Livable Streets

London retailers enjoyed a £100 million spending spree as Oxford, Bond and Regents Streets were closed to motor vehicle traffic for a day

Crashstat shows Fordham Rd. in the Bronx to be one of the most dangerous streets in New York City.

We're just catching up to this piece of good news in The Villager last week:

Recently, I had the opportunity to travel with comrades Karla Quintero of Transportation Alternatives and Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek to Bogotá, Colombia to document some of the amazing advances going on in the livable streets movement there. We spent an entire Sunday, from 5am 'til nearly 5pm, riding bicycles around during Ciclovía, a weekly event in which over 70 miles of city streets are closed to traffic and opened to walking, biking, running, skating, recreating, picnicking, and talking with family, neighbors and strangers. Ciclovía was simply one of the most moving experiences I have had in my entire life (no pun intended).

We do a lot of criticism here on Streetsblog, so in the spirit of the season we thought we'd reflect on what we in the livable streets universe have to be thankful for.

Opponents of the Department of Transportation's plan for a new Lower Manhattan crosstown bike route are expected to make a show of force at tonight's Community Board 2 Transportation Committee meeting in an effort to preserve a few dozen on-street parking spaces along Carmine and Bleecker Streets. Bicycling advocates are urging their supporters to show up as well.

Via Brownstoner, the Department of Transportation is building out a nice street redesign project in Brooklyn right now as a part of its Ft. Greene Bike Lane & Traffic Calming Project (download a project description here). Formerly a 70-foot-wide one-way street, Carlton Avenue, above, has been converted to two-way operation with five-foot bike lanes on either side. DOT is now building a 20-foot wide planted median in the middle. The Carlton Ave. improvements are similar to recent projects on Park Slope's 9th Street and Vanderbilt Ave. in Prospect Heights.

An op/ed by Eduardo Porter in today's New York Times makes a passing suggestion that by reducing the number of people who do solo car commutes, congestion pricing would make New Yorkers happier.