Quality of Life

Monday, September 246:00 to 9:30 pmJohn Jay College899 Tenth Ave. (at 58th St.)RSVP to westsidestudy @ hshassoc . com or (917) 339-0488

Driving (carefully) with Dutch "shared space" guru and traffic engineer Hans Monderman.

We reported yesterday that noted Danish urbanist Jan Gehl will soon be surveying New York streets with an eye toward improving them for human use. Gehl has been working in Sydney, Australia as of late, and an essay he wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald offers insight into what he may be looking for here in the city.

Last weekend the New York Times published a nice piece about a resurgence in downtown Manhattan street life.

Citizens for NYC, whose mission is to stimulate and support self-help and civic action to improve the quality of life in New York City neighborhoods, invites you to participate in their new Neighborhood Quality of Life Survey. 

Workers on a DOT truck reconfigured a traffic signal in front of P.S. 200 in Queens on Friday.

The mother and grandfather of James Rice.

Carrie McLaren and Steve Lambert are working on a public service photo project called "People's 311." They want New Yorkers to submit shots of things like potholes, bike lane hazards, dying trees and broken traffic signs.

Transportation Alternatives has teamed up with cycling advocates from Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle to issue the Urban Transportation Report Card (PDF), which rates these cities' progress on greening their transportation systems. The report notes that transportation accounts for 20-60% of carbon emissions in major U.S. cities, so it is very encouraging that in each city the most significant growth occurred in bicycling, with Chicago registering an 80% increase in cyclists from 1990-2000.