Pedestrian Infrastructure

It's official. When it comes to livable streets, Hoboken is pulling out in front of every other New York City suburb. In some ways, the one-square-mile town is even lapping New York City. The latest in a string of envy-inducing projects under Mayor Dawn Zimmer and Parking and Transportation Director Ian Sacs is the city's new bike and pedestrian plan.

People tend to identify most strongly with things that set them apart. If everyone’s doing something, it hardly seems worth calling attention to the fact that you do it too.

I had to pull this Marcia Kramer segment out of the headline stack and post it, because you've got to see it to believe it.

A few months after launching the city's first "pop-up café" on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, NYC DOT is putting out a call to other businesses who might be interested in reclaiming curbside spaces to make way for seasonal sidewalk extensions, tables, and seating. The department announced today that it's seeking applications [PDF] to expand the pop-up café program to as many as 12 locations throughout the five boroughs next year.

Via the League of American Bicyclists, new information is out about how much the feds are spending on bike-ped projects. While federal funding for bicycle and pedestrian projects is down a bit from last year's all-time high, it still comes in at more than a billion dollars. A third of the money is from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which begs the question of what will happen to bike-ped funding once the stimulus funds dry up. We got some foreshadowing last week of what might be in store for bike-ped funding if Republicans cut the transportation bill to the "core program."

Manhattan Community Board 11's transportation committee voted in favor of a slate of safety improvements along the Harlem River waterfront last night, a project that will give New Yorkers better access to the underutilized Harlem River Park. Changes like pedestrian refuge islands, sidewalk extensions, and leading pedestrian intervals got a thumbs up from committee members, but they put on hold a plan to reverse the direction of a service road along 135th Street. DOT's full plan is available for download in this PDF.

We reported recently that the federal government was demanding $2.2 billion back from state DOTs in rescissions -- money that was already allocated to states that they were then asked to give back. Bike and pedestrian advocates were worried that states would disproportionately target active transportation projects for cuts, instead of carving into car-centric programs. They were right.

The long history of violent traffic crashes where Broadway, Amsterdam and 71st Street converge is about to take a turn for the better. This intersection was the site of 19 pedestrian and cyclist injuries between 2004 and 2008. Earlier this summer, in the course of a few hours, two people were injured in separate crashes while walking in this area.