Livable Streets

Against the backdrop of news that three more pedestrians were killed on Saturday, a hundred people rallied for pedestrian safety on the steps of City Hall on Sunday. Karla Quintero of Transportation Alternatives, above, started with a moment of silence for those killed by the automobile on the streets of New York and called for 2,000 fewer pedestrian injuries and deaths by 2009 (pdf). Speaking in English and Spanish, she listed five objectives for the improvement of pedestrian safety:

The New York Times came out advocating for progressive transportation policies in its Sunday City section editorial, saying that the departure of DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall presents "a great opportunity to take bold action on a vexing quality of life and health issue: traffic congestion."

We have more details and official confirmation of DOT's proposed changes for three Avenues running through Park Slope, Brooklyn. Brooklyn Community Board 6, which runs one of the better community board web sites out there, has posted its agenda for the next Transportation Committee meeting:

Park Slope's Fifth Avenue: a pedestrian- and bike-friendly, two-way, neighborhood Main Street.

Like Third Avenue in Brooklyn, Manhattan's Ninth Avenue is emerging as one of New York City's new "Boulevards of Death." This afternoon, the Clinton / Hell's Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition, the community group that has been organizing the Ninth Avenue Renaissance project, broadcast the following news and call to action:

As people living in the neighborhoods around Downtown Brooklyn are learning the hard way, New York City government's installation of pedestrian safety and traffic calming measures is remarkably slow and expensive. Even as children are dying while crossing the street in potentially preventable crashes, and even with projects approved and funded, New York City's bureaucracy appears to be organizationally unable to move faster than a snail's pace when it comes to installing fine-grained, spot-by-spot pedestrian safety and traffic calming measures.

Here's an editorial one wouldn't expect to see in The Times: An unabashedly pro-bicycle manifesto anointing cycling as "the cheap, green answer to so many contemporary troubles" and urging city authorities to use congestion-charging revenues to create a first-class cycling infrastructure.

The BBC reports:

We are interested in creating a new feature -- a collection of links to Streetsblog-ish web sites in other cities around the world. Ideally, this collection of links will represent the best, most comprehensive, most readable group of Livable Streets bloggers anywhere.