Livable Streets

Bayard Street, Chinatown. Photo: SkyShaper

DOT's failure to provide a traffic signal or even a simple crosswalk at intersections along DeKalb Avenue disconnects the neighborhood from its bus stops and its park.

In 2001, shortly after being elected the Mayor of Paris on a platform promising to "fight, with all the means at my disposal, against the harmful, ever-increasing and unacceptable hegemony of the automobile," Bertrand Delanoë began implementing a series of far-reaching transportation reforms throughout the City of Light.

Transportation Alternatives's Noah Budnick makes the case on NY1's "The Call." 

A Broken Street: Broadway north of Houston St. on an August Friday. New Yorkers want the Mayor to fix it.

Woman crossing at 43rd Street and Ninth Avenue. Video still by Clarence Eckerson

Mayor Bloomberg offered a depressing-yet-enlightening dose of complacency about the city's traffic crunch this morning. Speaking at Museum of the City of New York's construction kickoff, Bloomberg explained that he'd arrived late because he'd been "huddled with Con Ed" to monitor power usage during the heatwave. After carping a bit about residents turning up their air conditioners at night, he turned to traffic. Normally he blames traffic for his tardiness, he noted, adding:

Streestblog foreign correspondent Geoff Zink sends in this snapshot from Paris, France, where every summer since 2002 an expressway running along the River Seine has been transformed into a beach and linear park. More from Geoff on Flickr.

At the Museum of the City of New York, Vincent Cianni's bracing photos show how a group of teens on Williamsburg's south side organized to get a skate park built in the shadowy wasteland beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. If these kids can persuade City Hall to let them shape their own terrain, imagine what five boroughs'-worth of block associations, business improvement districts and Livable Streets advocates can accomplish. Check out the show, We Skate Hardcore, and get the wheels turning. It closes August 6.