DOT’s Park Slope One-Way Presentation

10:27 AM EDT on March 16, 2007

Above is a bootlegged copy of DOT Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia's Park Slope one-way traffic presentation. Though the plan is supposedly all about improving pedestrian safety, you can see for yourself that it is almost entirely concerned with the movement and flow of motor vehicles and the calculation of "vehicular level of service."

In this plan you will find nothing about traffic calming, pedestrian counts the numerous activities that take place on the streetscape beyond the movement and storage of motor vehicles. You will find no attempt to measure street performance and neighborhood impact beyond the counting of cars and trucks. You will find no discussion of the transformative development curently underway in and around Downtown Brooklyn and the goals of the Bloomberg Administration's Long-Term Planning and Sustainability initiative. And if you are looking for any response to long-standing community concerns or acknowledgement of the forward-thinking, pro-active planning that our community has undertaken over the last couple of years, you won't find that either. All you will find here is a traffic engineer's monomaniacal focus on moving motor vehicles through a dense urban environment.

Given Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff's speech at NYMTC yesterday calling for "bold and creative" solutions to New York City's transportation problems, you've really got to wonder: How did City Hall even let this plan out of the box?

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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