Film & Talk: Breaking NYC Gridlock: What Other Cities Can Teach Us about Taming Traffic and Freeing Our Streets

Transportation Alternatives' Dani Simons will moderate a showing of the film Contested Streets.

Through interviews with leading historians, urban planners, and government officials, this 57-minute film explores the history and culture of New York City streets from pre-automobile times to the present. Contested Streets shows how the city with the best mass transit in the United States has slowly relinquished a richly used public space to cars and trucks. New York is compared to London, Paris and Copenhagen, where curtailing automobile use in recent years has improved air quality, mitigated noise pollution and enriched commercial, recreational and community interaction. Congestion pricing, bus rapid transit and pedestrian and bike infrastructure schemes are examined in depth.

Dani Simons is the Deputy Director of Development and Communications at Transportation Alternatives. For the past decade, she has worked on urban environmental issues at the city, state and national levels and coordinated a myriad of special events that bring community and media attention to the relationships between social equity, transportation and public space. She has a Master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry and is a daily bike commuter.

Sponsored by:

• Friends in Unity with Nature
• NYC Peak Oil Meetup
• Neighborhood Energy Network