Livable Streets

Meet and mingle with other readers, activists, and supporters of a livable approach to transportation, development, and public spaces. Get to know the others who share your values about the kind of city we want to live in. Put faces behind the screen names online. And have a drink!

With DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall set to depart city government in three weeks, sources say that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is close to announcing her replacement. The Mayor's choice will have a profound impact on day-to-day neighborhood life as well as the City of New York's long-term future. Though the DOT commissioner job search has barely been covered by the local press, this may very well be one of the most important decisions of the last 1,000 days of the Bloomberg Administration.

Over at the site UncivilServants.org, the Transportation Alternatives project where readers can post photos of illegally parked cars sporting government-issued parking permits (like the court officers above who are comfortably ensconced in a no-parking zone on Crosby Street), there's a hot thread on whether showing the plate numbers of the vehicles constitutes a potentially dangerous invasion of privacy for police officers and others who are caught in violation. What do Streetsblog readers think?

In the aftermath of last Thursday's CB6 transportation committee meeting on the DOT's proposal to convert Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn to one-way arterials, some observers are noting that the motion that came out of the meeting may not accurately reflect the input of the nearly 700 people who came out to oppose the plan. As Norman Oder points out at Atlantic Yards Report, the language voted on by the committee leaves the DOT plenty of leeway.

A Chinatown tipster sent along these remarkable pictures yesterday of what seems to be an effort to cut down on placarded vehicles clogging the neighborhood's streets:

I can't get behind Prevention Magazine's ranking of New York as 39th among the nation's most walkable cities. But after spending three days in Atlanta for a conference recently, I have no problem understanding why it rates 86th.

An article in the LA Times (reg required) details how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has systematically withheld information on fatal accidents from the public, even going so far as to deny Freedom of Information Act requests from researchers.

Here are some highlights from Sunday's rally for pedestrian safety. In the words of Audrey Anderson, whose 14-year-old son, Andre, was killed by an SUV while he was riding his bike: "Drivers who kill and are not apparently drunk walk away from crash sites as free as the birds in the air. How can this be, we all must ask?"

Last Wednesday we learned about the Department of Transportation's plan for a major reorganization of traffic flow through Park Slope, Brooklyn. In Streetsblog's comments section, Andy Wiley-Schwartz of Project for Public Spaces asked: What problems are DOT's traffic engineers trying to solve with this particular set of solutions? Or, to put it another way: What triggered this initiative? Why now? I put the question to DOT and here is what the press office came back with: