#Sneckdowns Before and After: The Final Storm

After a decade of documenting nature’s traffic calming, I decided to go out to the snowy streets of Jackson Heights for one final Streetfilm about the craze we helped start: sneckdowns!

There’s a new wrinkle in this installment — before-and-after images to show how dramatically the snow changes the dynamic of the street.

If you’re new to sneckdowns, it’s a portmanteau of “snow” and “neckdown” (a technical term for a corner sidewalk expansion). A nice snowfall constrains the area where motorists take turns and provides clear visual evidence of where street space can be repurposed for walking instead of driving, creating much safer intersections in the process.

Sneckdown spotting is now a global phenomenon. To get a sense of how it all started, you may want to check out the first two Streetfilms in the series:

• “Street Lessons from a Blizzard” from 2006
• “Snowy Neckdowns Redux” from 2011

And the rest is history — which I recapped in this post from 2014.