The new illustrated edition of CNU's Sustainable Street Network Principles debuted this week. Image: CNU

The goal of the Principles is to promote development patterns that add value to communities. The way to do that, said CNU President John Norquist, is to design streets to play three simultaneous roles: that of a transportation thoroughfare, a commercial marketplace, and a public space. “Typically, U.S. DOT and State DOTs tend to look at roads only in the dimension of movement, and even in that one dimension, their rural-style forms fail in the city,” Norquist says.

The principles are a plain-language counterpart to the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ “Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares,” a collaborative effort with CNU which came out in March 2010 and is written in “engineerese” according to Norquist. By contrast, “the Principles are very readable,” he said, “and can be used to encourage local public works authorities or departments of transportation to do something in cities that adds value to neighborhoods.”

Those authorities don’t always have a very good record in that department. For decades now, government transportation policy has been geared toward speeding up long trips, while ignoring issues of walkability and the corresponding value added to neighborhoods. “If one person has to cross the street to get to work, and another drives 25 miles to work in the same building, the government is obsessed with helping the guy who drives, even though the guy who walks contributes more net value [by using fewer resources, spending less time in traffic, etc.]” Norquist told Streetsblog. “If you look at the little blue book, it’s designed to challenge that idea.”

One upshot of that shortsightedness, Norquist explained, is that for too long policymakers have attempted to minimize congestion, often employing the warlike verbs “eliminate,” “destroy” or “combat” to describe their approach to doing so. “But there are worse things than congestion,” says Norquist, who has written before on the subject. “It’s sort of like cholesterol: there’s good and bad. You die without any cholesterol, and cities die if they don’t have congestion. Look at Detroit: they’ve defeated congestion, but now that’s the least of their problems. They’re missing congestion, but federal policy is to destroy it.”

The pamphlet illustrates seven principles of street network planning aimed at maximizing the value of nearby neighborhoods. Image: CNU

So, why “occupy” TRB? The need for an “occupation,” Norquist said, comes from the continued insistence on the part of transportation policymakers to blindly adhere to the “Green Book,” the roadway design manual published annually by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Congestion reduction is paramount in the Green Book, which in Norquist’s view essentially encourages state DOTs to spend their money expanding capacity on freeways.

But Norquist argues that maximizing throughput does not add any value to an urban context, and in fact drains value from the land roads run through. State DOTs should instead be encouraged to concentrate on building dense, walkable street networks.

The first step in shifting that paradigm was CNU’s collaboration with ITE, which resulted in the walkable thoroughfares guide. This “Little Blue Book” represents the next step, a plain-language explanation of a better way to design street networks, accessible enough to reach a much larger audience.

The final step will be its adoption by AASHTO, about which Norquist is cautiously optimistic. “They’ll resist for a while, but they’ll adopt it eventually,” he said.

Most of the Javits Center site is devoted to a single superblock that divides Hell's Kitchen from the waterfront. Image: Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association

After Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State address last week, Streetsblog looked a little closer at the governor’s plan to build the nation’s largest convention center at the Aqueduct racino in Ozone Park, Queens. Counting on a huge convention center near JFK airport to deliver economic development seemed like a dubious proposition, but the other side of the plan — converting the Javits Center site on the West Side of Manhattan into a mixed-use neighborhood — has a lot to recommend it.

The Javits Center, built in the 1980s, controls 18 acres on the far West Side, from 33rd Street to 40th Street. Most of the site is an enormous superblock occupied by the main convention center building. The only cross street that provides access to the waterfront and Hudson River Park is 34th Street. (39th Street, while not part of the main building, is barricaded off to serve the facility’s needs.)

The Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association proposes an integrated street grid with housing, parks, and a mix of other uses at the Javits Center site.

“You look down the street and all you see is a black wall,” said Meta Brunzema, an architect and professor at the Pratt Institute who chairs the planning committee of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Association. “It’s very difficult for the community to have waterfront access.” Meanwhile, the area around Javits never caught on as a retail environment, said Brunzema, because the convention center is empty 100 days out of the year.

Cuomo’s plan to redevelop the Javits site using “the Battery Park City model” — presumably by offering long-term leases piece-by-piece to different developers, working from a set of planning guidelines — could create a cohesive district on the western edge of the neighborhood and finally reconnect city streets to the waterfront. “It’s really important that the Javits site be an extension of urban fabric, with a critical mass of residences, commercial uses, cultural facilities, and parks,” said Brunzema, noting that Hell’s Kitchen is also divided by bulky, traffic-choked approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel. “The neighborhood is completely fragmented.”

The Javits site sits next to the larger Hudson Yards special district, which the city rezoned in 2005 and will eventually be served by the extension of the 7 train to 34th Street and Eleventh Avenue. One important detail to keep an eye on is that the hard cap on parking spaces in the Hudson Yards district does not apply to the Javits Center site.

Selling the Javits site would also provide a windfall for the state. Speaking to the New York Times last week, Regional Plan Association President Bob Yaro pegged the value of the site at $4 billion. Proceeds from the sale or lease of land could be funneled into the MTA capital program, the construction of a 7 train station at 41st Street and 10th Avenue, or the development of Moynihan Station — the long-envisioned project to renovate Penn Station and build a new train hall inside the Farley Post Office building.

One project Brunzema would like to see funded is the construction of a garage to house the increasing number of commuter buses that park curbside and idle on West Side streets near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which can’t handle any more buses.

The bus facility is part of a plan for the Javits site that HKNA put forward in 2007, which proposes to reintroduce the street grid and add a mix of uses to where the convention center now stands. Brunzema said HKNA is in touch with State Senator Tom Duane and Assembly Member Richard Gottfried about what’s next for the site.

Is this the new image of walkable urbanism? Photo: WekeRoad

Leinberger noted that Hollywood does more consumer research than anyone else, and it portrays what audiences aspire to. So, we can see in the difference between TV shows of past decades and current shows the evolution of tastes in the U.S. Where we had I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, and The Brady Bunch, all set in the suburbs, we now have Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex in the City – all set in cities.

Indeed, Leinberger often talks about the increased demand for urbanism, especially among young people, but he also noted the downsizing trend as baby boomers move out of big houses to smaller spaces in more walkable, urban neighborhoods. And he credited the trend of people having fewer children with the expansion of the demand for walkable urbanism: Only 25 percent of households have children now, as opposed to 50 percent in the 1950s. Singles and couples without children are the “target market” for walkable urbanism, he said, and that constituency is only growing.

At the same time, Manuel Pastor argued that the main catalysts of walkable urbanism in the future are going to be the people with the highest fertility rate in the nation, having the most children: Latinos. (Latina women have an average of three children each, while each white woman has an average of 2.1.)

Pastor said the age gap between whites and “non-white Hispanics” (Latinos) – the median age among whites is 41; among Latinos it’s 27 – is causing significant tension. The state with the largest age gap between whites and Latinos is Arizona, which notoriously passed (what was then) the country’s most repressive anti-immigrant law last year. The gap is also responsible for low levels of per capita spending on education, since older whites “don’t see themselves” in the younger generation using the schools. And good urban schools are key to keeping families in cities as their children grow up.

Even with their big families and many children, Latinos prefer to live in cities, Pastor said. New arrivals, especially, disproportionately use transit. The walkable urbanism in immigrant neighborhoods is characterized by “taquerías, not cappuccino bars,” Pastor said. Latinos simply don’t follow the same trends as white Americans when it comes to suburban flight when kids come into the picture.

Photos: Ian Dutton

Reader Ian Dutton sends these shots of the pop-up café that just went up at “local” — a coffee shop on Sullivan Street in SoHo. Ian says owners Craig and Liz Walker worked hard to make this public space enhancement happen. Among other things, they had to bring a crew of supporters with them to Community Board 2 when their application to DOT’s pop-up café program came up for a vote. Their bid was the only one of six applications to withstand the onslaught from local reactionary Sean Sweeney.

Ian reports that the seats filled up just about instantaneously after the installation was finished this afternoon:

In related news, a new pop-up café also went up at Ecopolis in Cobble Hill today.

With a curb cut, surface parking along the street frontage, and no retail use on the ground floor, the pedestrian-hostile design for the "Le Bleu" hotel wouldn't cut it under newly proposed zoning rules for Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue. Photo: Ben Fried.

When the Department of City Planning put forward its rezoning of Park Slope in 2003, one of the earliest of the now 111 rezonings under Mayor Bloomberg and City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, it was intended to help turn Fourth Avenue into “a grand boulevard of the 21st Century.”

The sought-after residential development has started to take place, but at street level, there’s been widespread disappointment with the results. Instead of providing a healthy pedestrian realm, the ground floor of many new developments has been taken up by ventilation equipment and even a surface parking lot.

In response, the Department of City Planning has put forward a new set of rules intended to ensure that as Fourth Avenue develops further, it does so in a way that invites people to walk along the street.

At least half of the ground floor frontage of each new building along Fourth would be required to be retail, and parking wouldn’t be allowed anywhere along the ground floor street frontage. Requirements for a certain amount of glass storefronts would provide opportunities for window-shopping, while strict restrictions on curb cuts across Fourth Avenue sidewalks will give pedestrians more space and comfort.

With the endorsements of local Council Members Brad Lander, Stephen Levin and Sara González, the plan is likely to move relatively smoothly through the land use review process over the next few months.

The underlying zoning, including bulk, use, and parking requirements, will remain the same along Fourth. However, many of the worst offenders of the last development cycle would not be up to code under the new regulations.

The “Le Bleu” hotel, for example, includes a curb cut to a surface parking lot in front of the building, two would-be violations of the new zoning rules. Behind the parking lot is a lobby without any retail, another violation. If that project had been built under the proposed rules, the hotel could still have parking, but it would have to be structured parking, at least thirty feet back from the street or underground and accessed from a side street rather than Fourth.

It will be interesting to see how developers respond to the tighter restrictions on where parking can be placed. Building underground parking on Fourth is even more expensive than usual due to the subway tunnel that runs under the street, so it’s not unlikely that, on the margin, barring parking from part of the ground floor will result in less total parking being built along the street.

While parking requirements along Fourth generally require a parking space for 40 percent of the dwelling units, much of the parking built along the street was a result of developers’ profit motive. At the Novo, for example, the developer built 60 spaces when only 45 were required by zoning. At the Crest, a DCP spokesperson said, the developer was eligible to have parking requirements waived entirely. In buildings like those, neither of which engages the sidewalk, making it slightly more difficult to build parking could mean the developer would choose to build less parking altogether.

When DCP originally rezoned Park Slope, a department spokesperson told Streetsblog in 2008, it opted against retail requirements on the grounds that in a less-established commercial area, such requirements might inhibit development altogether or result in empty storefronts. That they are ready to put those requirements in place on Fourth — similar transparency rules are in effect on 125th Street and the St. George area of Staten Island, according to DCP — suggests that even in a downturn, the real estate market in that rapidly gentrifying section of Brooklyn is strong.

Image © Peter Calthorpe & Marianna Leuschel

Editor’s note: Today we are very pleased to begin a five-part series of excerpts from Peter Calthorpe’s book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change.” Keep reading this week and next to learn how you can win a copy of the book from Island Press.

I take as a given that climate change is an imminent threat and potentially catastrophic—the science is now clear that we are day by day contributing to our own demise. In addition, I believe that an increase in fuel costs due to declining oil reserves is also inevitable. The combination of these two global threats presents an economic and environmental challenge of unparalleled proportions—and, lacking a response, the potential for dire consequences. These challenges will in turn bring into urgent focus the way our buildings, towns, cities, and regions shape our lives and our environmental footprint. Beyond a transition to clean energy sources, I believe that urbanism—compact, diverse, and walkable communities—will play a central role in addressing these twin threats. In fact, responding to climate change and our coming energy challenge without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible.

Many deny either the timing or the reality of these challenges. They argue that global demand for oil will not outstrip production and that climate change is overstated, nonexistent, or somehow not related to our actions. Setting aside such debates, my book, “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change,” accepts the premise that both climate change and peak oil are pressing realities that need aggressive solutions.

Responding to climate change and our coming energy challenge without a more sustainable form of urbanism will be impossible.

The two challenges are deeply linked. The science tells us that if we are to arrest climate change, our goal for carbon emissions should be just 20 percent of our 1990 level by 2050. That, combined with a projected U.S. population increase of 130 million people,¹ means each person in 2050 would need to be emitting on average just 12 percent of his or her current greenhouse gases (GHG)—what I will call here the “12% Solution.”² If we can achieve the 12% Solution to offset climate change, we will simultaneously reduce our fossil-fuel dependence and demonstrate a sustainable model of prosperity. Such a low-carbon future will inherently reduce oil demands at rates that will allow a smoother transition to alternative fuels—and the next economy.

In addition to these twin environmental challenges, the United States has two other systemic forces to reckon with in the next generation: an aging population and a more diverse middle class with less wealth. We are now a country in which a third of the population are baby boomers or older and less than a quarter are traditional families with kids. And for the past decade, median income has actually fallen; in fact, “the typical American household saw its inflation-adjusted income decline by more than $2,000 between 1999 and 2008.”³ So, at the same time that we must respond to climate change and rising energy costs, we must also adjust our housing stock to fit a changing demographic and find a more frugal form of prosperity.

Such a transformation will require deep change, not just in energy sources, technology, and conservation measures but also in urban design, culture, and lifestyles. More than just deploying green technologies and adjusting our thermostats, it will involve rethinking the way we live and the underlying form of our communities. The good news is that our environmental, social, and economic challenges have a shared solution in urbanism. Shaping regions that reduce oil dependence simultaneously reduces carbon emissions, costs less for the average household, and creates healthy, integrated places for our seniors: one solution for multiple challenges.

The urban solution involves both technology and design. For example, we will need to dramatically reduce the number of miles we drive as well as develop less carbon intensive vehicles. It will mean living and working in buildings that demand significantly less energy as well as powering them with renewable sources. It will involve the kinds of food we eat, the kinds of homes we build, the ways we travel, and the kinds of communities we inhabit. It will certainly involve giving up the idea of any single “silver bullet” solution (whether solar or nuclear, conservation or carbon capture, adaptation or mitigation) and understanding that such a transformation will involve all of the above—and, perhaps most important, that they are all interdependent.

In fact, the viability of new technologies and clean energy sources will depend on the success of our conservation efforts at the regional, community, and building scales, which in turn will be determined by our basic lifestyles and the urban forms that support our changing demographics. The key will be designing the right mix of strategies, a “whole systems” rather than a “checklist” approach to climate change, energy, and economics.

There are three interdependent approaches to these nested challenges: lifestyle, conservation, and clean energy. Lifestyle involves how we live—the way we get around, the size of our homes, the foods we eat, and the quantity of goods we consume. These depend in turn on the type of communities we build and the culture we inhabit—degrees of urbanism. Conservation revolves around technical efficiencies—in our buildings, cars, appliances, utilities, and industrial systems—as well as preserving the natural resources that support us all, our global forests, ocean ecologies, and farmlands. These conservation measures are simple, they save money, and they are possible now. The third fix, clean energy, is what we have been most focused on: new technologies for solar, wind, wave, geothermal, biomass, and even a new generation of nuclear power or fusion. These energy sources are sexy, they are relatively expensive, and they will be available sometime soon. All three approaches will be essential, but here I focus on the first two—lifestyle and conservation—because they are, in the end, our most cost effective and easily available tools.

Perhaps just as important as greenhouse gas reductions and oil savings is the fact that urbanism generates a fortuitous web of co-benefits—it is our most potent weapon against climate change because it does so much more.

The intersection of lifestyle and conservation is urbanism. Consider that in the United States industry represents 29 percent of our GHG emissions; agriculture and other non-energy-related activities, just 9 percent; and freight and planes, another 9 percent. This 47 percent total represents the GHG emissions of the products we buy, the food we eat, the embodied energy of all our possessions, and all the shipping involved in getting them to us. The remaining 53 percent depends on the nature of our buildings and personal transportation system—the realm of urbanism.⁴As a result, urbanism, along with a simple combination of transit and more efficient buildings and cars, can deliver much of our needed GHG reductions.

Perhaps just as important as greenhouse gas reductions and oil savings is the fact that urbanism generates a fortuitous web of co-benefits—it is our most potent weapon against climate change because it does so much more. Urbanism’s compact forms lead to less land consumed and more farmland, parks, habitat, and open space preserved. A smaller urban footprint results in less development costs and fewer miles of roads, utilities, and services to build and maintain, which then leads to fewer impervious surfaces, less polluted storm runoff, and more water directed back into aquifers.

More compact development leads to lower housing costs as lower land and infrastructure costs affect sales prices and taxes. Urban development means a different mix of housing types—fewer large single-family lots; more bungalows and townhomes—but in the end provides more housing choices for a more diverse population. It means less private space but more shared community places—more efficient and less expensive overall. Urbanism is more suited to an aging population, for whom driving and yard maintenance are a growing burden, and for working families seeking lower utility bills and less time spent commuting.

Urbanism leads to fewer miles driven, which then leads to less gas consumed and less dependence on foreign oil supplies, less air pollution, less carbon emissions. Fewer miles also leads to less congestion, lower emissions, lower road construction and maintenance costs, and fewer auto accidents. This then leads to lower health costs because of fewer accidents and cleaner air, which is reinforced by more walking, bicycling, and exercising, which in turn contributes to lower obesity rates. And more walking leads to more people on the streets, safer neighborhoods, and perhaps stronger communities.

The feedback loops go on. More urban development means more compact buildings— less energy needed to heat and cool, lower utility bills, less irrigation water, and, once again, less carbon in the atmosphere. This then leads to lower demands on electric utilities and fewer new power plants, which again results in less carbon and fewer costs. As Bucky Fuller exhorted us, urbanism is inherently “doing more with less.” Or, as Mies van der Rohe famously asserted, “Less is more.”

But for the past fifty years, our economy and society have been operating on the premise that “more is more” and “bigger is better”: bigger homes, bigger yards, bigger cars with bigger engines, bigger budgets, bigger institutions, and, finally, bigger energy sources. In contrast, urbanism naturally tends toward a “small is beautiful” philosophy. This then involves trade-offs: less private space but perhaps a richer public realm; less private security but perhaps a safer community; less auto mobility but more convenient transit. Compact development does mean smaller yards, fewer cars, and less private space for some. On the other hand, it can dramatically reduce everyday costs and leave more time for family and community. The question is not which is right and which is wrong or that it must be all one way or the other—urbanism works best with blends. The question is how such trade-offs fit with our emerging demographics, our desires, our needs, our economic means—and perhaps our sense of what a good life really is.

From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Chapter 1, by Peter Calthorpe. Copyright © 2011 Peter Calthorpe. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Notes:

1. U.S. Census Bureau Population Division, “2008 National Population Projections: Summary Table 1,” U.S. Census Bureau. (accessed February 10, 2010).

2. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2007” (Washington, DC: EPA, 2009), ES-17.

3. The State of Metropolitan America, Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. (accessed June 22, 2010).

4. Author’s analysis of data from the World Resources Institute, “US GHG Emissions Flow Chart.” (accessed April 1, 2010).

The drawings released by Extell Development don't draw attention to the blank walls and curb cuts that would disrupt the sidewalk at Riverside Center.

A hearing on the Riverside Center mega-development yesterday revealed a popular hunger for a more walkable West Side and perhaps some interest from the City Planning Commission in the same. Extell Development is looking to build a housing and retail complex, including 1,800 parking spaces, on this waterfront site equivalent in size to two Manhattan blocks. Public testimony called for a slew of urban design improvements to their plan, including reducing the amount of off-street parking, integrating the site with the surrounding streetscape, and working towards burying the elevated Miller Highway.

As chair Amanda Burden and the other commissioners now deliberate over the approvals the project needs, they have the power to determine whether this block on Manhattan’s West Side will be dominated by the automobile or develop into a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood, in line with the goals of PlaNYC.

Efforts to better integrate Riverside Center with the surrounding neighborhood and streetscape got the most play yesterday. In Extell’s plans for the project, retail faces the inside of the development and passersby would see largely blank walls rising from the sidewalk, with the streets sloping down to the waterfront and the buildings stationed on an elevated platform. That wall would be interrupted by a slew of curb cuts to enter Extell’s proposed 1,800-space parking garage and auto showroom and service center.

“The development turns its back on the street,” said Brian Cook, the land use director for Borough President Scott Stringer. “It systematically ignores the rich context of the area,” explained Community Board 7 chair Mel Wymore.

The City Planning Commission appeared receptive to this critique. “Does one see an auto showroom as something that enlivens the edge of the project?” Burden asked Extell president Gary Barnett after he testified. “What is going to energize the sidewalk and the street life at the front of this project?”

Other commissioners pressed the developers and architects about the effect of driveways, retail, stairways, and platforms on the pedestrian environment. The developer, in turn, outlined a few minor steps to address the issue, such as changing a staircase to 59th Street into a slope.

But one underlying cause of the streetlife-deadening platform is the excessive amount of parking that Extell is seeking to build, according to Ethel Sheffer, a CB 7 member and former president of the New York American Planning Association chapter. The platform “is there in large part because it satisfies an extensive request of 1,800 parking spaces on two levels,” she said.

The second level of Extell's proposed 1,800 space garage covers the entire four-block site. Image: Extell Development

Those 1,800 spaces, which require special permits from the commission, would create a development dominated by the automobile, perhaps to a degree unmatched by any project in the Clean Air Act zone below 60th Street. The community board and borough president each recommended against allowing 1,800 spaces at Riverside Center.

Parking received some attention from the commission at the very start of yesterday’s hearing. Commissioner Richard Eaddy cited the community board’s request for a smaller lot and asked Barnett why he didn’t agree with the board.

“We’re actually cutting out parking from the area,” said Barnett, arriving at that claim by adding the surface parking currently on the site to the number of spaces he thinks his tenants will demand. “We’re going to be down 800 or 1,000 spaces,” said Barnett.

CB 7 member Ken Coughlin laid out just how inflated Extell’s demands are. If the commission simply used the same calculations in effect at the nearby Hudson Yards project, he said, only 768 spaces would be built. “Should we be creating additional incentives to drive in an already congested and polluted urban environment?” he asked.

The commission has written that one of its goals for Hudson Yards was to “limit the amount of off-street parking… consistent with the objective of creating an area with a transit- and pedestrian-oriented neighborhood character.” Riverside Center could be the first large-scale development near Hudson Yards where the commission proves it is truly committed to that goal.

The elevated Miller Highway running in front of Riverside South. Photo: Riverside South Planning Corp.

Other testimony focused on ensuring that the project furthers efforts to bury the elevated Miller Highway between 59th and 72nd Streets. According to architect Daniel Gutman, who helped design the original plan for the Riverside South complex, the 1991 agreement required that the developer build the northbound tube for a tunnel while the state would build the southbound tube. Some of that construction has already taken place. Actually burying the road, however, would require additional funding that isn’t available yet — the highway was renovated only 15 years ago.

Even so, many urged the commission to do what it takes to move the plan forward, whether by extracting more funds from Extell or simply not obstructing the current slow progress toward a tunnel. “The space is still marred and made dangerous and oppressed by the highway,” said former Municipal Art Society president Kent Barwick.

“The vision that drove that compromise was the relocation of the overhead road,” said Barbara Fife, a former Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning under David Dinkins. She urged that the Commission require the developer to complete part of the southbound tunnel in order to gain approval.

Burden showed some attention to the potential of a buried Miller Highway, at one point asking Extell’s landscape architect how her plans would change if the highway were moved underground.

In addition to requests for design and planning improvements, testifiers made strong demands yesterday for Extell to build a new school and provide more affordable housing. To the extent that negotiations pit competing priorities against each other, the commission will need to fight that much harder to make Riverside Center a walkable place and not let sustainability fall by the wayside.

"Brooklyn Bridge Remix/Redux," by Terreform and Michael Sorkin Studio

In the middle of the 20th century, cities across the United States were redesigned to accommodate the car. As people flocked to the suburbs, cities were retrofitted with highways and parking lots. Roads expanded, public transit declined and so did our cities. In the decades that followed, cities around the world imported this auto-dominant urban design and began to suffer from its devastating impact. Our Cities Ourselves proposes an exciting alternative path.

The aim is to think about what sort of cities we want to live in, the sort of street we want to walk along, and the sort of future we want for ourselves and our children. Looking ahead, how will each of us help create our cities for ourselves?

Though the program focuses on cities in developing countries, New York is among the 10 represented. For its contribution, Manhattan firm Terreform proposes road pricing for Lower Manhattan, bike lanes on the lower level of the Brooklyn Bridge, and public space in place of the FDR.

"Our Cities Ourselves" runs through September 11. Admission is free. Hours, location and other details are here.

On Fourth Avenue, "The Crest" meets the sidewalk with vents that mask ground-floor parking.

When asked why the Department of City Planning failed to mandate transparency and active uses in the Fourth Avenue rezoning, Purnima Kapur, who heads the agency's Brooklyn office, said that developers are too hesitant to commit to mixed-use properties in a newly residential area. "We would like to see retail on the ground floors, but in real estate, developers always lag behind demand," she said. Mandating retail, she later added, would cause some developers to not build at all, or ground floors to remain vacant.

But are developers really so risk averse? J. David Sweeny, an experienced Brooklyn developer and president of the PDS Development Corporation, allowed that "it's hard to compel retail," but that such requirements could probably work on a street like Fourth Avenue, where 12-story buildings are now permitted, because "money is made above the ground floor."

"It's not an excessive burden necessarily," he added. "The question is can you provide incentives so that they'll rent the ground floor at a low enough rate" to attract retail tenants.

For the foreseeable future, however -- or at least until the real estate cycle swings back around -- Fourth Avenue is stuck with the planning decision to accept development with ground floors designed for cars and parking rather than pedestrians.

As for the overall prospect of transforming Fourth Avenue into a great boulevard and public space, that's still "a twinkle in daddy's eye," said Nick Peterson, a member of the Park Slope Civic Council who helped put together the forum. Organizers were very encouraged by the turnout, which included freshman City Council Member Brad Lander, and hopeful that the event will create more momentum. Going forward, it will be interesting to see if a sustained advocacy campaign starts to take shape around Fourth Avenue, similar to the broad coalition that has gradually won improvements at Grand Army Plaza.

Myrtle Avenue today. The service road on the left is slated to become a pedestrian plaza. Image: Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, via Flickr

Although DOT and the Department of Design and Construction will ultimately select their own design team, local partners like the Myrtle Avenue BID were invited to hold "visioning workshops" for their sites. Rather than selecting a final design for the project, Friday night's event was intended to generate ideas and gauge public interest in different uses, with attendees writing their thoughts on clipboards and post-it notes.

The "New Wave" design featured an eye-catching centerpiece in its cantilevered awning, ecologically-minded materials like permeable pavement, and a sunken amphitheater for performances -- ideas that seemed to align well with the elements that participants asked for.

The New Wave design, by Jonathan Joseph, Gregór Nemitz-Ziadie and Lee Norsworthy. Image: Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, via Flickr.

Aaron Follett's bus shelter. Image: Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership via Flickr.

Christopher Peli offered perhaps the most fantastic vision of Myrtle Avenue. Calling his project "a movement against suburban planning techniques," he proposed a "dramatic overhead canopy" across the entire plaza which would light up section by section as pedestrians walked beneath:

Christopher Peli's design. Image: Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership via Flickr.

Michael Blaise Backer, the BID's director, said he saw three major themes emerge from the designs and the public feedback: public art, environmental sustainability, and spaces for unplanned performances. Those broader themes will now be communicated to DOT as guidelines for its design process. According to Backer, the city should announce an official design team for the plaza in about two months. 

Image: NYC Department of Buildings

Walking through parts of New York can feel like walking through a tunnel. The city's ubiquitous sidewalk sheds -- typically blue scaffolding holding up green plywood to protect pedestrians from construction overhead -- corral people into cramped, dark spaces wherever development or building repairs are underway. There are about 6,000 of these sheds throughout the city.

Today's sidewalk sheds may soon be a thing of the past. Image: threecee/Flickr

Now the city hopes to start phasing them out. The NYC Buildings Department and the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects announced the winner today of their competition to redesign the sidewalk shed: "Urban Umbrella," by 28-year-old design student Young-Hwan Choi.

Choi's design has a number of advantages over current sidewalk sheds, which have been the standard since the 1950s. It leaves much more of the sidewalk free for pedestrians and eliminates the cross-bracing that prevents people from getting on or off the sidewalk anywhere but at intersections. The design also figures to be, quite simply, more pleasant. It lets in significantly more light and air to the sidewalk.

Businesses will be encouraged but not mandated to use the "Urban Umbrella." Since Choi's sidewalk shed has lower maintenance costs than the current model and hides less of the building, the city expects that those incentives will eventually lead to widespread adoption of the design. 

More images after the jump...

Image: NYC Department of Buildings

Image: NYC Department of Buildings

Security barriers mar the Atlantic Terminal sidewalk. Image: Noah Kazis.

Brooklyn's new Long Island Rail Road terminal opened earlier this month to generally positive reviews for its airy interior. Outside the station? That's an entirely different matter.

The Brooklyn Paper called the "sarcophagus-sized slabs of stone" on the sidewalk -- which nearly come up to one's neck -- "a grotesque eyesore." City Council Member Letitia James agreed, telling Gothamist, "This is a facility that is supposed to celebrate openness, yet they put hideous barricades in front of it."

The barriers weren't in the original renderings for the site, which architect John di Domenico hoped would become a "civic presence." They were added after the fact for security, according to the Brooklyn Paper.

We're still trying to figure out just who decided to go for total overkill here. Requests are in with di Domenico + Partners, the NYPD, the MTA, and the Department of Design and Construction. While we haven't pinpointed exactly where the order came from, the fortress mentality on display exceeds even the NYPD counterterrorism division's own guidelines.

We did get to sift through the NYPD's 2009 report, Engineering Security: Protective Design For High Risk Buildings. As a major transit hub, the Atlantic Terminal falls under the NYPD counterterrorism division's "High Tier" category, for which they prescribe additional security measures. Those measures include "perimeter security," which the NYPD justifies like so: "The best way to minimize the impact of an attack is to keep the threat away from a building."

The NYPD also puts forward some basic guidelines about just how much protection they think is necessary. That's where the real surprise is. Here's what the city's counterterrorism experts recommend:

With respect to bollards, the NYPD recommends four feet of clear spacing, bollard sleeve to bollard sleeve. In general, New York City recommends that bollards measure between 30 and 36 inches in height.

And here's how the Atlantic Terminal sarcophagi measure up, based on an informal analysis conducted by Streetsblog today. The barriers loom a full foot higher than NYPD's own recommendations:

Image: Noah Kazis.

Image: Noah Kazis.

Some of the spaces between barriers are little more than three feet apart, barely enough for pedestrians to squeeze through and more draconian than the NYPD's suggested four feet. All you transit riders trying to get to your platform, consider yourself neutralized.

Categories of pedestrians, based on their walking patterns. Courtesy: Norbert Brändle, Austrian Institute of Technology.

Part of designing more walkable cities -- a goal of this week's Walk21 Conference -- is figuring out how pedestrians actually interact with the space around them, something that seems inherently difficult because of the erratic and unique behavior of your average walker. But two Austrian researchers came to the conference with with some intriguing ideas for measuring walking. Alexandra Millonig, of the Vienna University of Technology, and Norbert Brändle, of the Austrian Institute of Technology, decided to study and categorize pedestrian behavior based on a survey of Austrian shoppers. They lumped them into four basic types, as you can see above.

The researchers studied pedestrian shoppers in a variety of ways. On top of interviews, they followed shoppers on the street (Brändle called it "stalking"), noting their trajectories, speed, and number of stops. In another phase of the project, they equipped people with Bluetooth and GPS location trackers to map out each walking trip. If you know what different pedestrians look for based on these categories, you can build urban environments that have features that are appealing to each kind of walker.

Designing walkable environments, as you'd guess, is more complex than the grid-and-pavement planning of car-centric areas. The study found that, unlike drivers, who want the shortest path possible to their destination, walkers prefer more convoluted routes, and, more importantly, Brändle said, would prefer to take a different route home than the one they arrived on. That lends further credibility to the argument that in order to make areas more walkable, we also need to give them greater connectivity -- with more routes to and from the places pedestrians need to go.

If you want to see the full results of their study, Millonig and Brändle have made them available on an easy-to-read poster, which you can download here.

She may be experiencing an intellectual reconsideration in some corners, but Jane Jacobs is still a beloved figure for the urban planners and designers of Planetizen.

Other notables singled out by Planetizen readers include Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York's Central Park (No. 4), Enrique Penalosa, Bogota's former mayor and a dedicated proponent of bus rapid transit (No. 14), and Kaid Benfield, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's smart growth program (No. 42).

Check out the complete top 100 right here. Is anyone missing, or should anyone be ranked higher than they are?

Although there is undoubtedly an amazing streets renaissance going on in NYC, there still remain places in dire need of improvement. Every workday, heavily-used areas like the blocks surrounding Penn Station are overwhelmed with pedestrians making their way home via buses, subways, the Long Island Railroad and Amtrak. The sidewalks are so clogged by this "crush of humanity" that people are forced to walk in the streets. If you've never seen it, or if you're claustrophobic, get ready.

Open Planning Project Executive Director Mark Gorton recently went out to sample the atmosphere on a typical weekday evening and posits that we can do much better in how we choose to allocate street space. His words sum it up nicely:

The reason it's so crowded here is not because there's not enough space. It's because we give all of our space to the least spatially-efficient form of transportation available. 

Of course he is referring to the automobile -- especially the single-occupant vehicle. Oddly enough, I did a PSA over three years ago which aired during our New York City Streets Renaissance campaign launch. I filmed most of it in the same location. It still looks much the same, perhaps worse.

Miraculously, unlike Akim Saiful Alam, the unidentified driver in yesterday's crash didn't kill anyone when he lost control of his cab on Amsterdam Avenue. But it wasn't for lack of trying. Witnesses told NY1 the cabbie was speeding before he attempted to "make a turn from the far right lane of Amsterdam and turned all the way into the far left lane." The News reports what happened next:

The cab careened off the roadway and nearly cleared a 4-foot-high wrought-iron fence separating a traffic island from the intersection.

"He hit the fence, and he went flying," said Samuel Valerdi, 34, of Brooklyn.

Then the taxi smashed into a small building that houses the entrance to the 1, 2 and 3 subway trains.

"It hit like a bomb," said newspaper vendor Mohameed Raza, 22, of Brooklyn.

Pedestrians ran for their lives, but "luckily no one was coming out of the subway at the time," said David Spiers, 44, a Bronx electrician working across the street.

All told, three people -- the driver, his passenger, and a pedestrian -- were injured. The News says NYPD is still investigating, though no summonses were immediately issued.

While this incident will soon drop off the radar (just as surely as it will soon happen again), not everyone will be quick to forget. After the jump, witness Lisa Sladkus questions why all of us, every day, should suffer the consequences of dangerous driving.

What will it take to make these streets safer? A low-stress afternoon interrupted by screeching tires, a loud crash, and the terrifying thought, "Where are my kids right now?" It shouldn't be like this. Today on Broadway between 71st and 72nd Street, a cab went straight through the wrought-iron fence and landed on the sidewalk right outside the subway entrance. My sister and I rushed out to see what seemed to be the cab driver with a bloody head and at least one pedestrian with a head injury. The sadder part was hearing the first police officer to the scene of the crash say, "It's shocking there weren't more injuries or deaths."

What's more shocking to me is that this is okay with the powers that be. Why is it okay to have a person walk out of the subway and get hit by some flying metal from a car crash? Why is it okay to have 53 pedestrians and four bicyclists die on the Upper West Side between 1995 and 2005 because of car crashes? Why can cars drive through red lights and nothing happens? Why is Amsterdam Avenue more like a bustling highway than a lovely city Boulevard?

This similar shock and sadness happened to me a few weeks ago while walking home with my three kids and loads of groceries. A woman riding her bike was hit by a car in front of the popular grocery store, Fairway. She didn't move for many minutes, and my kids kept asking, "Is she dead?" Once we determined that she, in fact, didn't die, my kids switched their questioning. The question that really got me was from my four year old, "You and Daddy bike. Are you going to get rolled up by a car too?"

All I can say is that we need a serious re-thinking of our neighborhoods. How do we want them to feel? Do we want kids to feel safe while walking and biking? Do we want peaceful streets where we can meet neighbors and frolic with our children? Do we want our valuable police force, fire department and EMT doing something more beneficial than spending hours dealing with the aftermath of a totally preventable crash? If so, we need to start by lowering speed limits, we need to re-design our streets and sidewalks to accommodate the masses of people instead of motor vehicles, we need safe places to bike and walk, we need trucks off our neighborhood side streets (and, frankly, completely out of our neighborhoods unless they are absolutely necessary), and on and on.

After the death of 8-year-old Axel Pablo last week, the Post called on Mayor Bloomberg, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and TLC Commissioner Matthew Daus to crack down on cell phone-talking cab drivers. While this would be a welcome move, a more effective approach, for starters, would be an across the board no tolerance policy to speeding on city streets, coupled with prosecution of reckless motorists who maim and kill.

We know what it takes to "help us make safer streets and sidewalks," Sladkus concludes. "The question is: do we want that as our outcome?"

Before and after: Fulton St. and Marcy Ave. Image via DOT.

• Brooklyn: Fulton Street & Marcy Avenue; Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, applicant. Just off the bustling commercial corridor of Fulton Street, the Marcy Avenue plaza will narrow the width of Marcy Avenue between Fulton and MacDonough Streets to create 8,000 square feet of new pedestrian space in the heart of Bedford Stuyvesant. This project dovetails with the Bedford Stuyvesant Gateway Streetscape project by the Mayor’s Office of Comprehensive Neighborhood Economic Development and the NYC Economic Development Corporation, which is redesigning Fulton Street from Bedford Avenue to Troy Avenue.
• The Bronx: Boston Road & E. 169th Street; South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, applicant. By removing a slip lane this project will expand McKinley Square by 8,000 square feet.  This will allow the community to enhance a farmers market and create a town center for the neighborhoods of Morrisania and Clermont. The removal of the slip lane will allow children arriving by bus to walk to nearby PS 63 without having to cross a street, reducing conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles.
• Manhattan: Forsyth Street (between Canal Street and Division Street); Renaissance Economic Development Corporation, applicant. The Forsyth Street plaza will provide additional sidewalk space along the western portion of Forsyth Street to enhance the street environment currently alongside and underneath the Manhattan Bridge. In addition, the project will create an upper plaza on a vacant portion of property adjacent the bridge’s off-ramp so that residents and cyclists traveling off the bridge can enjoy public open space that looks down upon Forsyth Street and the surrounding neighborhood. In total, the project provides up to 10,000 square feet of new public space.

DOT, along with the Department of Design and Construction, will work with the applicants to develop site plans. Construction is expected to begin in 2011, as funding allows.

As livable streets advocates work to make headway in breaking the cycle of American auto dependence, the folks at Planetizen have put together a video narrative that explains how we got here. "The Story of Sprawl," a double DVD set produced by Managing Editor Tim Halbur, is a compilation of historical films dating from 1939 to 1965, documenting the confluence of factors that fostered the quintessential land use motif of the 20th century: far-flung, low-density, driving-intensive residential and commercial development. The discs include commentary from planning notables including Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, John Norquist, Neal Peirce, James Howard Kunstler and Robert Cervero, featured in the clip above.

"The Story of Sprawl" is available now. Check the Planetizen promo page for more clips and ordering info.

In 2002, then-mayor of London Ken Livingstone launched the 100 Public Spaces Programme, a campaign to better realize the potential of the city's public realm. With guidance from Jan Gehl, the initiative emphasized reclaiming space for pedestrians and enhancing street life.

Soon after Boris Johnson defeated Livingstone in last year's election, the new mayor shook up the city's public space plans, drawing fire from his predecessor. Some projects, like the pedestrianization of Parliament Square, got the ax, while others moved ahead. Last month, Johnson announced a re-vamped public space campaign, which he's calling "Great Spaces."

In her Streetfilms debut, Alice Shay speaks to Paul Harper, a head urban designer at Design for London who managed the 100 Public Spaces Programme. Here he discusses the origins of the program and guides us through projects currently underway in East London's Aldgate neighborhood, including a one-way to two-way conversion and the creation of a new public park.

Bronx electeds joined DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan yesterday to mark a completed round of ped-bike enhancements to the Grand Concourse and 161st Street. The package includes the newly ped-friendly Lou Gehrig Plaza (in front of the Bronx County Courthouse), and wider medians and bike lanes along one section of the Concourse. The project was launched in early 2006, while Iris Weinshall was in charge at DOT.

When Streetsblog posted photos of the nearly-finished courthouse plaza back in April, it was welcomed as a corrective to the rampant government employee parking that had taken over the space, while some readers questioned whether the design would truly invite public use. The plaza's been there for a few months now -- if you've had a chance to observe this place close up, tell us how you like it.

Follow the jump for a before shot of the plaza and plans of the new street geometry on the Concourse.

Here's the plaza back when it was a parking free-for-all.

For a larger version of this image, go to page 26 of this PDF.

Images: NYCDOT