Urban Design

A reliable Streetsblog tipster sends along this photo of a police cruiser parked in the Department of Transportation's new Ninth Avenue bike facility. The police officer seen getting into the car was returning from a nearby deli with what appeared to be lunch for him and his partner.

After a weekend that saw three pedestrian fatalities and just as many serious injuries -- with no known criminal charges filed against any of the motorists involved as of this writing -- a Manhattan-based advocacy group has renewed calls for action on pedestrian safety.

Sculpture on the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, Grand Army Plaza

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.

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:

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.

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. 

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:

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.