Urban Planning

Tonight, 6:30 pm at Old First Church on 7th Avenue and Carroll Street, the transportation committee of Brooklyn Community Board 6 hosts a blockbuster follow-up meeting to the "One-Way? No Way!" extravaganza of March 15.

All across the city neighborhood groups are coming together to re-envision and plan their own communities. In the last few months we've seen valuable community-planning processes taking place in Hell's Kitchen, the Meatpacking District and, to a certain extent, along Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. People aren't waiting around for real estate developers or city agencies to tell them how their neighborhoods should be. They are going out and doing the thinking and planning themselves.

The once traffic-filled street between Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery is now a thriving plaza.

"I don't see why people have to pay market rents to live in a neighborhood but the cars should live rent-free. In New York you have expensive housing for people and free parking for cars. You've got your priorities exactly the wrong way around."

With DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall set to depart city government in three weeks, sources say that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is close to announcing her replacement. The Mayor's choice will have a profound impact on day-to-day neighborhood life as well as the City of New York's long-term future. Though the DOT commissioner job search has barely been covered by the local press, this may very well be one of the most important decisions of the last 1,000 days of the Bloomberg Administration.

Yesterday, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and MTA President Lee Sander delivered a pair of one-two speeches at the annual meeting of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council. Sadly, the report I wrote up yesterday afternoon was eaten by my blog software. It was really good too. Much more entertaining than this one. What are you gonna do?

Big Crowd of Slopers Turn Out to Jeer One-Way Proposal (Gowanus Lounge) 400+ Slopers Deride DOT Plans for Sixth and Seventh Avenues (Yards Report) Slope Weighs One-Way Byways (Voice)  Board votes down one-way proposal (Brooklyn Paper) Jonathan Barkey photos

Above is a bootlegged copy of DOT Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia's Park Slope one-way traffic presentation. Though the plan is supposedly all about improving pedestrian safety, you can see for yourself that it is almost entirely concerned with the movement and flow of motor vehicles and the calculation of "vehicular level of service."