Livable Streets

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.

Earlier this week, I received a request  in writing from Gary Altman, the Legislative Counsel of the City Council to testify at a hearing on March 1st. The topic of this oversight hearing is: How do we achieve the PlanNYC2030's Sustainability Goal to Improve Travel Times by Adding Transit Capacity for Millions More Residents, Visitors and Workers? For reference here is the presentation on congestion (warning pdf) put out by the PlanNYC2030 folks.

A few weeks ago I attended the first of the Community Leader meetings for the PlanNYC 2030 Sustainability initiative. I thought Streetsblog readers might be interested in some reflections on this from a neighborhood environmentalist perspective.

In 2005, PBS came out with a widely promoted documentary narrated by Alanis Morissette called "Global Warming: The Signs and the Science." For people interested in learning more about the topic of global warming and climate change, this DVD is widely available. Being produced and distributed by a well known and highly respected organization, serves to set public opinion on causes and remedies for climate change.