Traffic Calming

The Greenstreet at 110th and Amsterdam helps keep sewage out of city rivers and features a beefed-up, traffic-calming "blockbuster."

 Traffic fatalities in 2007 were at their lowest level since the city began keeping records almost 100 years ago, according to data released today by the Bloomberg administration. However, while the number of pedestrian fatalities last year dropped sharply percentage-wise from 2006, down to roughly one death every two-and-a-half days, cyclist fatalities were up, and pedestrian and cyclist deaths combined accounted for 58.6 percent of the 271 total traffic deaths, the highest such percentage in the past eight years.

In the shortest, sweetest Streetfilm ever, a 24-second stop-motion animation, Elizabeth Press perfectly illustrates a chicane which is a sequence of bump-outs that force drivers to slow down and drive a more circuitous route along a straight, wide street. An added side benefit, chicanes also create more sidewalk space to be used for benches, tables, plantings and street furniture.

Why is Times Square so crowded?

This piece was written by Transportation Alternatives:

Streetsblog editor Aaron Naparstek and StreetFilms' Nick Whitaker hit the intersection of Atlantic, Flatbush and Fourth Avenues Thursday morning to see what a "Gridlock Alert Day" looks like at one of New York City's most congested intersections.

"If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars."

Crashstat shows Fordham Rd. in the Bronx to be one of the most dangerous streets in New York City.

Infuriated by reckless idiots speeding down your neighborhood street? Tired of waiting for city government to do something about it? Then you will probably enjoy this German guy's homemade traffic-calming system, inspired, perhaps, by the legendary killer bollards of Manchester, England.