps could open a path out of gridlock. Even if they come too late for Houston Street.

What are the committee and board demanding in the wake of Derek Lake’s death?
The Board is going to be requesting, for starters, a full contingent of Traffic Enforcement Agents during construction on Houston. According to the contract it is six agents, I think near and about the area of construction. And those six agents have been placed there for the first time as of July 5. It is an interagency issue between NYPD and the Department of Design and Construction. We’re going to urge that NYPD help monitor the safety of the project whenever possible. Obviously the police force is stretched pretty thin. This is something Councilmember Gerson has been advocating from the inception of the project.

Was it an emotional meeting?
It’s interesting. There’s a sense among people who live around Houston Street that DDC has been doing a relatively good job — granted, they’re not responsible for the design — but community outreach has been pretty consistent. They publish a newsletter, for God’s sake. We think the safety lapse was extremely unfortunate, but we have reason to be positive.

Did Lake die because of a misplaced metal plate?
There’s an investigation going on. The community relations rep, Sybil Dobson, said that if members of the community see imminent danger, such as a metal plate having been moved to expose a hole, they should call 911.

How do you move forward and deal with the design?
We’re interested to know how many summons have been issued in connection with the project and we’re going to work with Councilmember Gerson’s office on that. On the final design, it’s for many of us an old issue. It’s ironic that Houston Street is in the City’s Bicycle Masterplan and we hope to convene a meeting with DOT and some of our elected officials to see if a bike lane can get into the plan.

To what degree is DDC absorbing body blows for DOT?
They implement the design, so in any on-the-job issues, they are the responsible agency. We’re in a Catch-22 position because the community weighed in negatively on the reconstruction plan. DOT views that as a closed issue, but that doesn’t mean that the community can’t seek improvements to the final design and we think the top priority should be a bicycle plan.

Hugh Hardy's Greenwich Street South Study

"The greatest achievement of New York is the streets," says architect Hugh Hardy. And he says we can achieve richer public places -- if New York's citizens can persuade officials to make those places serve people rather than cars.

Hardy, who designed 42nd Street's New Victory Theater and the Atlantic Terminal in downtown Brooklyn, has made a career of designing urbane buildings near generic schlock. As you might expect, he loves the contradiction that defines New York's streets.

The Village Alliance, a business improvement district promoting pedestrian safety and retail mix between Astor Place and the 6th Avenue subway hub, invited Hardy to speak last month on changing forms of public space. Hardy reprised this talk for his staff and StreetsBlog on July 12. His premise: outdoor activity defines New Yorkers' lives and should expand beyond traditional sidewalks and plazas. "You can't live here and not walk around," he said. But you can walk around on new kinds of public space.

In the talk, Hardy noted that "the world is changing" how New York imagines citizens' capacity to share places: extended sidewalks and green patches under highways can be part of our urban vocabulary if the government will invest in them.

He saw heartening signs that many city officials share his view.

Even Queensboro Plaza, which became a car cluster, is due for new landscaping and increased bike use. This change, Hardy says, argues that "we're learning that you can succeed in making new places for people." Ditto for the profusion of sidewalk cafes from Washington Heights to Bay Ridge. Restaurateurs, planners and even transportation officials seem to be learning "to create public places that people can respond to," Hardy said.

But he warned that economic pressures can thwart this progress, especially on retail corridors. "How you can cultivate the diversity of street flow in new buildings is troublesome," he said. "The cost of construction is so enormous that a developer has to build something enormous. People who rent it have to be wealthy. That means they live in their hot tubs or they are a chain retailer." The profusion of national brands along Rockefeller Center and other shopping streets, he said, has made the "scale of the city bigger and more empty."

He warned against over programming public parks with too much entertainment and sought to contain the Las Vegas-style importation of mass culture that now defines 42nd Street. As an alternative, he said, space now allotted to cars should become lawn or sidewalk. Planners obsessed with making visual corridors tidy should preserve quirks like the Washington Square Park fountain. And places like 55 Water Street, which converted its roof to a rustic meadow with a shimmering sculpture, should dot every office-tower cluster. Where we now see hubs for shuttling goods and shuffling money, he stressed, we should encourage people to meet and move freely. 

Already, Hardy said, sidewalk cafes and community-based activism are pushing this change in Lower Manhattan and elsewhere. "It's happening all over town," Hardy said of the new push for public life. "It's such fun to see that on the weekend, [when the cars are gone], you can see a different attitude than you see during the business day."

Like Al Gore, the idea of making New York safer for walkers and bicyclists commands more popular support than government action would suggest. Also like the former veep, the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign is using film to rally support. (The campaign has never struggled, though, to keep its weight under control.)

"Contested Streets," an hour-long documentary distilling the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign's argument, debuted last night at Manhattan's IFC Film Center to a standing-room crowd. The film spelled out how New York's deference to cars threatens its productivity -- and how lessons from European capitals can shore up its future. Al, are you listening?

Plenty of citizens listened carefully to the documentary's message. Speakers presented the history of the car's ascendancy, the end of its viability, and the ways it can become less dominant. Historian Mike Wallace reminded viewers that cars initially cleansed cities of horse poop and flies, but car-makers and their suppliers conspired to kill mass transit.

Generations later, the film shows, "pedlock" and fearsome trucks traps many New Yorkers. When Times Square Alliance chief Tim Tompkins tells the camera that 68% of area workers complained about congestion, his point lands like a punch in the stomach: a city's greatness depends on how joyfully people can use its public space.

"Contested Streets" takes the viewer to Copenhagen, Paris and London for a tour of fresh approaches to public life. Copenhagen incrementally rolled out bike-only lanes and pedestrian-only streets. Paris' mayor steered investment in rapid bus service and replaced a highway with a riverside beach, London imposed a fee on cars in the central district. These measures' champions and the citizens who benefit from them all suggest ways New York can control cars' chokehold on street life.

When the film closed, viewers applauded and adjourned for a reception where several signed cards supporting Introduction 199, a bill before the City Council that would require the city's Department of Transportation to incorporate walking, biking and mass-transit wait times into its measures.

The bill would not require city officials to watch "Contested Streets," though some may do so on their own.