Livable Streets
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Visualizing a Car-Free Bedford Avenue
Emil Choski has given his Car-Free Bedford Avenue project a serious face lift. The 22-year-old freelance graphic designer and community organizer's new web site includes a three dimensional "flyby" visualization accompanied by some very un-Williamsburgy classical music. With apologies to the Meatpacking District and Ninth Avenue, Emil's project has to be my favorite grassroots livable streets initiative going right now. When is Dan Doctoroff going to wake up and give this kid a job at the Economic Development Corporation?! Choski writes:
February 15, 2007
Living Near Shops and Transit Makes New Yorkers Less Fat
A new Columbia University study published in the American Journal of Health Promotion, yet again, links livable streets to improved public health. The study reports:
February 15, 2007
Four-Year-Old Killed by Hummer Shouldn’t Have Died in Vain
The death of four-year-old James Jacaricce Rice at the intersection of Third Avenue and Baltic Street in Brooklyn yesterday didn't make a huge splash in the news. But it should have.
February 14, 2007
Crack Down on Drivers, Not iPods
Two pedestrians were killed in New York City last December by private sanitation trucks, one on Park Avenue South in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn Heights. Both deaths followed the most common pattern of pedestrian death in New York -- the peds were crossing the street, in the crosswalk, with the light, and a turning vehicle ran over them.
February 12, 2007
The Seed of a Revolution in Red Hook
How can we get drivers to respect the communities they are driving though? How can we make traffic slow down if we can't change the design of the street or the timing of the lights? How can a community reclaim its neighborhood streets?
February 12, 2007
Streetfilms: “A City Is a Means to a Way of Life”
At last October's Manhattan Transportation Policy Conference, convened by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, people from every neighborhood in Manhattan gathered to discuss a vision for the future of transportation in New York.
February 9, 2007
The Subway Should Be Free
George Haikalis of the Institute for Rational Urban Mobility, with microphone. Environmentalist Theodore W. Kheel, seated next to him, at far right, would reduce the subway fare to nothing.
February 9, 2007
DOT: “Our Job is to Keep Traffic Moving, Not Pedestrian Safety”
Scribner Avenue, New Brighton, Staten Island, formerly two- and now one-way, looking up the hill toward Bismarck Avenue from Westervelt Avenue
February 8, 2007
Streetfilms: An Interview with Sam Schwartz
Sam Schwartz, aka "Gridlock Sam," is best-known to many New Yorkers
through his Daily News column about the city's quotidian traffic woes. Schwartz is the president and
CEO of Sam Schwartz LLC, a traffic planning and engineering firm
that has worked on projects including the JFK AirTrain, the IKEA project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the World Trade Center Memorial. Before he moved to the private sector in 1990, Schwartz served as NYC traffic commissioner and as deputy commissioner of transportation in the Koch administration. He sat
recently with Mark Gorton, president and founder of the Open Planning Project, to discuss congestion pricing, cars in parks, and the way pedestrians in this city don't get much respect from traffic planners. As the city begins looking for a new transportation commissioner to replace Iris Weinshall, this interview is worth watching:
February 2, 2007