Pedestrian Infrastructure

At the foot of the Roosevelt Island Bridge, DOT is showing off how a few simple improvements can turn a dangerous intersection into a safer one. It's not a flashy redesign -- just a pair of pedestrian refuges and improved crosswalks -- but it's a good example of the street safety improvements that are becoming increasingly common.

Last Thursday evening, Manhattan Community Board 2 voted down five of six approved pop-up cafés in their neighborhood, choosing parking spaces over public seating.

When DOT installed its first "pop-up café" over a few parking spaces on Lower Manhattan's Pearl Street last summer, the 14-table public seating area helped increase business by 14 percent at its two sponsoring restaurants. With New York City still recovering from recession and much of the city starved for public space, DOT has moved to expand the program. Restaurants were given the option of requesting a café and DOT selected twelve locations from that pool of applicants. The selected locations are concentrated in the Village and SoHo, making tonight's Community Board 2 vote a critical moment for the program.

As the New York Post continues its increasingly tedious assault on pedestrians and crosstown transit riders, its writers always seem to suggest that giving priority to buses in an important retail area is both radical and self-evidently bad for business. If they bothered to look just one borough away, they'd see that nothing could be further from the truth. The eight bus- and pedestrian-only blocks of downtown Brooklyn's Fulton Mall make up the most successful retail strip in the city outside of Manhattan.

When large numbers of pedestrians, trucks and cars battle for limited space, you get a traffic mess. When that traffic mess is in one of the nation’s first high-density garden communities, which now is also one of the nation’s most diverse communities, you get Jackson Heights.

Since 2009, the Department of Transportation has been engaged in a major study of Jackson Heights' streets and sidewalks. At the request of community groups and with federal funding from Rep. Joe Crowley, DOT has been developing a plan to make the neighborhood safer, less congested, and more transit-accessible. After two years of research and community engagement, DOT will be presenting its first recommendations next Saturday, February 12.

Tonight, Community Board 2 will vote its recommendation on DOT's plans to make Astor Place more accommodating and inviting to pedestrians.

If you can't make it to Brooklyn for the Prospect Park West forum tomorrow, there's a Manhattan livable streets effort that needs a show of support.

The first time Adolfo Hernandez went to the National Bike Summit, he got a sense of just how monochromatic the livability movement can be.