The site plan for Riverside Center includes a large ramp for motorists to access below-ground garages (bottom center). Image: Extell Development

The site is just a few blocks north of Hudson Yards, where the city recently put a hard cap on the number of parking spaces that can be built. When the City Planning Commission enacted those parking limits, they asserted that capping parking is "consistent with the objective of creating an area with a transit- and pedestrian-oriented neighborhood character." It remains to be seen whether city planning will follow through on that objective elsewhere in the city, or if the Hudson Yards parking cap was a one-off victory for residents fed up with the proliferation of off-street parking and the traffic it generates. 

The Extell project, known as Riverside Center, would construct 1,800 spaces for 2,500 residents and a mix of stores -- including a car dealership -- on a site between 59th Street and 61st Street near the Hudson River waterfront.

Cramming that much parking into such a small space will promote driving, increase congestion, and erode the walking environment. As a result, the street-level design of the Extell project, which includes several curb cuts to allow motorists to access garages, doesn't call to mind "a transit- and pedestrian-oriented neighborhood character." Any way you slice it, the proposal for 1,800 parking spaces is excessive and completely inconsistent with the sustainability goals in PlaNYC:

• The site straddles two zones where parking construction is restricted by law. Below 60th Street, parking maximums are set at a 20 percent ratio -- developers can only build one parking spot for every five residences. Above 60th Street, the maximum is 35 percent. Extell contends that 45 percent of the residences at Riverside Center will need a parking space.
• Only about 25 percent of households in this part of Manhattan own cars, according to the 2000 Census.
  
• The Extell project is the final piece in a massive development site, known as Riverside South, stretching from 59th to 72nd Street. A 1993 agreement set the number of parking spaces to be built in the entire area at 3,500. More than 2,600 spaces have already been built on the rest of the site, so erecting 1,800 more will exceed the amount in the original agreement by nearly 1,000 spaces.
  

The Planning Commission is expected to certify the Extell project at a hearing this afternoon, which is not a final verdict but will set in motion the public review process. The local community board will weigh in with recommendations, and so will Borough President Scott Stringer. The Planning Commission can then approve the project, disapprove, or approve with modifications. The final vote rests with the City Council.

Objections to the volume of parking planned for Riverside Center have come from several sources. A coalition of sustainable transportation advocates including the Straphangers Campaign, Transportation Alternatives, and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign have told Stringer that Riverside Center should not be developed using Extell's car-centric, towers-in-the-park template. Manhattan Community Board 7 has called for total parking on the site to be reduced by 30 percent [PDF]. (The board is also asking for a 20 percent reduction in the total size of the project.) Local activists who successfully fought the Hudson Yards parking bonanza have mobilized to debunk the assumptions behind the parking projections in Extell's proposal.

Council Member Gale Brewer, whose position will be critical when the project reaches the City Council, believes that there's no reason for Extell to build so much parking, said Jesse Bodine, her director of constituent services. Brewer hasn't come out with a specific target for reducing the amount of parking, but she expects the proposal to be modified to include less parking by the time the council votes on it.

The most intriguing part of the process will come before the City Council vote, when the Planning Commission reviews the project. The commissioners can let Extell's proposal move forward without any attempt to mitigate the parking disaster. Or they can render a verdict that's consistent with their rhetoric on Hudson Yards and the sustainability objectives laid out in PlaNYC.

The Hudson Yards district on the Far West Side of Manhattan now has limits on off-street parking. Image: hotdogger13 via Flickr.

The amendments put a "hard cap" on the total number of off-street parking spaces that can be built in the Hudson Yards special district: 6,905. "If a new developer comes in and says normally he's entitled to have 300 parking spaces, if the cap has already been reached, he won't be able to build those spaces," said Christine Berthet, co-founder of the Clinton/Hell's Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition. Before the lawsuit, the city was poised to allow as many as 17,500 new parking spaces in the area.

The lawsuit grew out of local opposition to the Bloomberg administration's proposal to build a football stadium on the West Side of Manhattan. Sheldon Silver put an end to that particular idea but not the city's plan to allow huge amounts of off-street parking in the Hudson Yards area. Plaintiffs took their claims to court in 2005, arguing that the plan violated limits on parking south of 60th Street, established in 1982 to keep the city in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

The adoption of the zoning amendment last week is an important acknowledgment that traffic can be mitigated by managing the supply of parking. And, on the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, it's a timely reminder of the link between parking policy and environmental sustainability. "We filed this lawsuit because we knew what they were doing was violating the Clean Air Act," said Dan Gutman, an environmental planner and plaintiff in the Hudson Yards case. "Some people at City Planning thought they didn’t have to obey the rules anymore. Most people had forgotten that those rules existed."

In order to enforce the hard cap, the Department of City Planning will now track each and every off-street space in the area, roughly between Eighth and Eleventh Avenues and 30th and 43rd Streets. Counting those parking spaces will be a first for New York City. (San Francisco recently became the first American city to count all its publicly accessible parking spaces, information which will facilitate efforts to price parking more effectively.)

The changes will also prevent the City Planning Commission from granting special permits to build parking at Hudson Yards, a loophole that residents have consistently struggled against in Hell's Kitchen. Developers have always been able to skirt the parking restrictions below 60th Street by obtaining special permits from the city. "The special permits have been given out as the industry asks," said Berthet. "There are very few examples of special permits that were turned down." Berthet sees the restrictions on special permits as "a huge win" and believes that the new language does not leave major loopholes open.

In addition, the amendment eliminates parking minimums and lowers parking maximums in the area. Developers who want to build less parking will have that option, while those who want to overload their site with spaces will be prohibited from doing so. 

Overall, said Berthet, the zoning amendment is "a little more than was expected," in part because of language that the City Planning Commission added to original text. In the preamble, the amendment lays out the goal "to limit the amount of off-street parking... consistent with the objective of creating an area with a transit- and pedestrian-oriented neighborhood character." So, there is now a passage in city law that acknowledges the link between restricting off-street parking and building communities for pedestrians and transit riders.

The major question is whether this policy will affect areas outside the Hudson Yards special district. The planning department could extend the tighter control of special permits to the rest of Manhattan below 60th Street, for instance. Discussions with the city about pursuing that reform, however, seem to have lost momentum, said Gutman.

According to the Department of City Planning, a series of studies about parking policy in Manhattan are underway and any further recommendations will have to wait until they are completed. Whether the Hudson Yards rezoning signals a shift in planning department policy or a lawsuit-driven one-off remains to be seen.

In addition to the features already found on New York's Select Bus Service, the 34th Street plan adds full separation from traffic, with two-way bus service operating on one side of the street. General traffic would travel one-way toward the Hudson River west of Sixth Avenue, and toward the East River east of Fifth Avenue. Between Fifth and Sixth, a new pedestrian plaza would be constructed in place of traffic lanes -- a configuration that Streetsblog readers may recall from a presentation in 2008.

All told, DOT projects that bus speeds will improve 35 percent, cutting river-to-river travel time to 20 minutes. Currently, buses on 34th Street are in motion only 40 percent of the time.

The placement of the transitway was selected specifically to enable pedestrian improvements. Running bus service in both directions along one side of the street allows for wider sidewalks and pedestrian refuge islands, according to an analysis of different options for the corridor [PDF]. Compatibility with loading and deliveries was also a make-or-break factor -- the configuration maintains curbside access to one side of the street along the entire route.

Image: NYCDOT

The new transitway would connect four subway stations, the busiest rail station in the nation, and the 34th Street ferry terminal. The M34 and M16 bus routes, which both run on 34th Street, carried more than 14,000 passengers per day in 2008. Several other bus routes use a portion of 34th Street.

In coming years, the corridor will get busier. The ARC tunnel will bring more New Jersey commuters into Penn Station. The 7 train will extend to 34th and Eleventh Avenue, and the development of Hudson Yards will bring thousands more residents to the west side. On the east side, the transitway would link up with Select Bus Service on First and Second Avenues.

The planning process is still in the early stages, and nothing is set in stone. Still to come: more detailed design, environmental review, gathering public input (which you can currently submit via the DOT website), and an analysis of necessary changes to the truck network. Planners hope to attract federal funding for the project. We have a request in with DOT for more information about what's next.

Image: NYCDOT

Image: NYCDOT

The Argyle, a new arrival on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue, is close to transit but cedes the ground floor to parking rather than retail or even a stoop. Parking requirements throughout New York compromise walkable development. Image: Brownstoner.

This is the second installment in a three-part series on the reshaping of New York City and its consequences for sustainability and livable streets. Read the first part here.

Yesterday we looked at the Department of City Planning's eight-year record on rezoning and its general success at creating opportunities for development near transit. Density, however, is only one piece of the planning process. Amanda Burden's planning department has laid the foundation for transit-oriented growth, but so far failed to create conditions where walkable development can flourish.

"Everyone's trying to remake themselves into New York while New York is trying to make itself a more suburban environment."

The department's parking policy is one major impediment. By requiring most new residential developments to include a minimum number of parking spaces per unit, the department is artificially inflating the supply of parking, inducing more traffic and subsidizing car ownership.

New research from Simon McDonnell, Josiah Madar and Vicki Been at NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy [PDF] shows how these policies actually concentrate parking in transit-rich areas.

Required parking per thousand square feet of land. Parking minimums actually consume the most space along transit lines.

The research reveals that although buildings near rail stations have lower parking minimums than those in more car-dependent areas, on average residential development within half a mile of rail is still required to have 46 parking spaces for every 100 housing units. Perversely, because you can build more densely near transit, parking minimums per square foot of land are actually higher where transit options are most robust. So even as the planning department tries to concentrate growth near transit lines, it is simultaneously filling that valuable real estate with unnecessary parking.

The impact of inserting so much new parking into the built environment is enormous.

New York City's parking minimums will add a billion more vehicle miles traveled per year by 2030, according to Transportation Alternatives' 2008 report, Suburbanizing the City. Parking minimums can also force new development to disengage from the street, creating unpleasant sidewalks and dead spaces for pedestrians, as seen on Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue.

"Everyone's trying to remake themselves into New York while New York is trying to make itself a more suburban environment," said Rachel Weinberger, the lead author of the TA report and a professor of urban planning at UPenn. Weinberger argues that the combination of increased density and parking minimums means that the planning department is "pushing the urban form into a more Corbusian, towers-in-the-park shape." A form that has been discredited for the better part of 50 years.

Shortsighted parking policy has been complemented by outsized redevelopment projects widely seen as antithetical to sustainable planning. "The big way that Bloomberg projects have been anything but transit-oriented is not the rezonings, but those rezonings that have been combined with major redevelopment initiatives," said Joan Byron, the Director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center for Community Development. "These are the megaprojects: Yankee Stadium, Willets Point, or Coney Island, to name a few examples."

In these cases, Byron says, the planning department -- especially when working closely with the NYC Economic Development Corporation -- ignores good planning and instead "seeks to maximize the return on investment for a hypothetical developer." The upshot is that these megaprojects routinely sacrifice walkable streets in order to embrace the automobile, as Ron Shiffman, a co-founder of the Pratt Center and former planning commissioner, described for Streetsblog last November.

In some places, the planning department's transit-oriented rezonings and its auto-centric redevelopments sit cheek-by-jowl. The 1,248 parking space East River Plaza, for example, hulks next to the FDR Drive in East Harlem, while just a few blocks closer to the Lexington Avenue subway, huge swaths of the neighborhood were upzoned to take advantage of the area's transit resources.

The Department of City Planning's vision for Hudson Yards.

While the Bloomberg administration invests billions of city dollars in making Hudson Yards a "dynamic, transit-oriented urban center," it has also actively fought to make it a car-friendly location. These goals are fundamentally incompatible. "You can't make a place auto-accessible," said Weinberger, "without eroding the pedestrian and therefore the transit environment."

Bloomberg and Burden have undertaken a transformative rezoning of the city, mostly along transit-oriented lines. At the same time, their policies are not filling those transit-rich areas with development that actually fosters walking and transit use. Planners instead insist on the unnecessary construction of parking spaces and allow developers to import suburban standards into New York City's urban fabric. It's as if the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. In the third post of this series, we'll look at how the Bloomberg administration can use the next four years to better align its development policies.

Photo: hotdogger13/Flickr

At issue was a rezoning provision that would have dramatically increased parking inventory for new Hudson Yards development by establishing parking minimum requirements. HKNA claimed the parking plan -- adopted in 2005 as part of the failed bid to build a far West Side football stadium -- violated a 1982 agreement to limit parking below 60th Street in order to keep the city in compliance with the Clean Air Act. 

The 2005 zoning, according to HKNA, would have permitted the construction of up to 17,500 new parking spots (estimates cited by neighborhood media pegged the number at closer to 20,000). Under the terms of the settlement, says an HKNA statement, "new development in the Hudson Yards will be limited to no more than 6,100 parking spaces" -- a number that, all things considered, "is expected to be approximately the same as would have been constructed under the 1982 zoning rules."

And for the first time, special permits for additional parking spaces will not be approved unless there is an actual shortage of parking in the Hudson Yards area. Currently there is no limit on special permits. The Departments of City Planning, Consumer Affairs, and Buildings will collaborate to keep an up-to-date inventory of parking spaces in the area and publish it on a web site.

The city has also abandoned plans for a 950-space underground garage originally intended for use by the stadium.

Needless to say, for a neighborhood already overrun with traffic congestion and parking garages, with attendant high levels of asthma to prove it, the settlement is welcome news. Here's hoping it might inspire the Bloomberg admin to reconsider its pro-parking push in other areas of the city.

Portland, Oregon, which has ascended the ranks of cities judged most walkable, bikable, and urbane, benefits mightily from its small 200-foot square blocks, which provide businesses more street frontage and people more streets on which to bike, cycle and walk. These short blocks did not create Oregon's and Portland's growth management and pro-transit policies, but they gave them terrain on which these policies could take root.

Contrast that to Salt Lake City. Its founder Brigham Young for some reason opted for one of the widest urban grids anywhere. (I've read he wanted teams of cattle to be able to turn around?) Its streets are laid out in a grid where each blocks is 660 feet square - which means that nine Portland blocks to fill up one Salt Lake superblock. This makes getting around Salt Lake City on foot very difficult, as I can personally attest.

New York City is somewhere in the middle, at least in Manhattan. Its numbered streets are set at a pedestrian friendly 200 feet apart while its avenues are set at a pedestrian unfriendly 800 feet apart, except where broken in two by Lexington, Madison or other mid-grid streets. This deficiency has long been noted, so if anything the city should have a set policy creating new streets when possible, and so to create shorter, more pedestrian friendly blocks.

But that is not the case. Instead the city and state often encourage one of the deadest institutions, the Superblock. Not content with blocks that are too large already, the city and state often team up to create even bigger blocks, and not even pedestrian friendly versions of those.

What exactly is a superblock? This term came into vogue in planning circles more than a half century ago to describe the then fashionable idea of demapping older street grid and creating one large blocks where before many blocks had been. It was thought that the old small blocks were outmoded, and did not fit a car-friendly culture. Jane Jacobs, among others, fired a stake into the heart of this idea, and now, theoretically at least, the superblock is dead. There are few defenders of it -- theoretically.

But practice is different than theory. Let's look at a few examples.

There's the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. While there are a lot of reasons to criticize this project, starting with the process that seemed to reverse the normal way development of a public parcel should proceed. But when you get down to urban design of the plan itself, it has entirely too few streets. Not only does it de-map some existing ones, it doesn't pick up the possibility of creating new ones so that this big area could be divided into smaller, pedestrian friendly blocks.

The Hudson Yards Development on the Far West Side of Manhattan is still evolving and it's far from clear what exactly will emerge there. But most of the proposed plans submitted by developers for the new area atop the West Side Rail Yards show towers set in parks or plazas. They seem more appropriate to an Edge City outside Dallas than in a dense urban city. Only the Brookfield plan, in its words, "honors the Manhattan street grid" by drawing several new streets across the site, and puts an emphasis on urban style buildings that front on streets.

Brookfield's Hudson Yards project plan essentially maintains Midtown Manhattan's street grid.

Why do developers haul out the superblock so quickly when designing current projects, and why do public officials let them, despite its near death in academic circles?

One common answer these days is terrorism concerns. Setbacks for more prominent buildings are often larger now, to allow for the placement of bollards and other protective measures. But there is a certain lack of logic here. After all, most New York City buildings do not have enormous setbacks from the street, so pushing that for newer buildings hardly deprives a terrorist of potential targets.

A stronger explanation to me lies in finance and issues of political power. Large concentrations of money affect development in New York City disproportionately, and such large concentrations of money often favor having large concentrations of land to work with. While it may be a disservice to the city to have a large, island-like superblock - traffic flow is disrupted, walking and bicycling trips are made more difficult -- to the developer, a superblock allows for wide floor plates, campus-like settings and a level of land use control that would not otherwise be possible. And since the government sector is weak, large developers often end up doing what suits them first, not the public.

I'm not expecting to get rid of all superblocks. But it is a fair question whether the city should make creating a pedestrian friendly city of short blocks with buildings close to the street a priority. We have the most pedestrian oriented city in the country, but too often we chip away at its essential attributes in this regard, rather than seeking to add to them.

Photosim by Eric McNatt and Jason Lee for New York Magazine.

In June we reported on the city's effort to bring some 20,000 additional parking spaces to the Hudson Yards area on the far West Side, via a rezoning provision adopted in 2005. Though it's a remnant of the failed stadium plan, the Bloomberg administration nonetheless intends to hold on the parking component, going so far as to defend itself against a related lawsuit by claiming that the city's carbon monoxide levels are declining. (Not surprisingly, neighborhood folk aren't taking the city's word for it.)

Four months ago it appeared the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) was cooperating with the city by attempting to remove references to parking from its Clean Air Act State Implementation Plan (SIP). Back then the DEC claimed that parking should not be considered part of the SIP since the city was not legally required to consider parking as part of its compliance strategy.

Now, however, it looks like the state has changed course, according to a report from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign:

Officials at the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation say DEC is resisting New York City's efforts to increase parking in the Hudson Yards/Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan. The area, along with the rest of Manhattan below 60th street, is currently subject to restrictions in the number of off-street parking spaces allowed as part of NY's State Implementation Plan (SIP) for attaining carbon monoxide (CO) levels in accordance with EPA standards. The City raised the level of allowable parking in a 2005 zoning change, essentially changing maximum parking restrictions into minimum parking requirements. The direct conflict between the new zoning and the SIP forced the City to seek a revision of the SIP to remove the parking program, and also got it hit by a lawsuit.

In short, the City claims to have attained EPA CO standards without the aid of the parking restrictions making the parking restrictions unnecessary and burdensome on planned development of the area. In response to the City's requested SIP revision, NYDEC has asked for an update regarding the status of a parking study mandated by the SIP; the chimerical study has been "in the works" since 1979. Although the meaning of "update" remains ambiguous, a source says the DEC won't entertain the City's request without some accounting for the study.

Furthermore, the DEC is studying the possibility that the parking restrictions in the SIP may apply not only to CO, but also particulate matter and ozone, neither of which are within EPA target levels for NYC. If this is the case, the City's CO attainment may be moot. It remains a mystery why the City is pushing so hard for more parking. The zoning was changed when NYC was a contender for the 2012 Olympics and had proposed building a stadium over the Hudson Yards. With the bid a memory, the zoning change is now a relic. With PlaNYC, congestion pricing and the great promise of progress looming over the City, to encourage more traffic-inducing parking spaces is counterproductive at best.

In related news, the MTA could soon be accepting public comment on those closely guarded Hudson Yards development proposals.

Photo: hotdogger13/Flickr

Janette Sadik-Khan: Four days.

Streetsblog: Left in the legislative session?

JSK: Yeah, well, maybe four days left, maybe more days. August in Albany. What can be better?

SB: (Laughing) So, let's start with something other than congestion pricing. How was your trip to Copenhagen to meet with Jan Gehl? Had you ever been before?

JSK: Never been.

SB: What did you think?

JSK: I thought it was spectacular. The experience of riding a bicycle in a city in which the car is not the priority was really inspiring. One piece that was a bit of a surprise was how well behaved people were in Copenhagen. I didn't see a single person break a single traffic law while I was there which is certainly a little different than the experience that we have here.

SB: I noticed the same thing when I was there last fall but every Copenhagener I asked insisted they were just as rude and unruly as New Yorkers.

JSK: Gehl went through the historic trajectory of how they've reclaimed public space bit by bit, one street at a time. Today, they've reached a tipping point where 36 percent of the people commuting to work are on bike and they're looking to get that mode share up to 40 percent.

The other thing that amazed me is that there are all of these bikes parked all over the place and it appears that none of them are locked. They all have these small black handcuffs on the rear wheel. You turn the key and this steel rod comes through and locks it up. How long do you think that would last on the streets of New York City? Ten minutes?

So, there are definite cultural elements that make Copenhagen Copenhagen and need to be adapted to work in New York. But the design of the streets and their approach to the streets are really interesting and I'm hoping to bring Gehl over at the end of next month to help us work on a pedestrian and public space strategy much like what he did for London.

SB: Would you have him work in a specific location or citywide?

JSK: We need to be able to show what can be done in all five boroughs with a variety of different techniques. But not everything needs to be a massive capital project. I'm looking to see what we can do on a shorter term basis to have some immediate impact in reclaiming streets and coming up with different designs for roadways and sidewalks.

SB: Are you looking at reclaiming on-street parking space for other uses?

JSK: That is something we're looking at. In fact, we're talking about removing a lane of parking on Broadway next to City Hall. Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia has been really great about looking for ways to reclaim street space. He's been helping me identify where these different places can be. The other question is once we reclaim it what do we do with it? You have to do it in a way that leaves a meaningful public space.

SB: So, let's talk about congestion pricing. There are a lot of negative signals coming out of Albany and Sheldon Silver. What's the status?

JSK: We're very hopeful. It's a heavy lift, certainly. The Mayor's working very hard and all of us are working very hard to see the legislation and authorization come through by Thursday, which is when the session ends. The Senate has been terrific. Bruno's been really good. The Assembly is open and we continue to do briefings. The governor has been very supportive, so that's a big help. We'll see what happens when the chips fall on Thursday.

SB: If congestion pricing doesn't pass do you have a Plan B? Are there traffic reduction measures that the city can implement if this plan falls through?

JSK: Everyone is shooting for Thursday but the promise of a special legislative session later this summer is still out there. So, Plan B is the special session. We are not giving up hope at all. We are fully committed. We need to get this legislation passed. It needs to pass now. It would be ridiculous to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. That's our plan and when the plan passes we're looking to institute a series of immediate short term improvements before the switch is flipped on congestion pricing, including increased express bus service, ferry service and a variety of other initiatives. So, our emphasis is on making sure this congestion pricing program passes. On the transportation side, we don't think there's anything more important for the future of New York than getting this plan through.

SB: Is it a given at this point that no new "SMART" authority will be created and the MTA will administer the congestion pricing program?

JSK: That is still in negotiation. On the governance side I think that they are looking at a model that includes both the city and the state much along the lines of the Capital Program Review Board which handles the MTA's money. There are four votes on the CPRB: the City, the State, the Assembly and the Senate. Four people in a room. It takes a unanimous vote of the CPRB to pass the MTA's capital program. So, I think people are moving towards that kind of a governance model. But the negotiations continue.

SB: The City's proposed Bus Rapid Transit system will be dependent on camera-based enforcement of the bus lanes. Is the legislature going to give us the cameras? Is that sort of issue even on the radar in Albany right now?

JSK: It's definitely on the radar. It's part of our plan. We're hoping it is also addressed in the next four days. Keep those phone calls going to your legislators.

SB: The Hudson Yards rezoning on the west side of Manhattan requires developers to include over 20,000 new parking spaces. We recently did a story about this on the blog that generated a lot of response. People don't understand how these parking requirements fit with the Mayor's long-term sustainability and traffic reduction goals of PlaNYC.

JSK: In Copenhagen I was joined by City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden. We spent a lot of time talking about the success of cities like Portland and Chicago that have revised their zoning codes with lower parking ratios and how that has led, in a lot of instances, to a renaissance for pedestrian space and transit without any apparent downside.

SB: Towards the end of his private consulting career, your new Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller put forward a study suggesting that pedestrianizing Prince Street in SoHo, say, on weekends, might be doable and even desirable. Can we expect to see you move on this type of project?

JSK: We're looking at all sorts of treatments to improve the streets of New York. Bruce being here is going to help us. A lot of people have interesting ideas. It will be exciting to have Jan Gehl here because he will help us identify some of the places where we can do urban acupuncture and specific interventions, much as he's done in other cities.

As important as it is to do these interventions, it is also important to ensure that we have policies and programs in place that will set the direction for the agency for years to come.