Public Health

An article in the LA Times (reg required) details how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has systematically withheld information on fatal accidents from the public, even going so far as to deny Freedom of Information Act requests from researchers.

Crain's reporter Erik Engquist gets some more information about the Department of Transportation's plans to convert two Park Slope Avenues into one-way streets. DOT's press office is now saying:

"What became clear to me in this discussion was that the engineers were thinking from the motorists' viewpoint."  -- Iris Weinshall, New York Newsday, April 29, 2001

Like Third Avenue in Brooklyn, Manhattan's Ninth Avenue is emerging as one of New York City's new "Boulevards of Death." This afternoon, the Clinton / Hell's Kitchen Pedestrian Safety Coalition, the community group that has been organizing the Ninth Avenue Renaissance project, broadcast the following news and call to action:

As people living in the neighborhoods around Downtown Brooklyn are learning the hard way, New York City government's installation of pedestrian safety and traffic calming measures is remarkably slow and expensive. Even as children are dying while crossing the street in potentially preventable crashes, and even with projects approved and funded, New York City's bureaucracy appears to be organizationally unable to move faster than a snail's pace when it comes to installing fine-grained, spot-by-spot pedestrian safety and traffic calming measures.

DOT has gotten back to me with some answers.  

When there isn't snow on the ground where does all the black stuff go?

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:

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.