Streetsblog New York City

The term “livable streets” first surfaced in 1981. That’s when UC Berkeley urban planning professor Donald Appleyard made it the title of his path-breaking new book on the social effects of cars on cities. But it was the advent of Streetsblog and the livable streets movement 25 years later that brought the term into public view.

The beauty of “livable streets” and of the movement bearing its name is that it unites under one rubric what had long been largely separate concerns — better bicycling, safer walking, affordable transit, inviting public spaces, urban sustainability. The term also recasts a negative as a positive, turning what could appear invasive — “getting people out of their cars” — into something situational: creating streets for people.

Try telling that, though, to the folks at the Manhattan Institute, who this week published a spectacularly retrograde piece, Idle in Manhattan, by one Herbert London, retired academician and one-time NY State Conservative Party candidate for governor. Writing in the Institute’s City Journal, London trots out one canard after another: Londoners “grudgingly” tolerate congestion pricing … “Most bicyclists in Manhattan are delivery carriers” … “In one hour [at the First Ave. bike lane] I counted just two bicycles” … “the mayor[‘s] efforts to control traffic … have only increased congestion.”

It takes about a minute of fact-checking or direct observation to rebut these claims. But what’s striking about (Herbert) London’s diatribe isn’t just its counterfactualism, but its willful ignorance of how livable streets change the way urban transportation systems function.

Pondering the genesis of the Bloomberg administration’s bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, London can’t conceive that the mayor was connecting the dots between physical activity, fighting obesity and downsizing health-care costs. Or had learned from his planning and transportation commissioners about cities in Europe where active transportation (biking and walking) accounted for as many as half of all trips, and workers, residents and tourists alike flocked to the city centers. Or thought it was worth putting a handful of districts on a road diet to see if the maxim that turning more street space over to cars produces more gridlock, could be run in reverse.

No, according to Herbert London, the mayor’s attempt to try out livable streets practices in New York is proof that “the Bloomberg administration has declared war on the automobile.”

Yet the facts show that city drivers aren’t victims of the emerging street paradigm, they’re beneficiaries — not just in Midtown, where car speeds have risen following introduction of the Broadway plazas, but throughout the Manhattan Central Business District.

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You could say Oskaloosa, Iowa, population 11,000, is a model of small-town livability. Families rent apartments over renovated historic storefronts. Local college students take the bike lane down Market Street to grab a bite in the local restaurants. Visitors travel from distant towns to browse the city’s local bookstore in its revitalized, walkable town square.

Oskaloosa’s vibrancy is owed in large part to Iowa’s Main Street program — a public-private partnership aimed at returning economic competitiveness to historic town centers. Over its 25 year history in the state, this program has encouraged walkability, mixed use development and historic preservation in 47 Iowa communities.

To those who question whether the concept of livability works in rural communities, the answer from Oskaloosa and the Iowa Main Street program is self-evident. The Main Street effort has been credited with attracting $1 billion dollars in private investment — about $79 private dollars for every public dollar — according to an economic analysis commissioned by the program. Hardly an exclusive domain of the Hawkeye State, Main Street is a national program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation — at work in 37 states.

However, some key Republicans have threatened to dismantle efforts to bring these kinds of common-sense investments to communities around the country.

Indeed, Iowa Congressman Tom Latham, whose district is just a few miles from Oskaloosa, is chair of the powerful Transportation and HUD Subcommittee on Appropriations. Latham has questioned whether the concept of “livability” applies in rural communities. And others in the Republican leadership have threatened to cut funding for President Obama’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning program and TIGER grants, efforts that aim to bring important economic and quality-of-life improvements — as well as overall infrastructure cost savings — to both rural and urban areas.

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You may have wondered, while watching a Streetfilm or reading a post on Streetsblog, where we got the term “livable streets.”

The answer can be found in the work of Donald Appleyard, a scholar who studied the neighborhood environment and the ways planning and design can make life better for city residents. In 1981, Appleyard published “Livable Streets” based on his research into how people experience streets with different traffic volumes.

Today we’re revisiting Appleyard’s work in the second installment of our series, “Fixing the Great Mistake.” This video explores three studies in “Livable Streets” that measured, for the first time, the effect of traffic on our social interactions and how we perceive our own homes and neighborhoods.

New Yorkers think their city is very livable, a new survey conducted by the Municipal Art Society shows, but livability isn’t equitably distributed across the five boroughs. To make the city truly livable, said panelists today at an MAS conference, New York needs to figure out how to bring its best features to all neighborhoods.

Overall, New Yorkers like their city: 84 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied or very satisfied with living in New York City, and 82 percent said the same about their neighborhoods.

Perhaps part of that satisfaction comes from living in the American city least dominated by the automobile. The two neighborhood characteristics that New Yorkers were most satisfied with were access to transit (93 percent) and neighborhood walkability (85 percent).

However, the MAS survey showed huge disparities in the degree to which New Yorkers find their neighborhoods to be livable. Overall, while 22 percent of African-Americans and 29 percent of Latinos were dissatisfied with their neighborhoods, only nine percent of whites were. Only eight percent of whites disagreed that their neighborhood was a good place to walk, while 18 percent of African-Americans and 19 percent of Latinos disagreed.

In the words of MAS Urban Fellow Mary Rowe, “If you’re white, you’re male, you’re under 45, and you’re making more than 75K, the city’s working well for you. Duh.”

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The current iteration of Grand Street, by most any objective measure, has to be considered a success. In the year since it was reconfigured to host the city's first parking-protected bike lane, with the blessing of Community Board 2, injuries are down 30 percent, with about 1,000 cyclists using the lane daily.

Other recent street safety projects are paying off with similar dividends, according to DOT data:

• After the Ninth Avenue protected bike lane was installed in 2007, injuries among all users dropped 56 percent.
  
• The protected Broadway bike lane between 42nd and 35th Streets brought a 50 percent drop in injuries.

Given quality of life improvements like these, it would make sense for mayoral challenger Bill Thompson to promise to at least stay the course, if not to one-up the incumbent. And in his responses to the Transportation Alternatives Candidate Survey, Thompson comes across as a big believer in the benefits of livable streets. New MTA revenue streams, expanded BRT service, ramped-up traffic enforcement, on-street parking reform -- when playing to the TA crowd, the candidate is nearly pitch perfect.

But depending on whom he's talking to, Thompson is either eager to expand on the safe streets initiatives of the past few years or eradicate them on day one -- starting with a shake up at DOT and removal of the Grand Street lane.

If increased safety and community board approval wouldn't be enough for a project to be judged a success by Mayor Thompson, what criteria would he use? Though we were assured several times that the candidate supports bike lanes, our conversation with a Team Thompson spokesperson did little to clear things up.

"It's a wide range of factors," said the spokesperson. "It's not just the small businesses in the area, it's also the community. I can't comment on something in the future. I mean, obviously you have to look at each bike lane separately, right?"

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The latest production of the Yes Men hit the streets and the Web today: an Onion-esque "Special Edition" of the New York Post devoted completely to climate change, released ahead of this week's global summit at UN headquarters. Coming in at 32 pages in print, there's a lot here to digest -- including a fun take down of livable streets skeptic Steve Cuozzo, whose alter ego sees the error of his auto-centric ways.

It may be a fake edition of the Post, but it isn't fake news, says the group:

Everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

"This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem."

Take, for example, the city's own climate change report [PDF], which warns of a future New York beset by extreme heat waves, flooding and drought unless "all nations" reduce their carbon emissions.

The bright side, inasmuch as there is one, is that most New Yorkers are already committed to a relatively low-impact lifestyle simply by residing in a city where over 80 percent of the population gets around by walking, biking and taking transit. Hopefully copies of today's faux-Post will make their way into the hands of oblivious politicians like Bill Thompson, for whom urban carbon-cutters like bike lanes and pedestrian spaces are only as valuable as the next faux-populist sound bite.

Update: Daily Finance (via Gothamist) reports that NYPD detained three volunteers who were distributing fake Posts outside the News Corp. building in midtown.

There is probably no more beloved figure in urbanism than Jane Jacobs, who fought to preserve some of New York City's most treasured neighborhoods and who gave urbanists some of the field's fundamental texts. As Ed Glaeser notes in the New Republic this week, Jacobs died in 2006 "a cherished, almost saintly figure," while her principal antagonist, Robert Moses, remains popularly reviled as a villain.

But as American cities have outgrown their infrastructure in recent decades, and as political institutions have proven unable to muster the energy necessary to construct great projects, Moses' reputation has enjoyed something of a recovery. Increasingly, he is being actively rehabilitated in new histories and essays, of which Glaeser's review is an example.

These efforts are interesting because they manage to earn a degree of sympathy from urbanists themselves, who have grown increasingly tired of the decades required to navigate a transit line from planning stages to operation.

There is something very attractive about an individual who can drive the stakes and get the project built -- damn the politicians, and damn the NIMBYs.

But this is dangerous territory. In rehabilitating Moses and reconsidering Jacobs, it's important to be clear about where each was right, and where each went wrong.

There are many ways to interpret the clash between Moses and Jacobs: development versus preservation, city versus suburb, design for people versus design for automobiles, power versus powerlessness, and so on. To acknowledge that the balance has swung too far in one direction in one of these conflicts does not at all suggest that the balances are similarly out of whack on others.

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With summer winding down, we can expect to see a big push ahead of the September 15 primaries. Hope the long weekend leaves you refreshed and ready.

If you need inspiration, click over to nycbikemaps' YouTube channel for more videos like this one, showcasing some of what livable streets advocates have helped achieve as of late, and what many free riders and their elected enablers would love to take away.

See you Tuesday and feel free to use the comments section as an election week open thread. Who do you think are the best candidates when it comes to livable streets and a sustainable city?

This was the scene at Herald Square yesterday afternoon. It's full of people doing what the Times' Susan Dominus finds so un-New York: sitting down. Some of these loafers are actually putting their feet up, right in the heart of our fast-paced, cutthroat city. It's like they've never even seen The Sweet Smell of Success.

Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson sent this photo and some others he snapped while shooting footage of the new Broadway. Before we get to those, a few Independence Day weekend notes.

• First, a reminder to tell John Liu that you support the Bicycle Access Bill. This is a big one.
• Second, the Macy's fireworks are switching rivers this year, so instead of the ultimate car-free event on the FDR, we'll have a car-free Route 9A and bike-free Hudson River Greenway. Starting at 4:30 on July 4th, the bikeway will be closed from 14th Street to 68th Street. It's expected to re-open in the wee hours of July 5th, after the cleaning wraps up.

Enjoy the weekend everyone. We'll see you back here on Monday. On to the pictures from Clarence...

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This image of Fifth Avenue unearthed by the Times' Jennifer 8. Lee (nice headline!) is a fascinating relic from the dawn of the motoring age. The new geometry pictured here nicked 15 feet of sidewalk from pedestrians to make room for two traffic lanes. In one fell swoop, the balance of space shifted dramatically: Two 30-foot sidewalks and a 40-foot roadway became 22½-foot sidewalks and a 55-foot roadway. The insets show the sort of "imperfections" slated for elimination on the auto-friendly Fifth Avenue: terraces, stoops, gardens -- the type of amenities that make streets more than simply thoroughfares to pass through.

Which got me wondering: A hundred years from now, how will we interpret images like this?