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A Ride Down NYC’s “Street of the Future”
For years, Livable Streets advocates have pleaded with New York City's Department of Transportation to just try new things. Do street design experiments using temporary materials. Give new ideas a shot. If an experiment doesn't work, take it down, redesign it, improve it or, heck, just restore it to how it used to be. What do we have to lose? If we don't start figuring out new ways to design and manage New York City's streets, all we're left with is a future of ever-increasing gridlock, pollution and honking.
October 4, 2007
New Ninth Avenue Separated Bike Path is Already in Place
The unprecedented new physically-separated bike path running along Chelsea's Ninth Avenue has already been set up using temporary materials. The Department of Transportation is billing it as New York City's "street of the future." New York 1 reported yesterday:
October 3, 2007
Yankees’ Subsidy Deal Gets Stranger and Stranger
The Yankee Stadium subsidy package is the gift that keeps on giving. If you're the Yankees.
October 3, 2007
DOT Minds the GAP
With city workers pouring concrete in the background (and StreetFilms' cameras rolling), New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced pedestrian and cyclist improvements for Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza yesterday. The plan calls for 11,000 square feet of new, landscaped pedestrian islands, a separated bike path, new crosswalks and pedestrian signals.
October 2, 2007
Meat Market Plaza is Open for Business
The interim redesign of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street is done. Tables, chairs, planters and some of those giant granite blocks from DOT's Bridges Division have been set out as multipurpose bollard-bench-tables atop a gravelly, earth-tone pavement surface.
September 27, 2007
More Park(ing) Day Photos
Park(Day) co-organizer Jen Petersen and Robert Cipriano lounge at No Impact Man's spot in front of Whole Foods at 7th Ave. and W. 24th St.
September 21, 2007
Myrtle Ave. Parking Spot Becomes a Park and Classroom
The first round of Park(ing) Day photos are coming in. Here is a public space reclamation project currently underway on Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Blaise Backer, executive director of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership explains:
September 21, 2007
Making the Case for Compact Development
From the people at Smart Growth America comes word of a new book, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, just out from the Urban Land Institute. In the book, researchers argue that more compact development (such as Atlantic Station, a mixed-use complex in Atlanta built on reclaimed industrial land, shown at right) must play a key role if this country is to reduce emissions:
September 21, 2007
NYC Gets Its First-Ever Physically-Separated Bike Path
The Department of Transportation revealed plans for New York City's first-ever physically-separated bike lane, or "cycle track," at a Manhattan Community Board 4 meeting last night. The new bike path will run southbound on Ninth Avenue from W. 23rd to W. 16th Street in Manhattan. Unlike the typical Class II on-street bike lane in which cyclists mix with motor vehicle traffic, this new design will create an exclusive path for bicycles between the sidewalk and parked cars.
September 20, 2007