From Transportation Alternatives: Mayor Bloomberg is considering some bold changes to New York City's streets and he needs to hear that you support them.
Over the next three weeks, his honor's PlaNYC team will host a Town Hall meeting in every borough to hear New Yorkers' ideas about creating a sustainable city that can accommodate growth and maintain livability.
Attend one of these meetings and speak-up about:
- Traffic Relief!NYC needs congestion pricing, market-rate parking pricing and traffic calming. There is too much car and truck traffic cutting through our neighborhoods. Nine of 10 Manhattan-bound drivers have transit options they are not taking, largely because 60% of them get free parking.
- Safer Biking and Walking!It must be safer to walk and bike (pdf) in NYC. This would give New Yorkers viable options to eliminate the 22% of driving trips citywide that are one mile or less. NYC needs a "Complete Streets" policy so that anytime the City is reconstructing or repaving a street, more space for safe biking and walking is installed automatically.
- Car Free Space!Too much of NYC's precious public space is wasted on moving and storing cars. With obesity, diabetes and heart disease reaching chronic levels, we need to claim street space for activity-inducing pedestrian plazas (pdf), greenways (pdf) and parks.
By sharing your experience and voicing support for these goals, you can be sure that Mayor Bloomberg will understand the public's support for sensible streets.
Don't miss this rare opportunity, and don't forget to tell the Mayor that he needs to start now! Bloomberg is planning for 2030, but he will only be mayor until December 31th, 2009. If by 2030 the Mayor wants to improve travel times, achieve the cleanest air of any big city in the U.S., reduce global warming emissions, reach a state of good repair on our transportation systems and put every New Yorker within a safe, ten minute walk of a park, then by 2009 he needs to lessen traffic, make streets and traffic safer for bikers and walkers of all ages and make more efficient use of streets and other public space. (Links pdf format)
