Streetsblog New York City

Before hitting the "World Class Streets" launch Thursday night, Jan Gehl addressed about 70 staffers from DOT, City Planning, and NYCEDC, part of a day-long exercise that introduced participants to the Danish planner's site evaluation methods. Commissioners Amanda Burden and Janette Sadik-Khan gave a hero's welcome to Gehl, whom they called "instrumental" to revamping New York's approach to planning.

Calling the assembled city staff "the pied pipers of the new way of doing business," Sadik-Khan touted the city's transition to more human-centered street metrics. "The tools that we've used in the past have done a really good job of helping us measure cars and traffic," she said, "but as we're looking to improve the condition of our streets for other users of the system -- for pedestrians, for cyclists, for people whether they're walking around, riding around, chatting, strolling, having lunch -- we need a much more comprehensive approach."

After a powerpoint from team Gehl, everyone got a feel for what Sadik-Khan was referring to. Fanning out from City Planning's Reade Street headquarters, 11 groups headed to different sites downtown, timers in hand, to see how well New York's streets and public spaces serve the people who use them. The evaluation combines hard stats like pedestrian and cyclist counts with open-ended questions that touch on the quality of the public environment and how well it supports social activity. The same technique underlies much of the data presented in World Class Streets.

DOT Assistant Commissioner Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who heads up the Public Plaza Program, said that the day's events presage permanent changes. "We are going to be working on different ways of building some of these methodologies into our standard operating procedure," he said, "so that we are more versed in studying street life." DOT will both perform the evaluations on its own, he added, and insert the work into consultant contracts.

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Construction is underway on what may be the nation's most advanced urban greenway system.

Indianapolis, Indiana is making what could be the boldest step of any North American city towards supporting bicyclists and pedestrians. Known as an extremely auto-oriented city, most closely associated with the Indianapolis 500, this is one of the last cities we would have expected to see systematically removing vehicle lanes and replacing them with bicycle and pedestrian space.

The Indianapolis Cultural Trail is a bold vision for about 8 miles of separated greenway that is currently being built through the downtown core of Indianapolis. Led by the Central Indiana Community Foundation in partnership with the city, the project is a visionary response to skyrocketing obesity and the opportunity to leverage and better serve downtown infrastructure investments.

Downtown Indianapolis before the Cultural Trail.


Downtown Indianapolis after the Cultural Trail.

More than just a separated bike path, the Cultural Trail is an economic development tool that will help support and connect the city's many cultural and civic destinations. It will help revitalize streets by bringing more people downtown and increasing the circulation and length of time that people spend in the central city. As it becomes part of the city, it will also enhance the public presence of existing destinations and help create many new destinations throughout the downtown.

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Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan launched New York City's new Public Plaza Initiative with the opening of a new pocket park in DUMBO yesterday. "A short time ago, this was a barren parking lot," Sadik-Khan said. "But people immediately filled up this space as the green came in. That speaks to the hunger and demand that New Yorkers have for this sort of space." That's DUMBO Business Improvement District executive director Tucker Reed standing to the commissioner's left in the photo above. Reed's organization is responsible for the maintenance of the new plaza.

Melvin Westry from Ready Willing & Able helps to maintain the plaza and its plantings on behalf of Reed's organization. "It's a popular spot," Westry said, pointing to the blue umbrellas over a half dozen cafe tables. "People have been coming more and more since we gave them some shade. They're eating lunch, opening laptops, some are meeting, some just sit and relax. It's nice. I think we need some more. Turn every triangle into one of these."

DOT Assistant Commissioner Andy Wiley-Schwartz, said the agency currently has 31 plaza projects in the pipeline throughout the city and they are looking for more plaza opportunities. "We want to find places in every Community Board district where there are community partners who can help maintain and run a place like this," Schwartz said. "This DUMBO project is the perfect example. We had a BID that wanted to make it happen, adjacent land uses that support it, and its on a direct pedestrian path between the subway East River Park. The key is to have a BID or some community partner willing to take care of the space." That is Schwartz, above, in the suit jacket, sitting with DOT press officer Chris Gilbride and Commissioner Sadik-Kahn prior to yesterday's press conference. That's the Brookyn's Brown coffee truck in the background, parked along one side of the Plaza during lunch hour. The sculpture at right was created by an artist who works in the neighborhood.

A DJ sets up a turntable outside of the Halcyon Gallery across the street from the Plaza. DOT's Bridges Division donated the giant granite blocks that mark the plaza's border. They are just the right size for sitting and keeping out vehicles.

I'm told that the double-white lines are used in place of a curb. Tucker Reed said that at some point in the future the DUMBO BID and City DOT plan to dig up the green asphalt to bare the old, original belgian block street surface. 

The plaza is dotted with sulptures by local artisits, like the drift wood sculpture at lower right. The red building at the base of the plaza is currently under renovation. Reed expects that the landlord will lease the ground floor space to a cafe or some other tenant who can take advantage of and add value to the new plaza. 

Subway noise? What subway noise?

Dani Simons, Transportation Alternatives' Director of Communications will be joining Bruce Schaller, Jon Orcutt and Andy Wiley-Schwartz at New York City's Dept. of Transportation. She starts next week. No word yet on what her title will be but rumor has it that she will be helping DOT launch some sort of new blog.

Bring it on, Simons.

DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan bicylcing to work during her first week on the job

Crain's New York reports that the earth is shaking below Dept. of Transportation headquarters at 40 Worth Street:

Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's new transportation commissioner, politely says she's building on the foundation left by her predecessors. In fact, she is shaking it. A month into her job, she's advancing ideas that the department has long rejected, from residential permit parking to banning cars from Central Park to the mayor's revolutionary congestion pricing plan.

Ms. Sadik-Khan knows she can't merely reform the Department of Transportation's policies. She has to change its very mind-set, because staffers have long seen their mission as moving as much traffic as they can, as fast as they can.

Overcoming such entrenched thinking is an immense task, as Ms. Sadik-Khan, 47, knows from experience. As a DOT staffer in 1991, she answered Mayor David Dinkins' call to reduce congestion by writing a plan for East River bridge tolls. The idea was predictably unpopular and died quickly. Ms. Sadik-Khan's abandoned report sits on a shelf in her unglamorous 10th-floor office at 40 Worth St., a reminder of what happens when policy meets politics.

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Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan continues to assemble an impressive management team.

Following in the footsteps of Bruce Schaller and Jon Orcutt, Project for Public Spaces vice president and transportation program director Andy Wiley-Schwartz is heading over to 40 Worth Street where he will be reporting to Deputy Commissioner Schaller at DOT's new Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. There they will be working to implement the transportation and public space objectives set out in Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC.

Wiley-Schwartz starts at DOT on Monday. While there has been no official announcement of his hiring or his title, word has it Wiley-Schwartz will be working on new public space initiatives, which seems like a natural fit, given his experience at PPS. With DOT's recent focus on reclaiming under-utilized bits and pieces of street space as public plazas and with tremendous grassroots energy in places like Hell's Kitchen, SoHo, Gansevoort, Grand Army Plaza, Williamsburg and even the occasional, random on-street parking spot -- it seems like "public space initiatives" could be a pretty exciting job description at DOT right now.

Wiley-Schwartz has been a contributor here at Streetsblog. At PPS he specialized in working with Departments of Transportation and community groups all across the U.S. on downtown street enhancement, traffic calming and bicycle and pedestrian projects. He is a national lead in the Context Sensitive Solutions movement, an articulate advocate and just a really pleasant guy to work with. Here is an excerpt from his PPS bio:

He specializes in helping communities rebuild their neighborhoods and cities by leveraging transportation funding into the development of public spaces, including streets and other transportation facilities, in part by focusing on strategic partnerships and programming.

Andy's current projects include PPS's New Jersey Smart Choices program: an outreach, education and training program to help municipalities plan and make sustainable land use decisions in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Transportation. He is also working with the Times Square Alliance in New York City, the City of Elmira, NY to revitalize the area under and around a railroad viaduct downtown, and advising the City of Indianapolis on their plan to build a "Cultural Trail" through their central business district.

And, no, this is not an April Fool's prank. It's June, people.

A "woonerf" or "shared space" street design in the Dutch town of Haren.

Yesterday a Streetsblog reader reported that the Department of Transportation is removing stop signs and installing traffic signals at some intersections in Battery Park City as a way "to provide for the safest streets possible citywide." The reader noted, "The area is home to many small children and seniors, who are fighting the DOT change. My instinct is to agree, but I also know that some new thinking favors fewer traffic controls."

Andy Wiley-Schwartz, vice president and director of Project for Public Spaces' transportation program, wrote a great response in the comments section, suggesting that to create safer and more community-friendly streets, city government and community groups need to look beyond stop signs and traffic signals. Here is what he wrote:

It's good that DOT spoke with the residents of Battery Park City and listened to their concerns. What I wonder is if either side ever considered that the streets should be designed to support a variety of types of activity, and that the pedestrian issues could in fact be far more important than the mobility issue for motorists.

In this case, we have a large park and lots of apartments, with a road in-between. So is the goal of this street to move cars through, or to facilitate community activity? If a neighborhood wants people to go slowly and respect pedestrians than there are lots of ways to change the street to get that kind of behavior, through lane widths, medians, sidewalk activity, pavement treatments, etc. Changing or eliminating controls at intersections is only a small part of that equation.

In Battery Park City, with it's limited through-traffic and local destinations, you have a good place to try out more innovative treatments. Considering that we are talking about a street that is in between a large park and a bunch of houses, this would seem to be a great opportunity to traffic-calm through a variety of measures.

Design speed on a street like this should be incredibly slow, but here the city and BPCA are only considering changing the intersections to control driver behavior. If people are speeding in between intersections, than the street should be redesigned to move cars very slowly all along. Then the "confusion" at the stop-controlled intersections would not be a problem.

In fact, engineers in Europe are telling us that this confusion is exactly what heightens safety, because drivers and pedestrians have to negotiate with each other. Signals increase predictability through and makes drivers and pedestrians LESS conscious that they need to be looking out for each other at all.

Haren photo: Ben Hamilton-Baillie, Woonerf diagram: Eran Ben-Joseph 

The Department of Transportation's press office sends along this response to the story we broke yesterday about the agency's plan to revamp Fourth, Sixth and Seventh Avenues running through Park Slope, Brooklyn:

DOT has proposed changing 6th and 7th Avenues to one-way streets which we believe will have many benefits including simplifying the turning movements at intersections to make it safer for pedestrians crossing the street and narrowing the travel lanes on 7th Avenue to encourage vehicles to travel within the existing speed limit. DOT also proposes making these changes in conjunction with a plan that would remove a travel lane in each direction on 4th Avenue (between 17th and Dean Streets) using this space to improve the existing left turn bays.

Andy Wiley-Schwartz, a Boerum Hill resident who also happens to be the Vice President and Director of the Transportation Program at Project for Public Spaces, writing in Streetsblog's comments section yesterday, posed a great follow-up question for the agency: What problem is DOT trying to solve with this particular set of solutions? Or, to put it another way: What triggered this initiative? As Andy puts it:

This type of measure (DOT's call them "improvements" whether they are or not) is always triggered by something. The trigger could be a request or complaint from a community board or politician, an accident or accident trend, some type of automatic system-related alert, etc.

My question is, what is the perceived "problem" in this case, and how is DOT's proposal being justified as a fix for it? I suspect the problem and solution are defined narrowly as a traffic flow issue, and at the expense of the neighborhoods.

Many, many DOTs around the country are going through an entire re-thinking of the project development process, through something called "Context Sensitive Solutions".

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The death of Derek Lake, killed one month ago at age 23 when his bicycle tripped a metal plate on Houston Street, hints at a tragedy shared by all New Yorkers: City Hall’s continued insistence that the ultimate goal of a New York City street is to move as many cars and trucks each day as physically possible.

Houston Street, from its ramps onto East River Park to its flow into kayak launches at the Hudson, is undergoing a $30 million reconstruction project. When it ends by 2008, it will add five left-turn bays for cars and slightly widen a few sidewalks where street vendors work the edge of SoHo. Transportation spokesperson Chris Gilbride says the project will cut a lane of traffic from some blocks and not eliminate any pedestrian refuge areas.

But Livable Streets advocates say the DOT’s approach to the project misses a historic opportunity to transform Houston into a truly great urban boulevard, designed not just to move motor vehicles, but to create space for pedestrians, bikes, buses, cafe tables, merchants and the full diversity of New York City street life.

Community members and former city officials say the Department of Transportation alternated between bullying and ignoring neighborhood pleas for bike and pedestrian safety during the reconstruction project. "The community expressed outrage repeatedly," says Dirk McCall, who headed City Councilmember Alan J. Gerson’s staff during meetings on the Houston Street project in 2001. "They wanted more crosswalks."

Charle de Cafiero, a former member of Community Board 2 who lives near the busy corner of Houston and Lafayette, echoes this. He says his neighbors’ insistence that Houston Street serves as a local "Main Street" and not just a regional truck conduit met scorn from DOT officials, prompting them to deride the community’s ideas as "anti-car." De Cafiero says the non-collaborative atmosphere poisoned hopes for innovations that could have made Houston a model "Livable Street."

There’s no lack of vision or precedent for how a "Livable" Houston Street could look.

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