Streetsblog New York City

Over the next week or so, community boards in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn will take up planned livable streets projects, as described below.

• Thursday, April 3 - Queens CB2: A street conversion of Barnett Avenue to a one-way westbound from Woodside Avenue to 39th Avenue, and a request for speed bumps at several locations along Skillman Avenue.
  
• Tuesday, April 8 - Manhattan CB7: Traffic calming on West 106th Street, including buffered bike lanes in both directions.
• Thursday, April 10 - Brooklyn CB8: Redesign for Vanderbilt Avenue between Dean Street and Grand Army Plaza, including the addition of bike lanes and Greenstreets medians.

Opposition is expected to the Queens and Manhattan projects, especially over potential loss of parking. As evidenced by the recent failed effort to pedestrianize Prince Street, it is important that as many advocates as possible, particularly those who live in the respective districts, come to these meetings.

More project proposals are planned for later this month and into May. Streetsblog will keep you posted.

Broadway at Dyckman/200th Street and Riverside Drive: a confusing, foreboding free-for-all

Livable streets advocates in Northern Manhattan are proposing a cycle track, similar to the one on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, to link the Hudson River and Harlem River Greenways at 200th/Dyckman Street in Inwood.

Dyckman currently has bike lanes at its east and west ends, but the stretch between Broadway and Nagle Avenue is four lanes of auto traffic with parallel parking on both sides. When an item showed up on Community Board 12's Traffic and Transportation Committee agenda suggesting DOT might be poised to add bike lanes from Broadway to Nagle, Maggie Clarke got to work.

Clarke, who has a Ph.D. in environmental science, has been an active Inwood organizer since the 1970s. She was a key player in establishing the RING Garden, transforming the Lt. William Tighe Triangle at the intersection of Dyckman and Broadway into a community-supported treasure and making Inwood home to Manhattan's second Greenstreets site. Clarke has not seen the city's plans, if any, for Dyckman Street (neither has Streetsblog -- we have a message in to DOT as of this writing), but says that, because of harrowing traffic, a simple restriping would be a "waste of paint, unless it was a prelude to something bigger."

One idea for "something bigger" was presented by Clarke and other Inwood residents at the CB 12 T&T committee meeting earlier this month. Modeled on the Ninth Avenue cycle track, Clarke and a small group of neighbors proposed a two-way separated bike lane on the north sides of Riverside Drive and Dyckman Street, buffered by a narrow green median, connecting the Henry Hudson and Harlem River Bike Paths.

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The Greenstreet at 110th and Amsterdam helps keep sewage out of city rivers and features a beefed-up, traffic-calming "blockbuster."

It rained yesterday, sending stormwater streaming down New York City streets and through sewer grates. The runoff mixed with wastewater in the system and overloaded treatment facilities, causing raw sewage to spill into the city's waterways.

Sound like an ecological disaster? It can be triggered by as little as one tenth of an inch of rainfall in one hour. Called Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO), this toxic broth also contains chemicals leached from roofs and pavement. 27 billion gallons of CSO pour into city rivers and bays every year. Until recently, there was no concerted effort to prevent it.

One of the more unsung PlaNYC initiatives aims to drastically reduce CSO, in part by managing streets more wisely. Certain traffic calming measures, it turns out, can not only make streets more ped-friendly, but also help make the city's rivers clean enough to swim in. To accomplish this, PlaNYC calls for retooling the Parks Department's Greenstreets program, and we are starting to see the results.

At their best, Greenstreets -- the pint-sized green spaces that Parks began planting in 1996 -- have served as modest traffic-calming measures, displacing asphalt with patches of greenery that send cues to slow down. The new breed goes a few steps further: They combine advanced stormwater capture techniques with more overt traffic-calming devices, like neckdowns and bulb-outs.

Read more...