Quality of Life

A sacrifice we were willing to make: Until 1922, much of Park Avenue was, in fact, a park. Looking north on Park Ave at about 50th Street. That's Saint Bartholomew's Church on the right.

The Department of Transportation's recently announced streetscape renovation at the Bedford Avenue L subway station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn marks the first time ever in New York City that car parking spaces have been removed to make way for bicycle parking.

The Vauban Department of Transportation gets to work. Schritt Tempo: Walking Speed.

In just the last ten days here in New York City a 7-year-old boy was killed in the crosswalk by a trucker trying to beat a red light in Brooklyn, a young woman on the Upper East Side and a Brooklyn Heights law professor were crushed to death by private sanitation trucks, and a 12-year-old boy was mowed down by a hit-and-run driver in Queens. The list goes on. Yet, none of these horrible killings of innocents on the streets of New York City merited even a mention from Mayor Bloomberg or any other high level city official. Apparently, in America's safest big city, this is just business as usual.

Some of us at Streetsblog headquarters were talking about putting together a sidebar listing of recommended books to reinforce the commentary you find on the blog. I put together a few brief recommendations of five of my favorites, but we're also interested in learning what you've all been reading and what you'd suggest to others, so treat this as an open thread on livable streets-related books now that we're in the midst of the holiday gift-buying season.

A Porsche, an ambulette, Paul Steely White, Bruce Schaller and a vendor compete for street space in Soho

Only a couple of hundred yards from the rusting remains of the 1964 World's Fair, Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid out his own vision for the future of New York City this morning. In a speech entitled "New York City 2030: Accepting the Challenge," the mayor introduced a broad plan for creating a sustainable city "making room for 900,000 new residents, upgrading aging infrastructure, cleaning up pollution, and coping with the effects of global climate change."

An apology to Streetsblog tipsters. Though our new, high-tech "Contribute to Streetsblog" page has been up and running for a few weeks, I've been having technical problems with the tips@streetsblog.org account and haven't really been checking reader mail very regularly. The problem is now fixed and I'm excavating lots of excellent contributions. I'll try to post a bunch of them this week and I promise we'll be better about this in the future, so please keep them coming. Here is the first batch:

This letter just rolled off my printer: