Livable Streets

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. 

A rendering of the Sands Street bike path on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge

Last week, columnist Steve Dunleavy used his 400-word rant-space in the New York Post to urge the city's cab riders and motorists to throw open their car doors in front of "pedal punks" riding their "maiming machines," and, "take back the streets" from bike-commuting "kamikaze jerks." 

While we're on the topic of Williamsburg, this lengthy piece of original reporting on NYTurf is worth a read if you didn't catch it when it was filed a couple of weeks ago: How the City Has Left Williamsburg in a Traffic Jam

The death of Derek Lake, killed one month ago at age 23 when his bicycle tripped a metal plate on Houston Street, hints at a tragedy shared by all New Yorkers: City Hall's continued insistence that the ultimate goal of a New York City street is to move as many cars and trucks each day as physically possible.