Indianapolis, Indiana is making what could be the boldest step of any North American city towards supporting bicyclists and pedestrians. Known as an extremely auto-oriented city, most closely associated with the Indianapolis 500, this is one of the last cities we would have expected to see systematically removing vehicle lanes and replacing them with bicycle and pedestrian space.

The Indianapolis Cultural Trail is a bold vision for about 8 miles of separated greenway that is currently being built through the downtown core of Indianapolis. Led by the Central Indiana Community Foundation in partnership with the city, the project is a visionary response to skyrocketing obesity and the opportunity to leverage and better serve downtown infrastructure investments.

Downtown Indianapolis before the Cultural Trail.


Downtown Indianapolis after the Cultural Trail.

More than just a separated bike path, the Cultural Trail is an economic development tool that will help support and connect the city's many cultural and civic destinations. It will help revitalize streets by bringing more people downtown and increasing the circulation and length of time that people spend in the central city. As it becomes part of the city, it will also enhance the public presence of existing destinations and help create many new destinations throughout the downtown.

The Trail will help connect and define several districts within the downtown core.

A combination of private and federal funds are being used to pay for the project. Public spaces have generally not attracted this kind of private investment, particularly in car-dominated Midwestern cities, but a bold vision and strong leadership at the community foundation has raised the bar for other cities.

The design of the path will variably integrate and separate pedestrians and bicylists.

Project for Public Spaces was in Indianapolis last week doing Placemaking training for the grantees and partners of the community foundation's Inspiring Places Initiative. We are part of the design team for the Cultural Trail project, doing the international best practices research of separated bike paths that informed the final design. Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who now works as an Assistant Commissioner at the New York City Department of Transportation, worked on the project while at PPS.

Sidewalk extensions make pedestrians and bicyclists more prominent on car-dominated streets.

One of the challenges in the design was to figure how to deal with intersections. While we found many different approaches from around the world and discussed additional options, we decided that reducing the crossing distance for bikes and pedestrians by extending the curbs and creating large integrated pedestrian areas would work best.

The Cultural Trail is creating a powerful impetus for Indianapolis neighborhood groups to begin redefining their streets as public spaces that satisfy a broad range of community needs. Indianapolis -- a quintessential Midwestern car town -- has decided that a street can and should be more than just a place to drive and store motor vehicles.

With apologies for my carbon footprint, I recently returned from a working tour of eight cities Down Under. The trip included an invitation to Melbourne to work with the staff of the city's successful new public space development, Federation Square, and to help lead a Placemaking training course that included many city staff, local developers and "place managers." In the process, I had the opportunity to learn a few things relevant to my hometown, New York City.

Melbourne's central business district is as dense and urban as any U.S. city other than New York. Like New York City, Melbourne—the fastest growing city in Australia, with a population of nearly 4 million—has a lively public life. But it hasn't always been so. A “New World” city, designed on a grid, Melbourne went as far, or further, than its U.S. counterparts in planning itself around the automobile.

In 1993, Jan Gehl, who happens to be in New York City this week to start work with Department of Transportation, ran one of his “public spaces, public life” surveys in Melbourne. During that first Melbourne study Gehl collected baseline data on how public spaces were being used and made recommendations for improvements. He worked with the city to implement some of these improvements and in 2004 Gehl's team was invited back to do a second study. They found that dramatic changes had taken place during the decade between the studies.

Street space in Melbourne's central business district has been taken away from private automobiles and reallocated to transit riders and pedestrians.

Gehl’s studies makes Melbourne one of the few cities in the world where accurate data on public life has been collected over such a period of time. Between 1993 and 2004, these were some of the changes that Gehl's team observed:

• 71% more space for people and activities on streets and squares
• 177% more café seats
• 39% increase in pedestrian activity during the day on weekdays
• 98% increase in pedestrian activity in the evenings on weekdays
• Large increases in stationary activity that came with the newly created space

A page from Gehl's report shows a grading of the degree to which ground floor uses support public life during the two study periods.

In addition to documenting the increase in sidewalk space and decrease in cars, Gehl’s studies tracked the steady improvements of ground floor retail spaces in central Melbourne. These improvements contributed significantly to the city's increasing pedestrian friendliness and the revitalization of downtown.

Reallocation of street space away from private automobiles and public investment in transit has provided direct benefits to retail businesses in central Melbourne.

Efforts to reduce the cost of traveling by transit from the suburbs to the city center combined with the rising cost of gasoline has led to a rise in transit ridership that has greatly surpassed expectations.

As in Jan Gehl's Copenhagen, Melbourne has steadily eliminated on-street parking space.Today, there is very little on-street parking and virtually zero free parking in the central business district.

In the beginning of 2006, Melbourne instituted a new parking levy on all long-stay private/commercial parking spaces in the central business district, starting at $400/space and moving to $800/space. The revenue generated from this levy, estimated at $38.5 million in fiscal year 2006-07, is being reinvested in transportation improvements including a free shuttle in the central business district.

Completed in 2002, Federation Square is Melbourne’s most prominent public realm improvement and the greatest testament to the city's commitment to fostering public life. Built over a rail yard, Federation Square is the city’s living room, cultural center and nighttime destination. It took a huge public investment of around AU$473 million (just under US$400 Million) to do the project. For comparison, Chicago’s Millennium Park, which is a similar size new public space and also built over rail yards, was built for $475 million around the same time. Despite initial community resistance, the Square has been embraced by the city and is generating significant returns on many fronts.

My work with Federation Square included facilitating a public space audit to help them look at how to continue to improve and manage the space, engage new partners and audiences, and create a broader sense of public ownership and participation. In many of the newly reclaimed areas in Melbourne these same issues were very relevant.

Bourke Street Mall was transformed into a pedestrian street in the late 70s and then reconfigured recently as a transit mall. It is also one of the Melbourne's defining public space destinations. However, participants in my Placemaking training course gave the new streetscape poor marks. Just as the street was once dominated by automobiles, many now feel that the new transit-oriented design is still oriented too much around transportation and not enough around shopping, cultural creativity and social life.

In the middle of one of the busiest sidewalks in Melbourne, people take time to stop and play chess, watch chess or just watch people.

As the title of Gehl’s report suggests, it is the "places for people" that are making Melbourne work and are bringing about its dramatic shift. It is these destinations that, despite greater difficulty in accessing via the private automobile, are bringing people downtown, getting them to stay longer and driving further investment.

At first glance, one might assume that the successful revitalization of Melbourne's downtown was the result of the city's efforts to drive automobiles out of the central business district. But traffic reduction was only one piece of the puzzle. Melbourne's renaissance was accomplished by focusing on the improvement, democratization and vitality of the city's public spaces.

I was recently in Bogotá for their weekly Ciclovia event and experienced first hand what may be one of the simplest and most powerful ideas for bringing a livable streets movement into reality.

Ciclovia spans over 70 miles of the city every Sunday and holiday, enabling people to explore communities previously perceived as unwelcoming to anyone but cars.

"It is like a gigantic
paved park that is open 7 hours a week, and people of all ages and backgrounds
take over the otherwise car dominated space and have fun." This is how Gil (Guillermo) Peñalosa describes the event that he led to world renowned success.

Ciclovia is no small accomplishment. With great leadership in the city from Gil and others the event has grown to
where now, every Sunday and holiday an average of 1.5 million (up to 2 million) people use more than 70 Miles of
city streets for everything but driving cars.

All modes (except cars) and all ages, sizes, classes share the road.
The event seems as simple and direct a way as possible at
addressing the great class and race divides in Colombia.

When Gil Peñalosa was first Parks
commissioner, in the administration before his brother's (Enrique), there were eight miles and about 140,000 riders every Sunday; in two years he had increased the distance to 70 miles and 1.5 million people! Gil also led the creation of a managerial
structure, with managers, volunteers, uniforms, marketing, signage, and other activities such
as aerobics, bike day, food vendors, and bike repair stands.

Gil likes to say that "You will see people in
$5,000 bikes and others in $50 bikes, and all having the same fun! Rich and poor,
young and old, men and woman, tall or short... ALL!" The event is also credited with generating everyday
bicycle riders for the extensive network of protected bicycle lanes in the city
(implemented by Enrique's administration) by quickly getting people
comfortable riding bikes in a city that previously had very few bicyclists.

A lawbreaker is reprimanded, politely, by the ride facilitators. Cyclovia
is the ultimate critical mass ride with 350 city employees helping to make
people feel safe and comfortable.

An average of 1.5 million attending in a city of seven million is a very popular
event. Surveys show that it is not the
same 1.5 m every week, but that at least four million are users at some time of
the year. The surveys showed that the average time that people spent on the
Ciclovia was 4 hours and 15 minutes, where their normal excise routine lasted only 48 minutes.

Gil is sure to point out though that "they go to walk or bike, skate or
do aerobics... AND to watch people, a preferred activity by human beings." Certainly, what struck me more than anything else was just how the opportunity to be outside and around other people seemed to make the thousands of people I saw so happy and friendly.

Clearly, it is an idea that can be relatively easily applied in many different
forms in a wide range of urban contexts. As
Gil says, "the infrastructure is there, there are no major needs of
capital investments, no sports complex to build. It is an operational cost and
it takes political will, public sector staff that are doers (looking for solutions to problems and not problems to solutions), and community engagement."

In a city that has been built for children, the children, and most every other public space user,
seem to reflect the respect given to them.

How would we start planning such an idea in NYC? How could it be
phased in, in a politically feasible manner that could test the concept while
drawing people from around the city and getting enough use to make it
work? Could we close Broadway on Sundays? How about Brooklyn's 5th
Avenue, or Bedford Avenue (closing some streets to cars
in Hassidic neighborhoods on a Saturday might be appropriate)? Where else?

The three commemorative exhibits on Robert Moses, like the press articles covering them, have neglected the mass transit issue almost as seriously as Moses did. The New York Times mentioned in passing that he "championed highways as he starved mass transit" but said no more on the subject. Paul Goldberger, writing for the New Yorker, devoted a few more words to the matter, before dismissing it entirely. He reasoned: "[I]n Moses's day cities all over the country were building highways at the expense of mass transit. Some critics were complaining but most people didn't see [the problem] until long after the damage had been done."

Perhaps Moses was doing what everyone else was doing, or perhaps he was leading the others. Whatever our conclusion, it does a disservice to our city to ignore this piece of the Moses story, and what it has to teach us. With that thought in mind, I decided to share with New Yorkers my most notable experience with Moses.

It was 1965. Moses' Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was awash in funds; so was the Port Authority, headed by Austin Tobin. Meanwhile, mass transit was strapped for money, and transit workers were demanding higher wages. Moses and Tobin had built empires catering to the automobile, while turning a back on mass transit; they were not concerned.

I decided to make a proposal. I suggested that tolls for the city's bridges and tunnels be doubled, and the proceeds used to subsidize mass transit. If this two-pronged proposal sounds mundane now, in 1965, it did not. It was front page news in all the city's papers, including the New York Times; in some, it commanded two inch banner headlines. Moses and Tobin, normally arch rivals, joined immediately in branding the proposal illegal. Later, in an article titled "Is Rubber to Pay for Rails," Moses fumed: "Ted Kheel has gone berserk." "The Kheel scheme is too silly for words." "Of course, nothing will come of it." "Kheel has earned the degree of M.U.B., Master of Unconscionable Bunk."

Harsh words. And maybe a little shortsighted. For a seed of an idea had been planted, and it slowly grew. Within a few years, tolls were doubled and then tripled, and TBTA revenues were eventually used, in part, to fund mass transit.

Fast forward to the present. Once again a transit problem confronts us, as we face the reality that car congestion is strangling the city's economy, destroying our health, and damaging the atmosphere. And once again, a novel and controversial solution has been proposed, or rather, a pair of solutions, which-- like my two-pronged proposal in 1965-- would turn car drivers' pain into mass transit's gain.

Here are the old ideas in their new clothes. Prong one is congestion pricing: imposing a fee on cars driven in the city, which would discourage some from driving, and raise revenues from those who do; prong two, is free mass transit: eliminating the bus and subway fare, and using the revenues from congestion pricing to cover the costs. The carrot and the stick. Simple enough. But as strange to our way of thinking as my proposal almost half a century ago.

Here's what they say about these ideas.

First, on congestion pricing, a recent New York Times article reported: "Everyone accepts that if your car is stationary, it's fine to pay for parking." "But if you tell people they have to pay to move their car between two points, they think it's crazy." Maybe in New York. But congestion pricing has been adopted successfully in cities like London, Stockholm, Rome, Singapore, Melbourne and Toronto. In fact, as the article acknowledges, "there's reason to think that we could be entering a golden age for congestion pricing."

What about free transit? I recently funded a $100,000 study of the benefits of free mass transit, in the belief the benefits would outweigh the costs. The concept shocked many. One writer branded my proposal that of "some hippy environmentalists"; others dismissed the idea as hopelessly utopian- not knowing, perhaps, that only a small portion of transit costs are paid today by fare revenues, and that funds from congestion pricing could comfortably cover that amount. Yet the proposal intrigued people, at the same time it surprised them. Newspapers, television stations, and public radio picked up the story. Pictures of crumpled Metrocards circulated on several websites, while another announced "Metrocards Make Good Coasters." Comments streamed in on the blogs. One site described the proliferating discussion as a "free frenzy".

For a few short hours last weekend, Red Hook, Brooklyn, had an answer. In the middle of Van Brunt Street, the neighborhood's main drag and the primary conduit for the dramatically increased vehicle traffic generated by the new Fairway, an artist erected a mental speed bump in the middle of the street.

When I heard about it, I thought of what Allan B. Jacobs says about great intersections: "The reason great intersections work is because of the creation of a pedestrian realm where the cars know this. When streets become unsafe, it is almost always when the pedestrian realm does not exist."

In many parts of Van Brunt Street, the pedestrian realm effectively does not exist. One person has been killed on Van Brunt since Fairway moved in--a death that was essentially predicted by the chief of the 76th Precinct--and a resident interviewed by the Brooklyn Paper said he sees "accidents every week and near accidents almost daily. It wasn't like this even a year ago."

Red Hook locals angered by last year's pedestrian death demonstrated to protest the traffic conditions, and the DOT eventually responded by saying a traffic light will be installed--at some future point--at the corner of Van Brunt and Sullivan.

It's a shame, though, that a traffic light is the only solution the city thinks to look for, and that the warrant for a traffic light only becomes relevant once the number of car trips reaches a certain threshold. Because there is still question whether a traffic light is really what is needed. Perhaps a stop sign, or more permanent forms of mental speed bumps, would yield better outcomes.

Red Hook in transition: Will the neighborhood be defined by cars and traffic or people and places?

Until Fairway came into the neighborhood, the sidewalks and many businesses of Van Brunt Street were among the most important destinations in Red Hook. Though the experience of them has been degraded by increased traffic (and just wait until IKEA opens), they remain valuable to the people living there and in the surrounding neighborhoods. The city's DOT, EDC and consultants, however, see Van Brunt not as a destination in itself, but as a street with excess road capacity, prime to be exploited. Until there is congestion, or more people die, the "impacts" of the new traffic will not show up on their radar.

By just focusing on moving traffic and then evaluating its impacts later, we are degrading and isolating our existing neighborhood destinations and the communities they define. If transportation planning is supposed to facilitate getting people places, then its primary goal should be to create places worth going to, then maximizing their accessibility by creating more successful places nearby. This is perhaps the very nature of how we create a great, livable and walkable street.

In the name of mobility, transportation planners have forgotten to create and support destinations, and have instead often degraded existing destinations along the way. Mobility may be increasing, but we are accomplishing less and less while moving around more and more.

The Added Value market and farm project is creating a destination that celebrates the neighborhood.

Let's take food shopping as an example. A destination like Fairway offers a limited and predictable set of benefits-a dazzling selection of food flown from in around the world (made possible by a food system that emphasizes food mobility while undermining food access). Red Hook's Added Value farmers' market, in contrast, or any other such market in Brooklyn, doesn't offer that global selection. But if you shop there, especially if you travel by foot or bike or public transit, you might well accomplish 10 other things along the way-several of which may have been unplanned. It is this wealth of unplanned destinations that make many of Brooklyn's neighborhood streets some of the best in the world.

This simple piece of temporary artwork in the middle of an intersection is a strong statement that neighborhood streets need attention as more than just conduits to "keep traffic moving smoothly." Perhaps this small act can be a turning point for Red Hook and for the city. Perhaps we start planning for neighborhood and community outcomes first, with the idea that local action will engender the broadest citywide outcomes (rather than the other way around). But it all comes down to how we treat each intersection, and good planning is very likely going to be more art than engineering.

A few of us from Project for Public Spaces were recently in Dubai to train a group of the city's leading real estate developers in Placemaking. The largest city in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai has experienced explosive growth in recent years, emerging as the region's financial and cultural capital. 

The real estate development boom currently underway in Dubai almost makes New York City look like a sleepy ghost town. Combined, the group of developers we met are launching or planning tens of billions of dollars in new projects over the next few years. Despite many iconic, ambitious and, perhaps, visionary developments, the modern part of the city has almost no successful public spaces. As is usually the case, the major limiting factor was the city's nearly total automobile dependence. Not surprisingly, the rapid changes are setting a course that will force Dubai to confront many difficult transportation and development policy decisions in the coming years.

Dubai's transportation system depends almost entirely on the ever-widening Sheikh Zayed Road. The city lacks the smaller, more distributed and diverse destinations of a more organically developed city. With limited destinations scattered up and down this road there is little possibility for walking or bicycling (Neighborhing Qatar is building a network of mist-cooled bike lanes). Mass transit is planned and the current burst of development is creating density but nothing is being designed to be transit- or pedestrian-compatible.

Photo Credit: Asghar Khan/Gulf News

Like all undiversified systems, the transportation system of Dubai is susceptible to overshoot and collapse. With a rapidly growing population of 1.1 million, nearly 1.8 million daily car trips are made on Dubai roads, of which 800,000 trips are on the highways. Despite these conditions, the Gulf News recently reported optimistically that "Dubai Traffic Will Be Smooth Within Three Years."

We were told that 25 percent of the world's cranes are in Dubai.

The economy seems to have been driven by construction and the mere momentum of growth with a concentration on high rise, luxury condominiums. Notice, even with all of this construction, there are no trucks allowed during the morning rush hour.

Soon to be the world's tallest building, Burj Dubai is estimated to top off at 190 floors, but they will not disclose the final height. The Burj Al Arab, the city's most iconic building, is described as a "7 star hotel" and together with the surrounding malls and resorts, it is the city's primary tourist attraction. The city cannot go much further to impress the world with resorts or starchitectural monuments.

The most popular "alternative" form of transportation has perhaps an even larger ecological footprint, at the world's largest indoor downhill ski slope located at the Mall of the Emirates. Apparently, they are about to build another, even larger, indoor ski slope. When the snow finishes melting off the Alps we'll still have these. 

All this was in sharp contrast to Copenhagen where we had spent the previous few days at the Public Spaces Public Life conference (with world famous blogger Aaron Naparstek. Editor's note: This is your best post ever, Ethan. --AN). Certainly, the stories we learned of Scandinavia overcoming the "bad weather excuse" and creating a walking and public space culture on "shoulder seasons" were relevant to Dubai.

As with most globally oriented cities, Dubai contains a hidden city within. We did not get to see the vast camps of immigrants brought in to do construction. The vibrant Deira section was not listed on the maps given to us at our upscale Bur Dubai Hotel, but this "poorer" part of the city is where one finds the only successful public spaces. Mostly car free, Deira is a maze of souks, pedestrian streets, small squares, markets and mosques.

Peering into a Mosque where Muslim men from all over the world worship.

Dubai and New York make for an interesting comparison. While completely different in many ways, in both Dubai and New York, recent development and real estate booms have been led by luxury housing and have largely ignored public amenities, livable streets and culturally dynamic and diverse public spaces. Both cities now seem to be playing catch-up for the lack of planning.

New York and Dubai have achieved great success by their own standards but are also at critical junctures. Transportation seems to be the major obstacle and limiting factor in both cities. Both cities are finding that the inefficiency of a surface transportation system built around the private automobile creates severe limitations. Both cities need to stop planning for cars and start planning for destinations that actually build and reflect local culture. Dubai and New York may be two of the world's most rapidly growing cities, but the long term sustainability and competitiveness of both will be determined by their ability to wean themselves off the automobile and create highly functional destinations at every scale.

For more on how this can happen in NYC (with relevance to many large cities), see Project for Public Spaces' recently released Nine Ways to Transform NYC into a City of Great Places.

With perhaps the densest downtown in the world, Hong Kong is meeting its livability goals and addressing its congestion problems by strategically reclaiming streets as public spaces.

Hong Kong, even more than New York, is a city run by and for business interests, and its buildings, streets and public spaces have increasingly reflected this dominance. It is exactly this imbalance that makes it all the more impressive and relevant to New York City that the Hong Kong Transport Department has in the last few years seized the initiative to make its congested streets more pedestrian-friendly.

A high vehicle demand street in the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong has not only been narrowed with various traffic calming measures, but it is completely closed to cars evenings and weekends.

In each of ten central districts the city has chosen to do a combination of traffic calming and permanent and part-time street closings. For instance, in the Causeway Bay area, the city has transformed a district of isolated, internally focused shopping centers into a unified shopping district with the streets as the main focus.

Green signifies full-time pedestrian streets, blue part-time and Yellow traffic calmed.

One of the commercial shopping centers is even called Times Square, highlighting the point that similar improvements could easily be made in New York City's Times Square. Closing streets in Times Square at specific times, like when the theaters get out, would be a boon for the district on many levels.

A temporary street closing is on a "Trial Run" near Hong Kong's Times Square shopping center.

Hong Kong thinks of itself as Asia's capital city, just as New York City sees itself as the primary city of North America. In recent years Hong Kong's centrality has been threatened by increasing congestion and diminishing quality of life. Businesses and workforce talent have been threatening to move to the Chinese mainland and other Asian cites like Singapore, Taipei, Shanghai and Tokyo. In response to that threat, Hong Kong is choosing to squeeze the private automobile out of its downtown.

A city that once had almost no space for walking and where tourists, business travelers and residents dreaded its transportation system now has speedy and efficient mass transit and nice public spaces.


Double-decker trolleys and buses carry the bulk of trips on Hong Kong's streets.

The streets still carry an extraordinary amount of capacity but it mostly consists of buses, trolleys and taxis. Hong Kong also improves on our Metro Cards with its Octopus Cards that do not even need to be swiped, but can just be briefly held over the turnstile. Like the Metro Card, the Octopus Cards have boosted ridership, efficiency and pride in the city's transport system.

Hong Kong is not a city that New York has historically looked to for inspriation, but this global commerce capital is creatively addressing many of the same challenges that New York City currently faces. I personally would not be an advocate of permanently pedestrianizing all that many streets in New York but closing streets temporarily in shopping areas during lunch hours, evenings and weekends would certainly work in Soho, Chinatown and a number of other selected spots. Why aren't we trying it out?

Traffic Calming and removing parking in many of the areas where we are trying to encourage walking, shopping, and better quality of life would also make a ton of sense.  I'm sure the folks in Hong Kong said it could never be done. Well, they're doing it. And it's working.  

Here are some before and after images from Hong Kong:

This is what Atlantic  Avenue looked like on Sunday.

A police officer holds back a handful of cars for throngs of people to cross the street.

Traffic doesn't belly dance!

Businesses and institutions along the avenue showcased themselves and connected to passersby.

There were experiments with alternative forms of transportation.

And on Monday it's back to work.

For the pedestrians that are not forced to walk in the street on Canal Street, many are forced to duck out of the way of the pedestrian warning sign that for years has been leaning away from the view of the drivers it is meant to inform. 

Of course, on Queens Boulevard (and in many locations where DOT faces a pattern of pedestrian safety problems), there are no signs asking drivers to watch for people walking and the prominent signage is more direct in putting all of the responsibility and the fear into the hearts of pedestrians.  "A pedestrian was killed crossing here.  Be alert, cross with care."

Perhaps the NYC DOT Signs and Markings division could take some inspiration from Metuchen, NJ, and the Automobile Association of America (the core of the automobile lobby) where they have together taken the initiaitve to sponsor a full banner to enforce priority for pedestrians.

Though currently dominated by old industrial buildings, the thriving neighborhoods adjacent to the waterfront seem poised to reclaim and reinvent this last urban frontier. Unfortunately, many of the city's current redevelopment plans threaten to bring deadening, one-dimensional uses to the City's valuable waterfront.

The car-oriented entrance to Schaefer Landing, a new waterfront condo tower in Greenpoint-Williamsburg.

Much of the new waterfront development is being defined by large car drop-off areas, vast amounts of parking, passive walls and expansive "open space" -- designs that deter public use and distance the new buildings from their neighbors. We are, essentially, suburbanizing our waterfront.

Similar luxury high-rise developments and elaborate design schemes are degrading urban waterfronts like Barcelona's Diagonal Mar development and Toronto's new highrise waterfront.

Here in New York, the new residential towers are being sold as bringing a built-in constituency to the waterfront, but they will inevitably house a small, well-heeled population intent on keeping any other constituencies out of the surrounding public spaces. The towers themselves and the large open spaces that surround them will also reinforce exclusionary goals.

Teardrop Park is a $17 Million public park that serves primarily as a private courtyard arboretum to the surrounding high-rise development.

Even the celebrated Battery Park City does not really work for the public in the areas around the residential developments and there is really not that much to do there. The public spaces that work better there like Rockefeller Park and the plazas of the World Financial Center were put in before the high-rise residential and are extremely well managed and programmed for public outcomes. The newest part to be developed around Teardrop Park reveals that this lesson has not yet been learned.

The most recently completed suburban, "tower-in-the-park" developments include Schaefer Landing in Williamsburg and Queens West. More "luxury" residential is sure to follow with the advent of the Williamsburg-Greenpoint rezoning. The most egregious planned development is approaching finalization on what could be Brooklyn's and perhaps NYC's most promising waterfront stretch.

The current plan for Brooklyn Bridge Park lacks the entrances, connections and destinations of successful parks and seems designed more for the private needs of the residents of Brooklyn Heights and the planned luxury towers.

Brooklyn Bridge Park, is a development project masquerading as a park. I have recently written a more in-depth critique of this plan and the park design. Most of these efforts seem to be driven by the Empire State Development Corporation but are also supported by the city. They all are threatening to preclude public access and ownership of our waterfront while bringing more traffic and private control of public space.

The fact that the buildings are placed at the entrances to the waterfronts and the parks and are surrounded by highly-trafficked roads, car-dominated entrances and large swaths of passive green space ensures that these crucial areas will clearly belong to the high-rise residents and not the people of Brooklyn.

It does not have to be this way. Before these narrow development interests dominate the public process and public right-of-way any more than they have already been allowed to, there are copious opportunities to stake claim for more public uses and public access.

It is not too late, the face of Brooklyn can still be its front porch showcasing the character and diversity of brooklyn rather than a suburban backyard.

Looking at the best waterfronts around the world, few have high-rise residential at the waters edge and many have been able to keep some existing light industrial uses and integrate other more public uses while maintaining a financially self-sustaining model.

Will our new waterfronts become the face of our great neighborhoods, bringing more public access and public benefit, or will they resemble more suburban values with private control of land use and more car traffic?

The scale of buildings bordering a waterfront should not be towers but a continuous line of 4- to 8-story buildings that actively engage the public spaces. Towers, where appropriate, can be back from the first line of buildings. Otherwise, towers can dominate and "control" waterfront destinations. Likewise, contrary to popular belief, parks do not usually work as major waterfront destinations but can be used to connect more defined urban waterfront destinations. Many places outside of NYC offer strong models for alternative waterfront development that could easily be applied to many locations in NYC.

Vancouver's Granville Island has many revenue-generating uses that also serve as great public space and cultural destinations, while providing very limited parking and the lowest possible level-of-service on its streets.

Vancouver's Granville Island - This difficult to access island industrial site has become Canada's most successful development. Run publicly and breaking even financially, the development has a full range of publicly focused uses, from artist live/work spaces that spill out on to streets, to a community center, shops and the world's highest performing public market per square foot -- and a negligible amount of housing.

Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia - a world famous urban mixed-use waterfront with many destinations, throughout, the public spaces come first.

Rhine River Promenade, Düsseldorf, Germany - A shrinking budget ended up creating a better waterfront

Porto, Portugal - A historic model of an urban waterfront as the soul and center of a city.

Miami's Design District - This brand new district was quickly transformed from an inaccessible industrial area. It was a near immediate economic success, building itself around a pedestrian scale, with widened sidewalks, curb extensions, low residential density, and a strong 24-hour artist community.

The Water Taxi Beach was of course the highlight of the trip and turned out to be a refreshingly good example of a more entrepreneurial approach to waterfront planning while maintaining a broader public purpose. It is brought to you by the same person who created Peir 63 and was involved in many of the successful parts of Hudson River Park.

The new Water Taxi Beach is open to the public and draws people from all over while costing the city nothing.

With New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall heading to Paris for a summer vacation we wanted to make sure that she was aware of some recently-released results of these reforms.

A gridlocked Parisian street in 2000, before Mayor Bertrand Delanoë's transportation reforms.

According to newly released statistics from the City of Paris:

• Vehicle Miles Traveled by car in Paris fell 5% in 2005, 15% since 2001.
• Bicycle use has increased 5% since 2004.
• The number of vehicle crashes has decreased 21% since 2001.

Le Mobilien in Monmartre. To discourage driving in the city center, many Parisian streets now have lanes set aside for the exclusive use of buses, bikes and taxis.

• Subway use increased 2.8% and commuter rail increased 2.9% in 2005.
• The speed and regularity of buses on dedicated routes improved 10% to 13% in 2005.
• The city is expanding the number of bus lines that run all night, as well as those buses' frequency.

Physical separation allows buses, taxis and bikes to have faster, safer more reliable travel. If you want to drive an automobile into town, you can, but you have to deal with more congestion.

You can find more on Paris's creative, effective and politically successful transportation reform at New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign and Project for Public Spaces:

Reporting (and translation) by PPS's french speaking Paris native Juliette Michaelson.

I was working in Flint, Michigan the first part of this week. Remarkably, for a city that was planned for everything but people, there are still some great people working to create a genuine "Steets Rennaissance." Flint originally built itself around the car and, after General Motors left town, rebuilt itself around large "economic development" projects. Yet, today, "Vehicle City" barely generates a trickle of downtown traffic.

Though there are few reasons for people to come downtown, city planners remain focused on  parking availability as their major concern. As we often see in other places, New York City included, a narrow focus on parking is an indicator that a community has no larger vision for itself.

The Rennaissance Center in nearby Detroit is an icon to the Renaisnace of the automobile and the anti-human architecture and land-use policies that came with it. 

Not a friendly building close up either.

On a more hopeful note, Project for Public Spaces developed the vision for what could be the start of a Streets Renaissance for Detroit in the fomerly asphalt and car-dedicated Campus Martius Park.

Project for Public Spaces got this festival started back in 1978 along with the nine museums that line New York City's "Museum Mile." The main goal was to spur the development of new museum audiences and increase support for the arts during the fiscal crisis of the 1970's. But the festival also shows how great an asset New York City's streets can be when they are not used soley for the movement and storage of motor vehicles. 

In Tokyo, the equivalent of Fifth Avenue is called Ginza. The entire Ginza is closed to cars not just once a year, but every weekend, all weekend long. I was in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago and took this picture:

It is easy to imagine New York City doing the same thing on Fifth Avenue or sections of Broadway on weekends. If you make it to this evening's festival, you will get a sense of how great this could be.