Bicycling

A Ride Down NYC’s “Street of the Future”

For years, Livable Streets advocates have pleaded with New York City's Department of Transportation to just try new things. Do street design experiments using temporary materials. Give new ideas a shot. If an experiment doesn't work, take it down, redesign it, improve it or, heck, just restore it to how it used to be. What do we have to lose? If we don't start figuring out new ways to design and manage New York City's streets, all we're left with is a future of ever-increasing gridlock, pollution and honking.

By Aaron Naparstek

9:05 AM EDT on October 4, 2007

For years, Livable Streets advocates have pleaded with New York City’s Department of Transportation to just try new things. Do street design experiments using temporary materials. Give new ideas a shot. If an experiment doesn’t work, take it down, redesign it, improve it or, heck, just restore it to how it used to be. What do we have to lose? If we don’t start figuring out new ways to design and manage New York City’s streets, all we’re left with is a future of ever-increasing gridlock, pollution and honking.

Finally, under the administration of new DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, innovation is happening on New York City’s streets. And it is happening fast.

Yesterday, StreetFilms’ Clarence Eckerson was down on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea when he stumbled across DOT’s new cycle track — the first significant length of physically-separated bike path ever installed in New York City’s urban core. Though the project was announced just weeks ago, the city has already built a quick-and-dirty version using inexpensive temporary materials.

Amazing. I guess we can check this off of the Livable Streets movement’s 2007 New Year’s resolution list.

Aaron Naparstek

Aaron Naparstek is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparstek's 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. He was also one of the original cast members of the "War on Cars" podcast. You can find more of his work on his website.