Manhattan

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:

As seen outside Wednesday's 34th Precinct Community Council meeting. The driver of this livery cab stopped on Broadway, backed 90 degrees into the crosswalk, drove forward (about halfway across the crosswalk) to straighten out, then backed up again, taking up a good share of the disabled access curb ramp in the process. Then he and his passenger got out and walked into the station house without incident, despite the police presence outside -- which is no surprise given the position of the NYPD van to the right.

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. 

This spiffy new illuminated bus stop shelter replaces another destroyed by a  motorist at Broadway and Dongan Place, near the border of Inwood and Washington Heights.

The Department of Transportation announced the installation of a buffered bike lane on Fifth Avenue in this month's NYCycles, a monthly e-newsletter produced by DOT on cycling issues.

Howard/Stein-Hudson consultant Chris Ryan directs UWS traffic