Livable Streets

David Engwicht is a livable streets philosopher and author. Creator of the Walking School Bus, Mental Speed Bumps and many other innovative ways of taming traffic and increasing pedestrian safety, he has taken on “the challenge of a lifetime” to revitalize the downtown district of Wodonga, a small city in Australia often referred to as “Struggle Town” in comparison to its sister city Albury just across the Murray River.

With conflicting reports on congestion pricing's status in Albany, and given his own ambiguous statements, it remains to be seen whether Governor David Paterson will get behind the plan -- though a look at census data published by the Tri State Transportation Campaign shows that most of those he once represented in the New York State Senate could only benefit.

After months of following the step-by-step evolution of the congestion pricing proposal, there's a certain satisfaction in seeing familiar concepts codified in legislative language. To wit, we hope readers who've been tracking Streetsblog's coverage of this topic enjoy these excerpts from the bill. Parse away.

Following word that a congestion pricing bill has surfaced in Albany, details are emerging about the actual legislation. Today's New York Times story on Governor Paterson's attitude toward pricing included specifics on how penalties would work and confirmed the existence of a "livable streets lock box" funded by parking fees:

This Monday the Washington Post ran a long feature on page A1, "Letting the Market Drive Transportation," about the Bush administration's attempts to shift financing for roads from the gas tax to user fees, and starve transit in the process. The cast of characters includes a pair of conservative ideologues, Tyler Duvall and D.J. Gribbin, high up in U.S. DOT, as well as Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who earned the enmity of alternative transportation advocates last summer when she said bikes aren't transportation.

As a candidate for a livable streets makeover, Columbus Avenue is a no-brainer. A block from Central Park, it is home to the American Museum of Natural History and sports a string of active ground floor businesses, but the street itself is a classically car-oriented corridor: three moving lanes sandwiched between two parking lanes. The Columbus Avenue BID has been working with Project for Public Spaces to make the street itself more of a destination -- to create a walkable, transit-oriented "spine" running from the museum to Lincoln Center on Broadway.

In a first for a big east coast city, Washington, DC, is putting the ideas of celebrated parking reformer Don Shoup to work. Spurred by concerns over game day traffic surges caused by the opening of a new baseball stadium, the city council recently created two performance parking pilot project zones. The most important provision of the legislation is that 75 percent of the meter revenue, after initial expenses and maintenance, "Shall be used solely for the purpose of non-automobile transportation improvements in that pilot zone." This includes a menu of transit, bicycling and pedestrian improvements including sidewalk widenings, traffic calming, separated bikeways and real-time information signs for buses and trains.

Here is the slide show outlining the DOT proposal to open Prince Street to pedestrians on summer Sundays. As we reported yesterday, the plan isn't popular with some SoHo residents, who say it will turn Prince into another Mulberry Street.

On weekends, 200 vehicles and 4,500 pedestrians per hour make their way down Prince Street, yet the vast majority of the street's public space is given over to motor vehicle traffic and parking.