A template to prioritize walking, biking, and transit at the intersection of Third Avenue and 117th Street. Image: Transportation Alternatives

Earlier this week, Laurence Renard was killed as she crossed First Avenue when a dump truck driver turned into her path from 90th Street, hitting her from behind. Renard was one of at least six pedestrians and cyclists who have lost their lives in traffic crashes on East Side streets since last August.

People are seriously hurt and killed with terrible frequency on the East Side of Manhattan: 148 pedestrians and cyclists died on its streets between 1995 and 2008, and more than 15,000 were injured. The area is rife with wide streets and intersections that invite speeding and reckless driving. At the same time, the East Side is home to high percentages of walk-to-work commuters, car-free households, and senior citizens. East Siders lead walkable lifestyles and make many trips by foot or bike, but their streets are extremely dangerous.

Last night, more than 100 people gathered at St. Mark’s Church on East 10th Street for the unveiling of Transportation Alternatives’ East Side Action Plan [PDF], which outlines a broad vision for making this part of Manhattan safer and more livable.

In a series of public workshops, more than 600 East Siders helped TA put together recommendations to redesign their streets and put walking, biking, and transit first. The Action Plan came out of those workshops to serve as “a tool for local East Side experts to use as citizen planners, so they can educate their communities and generate the local support needed to engage decision makers around design and policy change,” said TA’s Julia De Martini Day. Dozens of community groups from Chinatown to Harlem have signed on to the campaign.

With political attacks on pedestrian and bicycle improvements fresh in everyone’s mind, the kick-off event last night was something of a rallying cry for the coalition. New Yorkers who want safer streets have to organize and mobilize as effectively as possible, a point that former Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa brought home when he told the audience that the allocation of street space “is a political decision, not a technical decision.”

The East Side campaign has an ally in Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh, who told the crowd that he’s been very encouraged by last year’s improvements for transit, biking, and walking on First and Second Avenues, and that he wants to see the NYC DOT and the MTA do more to prioritize those modes of travel. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and City Council Member Dan Garodnick also lent their support to the campaign in TA’s press release.

The East Village Community Coalition is one of the neighborhood groups that will be making the case for safer streets. EVCC Managing Director Kurt Cavanagh said he hopes to meet with the local community board and elected officials in about a month to talk about the recommendations in the East Side plan. Other community groups in Harlem, the Upper East Side, and Chinatown will be approaching their CBs and electeds in the months ahead as well. Stay tuned.

Video: Clarence Eckerson

When Boston livable streets advocates invited Enrique Peñalosa to town recently, Streetfilms' Robin Urban Smith made the trip north to hear what the Colombian urbanist had to say to residents of "The Walking City." Watch here as Peñalosa speaks to a packed house at the Boston Public Library, and see what Bostonians think of their town's past, present and future transportation systems.

Bicycling with children initiates so-called "virtuous cycles" that further promote bicycling. Parents who bicycle with their children may be encouraged to bicycle more often because of their children's enthusiasm for bicycling. Adults bicycling with children tend to zealously guard their children's safety, becoming potent advocates on the road and with government for improving bicycling safety. Motorists tend to drive less aggressively when they are aware of children bicycling nearby. Children who bicycle regularly will be more likely to bicycle as adults. In all of these ways, urban bicycling with children promotes bicycling and bicycling safety generally. 

As Enrique Penalosa has said, "The measure of a good city is one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can safely go anywhere."  Parents can help realize this vision of a good city by bicycling with their children and making sure that they are safe.

After the multi-generational turnout for New York's first Summer Streets Saturday, the audience for this type of information should be on the rise.

Which reminds me, there's a new wiki entry on Summer Streets that's just begging to be filled out. I'm sure there are plenty of Streetsbloggers out there who can chip in. All you need to contribute is a Livable Streets account.

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign has a new online "clearinghouse" of information on Bus Rapid Transit.

From the Mobilizing the Region blog:

The clearinghouse explains what bus rapid transit (BRT) is, how it compares to other modes, how it can be implemented in suburban and urban contexts, and how it can anchor transit-oriented development. The clearinghouse will continue to be updated.

Earlier this month a new coalition called Communities United for Transportation Equity (COMMUTE!) called for expansion of New York's BRT plans, and for electeds to support BRT through congestion pricing. Their effort was punctuated by a visit from Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, which is home to the TransMilenio system.

Check out the Bogotá StreetFilm to see BRT in action.

One of the most entrenched fallacies in the congestion pricing debate has been the assertion that blue-collar New Yorkers get the short end of the stick. The claim never withstood scrutiny, but now it is facing an especially strong counterargument from Communities United for Transportation Equity (COMMUTE), a coalition of organizations from low-income communities of color underserved by transit.

COMMUTE calls for giving poor New Yorkers better access to transit by implementing extensive, inter-borough Bus Rapid Transit corridors, funded from pricing revenues and the MTA capital budget. On Monday, they hosted an appearance by former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, who described how he addressed what he calls "quality of life inequality" by improving public space for pedestrians and building the TransMilenio BRT system.

COMMUTE presented Peñalosa's story as a challenge to New York pols. "People want to see that pricing is going to benefit them directly," said Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development, a COMMUTE partner. "He really demolishes the argument of electeds who oppose the plan and have 20 percent car ownership and 5 percent commuting by car in their districts."

The Pratt Center's Elena Conte brought this point home when she addressed the room following Peñalosa's Q & A: 

The example of Bogotá... reveals that inequities in the mass transit system can be addressed when elected leadership has the will to place the needs of the underserved above the long-established privilege of the tiny minority who drive cars

COMMUTE! calls upon our elected leadership here in New York City to do no less.  We cannot let this opportunity to address inequities in the mass transit system slip past us because we’ve been distracted by the rhetoric of those who represent the most privileged amongst us.  The fact is, mass transit is the life-blood of our city, and access to mass transit determines access to economic opportunity, education, and vital services.

We urge the elected officials who represent our communities to lead the charge for mass transit improvements that serve the needs of those whose mobility is most severely limited by the current biases in the system. This can be accomplished by a comprehensive, citywide network of Bus Rapid Transit that fills in gaps in the subway system, is full-featured, and crosses bridges.

The event also provided a platform for COMMUTE to introduce its partner organizations:

• Centro Hispano Cuzcatlan
• El Puente
• Families United for Racial and Economic Equality
• The Fifth Avenue Committee
• The New York Immigration Coalition
• Nos Quedamos
• The Point CDC
• Pratt Center for Community Development
• Sustainable South Bronx
• United Community Centers
• UPROSE
• West Harlem Morningside Heights Sanitation Coalition
• Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice
  

With congestion pricing now before the City Council, the coalition pushing it forward shows signs of strengthening at exactly the right time. One group we'll be hearing more from is Communities United for Transportation Equity (COMM.U.T.E!), a recently-formed partnership between the Pratt Center for Community Development and community organizations in low-income neighborhoods around the city. At a press event this morning, COMM.U.T.E! representatives spoke about their strategy to lobby for congestion pricing and greater funding for BRT in the MTA capital plan. 

Their campaign will call attention to stark inequities in New York City commute times. The Pratt Center has crunched 2000 Census numbers showing that two-thirds of city residents with commutes longer than one hour earn under $35,000 per year [pdf]; and that black New Yorkers face a 30 percent longer commute, on average, than white New Yorkers [pdf]. Disparities were present, if less pronounced, across other racial groups as well. Considered alongside the transit improvements that congestion pricing will make possible, the findings again pierce the argument that pricing is a regressive tax.

The problems revealed by the report are fundamentally about "human rights and dignity, rather than dry economic measures," said Joan Byron, Director of Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative at the Pratt Center.

Time lost to long commutes is "corrosive to community life and family life," said Silvett Garcia, Senior Planner at Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in the Soundview section of the Bronx. "That is time people cannot spend with their families, cannot meet with their children's teachers, cannot go to community events." She noted that bus commuters in the Bronx have to transfer twice to make a trip across the borough, which takes an hour. The same trip only takes drivers ten minutes.

Byron applauded DOT's commitment to a BRT pilot program, but noted that the scale of a BRT system would have to exceed current plans to seriously address inequities in transit access. The only way to dramatically improve transit access in neighborhoods that are currently underserved, she said, is to implement congestion pricing and significantly boost MTA funding for BRT.

"In the MTA capital plan, resources earmarked for BRT are too small compared to rail projects," she added, distinguishing between rail projects that do improve transit access, such as the Second Avenue Subway, projects that enable real estate development, such as the 7 line extension, and ones that serve a small number of mostly affluent users. "The money for the JFK-Lower Manhattan rail link -- $6 billion -- could be used to blanket Queens with BRT."

Citing the success of Enrique Peñalosa's vision for transit in Bogota, COMM.U.T.E! hopes to rally elected officials around congestion pricing and BRT as means to address inequality, analogous to campaigns for affordable housing.

"Electeds in New York have a mastery of affordable housing issues," said Byron, "but they've been out of the game on transit." 

COMM.U.T.E!'s two-pronged strategy will involve lobbying elected officials to simultaneously pass congestion pricing and influence the MTA capital plan.

"Electeds have a chance to own this issue," said Byron. "We're going to be reaching out to folks one by one. We have statistics for every district. Guys like Brodsky have captured headlines with a fake populist stance. The breakthrough that needs to be made is that people see a revolutionary change coming out of this. BRT is that revolution."

We'll hear more from COMM.U.T.E! on February 18th, when they publicly unveil the roster of elected officials and community groups who've signed on to their platform.

Indeed, it is a new concept for New York City. And if one has never seen a city where it's done well, the idea of bicycles functioning as an extension of a transit system may be somewhat unimaginable.

I saw some great examples of a bike-oriented transit system just a few weeks ago during a trip to Bogotá, Colombia. I was there with StreetFilms' Clarence Eckerson, Transportation Alternatives' Karla Quintero and Project for Public Spaces' Ethan Kent. The New York City Streets Renaissance team was taken around the city by Gil Peñalosa, Bogotá's former Parks Commissioner and brother of former Mayor (and current mayoral candidate) Enrique Peñalosa and Eduardo Plata of the Fundación Por el País Que Queremos, otherwise known as The Foundation for the Country That We Care About.

(Update: Enrique lost the election to a far-left candidate promising an impossibly expensive subway system for Bogotá).

As a part of our tour, Gil took us to the Portal de las Américas, a major terminal of the TransMilenio bus system in the southwestern corner of the city. There, in the ground floor of the bus terminal, Gil showed us a bike parking facility unlike anything we have in New York and easily as nice as anything one might find in the most bike-friendly cities of Northern Europe.

With a ticket-taker, security guard and space for somewhere around 700 bikes it was, without question, the finest Cicloparqueadero any of us had ever seen (Granted, it was also the only Cicloparqueadero we'd ever seen).

New York City transportation advocates, I think, are accustomed to being told in contradictory fashion, that our various transportation agencies are either too focused on mega-projects to pay attention to something this small or too cash-strapped to do something this big. So, we immediately wanted to know how this project came about and how much it cost to build and run. Gil didn't have the numbers at his fingertips, but as a part of the mayoral administration that conceived and launched TransMilenio, he was able to explain the thinking behind it.

"For every 25 people who ride bikes to the terminal," Gil said, "That is one less 'feeder bus' we need to run through the neighborhoods. You do the math and pretty quickly you see it makes financial sense to set aside some space and hire a security guard to help people to ride their bikes."

Most of the TransMilenio system consists of these double-long red buses running along a four-lane, dedicated rights-of-way down the middle of major avenues and highways.

With no private motor vehicle traffic in their way and various other technological and design advantages, TransMilenio buses mostly run fast and according to schedule. Crosstown travel times on one major north-south route on the eastern edge of town dropped from 3 hours to 55 minutes once TransMilenio was up and running, officials told us. With wide doors, elevated platforms and passengers paying fares before they board, I finally understood why some people refer to TransMilenio as "surface subway."

TransMilenio also runs smaller green "feeder" buses like the one below. The green buses wend their way through neighborhood streets, picking up passengers and delivering them to major stations and terminals. A ride on a feeder bus is free, which is part of the reason why officials are eager to encourage bicycling to the bus terminals and major stations by funding a secure bike parking facility.

On our way to the Cicloparqueadero at Portal de las Américas, Peñalosa took us on a bike tour of one of the poorer sections of the city. We traveled through a neighborhood of unpaved roads overhung by jerry-rigged electrical wiring and surrounded, in spots, by open sewers. We rode past block after block of half-built cinder block housing covered with corrugated aluminum roofing. This was the scene I saw to my right.

To my left, there were cows grazing in an open drainage ditch. We were not talking about a particularly wealthy part of town.

Yet, in front of me, running right down the middle of this very same neighborhood was one of the finest bicycle and pedestrian paths I'd ever seen. It was as nicely designed and -- at 8am on a weekday -- as heavily used as any facility one might find in Denmark, Holland or Germany.

Gil explained that when Enrique was elected Mayor of Bogotá he scrapped plans to build a new network of elevated highways throughout the city. For just a fraction of the cost of the proposed highway system and in a much faster time frame, Peñalosa built TransMilenio and installed bicycle "arterials" down the middle of neighborhoods like the one above. Along these bikeways they built new schools, parks and connections to the rest of the city via TransMilenio.

How is it, we asked, that a city with about one-tenth the per capita income of New York was able to build one of sleekest, most efficient and high-tech surface transportation systems in the world? "It's not about the money," Gil told us again and again. "It's about the vision and it's about political will. The politicians can always find the money."

Photos: Aaron Naparstek, September 17, 2007

"People are addicted to their cars," said John Street, the Mayor of Philadelphia, at a panel on transport yesterday during the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit. He was identifying what he saw as the major challenge for cities striving to make their transport systems more environmentally sustainable.

That remark prompted a comment later from Jim Press, president of Toyota North America, who was in the audience. "It's not an addiction to cars, which makes me feel a little like a dealer," he said, to general laughter. "It's an addiction to personal mobility." Press went on to say he thought part of the solution to the problem of pollution in cities could be a car-sharing scheme (with Toyota supplying the cars, of course) in which people could take mass transit to a city center, then pick up a car to get to their precise destination.

Street, despite his earlier anti-car rhetoric, seemed suddenly interested. And no one in the room appeared to think there was anything odd about the idea of reducing pollution by giving people new opportunities to drive cars.

The exchange was typical in a discussion that focused on alternative fuels for existing and future motor vehicles, or on different types of motor vehicles, rather than on the reduction of the vehicles themselves. Certainly, mass transit (and getting more funding for it from central governments) featured heavily among the strategies touted by the municipal leaders on the panel, and all of them acknowledged personal cars as the biggest villain. But they seemed reluctant to press the idea that people could ever be convinced to give up their autos.

Representing the promise of better living through better fuels was panelist Ken Fisher (above, left), a senior vice president from Shell Oil. He acknowledged the deficiencies of ethanol and other fuel alternatives that require huge swathes of land and plenty of energy to produce, but he held out hope for "biofuel from waste, not food," like cellulose ethanol.

Apirak Kosayodhin (above, right), the Governor of Bangkok, bemoaned the difficulty of getting motorists to relinquish road space for Bus Rapid Transit in his city of legendary traffic jams -- where car ownership continues to soar, and where significant pollution reductions have been achieved only by focusing on means other than limiting vehicular traffic.

Only Luis Eduardo Garzán, the mayor of Bogotá, Colombia (where former mayor Enrique Penalosa promoted radical cyclist- and pedestrian-friendly measures), briefly mentioned bike lanes. Other than that, the conversation had little to do with encouraging entirely pollution-free forms of transportation -- or shall we call it "personal mobility"? -- such as bicycling and walking.

At this rate, that addiction is going to be hard to kick.

Manhattan on the Move Conference
Edited by Nick Whitaker
Running time: 6 minutes 52 seconds

In his keynote address, Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, made it clear that the conference was about much more than transportation:

I'm often asked to talk people in cities about transport. I say, I cannot talk about transport unless we have an idea of what type of a city we want. Before we have a vision of what type of city we want, we have to know, how do we want to live. Because really, a city is only a means to a way of life. So actually, whenever we start talking about transport, we really end up discussing how we want to organize our daily life."

This latest episode of Streetfilms captures the highlights of the conference.

Before Enrique Peñalosa took over as Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, this thriving downtown plaza was a decrepit, crime-ridden, traffic-congested slum. Peñalosa cleared out the old shacks, banned private motor vehicles, launched the Transmilenio bus service, created the plaza, and returned this public space to his city's people. Granted, the neighborhood pictured above clearly lacks the First World "vibrancy" that we boast of here in New York City, but it seems pleasant enough, no?

While former Bogota Mayor Enrique Peñalosa and DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall got most of the attention for their keynote speeches at last week's transportation policy conference, much of the day's real intellectual ferment took place in the five separate breakout sessions that convened before lunch. The groups were organized as follows:

• Subways and Commuter Rail moderated by Gene Russianoff
• Cars and Buses with Bruce Schaller
• Underutilized Modes with Paul Steely White
• Pedestrians and Sidewalks with Ethel Sheffer
• Comprehensive Planning and Policy with Ernest Tollerson and Bob Yaro

The goal of each workshop, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said, was to generate lists of specific short-term and long-term priorities. After lunch, the moderators returned to the stage to present each workshop's findings.

Interestingly, a few key issues bubbled up in all five groups, regardless of the specific topic:

• The five groups all expressed a deep and strongly-felt desire for a better quality of life on Manhattan's sidewalks, streets and non-park public spaces.
• All called for a greater ability for people on the neighborhood-level to test new ideas on their own streets and share urban design best practices with other civic groups.
• Each group called for better collaboration within city government and said that there needs to be improvement in the way that city officials work together across agency lines.

That last point emerged as the day's elephant-in-the-room. Tollerson and Yaro put the question this way: Can city agencies each working "in their own separate silos" nurture the flexible, collaborative processes necessary to create the needed change in New York City's transportation and public space policy? There were some serious heavy-hitters in the Planning and Policy workshop including Buz Paaswell, Director of CUNY's Transportation Research Center, and the general feeling in that breakout group was, "No." It is time for the post-Word War II structure of agencies and authorities responsible for New York City's vast transportation and public space infrastructure to be re-thought and reformed.

After her session on Pedestrians and Sidewalks Sheffer reported, "Many said it was important that communities have more of a role in trying to determine furniture, signage, and width of sidewalks." She also said, "a real concern is that there is not enough coordination on pedestrian and street issues" between city agencies. During the session neighborhood leaders said City Hall downplayed aesthetic priorities that weren't part of big development projects or well-funded retail districts. Wellington Chan of the Chinatown Partnership summed up the mood when he explained how hard it is to procure resources for something like new street furniture:

"Anything that's not dull gray concrete is not acceptable to the Department of Transportation. They'll say, "You have to design in accordance with DOT standards or you're liable for the cost. So, to put up a nice planter, you need to be a business improvement district or a local development corporation."

Sheffer said that many of the participants in her workshop are ready to take it upon themselves to foster a new proactive culture. They want to design their own principles for managing street vendors, for instance, and to build coalitions among different civic groups. Sheffer's Pedestrians and Sidewalks group wanted to:

• Ease the conflict between pedestrians and turning cars.
• Increase the number of pedestrian ramps throughout Manhattan.
• Promote exclusive crossing periods for pedestrians at crazy intersections.
• Seek "better access to the waterfront," with money and staff to promote innovative design and public amenities.

In general, Sheffer said, the group wants to help the city cater to pedestrians' shifting needs and "enable them to traverse the borough with some degree of pleasantness."

Bruce Schaller's session on Cars and Buses spent a lot of its time focused on parking. He reported that there was a "division in the group about whether adding parking spaces eases the parking problem or adds more cars." Like Sheffer's session, Schaller's yielded a call for smarter government. He said the city should "coordinate agencies" on teams to manage big new developments or zoning changes. If the city does that, he said, experts in transportation and health and planning could evaluate a project's total impact on neighborhoods.

Schaller's group called for strong measures to solve Manhattan's congestion problem:

• "Selective congestion pricing" via a phasing-in of charges on drivers where traffic "is most acute."
• This pricing should come with and, perhaps, help to fund more and more frequent bus service.
• The city should "rationalize" its parking policy to balance the needs of all street users.

Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives, whose group discussed underutilized transportation modes, also called for balance. "There's just not room enough to walk and bike in Manhattan," he said. His workshop proposed these steps:

• Extend crosswalk time on busy streets
• Improve connections between subway stations and bike lanes
• Improve cyclists' access to ferries
• More bike parking outside and in private buildings as well.
• Tighten enforcement of existing bike lanes and cyclist-protection laws.

White's group also discussed parking, noting that 15 bikes can fit in the same street space used to store one motor vehicle. The group consensus was that bike parking clogged neighborhoods with big numbers of cyclists like the East Village and Williamsburg would do well to set aside some street space for bike parking, particularly around subway stops.

Those who discussed subway service produced the day's most tailored suggestions. Activist Gene Russianoff, who heads the Straphangers Campaign for the New York Public Interest Research Group, said he had urged his group to "focus on things that could happen or are on the drawing boards." He reported support for the MTA's plan to install electronic real-time information on the 1, 6 and L lines in the next year. Looking farther ahead, Russianoff's group also pushed for cross-agency policies to make the subway better serve the streets above it. These would include:

• Completion of the 2nd Ave subway, ideally with a link to Brooklyn.
• A "green component across the system," building on the success of the solar panels at the Coney Island-Stilwell Avenue station.
• Expanding elevator access and other services to people who use wheelchairs.

Participants acknowledged the gap between what New Yorkers really want and what is currently politically popular. Russianoff rated outgoing Governor George Pataki's pet project, a link from Penn Station to Grand Central, "middle priority" and gave Mayor Bloomberg's plan to extend the 7 line to 11th Avenue and 34th Street "very low priority." Yet, "at the moment seems most likely to go ahead in the real world," Russianoff said.

How to narrow the gap between the real world and the ideal? That was the focus of Tollerson and Yaro's panel.  Tollerson's group called for sensible (i.e., radical) changes to guide future laws and rules. They want to see the City:

• Prioritize projects through inter-agency collaboration
• Create 24/7 live-work neighborhoods around transit hubs (without closing streets or building new towers that warp neighborhood scale)
• Use the zoning code to promote mass-transit oriented strategies.

Sounds like a tall order? For one day, at least, it all felt entirely possible.

10:40 am:

Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia is the keynote speaker. In only one three-year term as Mayor, Penalosa revolutionized the transportation system and public spaces of his city of 7 million (Mayors only get one term in office in Bogota so he had to work fast). This was a big speech for Peñalosa. He even said that he was a little bit nervous about it. The crowd here is large -- 600 people -- and all of New York City's major transportation policy players are in the room.

Here's a bit of what Peñalosa said (insert mellifluous Colombian accent on your own):

"Today, we aren't just talking about transportation. What we are really talking about is: What kind of city do we want? There has to be a collective decision about how do we want to organize our lives. NYC along time ago, explicitly or implicitly decided that much of the city's space would be dedicated to cars. This was a decision. It's not some sort of natural law. Tomorrow we can change this. This is something that we have to decide. Transportation is not a technical matter. It is a political matter."

Applause line: "How about if we took away curbside parking and made sidewalks bigger? I speak in cities around the world and present New York City's sidewalks as the best, most lively sidewalks in the world. Still, they should be bigger. We did this in Bogota and it worked. New York City sidewalks, they could be much better."

"Manhattan could be one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. Applause (Editors note: Wow on the applause. This is not a room full of TransAlt and Times Up members, folks. This is a pretty staid crowd). In Bogota we closed the city's streets to cars. I dream of Manhattan making a Broadway closure for pedestrians permanent. In Bogota we have the Sunday Ciclovía. We close the street on Sundays for bikes and joggers. I dream of this for Broadway for a few hours on Sundays."

"Bicycles are an amazing machine. If we are a democratic society then everyone has a right to safe mobility. But not everyone has access to a car. We have to think of a bike not as something that is cute or nice but a right. Safety for cyclists is a right. In a developing country cycling is a matter of democracy. Bike lanes are important, 20% for bike safety and 80% because it's a symbol that a citizen on a $25 bicycle is just as important as one in a $30,000 car." Applause.

"Bogota had 30,000 individual bus owners. So we created the TransMilenio Bus Rapid Transit system. The stations are in the middle of the street. When the bus comes four doors open and the bus floor is level with the covered platform. One hundred people can get in and out of the bus in seconds. Two dedicated lanes are going each wa. The system is moving more passengers per km/hour than most transit systems in the world. (Peñalosa shows a slide of automobile traffic completely jammed up next to a freely flowing bus lane). We called it TransMilenio to make it sound sexy. Buses have a bad name. The system is moving more than 1.4 million passengers a day. To pay for it we established a gasoline surcharge and 25% of the gas taxes goes towards financing TransMilenio." (More applause. What? Is this room filled with Communists!?)

"Why not a BRT while we wait for the Second Avenue subway to built? Make a bus that goes much faster than cars! Now Manhattan has beautiful buses but they move to slow. In our old, historic downtown people said the roads are too narrow for buses. We said, "You are totally right. So, now cars can not go downtown anymore." This is done in lots of cities -- parts of town where only buses and bicycles can go.

"Forty-second Street as a pedestrian promenade. I think that would be beautiful. Applause.

"What are we working towards? What is our goal? A city where a child can go anywhere safely on a bicycle." (Standing Ovation).

10:00 am:

Six hundred people registered for the conference and this auditorium is packed. Scott Stringer just finished his talk. Guess what: Congestion pricing is an applause line now. Stringer: "Cities around the world have shown us what a transportation policy can be. London's congestion pricing.... Copenhagen's bike and bus lanes.... Solutions are within our grasp. We are now poised for that change. People will make adjustments if we give them a reason to do so. Congestion pricing and Bus Rapid Transit should be part of this discussion." BIG APPLAUSE

9:47 am:

DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall just finished her introductory speech. Thanks to a police investigation nixing subway service over the Manhattan Bridge I missed the first half of it. But I got here in time to hear Weinshall announce one piece of significant news: DOT has agreed to close the Times Square "bow tie" making way for big pedestrian space increases in Midtown's congested heart. The "bow tie" is the segment of roadway between 42nd and 47th Streets that allows traffic to merge between 7th Avenue and Broadway. After the closure, cars traveling down 7th Avenue will be forced to continue down Broadway. Vehicles traveling down 7th Avenue will have to continue down Broadway. This entire middle section of Times Square will be given over to pedestrians. Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance has long sought this change. It will make traffic flow less complicated and creates a lot more pedestrian space within Times Square. Only a year ago powerful people within DOT were stymying the idea of closing the Times Square bow-tie. Today DOT's Commissioner is touting the change. The Times, they are a-changing

In recent months Peñalosa has held at least two private meetings with New York City Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and has become increasingly involved in the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign.

If you are interested in the issues that Streetsblog covers or have transportation and public space concerns in your own neighborhood, I'd urge you to attend -- even if you don't live in Manhattan. Here are the details: 

Manhattan on the Move: A Transportation Agenda for a Growing City
Thursday, October 12, 8 am to 3:30 pm.
Columbia University, Alfred Lerner Hall (115th Street and Broadway)
Find a more detailed agenda here.
RSVP here: conference@manhattanbp.org.

What is at stake and why are these issues so important right now?

Manhattan, indeed, all of New York City is at a very critical point. The City is in the midst of a major transformation and is trying to figure out how best to make room for a growing population, move people and goods around and through the city for that population while, at the same time, ensuring that the city remains a healthy, and functional place to live, work and visit. This forum is a great chance to listen to experts on these subjects, have your voice heard on issues you care about and help our local elected officials make informed judgments on the full range of ideas out there.

First, there are major mass transit capital projects like the Second Avenue Subway, East Side Access for the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), extending the 7 train to the Javits Center, the implementation of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and the New Jersey Transit Trans-Hudson tunnel that either planned, fully funded, or already under construction. These major projects will, in many ways, transform how New York City's mass transit system operates in the next 20 years.

Second, there are many other major capital projects that are not moving ahead, but could provide valuable benefits such as the pedestrian plaza and lightrail proposal for 42nd Street, the Cross-Harbor freight tunnel, a more expansive BRT system, and a legitimate, citywide bicycle commuting network infrastructure.

Third, transformative new technological innovations are now available that could vastly improve the management of traffic and its impact on the environment. Flexible, new, automated tolling technologies allow roads to be priced at different rates depending on time of day, amount of traffic, or even ozone levels. London and Stockholm have shown that congestion pricing is technically and politically feasible and extraordinarily effective. Hybrid electric engine technology has been proven to reduce emissions and fuel consumption.

Lastly, the Bloomberg administration is starting to it's big push on long term planning and environmental sustainability. As a major consumer of fossil fuels, New York City's transportation sector should be front and center as we look for ways to save on fuel, reduce carbon emissions and move our communities towards a healthy, sustainable future.