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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.

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
Photo of Aaron Donovan
Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.

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