According to surveys, local businesses benefit from the livable streets improvements at Union Square, and data shows there's less speeding without affecting congestion for the worse. So why does the Manhattan Institute claim that projects like this are part of a "war on cars"? Photo: c34/Flickr

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.

Where the official report to the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission found that “GPS data for October 2007 show that taxi trips average … 8 mph within the CBD as a whole (below 60th Street), between 8 am and 6 pm,” taxi GPS data from October 2010 now put the average at 9.5 mph. In percentage terms (which is where, mathematically, travel time savings accumulate), this 1.5 mph gain is huge — enough to save commuters and truckers over 50,000 hours a day. Even applying very conservative “values of time,” that’s half-a-billion dollars a year New Yorkers are holding onto by not sitting in traffic.

What brought this change? The recession is partly responsible, for sure, but in previous downturns traffic congestion never eased to this extent. There are a host of other likely factors — the reinforcing effects of three decades of capital investment in mass transit, the rising use of unlimited farecards, a shift of the zeitgeist toward both active transportation and transit-friendly smartphones, and, yes, the provisions being made for walking and cycling, including the public plazas and bike lanes sneered at by Mr. London, which allow New Yorkers to get around more and drive less.

The irony is that not long ago, the Manhattan Institute was actively engaged in untangling threads like these. In 2006, it commissioned transportation savant Bruce Schaller to examine the gridlock-busting potential of congestion pricing, and it presented his findings at a major forum. The buzz from that meeting, along with a Times op-ed by Bruce (now a deputy commissioner at NYC DOT) and his then-colleague Hope Cohen (now at RPA), helped set the table for the mayor’s PlaNYC push the following spring. But that was before conservatism congealed into resistance and denial, and urban livability became anathema to the right wing.

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.

Oskaloosa residents enjoy an event in the town's revitalized downtown. Oskaloosa is one dozens of small Iowa towns to have benefited from the state's Main Street program. Photo: National Trust for Historic Preservation

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.

In Iowa, the Main Street program is funded through the state legislature. This year, it will cost about $900,000, relying heavily on the volunteer labor of community members. But the program has also benefited from federal support. Since 2002, it has received almost $5 million in federal earmarks, said Thom Guzman, Director of the Iowa Downtown Resource Center at the state’s Department of Economic Development. That money has been leveraged to help create 3,400 businesses and a total of more than 10,000 full-time jobs statewide, he estimated.

When the program was begun in Iowa in 1986, the state was reeling from the devastating farm crisis. “Communities across the state were losing population,” Guzman said. “The leaders in the state were looking for ways to help address the exodus of population and help bring jobs and population back into the state… Virtually every city that has started and stayed in the program is dramatically different than they were before.”

Main Street continues to be a stabilizing force decades later. Officials in Oskaloosa say the program has helped the city weather the terrible recession. In Oskaloosa alone, the Main Street program is credited with the creation of 151 new businesses and 352 new jobs for a total of $15 million in private investment into the city.

“It’s been very very helpful to us,” said Jon Sullivan, Director of the Oskaloosa Area Chamber and Development Group. “It has help us rejuvenate what I call the cradle of our community — the downtown area.”

Twenty-five years after becoming a Main Street community, the sustainability push in Oskaloosa continues. The city is in the final stages of completing a 15-mile bike/pedestrian trail. Oskaloosa’s trail will be somewhat unique for the area, in that it will be integrated into the street pattern.

Oskaloosa Mayor David Krutzfeldt says the trail will allow families to bike to the city’s sports center without using a car. The local seniors have been enjoying it as well, Krutzfeldt said. A local business has been taking nursing home residents out on the trail using motorized carts.

Sullivan said the trail is providing another boost for local businesses. “It just makes people want into come into town,” he said.

Officials in Oskaloosa don’t see livability as a foreign concept. Krutzfeldt said local leaders’ overarching strategy is “having those fresh ideas about how we want to go forward and being innovative about how we do things. Trying to create and energy and vibrancy in the downtown — we try to keep beating that drum all the time.”

It’s a strategy that is serving them well.

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.

The intersection of Northern Boulevard and 108th Street is dangerous enough that Mayor Bloomberg announced the city's Pedestrian Safety Study there, but has Corona received the livable streets improvements found elsewhere in the city? Image: Google Street View.

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.”

Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Paul Steely White offered a pair of specific examples from the transportation perspective. “It’s troubling that those improvements on First and Second Avenue,” which had been presented earlier in the morning by Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, “stop at 34th Street,” said White. T.A. is receiving letters from East Harlem residents asking what happened to their bike lanes, he said.

Additionally, White brought up the city’s plaza program, which reclaims street space for pedestrians. He noted that the marquee plazas along Broadway are maintained by the local business improvement districts, which in those neighborhoods have the capital to invest in public space. Implementing that same funding model in Corona, where the safety and open space that plazas bring is badly needed, might not be possible, explained White.

Accordingly, much of the discussion focused on how to make sure all neighborhoods are livable, not just those with a certain demographic profile. Robert McNulty, the CEO of Partners for Livable Communities, urged large, established city institutions — like the government, museums and universities — to invest more in disadvantaged neighborhoods. “Take your wealth and spread it into the other boroughs,” he urged.

Rowe called attention to housing authority land as an underutilized resource. “Invest in assets we already own,” she said. “Turn those areas in public space, into the mixing space that Jan Gehl talks about.” Working through NYCHA could also help focus livability efforts on areas in need of them.

White pointed to another agency as ideal for bringing livability into low-income areas: the city’s Economic Development Corporation. Job creation and livable areas are mutually reinforcing, he said, and EDC would be perfectly equipped to make livable places a part of its efforts to bolster local economies, if it weren’t so in thrall to mega-developments and mega-parking lots. “EDC really needs to undergo a revolution and understand that this stuff isn’t just window dressing,” said White.

A later panel on the city’s changing demographic highlighted two groups likely to make up an ever larger shared of the city’s population in coming years, and who may have particular demands for a livable neighborhood.

Between 2007 and 2030, explained Joseph Salvo, the director of the Department of City Planning’s Planning Division, New York City’s senior population is going to rise from around 926,000 to 1,352,000. At the same time, the city’s population will continue to be fed by a stream of immigrants from across the world (in a graph showing the countries of origin of New York City’s immigrants, a full 46 percent had to be lumped under “other”).

And as the face of New York City continues to change, so too will the definition of livability. Gordon Campbell, the head of the United Way of New York City, pointed to the Age-Friendly New York City initiative as a model. Regarding city streets, he argued for pedestrian improvements targeted at slower walkers, elevators in the subways, and age-friendly bike paths.

Salvo noted that 1.8 million New Yorkers over the age of five have limited English proficiency and that almost half of Queens’ population is foreign-born. Equal access and open communications, therefore, are key to any livability initiative that would include the city’s entire population.

Thompson tells NY1 he'll "review" recent safe street projects.

• 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?"

Despite a lot of talk about "community," the spokesperson did not mention health or safety as factors in determining worthy projects.

"We've heard from the community. Not just the community board, but from small business community members, neighbors in the area that felt like the bike lane has actually hurt business in the area. Obviously with the economy the way it is, you want to do all you can to help the small businesses of New York. Again, I just want to make it clear that he does support bike lanes. He's said it over and over again."

So when it comes to livable streets initiatives under the Thompson administration, the litmus test won't be public health, or even environmental impact, but feelings and anecdotes. When you single out one of the city's most effective cyclist safety improvements for immediate demolition based on who's screaming loudest, a promise of theoretical support simply doesn't hold water. No matter how many times you say it.

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.

Jane Jacobs (center, in light dress) demonstrates at New York City's old Penn Station. Photo: Metropolis

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.

Take, for example, one of Glaeser's principal intellectual standbys: that resistance to development slows the growth of housing supply, increasing housing costs. Glaeser says:

Jacobs underestimated the value of new construction—of building up.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities argues that at least one hundred homes per acre are necessary to support exciting stores and restaurants, but that two hundred homes per acre is a “danger mark.” After that point of roughly six-story buildings, Jacobs thought that neighborhoods risked sterile standardization. (The one public housing project that Jacobs blessed, at least initially, had only five stories.) But keeping great cities low means that far too few people can enjoy the benefits of city life. Jacobs herself had the strange idea that preventing new construction would keep cities affordable, but a single course in economics would have taught her the fallacy of that view. If booming demand collides against restricted supply, then prices will rise.

The best way to keep cities affordable is to allow private developers to build up and deliver space. Jacobs was right that high-rise public housing is a problem, as street crime is much more prevalent in high-rise, high-poverty neighborhoods. But in more prosperous, privately managed buildings, height is not a problem. If you love cities, as Jacobs certainly did, then presumably you should want the master builders to make them accessible to more people.

In this, Glaeser has a point. The opportunities to live in walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods are extremely limited, and so safe, walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods tend to be quite expensive. When regulations or NIMBYs block new developments, they limit access to this already limited supply, in the process hurting the causes of affordable housing and environmental sustainability.

On the other hand, it's difficult to understand the ferocity of urban anti-development forces without reference to the battles that hardened their views.

In Washington D.C., where I live, urbanists are routinely frustrated by neighborhood groups opposing new infill developments around Metro stations. These individuals are often outraged by the encroachment upon their neighborhoods and reluctant to listen to the arguments in favor of new walkable, transit-oriented developments around what is a very valuable piece of transit infrastructure. This is occasionally maddening.

But these neighborhood groups were often forged in the highway battles of the 1970s, when planners sought to run freeways through Washington neighborhoods to downtown. Where the highway and public housing builders were successful, neighborhoods were irreparably damaged. The stubbornness is a reaction to the insensitivity of earlier cohorts of urban planners. Had Moses and his ilk been less Moses-like, Glaeser would not find himself so frustrated by construction limits today.

It's also worth asking whether Glaeser's ire is best directed at urban neighborhoods, rather than suburban ones. If you love cities, and if you love the things that cities do well, perhaps you should take aim at the heavily regulated, extremely low-rise metropolitan periphery.

Consider this: The Bronx is home to about 1.4 million people who live on 42 square miles -- a remarkably dense area by American standards. Next door in Westchester County, about 950,000 people live on 433 square miles -- dense for America but much less dense than the Bronx.

In 2004, the Bronx permitted the construction of nearly 5,000 new housing units to Westchester's 1,800. The following year, the numbers were again 5,000 for the Bronx, and only 1,300 for Westchester.

Tiny, dense Bronx County seems to be doing a much better job accommodating new housing units, regulations and all. And this is no outlier. Queens packs more people onto less land than neighboring Nassau County, and suffers from New York's burdensome zoning regulations, and yet Queens managed to approve far more housing in recent years than Nassau County.

Glaeser could use some perspective. New York City packs more than 8 million people into 300 square miles, while the New York metropolitan area has 19 million people spread across over 6,000 square miles. If you doubled the density of the metro area outside the city, you'd make room for an additional 11 million people, while still keeping the metro population density below the level of the least dense New York City borough.

In other words, supply restrictions bind most in the suburbs. Were the suburbs developed on the scale Jacobs favored -- think about those five-story buildings -- the New York metro area might easily contain three times the housing units it currently has. That's a lot of downward pressure on prices.

Glaeser also goes astray in confusing the importance of building infrastructure with the importance of building a certain kind of infrastructure. He says:

Jacobs was right that cities are built for people, but they are also built around transportation systems. New York was America’s premier harbor, and the city grew up around the port. The meandering streets of lower Manhattan were laid down in a pedestrian age. Washington Square was urban sprawl in the age of the omnibus. The Upper East Side and Upper West Side were built up in the age of rail, when my great-grandfather would take the long elevated train ride downtown from Washington Heights. It was inevitable that cars would also require urban change. Either older cities would have to adapt, or the population would move entirely to the new car-based cities of the Sunbelt.

When Henry Ford made the car affordable, millions of Americans understandably wanted to drive. After all, the average commute by car in the United States is twenty-four minutes, whereas the average commute by public transit is forty-eight minutes. The automobile certainly created great challenges for every older city that was built at highway-less higher densities. No matter what Jacobs thought, there simply was not a car-less option for New York. For the city to continue growing and changing and leading the world, it needed to be retrofitted for the automobile. And that enormous task was given to Moses. Perhaps he did too much for the car. I am certainly on Jacobs’s side on the Lomex issue, and cannot possibly approve of the destruction of Tremont; but New York’s fall would have been far more precipitous if it had ignored the automobile altogether.

It is hard today to accept the allegation that Moses was responsible for New York’s demise. The troubles that New York experienced in the 1970s were hardly unusual. Except for Los Angeles, every one of the ten largest American cities in 1950 lost at least 10 percent of its population over the next thirty years. New York is exceptional not in its decline but in its resilience, and perhaps Moses deserves some credit for that. New York and Los Angeles are the only two of those ten big mid-century cities that have gained population over the past sixty years.

For a New Yorker, Glaeser has an odd sense of the attractive qualities of his home city. The people aren't there for the highway bridges. New York City in particular -- and Manhattan specifically -- are the least auto-friendly parts of the entire country, Moses or no. And yet, as Glaeser admits, they continue to grow. Maybe Moses saved New York, or maybe he risked its future unnecessarily by threatening to destroy the density that makes it so vibrant.

And meanwhile, we have counterexamples. London opted not to build any motorways through the heart of the city, and yet it has managed to remain one of only a handful of global financial and cultural capitals.

Glaeser fails to entertain the obvious hypothetical: What might have happened to New York if Moses had focused instead on transit and rail construction, rather than accommodation of the automobile?

Robert Moses. Photo: Cup of Cha

The difficult question, then, is not whether to make some accommodations for the automobile but how to do so. And it's not at all clear that Moses' approach was the right one, or indeed, even a very good one.

We have good evidence that Glaeser, and Moses, are wrong. To cite just one example, a 2006 paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow reads (emphasis mine):

Between 1950 and 1990, the aggregate population of central cities in the United States declined by 17 percent despite population growth of 72 percent in metropolitan areas as a whole. This paper assesses the extent to which the construction of new limited access highways has contributed to central city population decline. Using planned portions of the interstate highway system as a source of exogenous variation, empirical estimates indicate that one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent. Estimates imply that aggregate central city population would have grown by about 8 percent had the interstate highway system not been built.

What New Yorkers were after wasn't the car, specifically; it was the promise of mobility offered by the car. But the job of city planners is to understand how to improve mobility across the entire city and region.

Given the density of New York, the space occupied by automobiles and parking structures, and the sheer cost of land in the city, construction of expensive, low capacity roadways seems like a poor decision.

Ed Glaeser is right when he says: "Successful cities need both the human interactions of Jane Jacobs and the enabling infrastructure of Robert Moses." But he seems unable to grasp that successful cities need city-oriented infrastructure, which actively facilitates those human interactions.

Most of the people who work in New York don't get there by driving, on Moses' highways or any other streets. They take transit, and many others can bike or walk thanks to the density that transit facilitates.

Moses didn't just get the means wrong, he also messed up the ends. And if present and future master builders don't learn better than he -- and Glaeser -- how infrastructure serves a city, they'll likely end up as loathed as Moses himself.

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...

Clarence, who is something of a giant chess aficionado, says he's never seen such a large crowd for a match.

You can now see some of the new street surfacing at Times Square.

A future performance area?

This is what the reverse side of a meter receipt looks like now.

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?

Photo: jblough/Flickr

The Naparstek boys riding last year's Summer Streets event... wearing helmets.

A Canadian Broadcasting TV crew doing a documentary on biking is filming me as I take my two sons to school on our Dutch cargo bike today. While the kids always wear helmets, and I do too when I'm commuting or riding longer distances, I often don't bother to wear one when I'm taking the kids to school in the bakfiets (also known around our house as the Cadillac Bikescalade). 

There are a few reasons why I tend to go helmetless. First, I'm a pretty careful, slow-riding cyclist in general, and even more so when I'm carrying kids. The ride to school is a short trip on residential streets marked almost entirely with bike lanes in a neighborhood where motorists are relatively respectful and aware of bikes. Walking across a street at an intersection with two young kids in tow often feels more dangerous.

Second, getting the kids out the door in the morning involves quite a bit of schlepping and hassle as it is. My own helmet sometimes just gets lost in the shuffle (as does my four-year-old's lunch). If the two-year-old is whiny or we're running late I'm not turning back to get the helmet. It's all about momentum.

Finally, I just don't like the way the helmet looks when I'm riding the bakfiets. This is less and issue of fashion (because lord knows I have no fashion sense) and more, I think, an issue of public perception. The bakfiets gets a lot of attention out there. We almost have to build in an extra ten minutes to every trip to account for all the passersby who stop us and ask questions about our unusual bike. Even though I know that I am putting myself slightly more at risk by not wearing a helmet, a part of me likes the idea that I'm showing that it is possible in New York City to walk out your door, hop on a bike and run a neighborhood errand without having to suit up like you're getting ready to play tackle football.

The first time I ever saw a cargo bike in action was on my U.S.-German Marshall fellowship trip to Copenhagen in 2006. In Copenhagen I saw people using cargo bikes to cart their kids all over the place. I rarely saw an adult wearing a helmet. It made an impression on me. This lack of protective headgear -- or any special bike gear, for that matter -- is one of the things that, to my eye, made biking in Copenhagen seem so remarkably convenient, casual, safe and part of regular daily life. It didn't matter what you're wearing. In Copenhagen you just hop on a bike and go.

The sheer sense of normalcy conveyed by streets filled with helmetless, kid-toting Danish cyclists seemed to me to do more to encourage bicycling and promote safety than any personal equipment or piece of infrastructure I'd ever seen back home. And the numbers back that up. Somehow, despite the lack of headgear, Danish, German and Dutch cyclist injury and fatality rates are a fraction of our own.

We know from the work of Peter Jacobsen that one of the most surefire ways to make urban bike transportation safer is to increase the number of cyclists on city streets. There are a lot of proven and effective ways to encourage more people to get on bikes. Compelling everyone to strap a styrofoam shell to their head is not one of them -- at least not in the world cities with the safest streets for cyclists.

Yes, I'm still going to continue to wear a helmet on the vast majority of my bike rides and I'd encourage every New York City cyclist to do the same. While cyclists have achieved a real safety-in-numbers effect in Copenhagen and are beginning to do so here, New York City streets are still mostly dominated by aggressive, unskilled nincompoops in overly large motor vehicles.

Still, I'm leaning toward wearing a dignified hat on this morning's bike ride rather than a helmet.

Following up on Sarah's post this morning, here's a Bike to Work Week special from Mikael Colville Andersen, the mastermind behind Copenhagenize and Copenhagen Cycle Chic. Colville Andersen's blogs are like extended odes to urban cycling and bike culture, and in this vid he shows what bicycling looks like when it's seen as a "normal" way to get from here to there.

Half a million Copenhageners bike each day, says Andersen. It took forty years of incremental improvements for the city to attain that level of bike ridership. According to Jan Gehl, the Danish urban consultant and NYCDOT advisor, New York City can get there in ten.

Check out this livable streets story from Ocean City, New Jersey, where a local arts group, high school art students, and the police department teamed up for a street mural installation. The kicker: the project was inspired by Streetfilms (look for the shout-out at the 4:30 mark).

Ocean City Mayor Sal Perillo says the benefits are threefold: the mural has spurred community involvement, improved neighborhood aesthetics, and will ideally serve as a traffic-calming device along a designated bike route. Depending on community reaction, Perillo says, other intersections could get the same treatment.

Here's a nice visual of what cities will look like when the livable streets movement has completely emerged from the wilderness (sorry for the extended metaphor, couldn't help it today). GOOD Magazine ran this photosim done by our very own Carly Clark in their transportation issue, with text by Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Aaron Naparstek. They've got a whole interactive graphic that walks you through the elements of a livable street, and -- hats off to my coworkers -- it looks great.

GOOD is also putting on a photosim contest where readers can submit their own designs for a livable street. If you send something in, don't worry too hard about impressing the jury. Aaron will be the only judge.

We'll be taking a break from posting on Streetsblog tomorrow. Enjoy the matzoh ball soup and Cadbury eggs everyone. See you back here on Monday.

SeeClickFix users report Union Street gridlock

Unlike most 311 systems, the visual mapping function enables users to see all existing complaints about a particular problem or to add their voice to an existing case, thus promoting it to a more urgent position in the queue. Users can create "watch areas" and receive notices when other users identify a problem within it. Each case generates an e-mail that is sent to the appropriate agency responsible for fixing it.

According to founder Ben Berkowitz, who is based in New Haven, Connecticut, SeeClickFix got its first trial run last year when New Haven's mayor, John DeStefano, Jr., was looking for a way to better respond to public quality-of-life complaints and to reduce duplication of efforts within agencies. DeStefano required the city to respond to cases that had been generated by the public on SeeClickFix and report the status of the cases online.

The system was so successful that the city now uses SeeClickFix as a proxy 311, with agencies such as the DOT, DPW, and police department using it for non-emergency issues. DeStefano was so happy with the service that he sent a letter to more that 100 other mayors encouraging them to try it.

Berkowitz says the system has now expanded beyond the local government to utility companies and non-profits.  He said they have seen numerous cases of good Samaritans responding to complaints without prompting, such as one carpenter who fixed several park benches he located on the site.

"That's the beauty of open source," says Berkowitz. "At first, we thought of calling it Little Brother, like 'Little Brother is Watching,' but then we realized we needed to be a bit more kind to government."

Berkowitz explains that SeeClickFix often coordinates with newspapers, such as those in Boston, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, to promote the software to the public, then advocates for the city to try responding to cases and noting the progress online. When the Philadelphia Inquirer added the SeeClickFix widget to its site, Philadelphia 311 soon started responding online to newly-generated cases.

In San Francisco, Phil Bronstein, editor-at-large of Hearst Newspapers Division, is a big fan of SeeClickFix and is planning to use the mapping widget on SFGate.com. Kevin Skaggs, executive producer of SFGate, said a collaboration with SeeClickFix has been in the works since Bronstein blogged about them last year, and that SFGate will use the widget in a few months on its new hyper-local Chronicle sites.

The new Chron sites will resemble the New York Times' recently launched local blogs, where SeeClickFix is already a presence. As of now, the Times has incorporated the map widget into the New Jersey edition of "The Local," which covers Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange. Berkowitz hopes the Times' Brooklyn blog, targeted at readers in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, will follow suit. If that happens, he sees city residents using SeeClickFix as a tool for broad scale community improvement.

"We know that it can be much bigger than 311 in New York," says Berkowitz. "It's a really great method for getting a dialogue started."

With reporting by Brad Aaron.

I was getting ready to put out the recycling one Wednesday evening a few weeks back when I heard what I thought sounded like someone playing a Bonnie Prince Billy album out in front of my house. Climate change notwithstanding, February is early for the start of blasting-music-on-Union-Street season and the Bonnie Prince isn't what typically gets pumped out of the local sub-woofers. Intrigued, I stepped outside with my glass-and-plastics bag and found an impromptu live concert taking place on a discarded sofa in front of my neighbor's house two doors up.

It was immediately clear that the bearded singer-guitarist and two women on cello and violin were something special. We get a lot of R train foot traffic on Union between Fourth and Fifth, and by the end of the 15-minute, three-song performance, a small, enrapt crowd had gathered in front of the sofa. Coincidentally, the crowd included Sharon Alpert from the Surdna Foundation who, just the day before, approved a big grant to The Open Planning Project to help us launch Streetsblog Capitol Hill (we're hiring, by the way).

The musician's name was Matt Jones and as the music blog Hooves on the Turf explains, the sofa performance was a part of their "Secret Garden" concert series:

After Matt Jones played his set at Union Hall, we led him and a few of his friends to an abandoned couch that was a block away from the venue. The lighting was poor, but that comfy bulk of green sitting amongst the continual swooshes of passing cars seemed like it was just waiting for us. Matt was joined by cellist Colette Alexander, who miraculously lifted a folding chair out of the venue without anyone noticing, and Carol Gray, who played the fiddle. They played three songs, “Lady Dawn”, “Threadlines” and “Hand Out the Drugs”, out of which the first two are from his latest, Black Path, and the last one features a little clap-along. Soon after they started playing, the person whose house we had settled in front of came out and stayed for the street show, as did a camera-happy couple who lived nearby.

That's my neighbor Leo annoying the videographer with his flash photography. With apologies to our spouses, I think Sharon and I are identified as the "happy couple who lived nearby."

Photo: Walter Hook, ITDP

Throughout 2008, the city continued to implement PlaNYC 2030, its comprehensive long-term sustainability vision. The city took 49 acres of road space, traffic lanes and parking spots away from cars and gave that space back to the public for bike lanes, pedestrian areas, and public plazas. Protected on street bike lanes were part of the 140 miles (255 kilometers) of bike lanes implemented. Bike ridership has increased by 35 percent over the past year. Over 98,000 trees were planted, a select bus service was implemented, car free Sundays introduced. As part of its standard operations, the city’s Department of Transport also recycles 40 percent of its asphalt. Although not successful, the city pushed for congestion charging, a first for [a] US city and now other cities are considering it.

The winner will be announced tomorrow in Washington, DC.

In November 2006, Danish planner Jan Gehl met Streetsblog Publisher Mark Gorton in Times Square to reflect on the state of the city's public spaces. In this Streetfilm by Clarence Eckerson, EIC Aaron Naparstek catches up with Gehl in the new Madison Square to talk about what has changed in the intervening two years, and what can still be done to make New York a world-class pedestrian city.

Building upon PlaNYC and DOT's Sustainable Streets, World Class Streets focuses on improving the public realm by concentrating on plazas, complete street design, and Summer Streets-style pedestrian and cycling events. Together these measures aim to transform New York streets into "an environment that is enjoyable as well as functional" for pedestrians, cyclists and transit users of all ages.

For the report, Gehl Architects and DOT conducted a "Public Life Survey," gathering a wealth of data that identifies overcrowded sidewalks, streets without seats, excessive scaffolding, isolated public spaces, and a low ratio of stationary activities as shortcomings to address. "Often the most crowded areas (such as sidewalks near subway stops and street corners) are the places where most obstacles exist," it observes, also noting that "a vastly disproportionate amount of space is allocated to parking cars than to public seating spaces." One telling example is Main Street in Flushing, Queens, where pedestrians outnumber vehicle passengers by a ratio of two to one, yet pedestrians must squeeze into less than one-third of the space.

Among other interesting tidbits in the report:

• Stroget in Copenhagen has 444 cafe seats per 1,000 yards, vs. 15 on Broadway (p. 15).
• Just six percent of pedestrians on Broadway are either under the age of 14 or over 65 (p. 31).
• Sixty percent of storefronts in the Lower Manhattan survey area had closed metal gates on a Sunday at noon (p. 35).

Accusing city higher-ups since Robert Moses of asking only "how the cars can be really happy," Gehl said today's DOT has finally recognized that streets should accommodate a multitude of uses. "New York has wonderful, wide streets compared to other places," he told the audience. Thanks to these relatively spacious streets as well as unique urban density, cultural vitality, parks, and waterways, he said, "New York can have the best streets in the world."

A new city street design manual -- due out this winter -- will set technical guidelines for DOT and all city agencies to implement the changes advocated by World Class Streets. Meanwhile there are miles of bike lanes to create, sidewalks to widen, pedestrian refuges to build, new bike racks to install, and recalcitrant drivers to educate.

Streets designed for safe, accessible, and equitable use. That is the vision of the "Blueprint for the Upper West Side: A Roadmap for Truly Livable Streets," to be unveiled tonight by the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance Campaign. The product of one year of community-driven planning, in consultation with urbanist legends Jan Gehl and Donald Shoup, the 51-page Blueprint [PDF] is an expansive neighborhood-wide plan that would employ many livable streets concepts already in use by NYC DOT. 

Proposals include:

• Separated bike lanes and bike boxes on Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus
  
• Bollard-protected pedestrian bulb-outs
  
• Leading Pedestrian Intervals
• Curb extensions to slow auto traffic and allow for garbage pick-up
• Bus bulbs with bike parking 
• Chicanes with reverse-angle parking on cross streets

The Blueprint was composed from input gathered via neighborhood surveys and citizen workshops in a community where drivers account for 10 percent of commutes but absorb 228 times more street space per capita, and where over 5,000 pedestrians and cyclists were injured or killed between 1995 and 2005.

Gehl will be on hand for tonight's reveal, as he was at the project's inception last November. The event is free and open to the public.

Where: P.S. 87, 160 W. 78th St. between Amsterdam and Columbus

When: 6:30 p.m.

RSVP here