Streetsblog New York City

Last year, New Yorkers took to Park Avenue on foot, on bikes, and on rollerblades to enjoy all the extra space of a car-free street. Photo: Jeff Prant

Get ready to stretch out your legs, New York City. The fourth annual Summer Streets starts tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. — the first of three car-free Saturdays on Park Avenue.

Last year’s dumpster pools are gone, replaced with a climbing wall, sand sculptures and New York City sports legends. Sure to remain are crowds of people eager to break out from narrow sidewalks and traffic-clogged streets and use the full width of Park Avenue for walking, biking, rollerblading, playing and relaxing.

The details, including a map of the Park Avenue route and the location of rest stops and activities, can be found on the Department of Transportation’s website.

Photo: Jeff Prant

Jackson Heights’ 78th Street Play Street, a summertime street closure won in last year’s best feel-good story of grassroots activism, has been expanded from two months of car-free space to three this year. If all goes well in September, when the school year has started, some sort of year-round street closure should be in the works for the kids of Jackson Heights.

“We’re on track to reforming the way that whole piece of street works,” said Donovan Finn, a member of the Jackson Heights Green Alliance. Both the Department of Transportation and City Council Member Daniel Dromm are “pretty solidly on board” with making some sort of big change in the next year or so should all go well this summer, Finn reported.

By extending the play street through September — last year, the block of 78th adjacent to Travers Park was closed 24/7 in July and August — neighborhood residents and city officials will be able to see how it works when school is in session. The private Garden School uses the street both to access its five-space parking garage and for loading and unloading school buses. “That’s actually the only use that faces the street,” said Finn.

DOT and Dromm specifically requested that the play street be extended into September in order to test out how the school would make a year-round closure work, whether full- or part-time.

We’ll see what happens in September, but so far the play street is again wildly popular in the open space-starved neighborhood. “Within 20 minutes of having it closed, there were kids out there running around,” said Finn. Once amenities like picnic tables, umbrellas, and astroturf are brought out, he said, residents will be able to use the new public space in even more ways.

Clarence put together these highlights from the morning presser with former Mets southpaw John Franco, all-time Knicks overachiever John Starks, and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announcing the 2011 season of Summer Streets and Weekend Walks.

Said Brooklyn native Franco: “Events like this bring the city closer and makes everybody one big happy family.”

Clarence also worked some footage from the past few years of car-free events in there. I think this needs to go in the highlight reel too:

Read more…

Former Mets closer John Franco, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, and Knicks star John Starks announce the program for Summer Streets 2011. Photo: Noah Kazis

This August, Park Avenue will again be closed to motor vehicles for three Saturday mornings as part of the fourth annual Summer Streets event.

The details are largely the same as in years past: The route will run for seven miles from 72nd Street south to Foley Square from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. When asked what the Department of Transportation had learned from last year’s event, Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan simply replied, “We’ve learned that it’s wildly popular.” Last year, 60,000 New Yorkers enjoyed the car-free street each Saturday, she said.

While the main attraction hasn’t changed, a new slate of programming will be available for families to enjoy. Sports fans should appreciate the participation of the New York Knicks and Mets — record-holding Mets closer John Franco and 1990s Knicks star John Starks were on hand at the press conference announcing Summer Streets this afternoon. “Maybe you can learn a few tips about shooting a basketball from me,” Starks promised potential Summer Streets attendees. Each team will have a presence at the event but it’s not quite clear if active players will be there as well.

Also along the route will be sand sculptures, a 25-foot climbing wall, and free bicycle and rollerblade rentals.

The flagship Park Avenue Summer Streets event will be joined by 18 neighborhood “Weekend Walks,” across all five boroughs.

At this point, the only question that remains about Summer Streets is when those 60,000 people will be able to come back for a fourth or fifth car-free weekend day. The state of Massachusetts, for comparison’s sake, closes Memorial Drive, a riverfront highway in Cambridge, to cars all day every Sunday from April through November.

Neighbors gather on Fulton Street to watch a fashion show at a Summer Streets event last year. Photo: NYC DOT

The traffic and transportation committee of Brooklyn CB 10 endorsed the concept of a weekend street closure along Bay Ridge’s Third Avenue Wednesday night, but due to a large number of unknowns, they held off on voting for the actual proposal. The elected officials supporting the Bay Ridge Summer Streets plan — State Senator Marty Golden and City Council Member Vincent Gentile — are now working to find answers to the community board’s questions in time for the full board to vote on the plan.

The decision came after a lengthy discussion of the merits of bringing Weekend Walks, DOT’s program to turn city streets into car-free community gathering places on summer weekends, to Bay Ridge. “They generally supported the concept, but they felt that there were a number of issues that were not complete,” said district manager Josephine Beckmann. “It’s new to us, so we have a lot of questions.”

The board’s unanswered questions included where a Third Avenue bus would be rerouted, how to provide programming for the closed street, such as fitness events or local art exhibits, and what time the street would have to be closed for events to start taking place by 6:00 p.m.

Some of the confusion was due to the fact that no representatives from the city were on hand to answer the more technical questions. Golden has pushed hard for the Summer Streets plan on economic development grounds, but isn’t the person to explain the nitty-gritty of implementation.

“Hopefully all of these answers can be provided,” said Beckmann. If a more concrete plan is in place by CB 10′s full board meeting on June 20, she said, the board could reconsider then.

A quick note from Brooklyn Community Board 10 regarding a meeting set for 7:00 tonight:

[The CB 10] Traffic & Transportation Committee will host a public hearing to discuss our elected officials’ suggestion to create a “Summer Streets Pedestrian Mall” along 3rd Avenue between 82nd and 92nd Streets on Friday evenings from 6:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. during the months of July and August. This would involve the street closure of 3rd Avenue to vehicular traffic with side street crossings remaining open to traffic from 82nd Street to 92nd Street.

This proposal has the support of Sen. Marty Golden but has received the customary preemptive drubbing in the media. With southern Brooklyn rivaling Park Slope as the epicenter of livable streets battles, opposition is expected. Here are the details, if you can make it: St. Anselm’s McMahon Auditorium, 365 83rd St. Handicapped access ramp is located at the side of the Church. 7 p.m.

Should a pedestrian-friendly Times Square serve as a model for other American cities? Who would ask such a thing? Certainly not the real New Yorkers who constitute the city’s hard-bitten press corps.

No, for meaningful analysis of the use of public space, it’s best to look elsewhere. Case in point: MSNBC’s “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which recently dedicated a full eight minutes to the redesigned Times Square. Spurred by the report that air quality has improved since Broadway traffic lanes were reclaimed for pedestrians, Ratigan asked Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, and Ben Goldhirsh, publisher of GOOD Magazine, whether such measures are “good for America.”

Ratigan, who used to work in Times Square, was once a skeptic, but two years later he’s a convert who ultimately makes no bones about his “bias.” Yet he still manages to hold a rational discussion about car-free spaces, punctuated by facts and figures, leaving the hysterics and fear-mongering to the pros.

Los Angeles’s CicLAvia is more than a seven and a half mile street party with a funny name. In a city so closely associated with cars and car culture, it’s one of the many signs that Los Angeles is changing and one’s status is not represented by the vehicle one owns.

For the people that took to the streets on April 10, CicLAvia was about a lot of other things too: freedom, fun, fellowship and community were just some of the answers we got when we asked Angelenos what CicLAvia meant to them. And what’s a film without some cameo appearances? Look for Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and an even more famous cyclist on this trip through a car-free Southern Californian Sunday.

DOT's new interactive map of Jackson Heights can display several layers of information, like the number of traffic crashes and pedestrian volumes at certain intersections.

Since 2009, the Department of Transportation has been engaged in a major study of Jackson Heights’ streets and sidewalks. At the request of community groups and with federal funding from Rep. Joe Crowley, DOT has been developing a plan to make the neighborhood safer, less congested, and more transit-accessible. After two years of research and community engagement, DOT will be presenting its first recommendations next Saturday, February 12.

In preparation for the release of those plans, DOT has also launched a first-of-its-kind data portal collecting all the information about the Jackson Heights Transportation Study. (The portal was developed by a division of OpenPlans, Streetsblog’s parent organization.) Everything from community board presentations to raw, block-by-block data about parking occupancy is in one place.

The portal includes a new interactive map of Jackson Heights. Presenting information like vehicle speeds, pedestrian volumes, traffic crashes and parking occupancy, the map helps visualize what happens on the neighborhood’s streets. You can see, for example, how rampant double-parking blocks buses along Broadway: On one block, there are an average of 32 percent more cars parked than there are spaces. According to DOT, even more features should be available after next Saturday.

What’s presented on the 12th could also be extremely exciting. At presentations to Community Boards 3 and 4 last June, DOT proposed classifying all neighborhood streets into four categories laid out in the department’s Street Design Manual.

• Through streets would be redesigned to move vehicular traffic more efficiently, without causing speeding.
• Transit streets would have bus lanes, curb extensions at bus stops and lights coordinated with the buses. 74th and 75th Streets are likely candidates.
• Slow streets would calm traffic with re-timed signals and traffic-calming treatments like neckdowns.
• Some streets could be pedestrianized, with furniture and greenery creating new public spaces.

Read more…

A little weekend viewing from the west coast of England. Since the summer of 2009, neighbors in Bristol have organized “Playing Out” events on seven streets, setting aside car-free hours for kids to play in the street without constant parental supervision. Watching this video immediately brought to mind Clarence’s Streetfilm of the 78th Street play street in Jackson Heights.

The Bristol moms behind “Playing Out” have put together a stellar web site laying out the case for car-free time on residential streets. I especially like their answer to the question: “Why do children need to play in the street when there are parks nearby?”

Parks are great for family outings and for older children who can get there independently but, unless you happen to live right next to a park, it usually involves a special trip, escorted and supervised by adults. Street play is very different. Firstly, it is literally on the doorstep so children can play ‘semi-supervised’ whilst parents get on with other things. This allows for more free, unstructured play, without being under the constant gaze of adults. Secondly, it is a step towards greater independence, giving both children and parents more confidence to gradually extend their ‘freedom to roam’, leading to children eventually being able to get to parks and other local places by themselves.