Streetfight:RewritingtheOperatingCodeforCityStreets

DRAFTApril1,2015
ByJanetteSadikKhanandSethSolomonow

Introduction:HiddeninPlainSight

Theopportunitieshiddeninplainsightineverycity;HowNYCchanged;dooropened
withbackgroundBloombergandPlaNYCwithoutthisimpetus,nothingwouldhave
happened.

Chapter1:UrbanLegends

ThemythologyandlegaciesofJaneJacobsandRobertMoses;Theircompeting
philosophiesinthecontinuumofotherschoolsofthoughtforstreetsandapersonalview
fromthestreet;HowNewYorkCitysstreetscametobewhattheyaretodayandhow
thisrevealshowmostcitiestendtooperatebyinertia,tradition,and,occasionally,outof
dateplanning;Streetsdidntjusthappen,theyhappenedbydesign.

Chapter2:DensityisDensity

Citiesareontheriseandwhereamajorityoftheearthspopulationlive;Theproblems
facingcitiesmustbeaddressedsystematically.Leveragingdensitybothforefficiencyand
sustainabilityismoreimportantthaneverandcitiesneednewstrategies;PlaNYCwasthe
firstattempttounifythecitysdepartmentsunderacomprehensiveoperatingprinciple,
drawingonsomeofthebestideasfromaroundtheworld(Willincludeexamplesof
globalC40citiesimplementingbestpractices);Outdateddesignstandardsandemerging
strategiestoimprovethem.

Chapter3:HowtoReadtheStreet

Theanatomyofthestreetandtheoperatingprinciplesthatledtostreetsbeingbuiltlike
highways;Learningtoreadingbetweenthelanesplannerscanfindentirecitieshiddenon
theirstreets.;Howcommonlyheldtheoriesabouthowstreetsworkcausemillionsof
peopletomisunderstandandopposeeffortstoimprovethem;Thepromiseand
difficultiesofpricingroadsaroundtheworld;Lessonslearnedfromthebattlesover
congestionpricinginNYCandaroundtheworld.

Chapter4:FollowtheFootsteps

Youcandesignastreettomakeitlivablebywatchinghowitsused;NewYorkCity
examplesillustratehowthatuseofastreetcanbechangedsimplybyapplyingpaintand

readilyavailablematerials;Rewritingthecodeunderlyingstreetsandshowingcity
residentsthepowerofthepossible;Applyingthisapproachandusingthesetoolsinthe
transformationofTimesSquare;Theimportanceofdatacollection,theeconomicimpact
ofthesekindsofprojectsandscalabilityforothercities.(Willincludediscussionof
sidewalks/wayfinding/viewsheds)

Chapter5:BikeLanesandTheirDiscontents

Whatyouseedependsonhowyougetaround;ThestoryoftheProspectParkWestbike
laneinNewYorkCityanditsbikelash;Howandwhybikeridinghassparked
politicalandculturalcontroversiesaroundtheworld.

Chapter6:Bikeshare:LeveragingthePoweroftheStreet

Bikesharesystemsarethebindingreceptorintransportationnetworks,settinganew
standardforconvenience;Byintegratingthetransportationecosystem,bikeshare
explodesthedemandfortransitandwalkingandprovidesthelowcostmissinglinkfor
citydevelopment;TheexperienceoflaunchingCitiBike,thenationslargestbikeshare
program,andbikeshareprogramsinothercities(Portland,LosAngeles,NACTOcities).

Chapter7:TransformativeTransit

Thefutureoftransitisalreadyembeddedinthestreetsofeverycity;Howcitieslike
Medellin,Bogota,MexicoCityandNewYork,moldedbygeometric,communityand
politicalrealities.

Chapter8:BloodontheStreets

Trafficdeathsarethegreatestunacknowledgedpublichealthcrisisintheworld;
Discussionofapproachtotrafficandwhathasworkedinothercities;Prescriptionsfor
thefuturenotjustforNYCbutforothercongestedcities;VisionZeroandglobalsafety
actionsandadcampaigns.

Chapter9:MeasuringtheStreet

Measuringtheimpactofprojectsrequiresaforensicapproachbeyondtrafficvolumesand
traveltimes;Datasolvestheproblemnotjustofdeterminingaprojectsimpactbutalso
howtocommunicatethatimpactandwinningsupportforsimilarprogramselsewhere.
Discussionofsimilarresultsinothercities,includingTransportForLondonstudyon
pedestrianization.REPURPOSEFOLLOWTHELEADER;

Chapter10:SignsandDottedLines

Parkingsigns,streetsigns,pedestriansignalsandcountdownclocks.Streetsarefilled
withabewilderingforestofcomponentsthatwebarelynoticeandareatbest
misunderstoodandignoredatworst.Thischapterlooksattheirrationalandcontradictory
policiesgoverningparking,thefutilityandconfusionofsignsandsignals,andhowcities
mightbebetteroffwithoutanyofthem.

Chapter11:WhatWeTalkAboutWhenWeTalkAboutStreets/Communicating
Change

Howplannersandleadersframechangestothestreetandwinpublicsupportcanbeisas
importantastheprojectitself,yetplanningschoolsarentgoodatteachinghowto
communicatechange.Alookatthecardinalmythsandfearsthataccompanyanyproject
thatimprovesstreetsandstrategiesforhowtosurmountthem.Acloserdiscussionathow
tonegotiatethelonggameofpublicopinionwiththeshortgameofmediaheadlines.

Chapter12:Conclude.

Finalthoughts;Streetsassmallcommunities;Alookatwhatsnextandexamplesfrom
aroundtheworld;Newinnovationsthatwillleadtothenextwaveofchange.

Introduction: A New Street Code

Every city has an underlying operating system, and no matter how exotic the city,
streets from Melbourne to Mumbai to Manhattan are all similar and failing in the same
way. Streets have been designed to keep traffic moving but not to support the life
alongside it. Streets force city dwellers to make bad choices about how to get around and
discourage them from walking, stifling the kind of varied and spontaneous street life that
energizes the worlds greatest cities and dragging down the local economies that would
otherwise thrive. Too many streets are inefficient and dangerous, reflected in chronic
congestion, chaotic streets and in 1.24 annual million traffic deaths along 40 million
miles of road worldwide. Until relatively recently, there hasnt even been a commonly
shared vocabulary to name or describe these failures, leaving streets in a kind of
suspended animation for more than a half century despite innovations that have
revolutionized almost every other field. Streets in cities around the world look virtually
the same in their utilitarian blandness and the underlying operation, danger and economy
of city streets remain as opaque and featureless as the asphalt roadbed. People have
forgotten what streets are for and have little idea how they can be used or how powerful a
force in urban life they can be.

This book reveals the underlying source code for streets that helped unlock New
York Citys roads, sidewalks and the collective space between buildings that is the
filament of all cities. It also demonstrates how to rewrite that code and alter your own
citys streetsan approach that is now spreading rapidly to city streets around the world.

After six years of the most radical restructuring of a citys streets this side of master New
York City planner Robert Moses and his nemesis, Jane Jacobs, the patron saint for streets,
nearly a half-million pedestrians in New York City daily walk across Times Square plazas
atop former vehicle traffic lanes that were changed overnight. Bicyclists ride safely in
green lanes painted along the curb where cars once parked on streets where people feared
to tread. Pedestrian-filled plazas bloom where scraps of asphalt had lain dormant for
decades. And, most importantly, hundreds fewer New Yorkers die annually in traffic
crashes.

But unlike the means used by Robert Moses, this revival of the citys
transportation network was accomplished without bulldozing a single neighborhood or
razing a single building. It was cheapabsurdly cheapcompared with the billions of
dollars spent annually building new streetcar and light rail lines and rehabilitating or
replacing aging roads and bridges in American cities. And it was fast, installed in days
and weeks using do-it-yourself and guerilla tactics: paint, planters, lights, signs, signals
and surplus stone. Overnight, centuries-old roads turned into pedestrian oases atop space
that had been there all along.

The strategies, tactics and the fight were so extensive and so effective in New
York City they have implications for cities globally. For the first time in history, as of
2010, the majority of the worlds population lives in urban areas. By 2050, that number is
expected to grow to seven in 10. Citizens of the world have become citizens of cities. But
cities themselves are not prepared for this urban reality. When it comes to streetcraftthe

design, diversification and balance of city streets, sidewalks and public space
governments, developers, engineers, architects and the people who live in cities have not
caught up with the new road order.

Despite this historic demographic realignment, todays city streets were built in
different ages and barely serve the long-outdated purposes they were originally designed
for. Car-based urban planning has built atop, around, over and through these streets,
adjusting for increases in population only by increasing the scale of the already obsolete
infrastructure. These effortsbuilding new highways, widening streets and endlessly
sprawling the citys limitshave only multiplied the damage wrought on city cores and
smothered the very things that make them places where people want to live: accessibility,
convenience, diversity, culture and immediacy. In turning streets into places to move cars
instead of people, theyve become places people dont want to go unless they are in one.

From Ancient Rome to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the New World,
cities have always been the global cradles of culture, technology and commerce, where
historys most luminous minds and civilizations converged and altered the course of
history. But little of this richness and creativity is reflected in the streets of the worlds
growing megalopolises, which are expanding faster than its people are capable of
consciously influencing. Elected leaders, city planners and citizens have few expectations
for how city streets should perform, and without a clear understanding of the scope of the
problem, few cities have explicit goals to reduce and eliminate serious traffic crashes,

reduce congestion and implement policies that make cities more walkable, more diverse
and discourage sprawl.

Streets are also cities social, political and commercial arteries, and they can
ascribe social status with famous addressesPark Avenue, Champs-lyses, Lombard
Street or Rodeo Driveor mark political and identity boundaries like Falls Road in
Belfast and the segregated roads of the West Bank. Regardless of the wealth or status of
their inhabitants, city streets are inherently democratizing public places. They continue to
play critical roles in democracies and the public life and transformative moments in the
history of people. Whether its Tiananmen Square, Mexico Citys Zcalo the Bastille,
Trafalgar Square, or Tahrir, Wenceslas or Taksim squares, these spaces are where the life
and history happen.

No city so embodies the strengths and contradictions of urban streets as New York
City. A 19th-century street grid cut imposed over pre-Colonial footpaths, Manhattans
streets were maximized for car space under a 20th-century city planning dogma. This
change grafted the motor vehicle and an idea of independent, suburban, internalcombustion progress onto a city where millions of people walk and ride subways and
buses. Postwar New York was built for a future that forgot its dense and efficient urban
origins, and its new, car-focused infrastructure became an obstacle for the future that
eventually arrived. Yet the most visible outcropping of this problemtraffic, its danger,
inefficiency and its uninviting, overrun driving surfacehas become an invisible part of
the streetscape.

Invisible in this new road order are the people of New York and every city. Every
city resident is a pedestrian at some point in the day. Any city whose streets invite people
to walk, bike and sit along them also inspires people to innovate, invest, spend money
and to move, love and remain in these cities. And regardless of where you live or how
you get around or how much you may detest bike lanes, streets matter. They are the
mortar that now holds most of the worlds population together and they must be designed
to encourage walking and the street life, economy and culture that they support.

Global city dwellers are beginning to recognize the potential of their city streets
and, after seeing whats possible, urgently want to reclaim them. They are slowly
recognizing an unmet hunger for livable, inviting public space. Parks, plazas, benches,
any place to sit down. Room to bike, walk and get around without having to get
somewhere. Many cities have embarked on significant and headline-grabbing efforts to
reclaim roads, bridges, tunnels and rail rights-of-way and turning legacy hardware into
the stuff of urban dreamsparks and greenways, city idylls that provide room to walk,
bike and play in the middle of a city where a highway once stood. Some cities have
embarked on plans to build bikes into the transportation network with bike lanes and bike
share programs. Tactical urbanists reclaim parking spaces for a day and calm traffic
through asphalt murals. They call them livable streets, complete streets, sustainable
streets, and they may be able to rescue cities from the urban disaster that awaits if they do
not change course. Yet few of these strategies have been incorporated into the way that
cities operate from the street up. Traffic planners and engineers still resort to outdated

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planning and engineering manuals that prescribe wide lanes but narrow imagination for
creating quality streets and walkable urban places. Even where the imagination exists and
the political will is aligned, the effort to make these overdue transformations can quickly
become a streetfight against the status quo. Its a daily battle for the city planners of today
to keep the next generation from reverting back to claiming more road space for cars
merely by force of habit.

During an intense, six-year period under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York
City proved to itself, the nation and the world that almost everything assumed how urban
streets operate was wrong. New approaches to public projects and to the data that
documented them turned global debates over public planning on their heads. Real-world
experience showed that reducing the number of lanes on a street or closing them entirely
didnt merely provide pedestrian space and breathe new life into neighborhoods, it
actually improved traffic. And simply painting part of a street to make it into a plaza or
bus lane not only made the street safer, it also improved traffic and increased both
pedestrian foot traffic and the bottom lines of local businesses.

Its no coincidence that the American city with the tallest buildings, the most
people, the most iconic landmarks and larger-than-life public figures would embrace such
an intense and a high-profile reshuffling of its streets. But while this counterintuitive
approach enjoyed widespread support and improbably high poll numbers, it also enraged
a small but vocal army of opponents. They were a mix of people who detested Mayor
Bloomberg and those skeptical of anything environmental, healthy or vaguely French.

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They denounced the changes and politicized the very data that should have transcended
the passions surrounding these changes.

Street life got better by virtually every measure, but it was the pushback to this
approach that got the biggest headlines. When you push the status quo, pushes back, hard.
Everyone likes to watch a good fight. And this was a streetfight: a politically bloody and
ripped-from-the-tabloids streetfight. I was deeply embedded in that streetfightright in
the middle of it, in fact. Call me biased, call me crazymany people havebut I am
convinced that the fight to wrest back New York Citys streets holds lessons for every
urban areas, and that the future of cities depends on it.

My six-year, seven-month, 18-day tenure as New York City transportation

commissioner started with a meeting at New York Citys at City Hall, at the foot of the
Brooklyn Bridge, in early spring 2007.

Why do you want to be traffic commissioner? the 108th Mayor of New York
City asked me.

It was his first question and my first time even in a room with Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, the billionaire entrepreneur-turned-mayor, sitting with six of his deputies
arrayed Knights-of-Camelot-style across the expanse of an immense, round table. Six

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years into his administration and two years into his second and term, I realized that it
wasnt clear to me that daynor to many outside that roomwho or what he was
looking for in a top transportation official during his remaining 31 months in office.

Despite Bloombergs phrasing, the question he asked wasnt a test. Its a common
misconception that the commissioners job is limited to managing traffic congestion.

I dont want to be the traffic commissioner, I said. I want to be transportation

commissioner.

Bloomberg said nothing. No one jumped in to break the tension. Well, at least I
got to meet the mayor, I consoled myself, confident that I had just blown the interview.

The administration of Michael Bloomberg had a global reputation for innovation

and a by-the-numbers-please approach to governance. This was the Mayor who had
created the 311 system allowing residents to dial one number to obtain virtually any city
service. He had banned smoking in bars and trans fats from restaurantstrifles compared
to his overseeing dramatic reductions in crime and wresting of control over city schools
from a notoriously ineffective Board of Education. But at the time there was no
transportation leg to his legacys table, no initiative, goal or accomplishment on a scale
even approaching his other achievements.

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Fresh from my traffic gaffe, I pushed ahead with my priorities, unsure how theyd
be received as I heaved them upon the table like a gauntlet: I wanted to make New York
Citys punch-line buses work better. To make bike riding a real, safe transportation option
on New Yorks mean streets. To charge a toll for all people who drive into Manhattan
during rush hour.

These were far from mainstream transportation ideas but I assumed that Team
Camelot must have wanted to hear my pitch or they wouldnt have asked me to the table
in the first place. So I made it plain: I wanted to change the transportation status quo in
New York City. Fifteen years earlier I was transportation advisor to Mayor David Dinkins
and since had worked under President Bill Clinton at the Federal Transit Administration
before leading the transit practice of a major international transportation engineering
firm. My audience with Bloomberg told me that they werent just looking for someone to
ride out the rest of the term with little change or controversy. They wanted someone who
understood the basic architecture of government and had transportation credentials, but
with a private-sector metabolism that thrived on ideas and innovative approaches to
problems.

Having already worked within the New York City Transportation Department, I
understood that it was in charge of so much more than traffic. New York City has 6,300
miles of streets, 12,000 miles of sidewalks, 1.3 million street signs, 12,000 intersections
with traffic signals, 300,000 streetlights, 788 bridges and the Staten Island Ferry, moving
22 million people annually, and facilities to make the signs and do the ironwork to hold

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together these streets, sidewalks and bridges. The chief mission was managing the
hardware and responding to the daily emergencies that wreak havoc on them. New York
Citys DOT, with a headcount hovering around 4,500 employees, was larger than many
transportation departments for entire American states. Instead of rural roads and
highways, New Yorks portfolio contains some of the most valuable, dense and contested
real estate in the nation. Viewed through another lens, DOT had control over more than
just concrete, asphalt, steel and striping lanes. These were the fundamental levers that
govern a public realm which, if applied slightly differently, could have radically different
impacts.

But judging by what the DOT had accomplished in the first six years of
Bloombergs administration, it wasnt clear what was expected from that agency in the
final two years. I didnt share that sentiment with the committee. Looking at the dour
faces around the table, I was certain that I had already bombed and even more certain that
the appointment would never happen. People dont usually succeed by implying that
prospective employers should have done things differently or should go out in a blaze of
glory.

I misjudged.

I would later discover that the reason there wasnt more palpable enthusiasm that
day was because my agenda was already settled law with the committee. The crux of this
city-altering approach was being codified as we spoke into PlaNYCthe visionary, long-

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range sustainability plan guided by Dan Doctoroff, then-deputy mayor for economic
development. PlaNYC was a detailed, 127-initiative blueprint for urban sustainability
unlike anything New York or any big city had ever seen. It stated a goal of reducing
carbon emissions by 30% while improving the efficiency and quality of life in New York
City neighborhoods and business districts. It also took the unusual step of laying the
groundwork needed to accommodate the one million more New Yorkers expected to live
there by 2030, which would have a profound impact on the operation and allocation of
resources of every city agencyand in particular how we designed and used city streets.
Strategies like buses, bike lanes, open space in every neighborhood and using less energy
and more sustainable materials to achieve it. This new vision changed everything about
how New York would function. Other cities had started drafting plans centered on a
handful of long-range goals. But no other citys vision embedded that approach into a
code for all city agencies to follow and support each other mutually, from transportation
and parks to housing and energy consumption and waste management. It was also
unprecedented in expecting all city agencies to work together and not as independent
fiefdoms run by strong-willed personalities. All agencies were expected to pull in the
same direction that the mayor set, or there would be consequences. PlaNYC was a new
manual that we could use to rewrite the streets and overcome the status quo myth that
New York was ungovernable.

This plan coincided closely with the priorities I had laid out gleaned from 20
years in transportation at city, federal and private levels. For Bloomberg, this made me
the right person for the right job at the right time. I would soon discover that reanimating

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dormant streets and implementing the goals of PlaNYC required an entirely new and
relatively radical approach. Its not enough to have a vision and specific goals for a city.
The way to achieve them is where the heart of change resides, and that change is
excruciatingly difficult.

City leaders, urban planners and engineers and the people that they serve have
been as hobbled as their streets by two opposite, increasingly unproductive tendencies:
Megaproject monomania, which is still embraced by mayors and leaders who want to
leave a mark and do something during their tenures, versus a strategy of neighborhoodbased preservation and resistance not just to neighborhood-destroying projects but to
even necessary and modest changes that would improve their streets. The future of our
cities has fallen between these cracks, remaining stagnant as governments plan big
sometimes too bigand communities routinely oppose changes in the status quo by
thinking smallmaybe too small. What both parties lack is the vocabulary to think
beyond their dysfunctional streets and identify the shared interest that would let them
work around their mutual distrust. I discovered that it was more effective to work with
local communities to put rapid-fire projects in the ground in real time using materials on
hand and then using those projects as instruments to win support to expand this approach
than the traditional, municipal alternative: An exhaustive attempt to achieve consensus on
a strategy even when theres consensus that the status quo isnt working. This approach
can risk years of indecision, inaction and paralysis by analysis to placate the opposition
of minorities that accompany any change to streets.

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This book pulls back the curtain on the battles fought to make this approach
succeed in one of the worlds greatest and toughest cities. It shows where I succeeded and
failed and how other cities and communities and their leaders can learn from what we
were able to accomplish against almost total oddsand how. Overcoming even obsolete
thinking requires an entirely new vocabulary for streets and it also requires new,
counterintuitive strategies to win over a skeptical city residents. For leaders, it demands
the resolve, courage and grit to withstand the slings and arrows required to do things
differently for the first time. Every community believes it has every reason why changing
the way that they use their streets is impossible, impractical or just insane. I witnessed
that firsthand and determined that there is no end to the excuses for inaction. But inaction
is itself inexcusable and as our cities grow, and leaders and the people they serve cannot
accept streets in their dysfunction without even attempting to change it.

More than policy or ideas, it is the practical experience and execution of projects
that provide the most valuable lessons for any city. As Jerold Kayden at Harvards
Graduate School of Design observed, To plan is human, to implement, divine. Based
on this real-world practice and not ivory-tower or third-party idealism, this book
deconstructs, reassembles and reinvents the street, inviting readers to view something that
they experience every day in ways they never imagined. We lay out a new road map to
inspire and empower city officials, planners and everyday city residents to create these
changes in cities around the world.

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This new operating code for streets is already being translated into projects in
global cities, from pocket parks and plazas in Mexico City and San Francisco to
pedestrian-friendly road diets in Los Angeles and Auckland to pocket parks in Buenos
Aires and street closures around the Coliseum in Rome. If it can happen in New York
City, according to the Sinatra model of transportation theory, it can happen anywhere.

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Ch. 1: Urban Legends

In July, 2014, seven months after I stepped down as transportation commissioner,
a work team from the New York Citys Department of Transportation added a footnote to
Manhattans urban history: Working with thermoplastic paint and concrete, the crew
striped and heat-stenciled a parking-protected bike path directly in front of 555 Hudson
Street in Greenwich Village, the former home of Jane Jacobs, the late urbanist and the
patron saint of city streets.

The design of the new bike path, running alongside the curb and protected by the
line of parked cars on the other side, wasnt new to Manhattans streets. The new lane
connected Hudson Street with an existing bike path built six years earlier just north of
Janes three-story, red-brick home. When it first appeared in 2007, a protected bike path
was a foreign concept on American streets, one that seemed to upset the balance of the
street and viewed as an enemy to traffic. By 2014, it was just another part of the
streetscape.

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Janes Lane, in front of her former home at 555 Hudson Street, Manhattan,
arrived 53 years after the publication of The Death and Life of Great
American Cities. (Credit: Seth Solomonow)

Meanwhile, across town at 378 Broome Street in the SoHo neighborhood, a tree
planted by Jane Jacobs in 1962 in front of the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix provides
a reminder today of the neighborhoods saved from master builder Robert Mosess
wrecking ball and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Moses hoped the planned
expressway would whisk traffic from the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges to the
Holland Tunnel along an elevated highway instead of churning along local streets. Jane
and her allies fought and successfully defeated that plan, which would have dramatically
altered the Lower Manhattan streetscape and destroyed hundreds of homes and
businesses in the process. The tree endures today as a monument to the power of
neighborhood preservation and of local resistance to bureaucratic overreach.

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These stories and the battles between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses are part of a
creation myth about modern New York and all cities. In this almost Shakespearean epic,
Moses is remembered as a public works dictator answered to no authority but his own as
he force-engineered a Utopian, car-based future onto New York. Jane offered an
alternative vision of a future built to a human scale instead of designed to move as many
cars as possible. Neither version of these caricatures captures the full extent of their
impact on cities and how they should be designed and whom they should serve. And as
the myth has evolved it hasnt always taught the right lessons of how to make our streets
safer and our cities better.

A native of Scranton, Penn., Jane moved to Depression-era New York City and
emerged as the unlikely voice of mid-century urbanism. Her path there was not the result
of traditional education but was sparked by her radicalization amid local development
politics in her adopted West Village neighborhood on Hudson Street, where she and her
husband moved during the 1940s. Her signal work, 1961s The Death and Life of Great
American Cities Streets, was an urban revelation. Jane declared in accessible language
how a citys design can nourish or destroy the quality of human life in cities. She blasted
the planners of the first half of the 20th century for being too quick to destroy old
buildingsand the neighborhoods with themin the name of progress and high-rise
buildings set back on superblocks in an attempt to evoke the suburbs. Jane said that this
approach grossly misunderstands how city neighborhoods function and ignores the small

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things that animate lifemost of which emanate from the street and buildings, not from
the grand designs of developers or urban planners.

Death and Life helped make armchair urbanists out of millions of city dwellers,
inspiring them to look at cities not as bleak, scary and chaotic places, but as fascinating,
complex networks of neighborhoods sparked into life formed by their density and
diversity. As she wrote the manuscript for the book, Jane took her primary inspiration not
from engineering manuals and textbooks, but by following the people she saw on the
street beyond her second-story window: The Ballet of Hudson Street. Along the
neighborhoods sidewalks and in the children, shopkeepers, bohemians, meatpackers and
longshoremen and filing through the streets stores, pizza parlors and local watering
holes, Jane saw the story of the street. Cities are, by definition, full of strangers, she
said, and within a single block, one can encounter a lifetime of characters and customs,
giving citizens something they otherwise would be able to get only by traveling.

Jane delighted in this spontaneity of her neighborhoods streets and the details that
comprised the life force of the neighborhood. A well-functioning neighborhood city
street, street has a little of everything; shops, cafes, schools, libraries, recreation and
destinations that encourage walking day and night. Buildings hold apartments but also
neighborhoods shops, doctors offices and office space. Having well-balanced street-level
design activate the sidewalks, inviting residents outside with their all-important eyes on
the street. When people occupy their streets and sidewalks, they see each other and are

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seen. Even strangers look out for each other, keeping the street safe and neighborhoods
engaged and connected.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they appear, Jane said, sidewalk contacts
are the small change from which a citys wealth of public life may grow. (p. 71) I can
think of no better summation of street life, literally or metaphorically. While active street
life generates neighborliness, which is a critical form of social wealth, its also good for
business. Where communities are walkable and where people are on the street, there is
also public ordera prerequisite for a safe and vibrant citiesand there is also foot
traffic that drives local merchants and that is sought after by new residentsand is
sought and supported by developers. Its as much about urban economics as it is about
quality of life.

Janes ideal human-scale neighborhood would have shorter city blocks with
varied building architecture and entrances close to the sidewalk. The size of buildings is
kept small to prioritize the street-level experience, lest the dwellers in tower apartments
set hundreds of feet back from sidewalks lose their connection with the energetic
sidewalks and the ground-floor retail. From architecture styles and building stock to
sidewalk, block and building size and the zoning allowing mixed uses, Jane showed how
density was a citys competitive advantage over suburbs, and that its design shouldnt be
left just to modern planners who were less interested in creating street life than about
designing something that looks impressive when viewed from above.

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There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city, Jane wrote, people
make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans. Instead of designing
streets from afar and focusing on cars, planners need only look to the street and follow its
use to find the solutions for its problems. To me, this way of looking at streets provides
the most relevant examples for modern cities. What makes cities great is how their streets
organize and concentrate people to catalyze the magic in the city street. Streets are the
essential spaces where city dwellers combine, and when people are closer together, it
sparks and amplifies humanitys greatest qualities. People interact and inspire each other,
generating the kinds of stories that dont happen in quite the same way in suburban strip
malls.

By closely observing how people are already using the streetwhere they are
crossing, where they gather and what places they ignore and why, how fast the cars are
walking, why or locals gather in front of a corner storeone can interpret how the street
wants to be used. And just as any ecosystem thrives on biodiversity, where one seemingly
small element can have dramatic, interconnected effect on everything else, so too do
streets depend on hidden-in-plain-sight components which, when out of balance, can
cause the entire system to fail. Street design is no idle or aesthetic pursuit. Entire
communities can be impacted by something as simple as how many trees there are on the
street and if theres a place to grab some dinner.

Unfortunately, while Janes human-scale vision has rightly analyzed urban ills and
inspired generations of city lovers, many of Janes own Village streets today are little

25

changed and remain stunted examples of what a human-scale street could be. As
inevitable as the new bike lane outside Janes former home may have seemed to New
Yorks increasing number of bike riders in 2013, new and safe infrastructure for bikes and
pedestrians was already decades overdue in Greenwich Village by the time it arrived.
Neither Jane nor subsequent generations of like-minded allies and progressive city
planners succeeded in reversing or significantly altering the existing footprint and impact
of a century of car-based planning, or found a way to embed this changed-based urbanism
into official city standards for street design so that it doesnt continue. Jane herself
observed that the protests and community involvement that she was famous for, including
banning cars from Washington Square Park and defeating a Moses plan to bisect the park
with a road to connect Fifth Avenue and new homes near LaGuardia Place, do not
represent any reversal of the erosion process of space already ceded to cars (p. 359). At
most, she said, they represent a stalemate.

New Yorks Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side and SoHo neighborhoods
are known for their packed and vibrant (narrow) sidewalks and they are also some of
New Yorks most desirable and expensive neighborhoods. But the streets that run
between the sidewalksCanal Street, Sixth and Seventh avenues, Houston Street,
Broome and Varick streetshave remained sewers of traffic, as broken and blighting in
2006 as they were when Jane left New York for a new life in Toronto in 1968. Every day,
endless streams of cars, SUVs, service vans and box trucks lumber along these streets,
often as slow as a pedestrian and rarely ever as fast as a cyclist. Meanwhile, the sidewalks
along Prince and Spring streets are so crowded that people jostle each other into the

26

street. Jane imagined a future of reclaiming streets and widening sidewalks that had been
sawed off to give more room to cars. Yet local community gadflies in her own
neighborhood, invoking preservationist language, led fierce attacks on proposals in the
2000s for weekend car-free street events weekends or to install bike lanes and bike share.

Instead of launching an urban renaissance, Death and Life was immediately

followed by decades of the urban blight and depopulation. Millions of mostly white city
dwellers sought relief from the costs, danger, poverty, stresses and the racial tensions
from cities to increasing distant suburbs. Combined with the loss of industry and
manufacturing within cities, this rapid de-urbanization brought disinvestment as the
municipal tax base fled, starving transportation infrastructure and stranding development.
New Yorks West Side Highway, literally and figuratively collapsing under its own
obsolescence, was demolished during the 1980s after a decade of plans to replace it
foundered. As of this writing, no new subway lines have opened in New York City since
World War II, a streak that the MTA is threatening to end in 20TK with the opening of the
first five stations of the Second Avenue Subway. Big cities across the nation similarly
found themselves saddled with the legacy of massive road and bridge networks that
divided neighborhoods and streets more car-dependent, drive-by corridors, unable to
support the mix of uses that made the streets rich and inviting places to begin with.

More than a half-century since Janes Death and Life, we still recall the general
lesson that cities are for people, but many city residents have long since lost the plot.

27

Jane led one of the earliest in a series of nationwide highway revolts that erupted during
the 1960s and 1970s in dozens of cities in North America and around the world. Local
residents, empowered by social movements they saw in their own cities, rejected plans
for new urban highways and their devastating impact on neighborhoods, the environment
and traffic, dozens of projects were scrapped, delayed or abandoned. Despite Janes
framing of the greater problems afflicting cities, her greatest impact stopped at the
highway off-ramp. Generations of communities have remained focused exclusively on
NIMBY fights over what they dont want city streets to behighways, construction sites,
residential or retail complexeswhile forgetting what our streets could be: dense,
vibrant, inviting and changeable public spaces.

The failure to change the way cities think about and design their streets wasnt
because Jane or any of the millions she inspired were wrong about the economics of
cities, real estate, or werent thinking big enough about their streets. For decades, our
strategies to achieve them werent small enough. Urban dwellers may have the vision but
they still lack the specific conceptual vocabulary and strategies to think small about their
streets. More and better space for pedestrians to walk or to stop. Sidewalks that include
benches and landscaped bioswales that capture rain runoff to nourish sidewalk trees.
Intersections that make it easier for old and young people on foot to cross the street safely
instead of maximizing traffic volumes. An approach to street and sidewalk design that
treats the public realm as important spaces and sees as an investment in them as
investments in its economic wellbeing, not merely in its quality-of-life.

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Instead, if a project isnt a highway, a retail complex or a megaproject, planners

and ordinary citizens have no starting points to understand the world of the possible for
streets, reducing these would-be developments to to-build-or-not-to-build proposals.
Whats desperately needed today is an expansive articulation of a small-scale, changebased vision for cities combined with specific, street-level details that planners can use to
retrofit, redesign and rebalance streets and sidewalks to support those who make the city
vibrant: its people.
#

Like many New Yorkers Im passionate about New York City streets but I didnt
grow up wanting to be a transportation commissioner. Still, my urban education started
early, exploring the streets of the city with my mom. She has always been a passionate
New Yorker with strong opinions about development, preservation and the nuanced
interplay between people on neighborhood streets. Wed be caught up in a conversation
about politics or current events and shed constantly tell me to Look up, look up! at the
buildings and people who were the backdrop for our ramblings. Theres an old saying that
New Yorkers never look up, but they also never really look down, at their streets. How
many lanes are there? Why are odd-numbered streets westbound and even numbered
streets eastbound? It was a great education and left a profound impact on how I viewed
the citys operating system of streets and bridges and their importance for people. My
Moms and my backyard was Washington Square Park, just a few blocks from her house,
and our conversations often turned to Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, two names forever
entwined by the park:.

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But I wanted be a lawyer and work on social justice issuesmore Clarence

Darrow than Jane Jacobs. I had been encouraged to go to law school by Marion Wright
Edelman, the visionary leader of the Childrens Defense Fund, my first job out of college.
After finishing law school I worked at a law firm but it didnt take long to realize that
wasnt where my passion lay. As soon as I was financially able, I left and was naturally
drawn back to the political work that I was involved in before law school.

I worked for the mayoral campaign of Dinkins campaign in 1989, at a time when
no one thought he could win. Ed Koch was seeking a fourth term as mayor, and after 12
years most New Yorkers had forgotten what life was like without him. The Dinkins
campaign headquarters was located in Times Square at Broadway and 43rd Street, above
a peep-show theater. Wed see women dressed in feathers and boas, sequins and crowns
riding up in the elevators we shared with them. They definitely got off on a different
floor. Around campaign headquarters I saw political luminaries like Harold Ickes, Ken
Sunshine, Bill Lynch and Don Hazen. Future mayor Bill de Blasio helped coordinate the
volunteer division. It was a strong team of people working on a shoestring budget.

Times Square circa 1989 was still in its raunchy era, with derelicts and hustlers
hanging along sidewalks lined with tchotchke stores and adult theaters. Parents forced to
walk through the square with their families on the way to a Broadway show would put a
protective hand over their childs eyes. It wasnt a place youd choose to go if you could
avoid it, and it was certainly not the cleaned-up Giuliani version that would come later,

30

much less the pedestrianized Times Square we have today. For lunch wed grab deli
sandwiches and bring them back to the office. There was nowhere and no reason to sit
outside. You would be careful walking on the side streets after dark.

After Dinkins won but before he was sworn in as mayor, I remember calling my
Mom to talk about what city agency would be good to work for under the new
administration. I told her that I wanted to do something that would have an impact and
make a difference in peoples lives every day. She waited a beat and said, If you want to
touch peoples lives every day, you have two choices: sanitation or transportation.
Maybe it was her background as a City Hall reporter for the New York Post covering
Mayor Koch that gave her that insight, but she was right.

My career at DOT started work for Lou Riccio the transportation commissioner
Mayor Dinkins appointed, working as special council for state and federal affairs. That
was just when a new transportation funding bill known as ISTEAwas being drafted,
a bill that would fundamentally change how transportation projects were planned and
funded. It reflected the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihans view that transportation
decisions are best made at the local level, rather than through federal dictates about how
and when funding from Washington could be used for road, bridge and transit projects. It
was a powerful new direction at the time. I read the entire bill and became a kind of
expert on how the rules applied in the city. Shortly after, I was named director of the
mayors office of transportation, overseeing everything from strategies to improve the

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already-doomed replacement Pennsylvania Station, as well as improved access routes to

the regions difficult-to-reach airports.

Underground, the transit system had improved from the fiscal meltdown of the
1970s and Gerald Ford famously telling New York to Drop Dead, at least in Daily
Newss translation of his refusal to bail out the city. But even 15 years later, the system
was still starved for funding. Above ground, the citys bridge and road infrastructure was
in no better shape. A previous deputy commissioner during Mayor Ed Koch
administration, Gridlock Sam Schwartz, sounded the alarm about the dire disrepair of
the four East River bridges, the backbone of New Yorks road system. Sam helped
generate awareness of just how badly the bridges had deteriorated, to the point where
disrepair had forced the city to shut down the Williamsburg Bridge to replace corroded
cables and weathered steel and road components. The bill had come due after years of
neglect, requiring billions of dollars and years of recovery projects just to bring them into
a state of good repair.

New Yorks streets were similarly decrepit, but that wasnt enough to stop me
from commuting to work downtown on the back of my husband Marks bike. He clerked
for a federal judge near City Hall. We rode down Greenwich Street to my Worth Street
office. I would sit on the seat as he pedaled, standing and steering around pothole
minefields and an obstacle course of yellow taxis. The bike was a one-speed silver cruiser
we dubbed The Tank. You didnt see a lot of bikes on the city streets at that time. There
were no bike lanes to speak of. Even ordinary street markings were hard to come by. It

32

was always a joyful ride, coasting down the street, holding onto Marks waist. But it was
dangerous. Seven hundred and one people died in traffic crashes in New York City in
1990. Twenty of them were cyclists.

Downtown Manhattan street life around this time amounted to hotdog vendors
and lunches eaten standing up. What public space there was could be found in front of
courthouses and official buildings, grim and uninviting spaces likely to be occupied by
homeless people and the citys less-savory elements. Safety wasnt on the agenda. The
quality of street life wasnt on the agenda. Plazas definitely werent on the agenda. The
agenda was basic maintenance and repair. The waterfront road along the Hudson River,
the site of the former West Side Highway near where I lived, was a jumble of dilapidated
piers and parking lots, and the way there was littered with broken glass and crack bottles.
There was no attention to the way the streets looked or felt. New Yorkers were just
desperately hanging on, trying to survive, not thinking about how these streetsthe
greatest asset in one of the worlds most walkable citiescould be used. Even then I was
thinking how wasteful this was and that New Yorks streets had more to offer.

When Robert Moses looked at New York Citys streets, sidewalks and
neighborhoods in the 1930s, he also saw a city struggling to modernize but weighed
down by the past. And more than anyone, Moses had the means, the power and the

33

motivation to do something about it. Three decades after his death in 1981, Moses and his
legacy remain as complex as the city of New York itself. As Jane has evolved into an
almost saintly image of the local preservationist, Moses remains the archetypal destroyer
of neighborhoods and caricature of institutional arrogance, as portrayed in Robert Caros
1972 Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of
New York. The devastating appraisal documented how Moses relentlessly amassed
political power and consolidated regional agencies to become the citys areas master
builder, shaping New York Citys physical environment more than anyone since the
creation of the grid.

Enabled by successions of mayors and governors and fueled by billions of federal

dollars in Works Progress Administration and Interstate Highway funds, Moses amassed
as many as 12 directorships and leadership positions over vital public works agencies,
including the New York City Parkway Authority to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel
Authority to the state parks. The federal government created massive public works
programs to build new urban roads and housing to replace the slum infrastructure of the
19th century. Moses was first in line to provide these urban renewal projects. With this
seemingly limitless funding and control over public planning, Moses from the 1930s
through the 1960s completed one of the most urban massive works agenda in urban
history. The almost incomprehensible list of projects that he moved from planning to
implementation included 17 parkways and 14 expressways that ringed and connected the
city in ways that were thought impossible. It doubled the acreage of city parks, built
Lincoln Center and brought innumerable playgrounds and public pools and public

34

beaches where millions of New Yorkers who couldnt afford summer homes or sleepaway camps could play or cool off during hot summer days. Slum clearance was
followed by the construction of superblocks of vast symmetrical apartment towers
surrounded by tree-lined paths. They housed hundreds of thousands of middle-class New
Yorkers at Penn Station South, Washington Square Village and Lenox Terrace and on the
Lower East Side.

In his relentless push, Mosess projects also divided the city. Armies of workers
bulldozed swaths of entire neighborhoods of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx,
displacing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Caro and others would note
that these projects, notably the Cross-Bronx Expressway, disproportionately impacted
African-American and immigrant communities with little political or cultural capital.
Thousands of families were dispossessed in this way, often with the promise that they
would be housed when reconstruction of new apartments was complete. Meanwhile, the
highways separated previously contiguous communities and isolated others that were just
hanging on.

Contrast these neighborhood-slicing projects with the aesthetic and engineering

marvels like the Verrazano-Narrows and Whitestone bridges overseen by Moses, or
contrast the grass-lined parkways with the utilitarian, water-hugging multilane highways
like the FDR Drive, Shore Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a section of
which is a four-tiered structure carved into the schist layers of Brooklyn Heights. But in
the end, this power proved to be far from absolute. Moses proposed a road slicing

35

through Washington Square Park in the 1950s to grant motor vehicles easy access to new
residential developments south of the park. Jane and her allies succeeded in halting the
plan while also shutting the park to all traffic.

The Power Broker remains required reading in schools, but despite its damning
critique, it would be simplistic to dismiss Moses merely as a public works dictator. Like
generations of planners before him and since, Moses was shaped by the assumptions of
his era. He believed that nothing but bold action could help New York City escape 19th
century obsolescence and build atop it a new and more prosperous city that could
withstand the future. From where Moses sat in the 1930s, that future was being driven by
the motor vehicle. Streets in Mosess era teemed with people, cars and double-decker
buses darting in every direction as streetcars rolled along the avenues and elevated
subways clanged overhead. Moses saw New York City as a traffic management challenge
that could be solvedengineered, built and erected into order. And just as Baron
Haussman built a new Paris atop the ashes of the old, so Moses believed that he wanted
to achieve was more than just building roads. Through a comprehensive urban renewal
program supported by local politicians and backed by billions in federal funds, Moses
was building a new city, an Empire of Progress for the common man reaching from
Staten Island across Long Island and through the Bronx.

While Mosess successes as a builder are widely debated today, he also prompted
fierce opposition at the time to many road projects from Long Island to Lower
Manhattan. In this, he wasnt the first city planner to prompt such an intense, polarizing

36

response. New Yorks earliest Transportation commissioners in 1808 started to survey

Manhattans patchwork of roads, farmland and waterways, drafting right-angled streets to
replace irregular foot- and cow-paths. In this pre-grid status quo, property owners feared
that roads might be built through their land, and they strafed the surveying commissioners
with vegetables and menaced them with dogs and threats of lawsuits.

Despite its opposition, the 19th-century grid plan instantly rationalized the
growing city. New crosstown streets measured 60 feet from building to building with 34
feet of roadbed bisecting them while most north-south avenues were allotted 100 feet.
New York City grew rapidly through the 19th century, with the streets growing choked
with hawkers and vendors. Transportation planners tried to build their way out of street
chaos by building up. The first elevated railway in New York City opened on Ninth
Avenue in 1868, to be followed by many elevated structures that would join the citys tall
buildings to shroud streets in midday shadows and noise. As buildings grew ever higher
and streets teemed with more people, carriages and streetcars in the late 19th century,
planners then tried to build their way out of congestion by building downbelow
ground. The first subway stations opened in 1904 as rail companies started dismantling
the remaining elevated rail structures as noisy and blighting anachronisms.

The 20th century transportation innovations of subways and cars helped

accelerate population growth, and the citys population doubled from 3.4 million in 1900
to 6.9 million in 1930. In 1910, the subway moved 810 million passengers. By 1930, that
number was 2 billion passengers. The streets of New York, already built for omnibuses,

37

horse-drawn carriages and streetcars, were more than wide enough to accommodate the
first motor cars, so long as people got out of the way. Children playing in the street wen
the way of the horse carriage

The relatively high speeds and loud engines of automobiles and the lack of a
comprehensive traffic signs and signals only amplified the streets bedlam. There were
few rules and even less experience in the new right-of-way and little margin of error. At
first, cars were seen as the invader on city streets and pedestrians the innocents who
started being run down in increasing rapidity. In 1910, the first year that records were
kept in New York City, 332 people were killed in vehicle crashes. By 1929, that number
more than quadrupled to 1,360. But instead of four times the outrage, city planners and
engineers took a different tack, building the city from the point of view of the motorist.
Streets were built wider, obstacles were removed and traffic signals became the arbiter of
when cars could stop or go. Pedestrians and playing children, who barely a generation
earlier mingled with horse carts and vendors in the street, were confined once and for all
to the sidewalk and assigned the responsibility for their safety and to stay clear of cars.

The Swiss-French modernist architect Le Corbusier in the early 20th century

envisioned cities of wide streets arrayed in geometric patterns and with populations
concentrated in soaring towers and pedestrians and cars segregated into tiers. This
symmetrical and distinctly futuristic design inspired planners looking to engineer a
rational course further away from the mixed-use chaos of the 19th century street, believing
that man and machine were species best kept separated. But gone with these new street

38

designs werent just traffic conflicts but all of the complexities of the streetthe
messiness that Jane Jacobs saw as vital to the streets viability. No street-level stores, no
strolling-friendly sidewalks where people could see others and be seen.

This futurist world was translated to New York City streets by architect Harvey
Wiley Corbett, who helped design Rockefeller Center and many other Manhattan
skyscrapers. Corbett yearned for a Manhattan taller, more futuristic and crowded than
others had dared at the timea gothic, three-dimensional city that continues to inspire
film versions of what the future will look like. Corbetts definition of the modern street
was as foreboding and intimidating as his renderings. Pedestrians are removed, from
street level in the first step to convert a street to modern times, allowing cars [to] invade
their former domain, he wrote. This wasnt seen as just pro-car. It was assumed that by
separating people from traffic, the relative quiet and dedicated space would improve their
lives.

39

Moses embraced this, thrilling in the engineering challenge and in planning

comprehensively at a citywide scale. He conceived of interconnected tunnels, elevated
highways and cloverleaf projects, whose radii expanded as years passed. New Yorkers
were equally caught up in the excitement of remaking of the city by 1939, when thenParks Commissioner Moses helped bring the Worlds Fair to Flushing Meadows Park in
Queens. Thousands of visitors lined up to view General Motors-sponsored Futurama
exhibit, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, the centerpiece of which was football-fieldsized model of the city of the future. Moses saw in the interconnected, almost elegant
metropolis as exactly the kind of urban utopia that New York could be, with cars gliding
effortlessly on wide roads around and past tall buildings. Impressed by the Futurama

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display and seeing how it amazed visitors, Moses would build models to awe his political
patrons, reporters and the public into supporting his own projects.

Yet conspicuously missing from Moses models or architectural renderings were

any representations of people and the life that the street was presumably being designed
to encourage and support. Like so much other planning, people were meant to make use
of whatever was left over on the street after space had been created for cars. The City of
the Futuredesigned to be viewed from above, built for cars, a place where pedestrians
were afterthoughtwasnt created by accident. It was by design.

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Forty years after the publication of The Power Broker, and 30 years after Mosess
death, New York City historian Kenneth Jackson and other historians have reevaluated
the Mosess long-term impact. While scorn is still heaped upon Moses, Jackson notes that
his was far from an original urban planning sin. Other cities couldnt build enough roads
Los Angeles built 900 miles of highways and 21,000 miles of paved streets in the 20th
Century, dwarfing New York City. And despite the limitations of the road network and
little new transit added, public transportation reached the highest transit ridership in 60
years and New York City thrived as never before.

Whatever the cause of the New York turnaround, historian Kenneth Jackson
wrote, it would not have been possible without Robert Moses. Moses left New York
City far better equipped to grow and thrive than the Depression-era husk that he had
inherited, and without his brazen and single-minded ability to complete projects, Jackson
said, Gotham would have lacked the wherewithal to adjust to the demands of the
modern world. (Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York
(Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson, eds.)

Moses, believing he was helping the city he loved, was apoplectic at the
publication of the Power Broker, responding to his biographer in a 1972 letter:

The current fiction is that any overnight ersatz bagel and lox and boardwalk
merchant, any down-to-earth commentator or barfly, any busy housewife who

42

gets her expertise from newspaper, television radio, and telephone is ipso facto
endowed to plan in detail a huge metropolitan arterial complex good for a
century. Anyone in public works is bound to be a target for charges of
arbitrary administration and power broking leveled by critics who never had
responsibility for building anything I raise my stein to the builder who can
remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets
without breaking eggs. Quoted in Flint, Anthony (2009-07-23). Wrestling with
Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed
the American City (Kindle Locations 3420-3424). Random House Publishing
Group. Kindle Edition.

Though Moses did not mention Jane by name (nor was she mentioned in The
Power Broker), she seemed to fit the profile of the kind of critics that Moses denounced.
To Jane, Mosess highways didnt just mean destruction of housing or some
minor, local dislocation. He proposed to demolish 416 buildings for the Lower Manhattan
Expressway. Those buildings were the homes for 2,200 families and the 365 retail stores
where they shopped and the 480 other commercial establishments where locals worked or
that otherwise contributed to and defined the area. Flint, Anthony (2009-07-23).
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and
Transformed the American City (Kindle Locations 2693-2694). Random House
Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. This wasnt breaking eggs, this was the destruction of
a neighborhood and the annulment of the very kind public life that Moses sought. Where

43

Moses saw slums that could only be replaced, not repaired, Jane saw neighborhoods that
already contained all the seeds and social networks necessary for their own renewal.
Uprooting thousands of residents and small business tenants from Chinatown, SoHo and
West Village properties and raising a highway to move people more efficiently from New
Jersey to Brooklyn missed the people for the streets.

Jane and the Village dedicated activists she organized with ultimately succeeded
in turning the politics against Moses and his plan, bringing it to defeat in the late 1960s,
followed by the erosion of Mosess authority. Ultimately, what she stopped wasnt just a
highway through Lower Manhattan or Moses himself. She stopped future generations of
city residents from being powerless at the hands of the leaders working on their behalf.
Jane showed that you didnt have to be a public engineer to know when a proposed
development endangers a community. Less clear today is if communities have the tools to
conceive of new ideas or to recognize when a proposed change is good for a community.
Judging by New York Citys streets, we may not have figured out that one. Transportation
technologies have undergone multiple revolutions in innovation and design. The modern
automobile changed from a 1961 Chrysler Imperial with its tail fins and curb-feelers to
the 2016 Toyota Prius hybrid, with nearly silent engines, air bags, anti-lock brakes and
GPS. Coins and tokens disappeared from buses and subways, countdown clocks display
how long the wait is for the next train. On Janes streets, however, little has changed aside
from the color of the street signs. Between the many newly constructed buildings, the
spaces in-between, streets have fallen between the cracks. Until very recently, theyve

44

shown none of the inventive, bold spirit that New Yorkers show in everything else they
did.

As the Moses/Jacobs story has been told and retold over the last four decades,
Janes strategy of grassroots resistance has been invoked in resistance to official ideas
and celebrating them as a victory, even if that victory is the status quo. Pedestrian-,
transit- and bike-friendly projects in dozens of cities from Adelaide and Sydney to
London, Toronto and New Orleans in recent years have been regarded by residents with
the same kind of fear and suspicion usually reserved for proposals for multilane
highways. Speaking at public hearings, local residents and business owners invoke Jane
Jacobs-like language to fight Jane Jacobs-like projects. They oppose plans for walkable
neighborhoods and bike lanes because of phantom fears that they might make streets
more dangerous, congest traffic, put local shops out of business or erode a
neighborhoods characteror property values. Even as cities belatedly draft
sustainability plans to address urban growth and proposing more compact and efficient
development, its extraordinarily difficult politically and publically to make the changes
that these plans call for in the face of NIMBY opposition, even when majorities of the
general population support them.

I saw this firsthand in the backlash to a bike lane we installed alongside a park in
Brooklyn in 2009. A small number of residents claimed that the lane made the street
dangerous and eroded the neighborhoods character. Pulling grassroots strategies from
Jane Jacobs, they collected their own data from video surveillance shot from one

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residents penthouse apartment, the findings of which, they claimed, showed that far
fewer bike riders used the lane than official counts. A lawsuit by the group alleged that
the lane violated rules that protect historical landmark districts and that the project didnt
conform to environmental regulations. Ill go into more detail on that in Ch. TK.

In San Francisco, a single gadfly halted the citys entire bike-lane-building

program for four years, from 2006 to 2010, citing bike lanes potential for unhealthy
environmental impacts. Invoking the California Environmental Quality Act, the litigant, a
dishwasher from county outside the Bay Area, waged a lengthy and tenacious battle,
forcing the city to declare in a 1,353-page environmental review documentconducted
over two and a half years at a cost of $1 millionthat removing parking and driving
lanes to accommodate bikes wouldnt cause congestion and harmful health effects of
more pollution.

For me, the Moses/Jacobs lesson is the transformative impact that transportation
infrastructure has on city life. Retrofitting our cities for the new urban age today will
requires a Moses-like reverse-engineering, with the next generation of city roads built to
accommodate pedestrians, bikes and buses safely and not just single-occupancy vehicles
and their diminishing returns on our streets. Jane taught us the need for a more inclusive
and humane approach to development projects, and to build them to to human scale and
driven by a robust community process. Reversing atrophy requires a change-based
urbanism that shows short-term results that can then be leveraged into creating new
expectations and demand for the kind of projects people are afraid to dream if.

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Globally there is a rethinking of the city and its relationship with its cars and its
infrastructure, embraced by new generations of transportation leaders and visionary
mayors. On the largest scale, highways in Madrid, Seoul and Rio are being torn down and
redesigned for pedestrian and recreational use. Pariss Plages and the Promenade Plante
and New York Citys High Line attract millions of visitors to former rail rights-of way
turned into parks. Cities are remaking their cities with bus rapid transit networks instead
of massive rail projects. On the micro scale, cities like San Francisco, Buenos Aires,
Mexico City are creating pocket parks atop former triangles of asphalt or reclaiming and
activating forlorn spaces beneath highways. These concepts have even been extended to
car-choked Atlantas BeltLine rail trail, and tactical urban interventions in cities big and
small to turn parking spaces into cafes or into a mini park for a day. They are examples of
urban alchemy and a self-evident how-to converting outmoded infrastructure into
modern, public space that makes people want to move to and stay in cities.

What is needed is to codify this approach so that it can be adapted in cities

around the world not just to repurpose highway rights-of-way, but to reclaim and give
new life to every street. Its one thing to turn back a proposed developmenta new
highway, a convention center, a too-tall building or out-of-scale, traffic-generating
shopping mall. Its another thing to rewrite the operating code of a street in favor of the
people, places and public transportation and replace the vestiges of last centurys
planning dogma that ignored the human experience on that street.

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Viewing Moses abundant roadbed through Janes idea of a diversified street, you
find limitless opportunities for an aggressive, change-based urbanism. There are livable
streets hidden in plain sight on every street. Just because a street today has five lanes of
traffic doesnt mean that tomorrow it cant be reprogrammed for another use that
transforms that street. In fact, it is because so much of our public space is paved that
today we have so much raw material to work with. In more and more cities around the
world, we must demand and embrace smaller-scale interventions that can quickly and
inexpensively reallocate space, reinforcing denser neighborhoods with the power latent in
our streets. As cities grow, the next generation of eyes on the street in front of Janes old
home may be those of a bike rider in the new bike lane.

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Ch. 2: Density is Destiny

From fifteen hundred feet above, Mexico Citys traffic problems seem to
disappear. The view rom a helicopter in the hazy sky at rush hour is of a city in slow
motion. Pedestrians, buses, taxis and cars inch along, barely perceptible along wide,
endless avenues. The only thing that seems to be moving are elevated metro trains and
rapid bus routes built along road medians, flanked on both sides by columns of stopped
cars.

From above, visible traces remain of the citys natural origins and the 14th-century
Aztecs who constructed settlements on an island within Lake Texcoco. That lake was
progressively drained and paved over the centuries into what today we call Mexico City.
In the city center, Hernan Cortes and the Spaniards conquistadores built Mexico Citys
Cathedral at the Zocalo in the sixteenth century using the stones from the Aztec temples
they destroyed. Ever since, the citys cathedrals and other ancient structures have slowly
retreated back into the clay earth, sinking and leaning, jostled by frequent earthquakes.
The network of canals and farming communities at Xochimilco in the citys south
provide a glimpse of what the lush, ancient lake city might have looked like. The canal
area is protected by law from development but immediately beyond it roads and seas of
housing and roads immediately resume. At Tlalpan, one of the citys major green spaces
more forest than parktwo gaps are carved into the parks otherwise green oval like
missing teeth. Once forest itself, the gap in the northwest today is a Six Flags amusement
park. In the northeast, a gated residential development, El Bosque, cuts into the northeast

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on a single road lined with upscale condominiums whose entrance is guarded by security.

Along the citys periphery, poor, informal settlements containing many migrants
from other parts of the country have grown rapidly for decades within environmentally
preserved greenbelt areas that over time prove no more resilient against development than
Tlalpan. One by one, these technically illegal communities have reached a critical mass
that force officials to recognize them as legitimate municipal communities to be
incorporated into the city and provide the necessary infrastructureroads, power, street
lights, water mains and sewers. It is the antithesis of urban planning yet these informal
communities are one of the fastest growing parts of the megalopolis that today
encompasses more than 21 million people spread over 573 square miles. Surrounded by
mountains and volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico forms a massive geologic bowl that holds
the city and the haze of the citys millions motor vehicle emissions breathed in by 42
million lungs. But the greenbelt cant hold back the sprawl of the city and once these
green tracts are absorbed, there is no bringing them back. After the helicopter lands, it
also becomes painfully obvious that the view of a city moving in slow motion is no
optical illusion. Traffic on the streets of Mexico City barely moves.

The problem in Mexico City isnt that there are too many people in too little
space, says Dhyana Quintanar Solares, director of the citys public space department.
The problem is too many people in too much space. We have all the advantages that
high population can offer but few of the advantages that can only come with density.

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Every day from her office near the main road Avenida de la Reforma, along
Avenida de las Insurgentes, Dhyana has a front-row seat to the futility of Mexico City
traffic. My meetings with her at her third-floor office over the last two years were
accompanied by the soundtrack of transportation failure: the blare of car horns. At any
hour, hundreds of cars, buses, mini buses, motorcycles, scooters, vendor carts and taxis
are crushed together in Mexico Citys asphalt arteries, waiting at traffic signals or
blocked into a standstill. The result is a multipart car-horn symphony every time a light
turns green. And at the intersection of Insurgentes and Reforma, the light is always green
for somebody.

In an effort to reduce pollution and congestion, Mexico City officials in 1989

announced Hoy No Circula (Today you dont circulate), instituting driving bans on
about one-fifth of vehicles from driving their cars on any given day, depending on their
license plate numbers. These no-drive days have been expanded over the years but there
are still so many vehicles on the road that it can sometimes be impossible for drivers to
see road markings or even the lights they are stopped for and what lane theyre supposed
to be in. Vendor stands and other hawkers selling mango, trinkets or washing windows
often encroach on the street and block sidewalks, forcing pedestrians into the road. In
those stretches of road that congestion hasnt paralyzed, cars attempt to make up for lost
time with speed. Many roads no longer allow curbside parking and have been converted
to one-way operation to eliminate as many barriers to cars getting through as possible.
Some 1,100 people in Mexico City die in traffic crashes annually.

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The city government isnt a hapless victim watching cars take over the streets.
The citys own planning rules require that new buildings provide new spaces to park, a
rule taken so seriously that new high-rise towers require the construction of a 10-story
mascot structure to house all the cars presumed with new office or residential buildings.
A 2014 study by the Institute of Transportation Development Policy (ITDP) analyzed 251
new real estate developments built in Mexico City between 2009 and 2013. It found that
of the 172 million square feet of new floor area developed, 42% of that space was just
what was needed to store cars driven by people using the other 58% of the space. Thats
250,000 spaces, a virtual off-street city built just for carsand this on top of the street
space already built to keep cars moving. This robs Mexico City of the opportunity to
build more residential properties and greater residential density where its most needed
near the citys metro stations and bus, bike and walking network. The added parking
within the city center assures commuters a parking space, inducing more people to drive
to work instead of taking public transit. In a sense, city regulations require private
builders to promote more traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mexico Citys roads have gotten wider and its primary, limitedaccess highways, such as the Circuito Interior, busier and bleeding congestion into its
service roads, then into surrounding neighborhoods, a daily tsunami of steel and carbon
monoxide. Any visitor whos tried to cross a Mexico City Street on foot has probably had
that life-altering sense of fear, of aging 15 years in 15 seconds, and of not being entirely
certain at the first step into the street that youll still be alive by the last step. The simple
act of crossing the street can be impossible along roads where officials have erected

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fences and other barriers, except via a quarter-mile odyssey of pedestrian bridges or
underpasses.

But something else is starting to grow through the cracks in the pavement. At the
initiative of Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, elected in 2013, Dhyana and her public space
department is trying to create invigorate neighborhoods with new community plazas
(parques de bolsillo, or pocket parks), which also serve as bulwarks against invasion by
parked cars.

A pocket park in Coyoacan, Mexico City, one of dozens that repurpose

unused street space to extend sidewalks for seating, gathering, eating
and people-watching (Credit: Seth Solomonow)

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Bike share stations and protected bike paths have emerged along busy Avenida de
la Reforma and in the areas around the historic city center. Six TK bus rapid transit routes
today operate along 65 miles of dedicated bus lanes where cars to sit idle, becoming part
of the citys transportation network, moving 855,000 daily passengers at full speed past
lanes of stopped cars. Avenida 20 de Noviembre used to be high-volume traffic corridor
delivering endless columns of cars north to the Zocalo, the nations cultural and political
epicenter, even though virtually all of them were bound for destinations far away.
Working with Dhyana, we came up with a plan to calm traffic and limit the number of
vehicles able to enter the area, creating cast stretches of pedestrian space and extending
the Zocalos grandeur further south.

Avenida 20 de Noviembre, Mexico City. Courtesy of Bloomberg Associates, City of

Mexico

Beneath the citys highways in Coyoacan, Dhyanas department emptied bleak

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lots of their fences, parking and garbage and turned these spaces into food courts,
bakeries and fitness areas. Little by little, these changes are creating spaces on the street
that invite people and create opportunities and not just cars. These strategies are more
than just novelties. They may ultimately be part of Mexico Citys long-term salvation.

I often tell people that if they want to save the planet, they should move to a New
York City. But it could be any big city. And its not just a matter of bright lights, great
restaurants and world-class cultural institutions. Because of their geographic
compactness, population density and orientation toward walking and public
transportation, cities are the most efficient places on earth to live, and large cities like
New York or Mexico City by far offer the best odds for sustainable growth as global
populations increase rapidly. Having millions of people condensed into buildings high
rise buildings instead of spread out over hundreds of rural and suburban miles is itself a
reason why so many people are attractedculturally, professionally, politically and
practicallyto cities like New York. But there is also a functional and economic
sustainability-in-numbers case for dense city living. New Yorkers have a carbon footprint
about one third of the average American, a function of driving less, living vertically and
the environmental economies of scale that come with centrally located goods and
services. For all their smog, graffiti, blacktop and seeming anarchy, cities are the greenest
places on earth.

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Two-thirds of the American population now live in the nations 100 largest metro
areas, which in turn generate three-quarters of the nations economy. Urban streets today
are the front yards for 80 percent of the American population, and they occupy just three
percent of the nations land area. Urban population is expected to growby one million
people in New York City alone by 2030, and by 100 million more people nationwide by
2050, a 33% jolt. Concentrating as much of that nationwide growth in cities will be the
single most important strategy that nations can embark on in this century. In order to
attract, retain and accommodate rising populations, cities must implement rapid strategies
to make them more attractive places to live and tp make what infrastructure they do have
function more efficiently.

The very idea that living in city can be healthy mystifies many Americans who,
channeling their inner Henry David Thoreau, reject cities as dens of pestilence, crowds,
noise and crime. The countryside, the Walden Pond theory goes, provides open space and
quiet where people can contemplate their higher purposes and live simpler closer to and
off of the land. In fact, as we have learned over the last 50 years, the environmental cost
of living in suburbs makes New York City look like a coiffed Swiss hamlet. Life in the
suburbs leads to two even greater related problems: A hidden but far greater
environmental price tag that is borne by society through the driving, emissions, and
maintaining and building new roads, while draining cities of the density that makes them
efficient and thrive. Suburbs and exurbs force not just mega megacommuting in cars, but
require cars to be used for every trip, no matter how banal. Zoning requirements in many
suburbs restrict commercial development and office parks to segregated areas,

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guaranteeing that residential communities will be far out of walking distance for any
activity. Unlike Jane Jacobs compact neighborhood, a trip to the suburban store for a
half-gallon of milk may be a five-mile drive. Visiting the doctor, going out to dinner,
getting the kids to and from school requires thousands of car trips annually, all trips that
could be done on foot and by transit en route to and from work in a city.

David Owens, in his influential work on the benefits of compact urban living,
Green Metropolis, observed that 82% of working Manhattan residents get to work by
public transportation, walking or on a bike, 10 times the national rate. The city has lower
per capita energy use than the entire nation, in large part due to people living more
compactly in smaller, more efficient homes that are easier to heat, cool and connect to
common water and sewer networks. New Yorkers as a state generate fewer greenhouse
gases7.1 metric tons annually, a lower rate than that of residents of any other American
city, and less than 30 percent less than the national average of 24.5 metric tons. Owen,
David (2009-08-29). Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving
Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (pp. 2-3). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

Owens and others have also observed that that after years of rhapsodizing about
the virtues of pristine forests, modern environmentalists have changed their tune on the
city. Instead of fighting to preserve the spotted owl in the forest, they are taking the fight
to cities and taking on the NIMBYs who stand in the way of new, denser residential
developments. Mainstream environmentalist organizations have reoriented their strategies
and started advocating smart or compact urban growth as part of an anti-sprawl strategy,

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reaching beyond the false pro- and anti-growth dichotomy. More people are realizing that
the surest way to protect the nations wonderful open spaces for future generations and
for the creatures that inhabit them is to build within cities so that subdivisions wont be
built where the deer and the antelope play. Its better for the planet to build one 50-story
residential tower in the heart of Manhattan than to force developers to build hundreds of
residential units across former greenbelt farmlands. Denser, better-functioning cities
mean fewer people fleeing to country and bringing their cars and the roads, parking lots,
and strip malls and low-efficiency HVAC and sewer systems needed to support them.

Despite the natural advantages of cities, political leaders havent fully capitalized
on them. Its not because theyre not smart, but typically because of the politics and urban
planning inertia that has brought them to this point. Jane Jacobs writings
notwithstanding, cities dont come with owners manuals. Planners, engineers and the
municipal foot soldiers who design, build and run cities tend to learn their lessons on the
job and then take any collected wisdom with them when they leave at the end of an
administrationoften on the way to more lucrative careers in the private sector. Within
city government, street design practices were standardized long before the current
generation of planners arrived, usually during a period with no tradition of innovation or
experimentation. In this way, cities have tended to operate in much the same way that
their cities have sprawled: by doing things the way that theyve always been done, by
relying on out-of-date planning manuals and deviating only when forced to.
Transportation-as-usual in much of the world means building, expanding, repairing or
replacing as many roads as possible and brushing aside anything not tested or explicitly

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authorized. The most dangerous phrase in the English language is Weve always done it
this way, a quip attributed to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a trailblazing US Navy
computer scientist.

The inertia of outdated street design isnt merely dangerous, it reflects outmoded
assumptions about how people want to use their streets. Americans are driving fewer
miles on average than a decade earlier, the first sustained drop since the oil crisis of the
1970s. [Citation Dshort] Fewer young Americans are even bothering to get drivers
licenses: In 1983, 87% of 19-year-olds had drivers licenses; by 2010, that number was
below 70%. And more are opting for rented or shared cars and riding bikes over private
car ownership as car sales to Americans under 35 dropped 30% from 2007 to 2012.
[Citation: NY Times] On the transit side of the ledger, ridership in 2013 reached its
highest level since the start of the car boom in 1956. The federal government has missed
these dramatic shifts, forecasting consistent, high growth in driving over much of the last
15 years even as miles traveled has flattened out or decreased.

The misreading of what is occurring in America isnt just confined to driving. Just
as parking requirements stifle density within cities, federal policy incentivizes people to
live in sprawling suburbs. The tax code allows homeowners to deduct the interest on
mortgages in their annual filings, encouraging home ownership, but in the wrong place
outside of the city, where it favors homeowners with better means. The federal gas tax,
designed as a mechanism for drivers to pay for the upkeep of the roads that they use,
hasnt been adjusted in two decades, asphyxiating the Highway Trust Fund and the

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transportation infrastructure reinvestment with it. This is no small sum: Its been stuck at
18.4 cents since 1993. Simply not adjusting the tax for inflation for two decades is a
difference in billions of dollars with two decades of diminishing returns. Despite the
decreasing returns, most of those revenues go back into roads and only a small fraction is
invested in transit. Even Republican lawmakers, usually opposed to any increase in taxes,
have come out in support of increases in the taxonly so long as the funds are
committed to roads.

Having eluded popular attention for so many years, a comprehensive strategy to

reimagine and innovate Americas urban streets somehow remained too small for a
national policy. Federal government officials want to cut ribbons on new highways or
streetcar projects, not bike lanes or street-based neighborhood redesigns. If a
transportation project isnt an interstate highway, a high-speed rail or light rail, or a multiinterchange bridge or road, its hard to get their attention or capture their imagination.
And while spending money to build roads is seen as a public investment, critics see
public transportation as a kind of welfare subsidy. The billionaire conservative Koch
brothers and their wealthy cohorts have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to
sponsor and promote initiatives that would ban transportation projects, particularly those
that take lanes from car traffic for use by buses. Yet a 2009 study from the Victoria Policy
Institute estimated that the cost per mile of travel was 29.3 cents in public infrastructure.
For bike riders, the amount was .9 cents and for pedestrians just .2 cents per mile.
(Citation: VTPI)

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These issues arent confined just to transportation; they affect the entire
metabolism of urban America, slow growth and deplete downtowns. This neglect has
forced cities into thinking for themselves and to come up with long-term strategies that
dont require federal vision or largesse. In New York City, the most enduring framework
to halt and reverse this hurtling toward social and environmental calamity didnt emanate
from Washington DC but instead through a plan developed by a mayoral office for long
term planning and sustainability. They called it PlaNYC.

As a rule, 95,000-word documents about urban health and long-term

sustainability arent headline news, much less the stuff of dinner-table conversation. But
the news on Earth Day 2007 was different. Mayor Bloomberg unveiled PlaNYC at the
American Museum of Natural History beneath its famous 94-foot-long, 21,000-lb.
fiberglass blue whale underscoring the urgency of the message. The unusually direct
language the Mayor used at the press conference was as rare as the extinct animals that
filled the museum halls, and it made news.

The document that Mayor Bloomberg and Team Camelot under Deputy Mayor
Dan Doctoroff produced (pronounced Plan-Y-C) was the first real inventory of the
citys collective resources, assets and deficiencies. It systematically reverse-engineered
the city to accommodate dramatic urbanization and expected population growth,
amortizing the costs of investments over decades instead of election cycles and looked at
the impact of growth on health, the environment and quality of life. From 2000 to 2005
alone, New York Citys population grew by 200,000 people.

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Dan recalled that the plan didnt start with trying to solve the ultimate problem
of cities, but from trying to solve a single city problem: Where to house the vast
stockpiles of chemical salt needed for city plows spread when it snowed. The kind of
municipal real estate that met the needs set in motion an exercise where the city assessed
its property holdings, which in turn forced officials to think about siting and retrofitting
the facilities where it could be stored, and then how equipment used to carry and disperse
it. It wasnt just salt piles but depots for busesit was also about lots for towed vehicles
and waste transfer stations, the banal stuff of municipal real estate.

As the exercise unfolded, Dan recognized that they were contemplating the
essential questions of cities, not just addressing specific problems. We started realizing
that preparing for the future meant much more than creating space for government
operations, he said. By 2030, there will be 9 million people in New York City, Dan
says, a net increase of nearly 1 million people. This will be the equivalent of adding the
populations of Boston and Miami into the five boroughs. To meet that obligation, the
plan returned to a central theme: That density is New Yorks destiny, and city planning
should make the most of that strength. Density isnt a simple matter of tall buildings
stacked next to one another. People by their natures require both space and privacy, green
space and open sky, breathing room and room to run. Determining how these pieces fit
together is the stuff of public space design.

And if the job were to be done right, the choices they made should carry more

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up-front investment and strategic thinking so that costs would be realized years down the
line. Dans simple question turned into a multiagency, multi-decade exercise. The result
wasnt just a compendium of New York Citys problems and tying policies to long-term
planning and land-use issues that usually are avoided. We thought of it as a
transformative vision for the future of the city and an extraordinarily detailed plan for
how to get there, he said. Another feature was that all of the initiatives were to be 100%
achievable. We vowed not to make a single proposal that we couldnt identify the
source of funds for our implement. This was to be a living plan that would begin
implementation right after it was announced.

The plans 127 proposals called for increasing the citys housing stock by
265,000 units, expanding wetlands and planting a million trees, building more efficient
buildings and installing street lighting that used less energy. It sought fewer emissions
from fewer vehicles on the roads and set out a plan for all New Yorkers to live within a
10-minute walk of open space. By investing more in five or 10 years, you could have a
greener, more attractive city and realize savings 15, 20 and 35 years later.

But as far as New York had come by 2007, the idea of administrative planning
beyond the length of a term in office would still have been viewed as a fantasy.
Sustainability plans for entire cities were a still a novelty in the first decade of the new
millennium, and the very term sustainability was a commonly invoked but frequently
misunderstood buzzword. Similar plans had been drafted in Seattle and Santa Monica and
San Francisco. Toronto had its version and London another. Ideas were percolating

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around the world that leapt from the realm of advocacy into the political biosphere of city
government. The ideas that people once marched forreversing pollution and the impact
people have on the environmentwere becoming accepted, modern practices. But in
other cities, planning is often absent. Houston, Texas is renown not just for having no
long-term plan, but lacking even a zoning code that spells out what kind of buildings can
be built where. The result, predictably, is that Houstons population of 2 million is spread
out over more than 625 miles, or about one-tenth of the people in Mexico City spread
throughout a slightly smaller area, creating the opposite problem of too few people in too
much space.

Beyond its 127 specific proposals, PlaNYC was a repudiation of the idea that
cities were environmental lost causes, oppressive places that people should abandon them
moment they earn the. Compact urban living was a both a joy and an economic and
environmental strength to be embraced: We went from cities being a gray problem to
density being the solution, said Rit Aggarawla, the sustainability guru Doctoroff brought
in to manage the reports production. The result was a document that in addition to being
written in clear and accessible language, was also inherently positive in its belief that
urban ills could be corrected.

For me, Mayor Bloombergs political agnosticism and orientation toward longterm results instead of short-term headlines was one of his most remarkable qualities.
Mayors tend to make decisions based on four-year election cycles, planning only whats
possible based on todays political realities and with initiatives to deliver results in time

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for Election Day. PlaNYC offered an unheard-of 25-year view of the city, with a slate of
unpopular and potentially explosive proposals in the short term, and with many results
coming decades later during a successors term. That was a lesson that guided me in
everything I did next: It was more important to be judged by how well you did difficult
things, not easy ones, and being evaluated by results and the data and not by the loudest
critics and the tabloid headlines.

News about my pending appointment starting leaking out at that event at the
American Museum of Natural History, one week before Bloomberg introduced me to
reporters and to the New York City public at a press conference at City Halls Blue Room
on April 28, 2007. Dont fuck it up, Bloomberg whispered to me after the press
conference, half kidding, half not kidding at all. I didnt realize at the time that it was a
piece of advice he gave all his appointees.

While PlaNYC was unique in its comprehensiveness and engaging the

politically unpopular strategies and decisions that went with them, many of the strategies
tested in other cities globally had clear applications to New York Citys streets. The plan
called for five bus rapid transit routes to speed up New York Citys moribund bus
network, which has the largest fleet size but the slowest speeds in the nation. Bus rapid
transit had been proven to be successful since the 1970s, when Curitiba, Brazil, Mayor
Jaime Lerner revolutionized the citys transit system with buses that ran in dedicated
lanes and passengers who paid their fares on train-like platforms before boarding. The
project cost one-tenth that of a new subway line and was completed in a fraction of the

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time. Today, over 500,000 take bus rapid transit daily in Curitiba, more than 15% of the
metro areas population. Successes like these helped inspire similar systems in Bogota,
Melbourne, Seattle and Ottawa. BRT systems now operate in 189 cities TK worldwide
and move 31.3 million daily passengers.

Bus Rapid Transit station in Curitiba, Brazil. Passengers enter and depart like a
surface subway onto high-capacity buses, paying their fare beforehand and boarding
via all doors. Credit: EMBARQ http://www.embarq.org/media/image/curitibas-busrapid-transit-brt-system

A robust network of bike lanes was also a significant part of PlaNYC, but it
didnt get a lot of attention at first. New Yorkers may not have had enough experience at
the time knowing what it took to build a bike lane. Americans returning from European
cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, brought back tales that sounded as exotic and
incredible as reports from sailors freshly returned from the ends of the earth: European

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bike riders had their own lanes, physically separated from car lanes and sidewalks. There
were bike traffic signals and massive bike parking lots, with thousands upon thousands
locked up next to train stations. Old and young people alike were on bikes dapper men
in suits and perfectly coiffed women sailing along on bikes. Unimaginable. This would
never happen in New York, so no one gave it a second thought.

While most the transportation strategies in PlaNYC were ambitious on their

own, one stood out in particularthe proposal on page 88 to pilot an $8 charge for cars
to enter Manhattan anywhere south of 86th Street during weekday rush hours. Congestion
pricing. Who would think that charging drivers electronically to enter Manhattan by
bridges or by streets would be a good idea, much less politically viable?

I was a skeptic myself, admitted Mayor Bloomberg to the crowd of

supporters, reporters and onlookers gathered beneath the whale. But I looked at the
facts, and thats what Im asking New Yorkers to do. And the fact is in cities like London
and Singapore, fees succeeded in reducing congestion and improving air quality. He
noted that many drivers already paid tolls at many of the bridges and tunnels to and from
Manhattan, but that drivers deliberately drive out of their way to avoid them by using the
remaining free.

Leading with most controversial ideacongestion pricingactually gave the

plan credibility, Rit told me many years later. Instead of leaving it tucked in on page 88,
Bloomberg put it at the top of the agenda. The fact that PlaNYC also came with a budget

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line of nearly $1 billion real money -- confirmed for a lot of people who might have
dismissed PlaNYC as just another glossy government report. There was no one in the
city who thought that Mike Bloomberg wasnt serious about this, Rit said.

Charging drivers to enter busy downtowns during rush hour had succeeded in
other cities in a way that pleading, cajoling, and engineering never could. Many people
prefer to drive, but the primary limit on that willingness for most people isnt traffic,
speed or peace of mind. Its the price. Faced with a new toll, a driver who wouldnt have
thought twice about commuting to town may do some quick math and ask herself, Is this
trip really necessary?

Singapore introduced the first cordon pricing system in 1975, which officials
married to new transit investments and strict rules on owning cars. It wasnt until the
early 2000s that European planners started to pick up on the quiet, pocketbook power of
charging people to drive. London officials in 2003 introduced a fee for people driving
into the city center on weekdays to reduce congestion and vehicle emissions. By 2007,
the plan reduced the number of vehicles entering the zone by an estimated 30 percent and
decreasing greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, Londoners walked, biked and took buses in
increasing numbers. Stockholm, Sweden had introduced a pilot congestion charge
program in 2006, one that it made permanent within months of PlaNYCs launch. Again,
traffic decreased, public transit ridership increased.

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New York drivers would not be so easily impressed. After decades of

overinvestment in roads, underinvestment in public transportation, providing public
subsidies to buy suburban homes and historically low gas prices, Americans are so far
removed from the cost of their commutes (would be great to come up with a
highway/transit subsidy #) that they wouldnt believe the price tag. The collective cost to
car owners of gasoline, insurance, registration and vehicle maintenance barely even
begins to cover the societal cost of road building, repair and maintenance combined with
resultant traffic and associated health issues from emissions, obesity and $230 billion that
the FHWA estimates traffic crashes cost the nation in property, lost wages and medical
costs. Add to it that the chronic urban underpricing of street parkingfree in most
residential areas in New York City and far below market rate in othersand you may
start to ask yourself why you wouldnt drive either.

Thats the choice behind the more than 250 million vehicle registrations in the
United States and 1 billion registrations worldwide. Cars have hidden costs that make

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them inefficient in ways that arent immediately obvious, but their cost pales in
comparison to what is needed to maintain the road. Still, to put it in blunt public policy
terms: no one likes suddenly to pay for something that theyve gotten almost free for their
entire lives. And who would want to pay for a system which, judging by daily congestion
and traffic delays, appears to work very poorly?

Another problem wasnt the policy but the branding. Congestion pricing was an
unfortunately named initiativetwo problems, traffic and payment, united in one tidy
phrase. And it was also unfortunately abstract: Charging drivers a toll to enter downtown
Manhattan during the busiest time of the day would discourage unnecessary car trips,
reducing congestion. The revenues plucked electronically from cars by overhead toll
gantries, cameras and license plate at bridges and along streets would then be invested in
public transportation.

Congestion pricing was rooted more on the basic concept of supply and demand
than transportation engineering. Opposition to instituting new tolls or raising old ones
remains an incendiary issue, yet motorists see no correlation between the price they pay
to use the road and the poor quality of that commodity. Soviet Russia used to charge
artificially low prices for consumer goods, urban economist Edward Glaeser quipped,
and the result was empty shelves and long lines. That is basically what happens when
people are allowed to drive on city streets for free. Glaeser, Edward (2011-02-10).
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener,

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Healthier, and Happier (Kindle Locations 1820-1822). Penguin Group US. Kindle
Edition.

Traffic jams were already notorious in the 1960s era of Robert Moses, and
despite recent, modest declines in traffic volumes, congestion persists today as an
inescapable part of daily life in New York and most major cities. Manhattans population
of 1.6 million doubles with commuters every weekday, the equivalent of the population
of the fifth-largest American city descending upon Manhattans entertainment, finance,
fashion, publishing, academic, culinary and news industries for work, play or tourism.

As vivid as traffic is in Manhattan, its a relatively small number of people doing

all that driving. Only 6.6% of the 1.6 million people who travel to work in Manhattan
daily drive alone, compared with a national average of 76.4%. In the next column, public
transportation is the choice for 59% of commuters who arrive at their Manhattan desks
riding aboard subways, buses, ferries and commuter rails that connect the city with the
suburban counties. Thats compared with the national average of 5% of public transit
commuters.

Still, even a small percentage of people commuting alone in vehicles is an

immense absolute number in a metropolitan area of nearly 20 million people.
Cumulatively, within the five boroughs including Manhattan, drivers make 4.3 million
daily car trips within New York City and rack up 30 million miles daily, and the sheer
numbers conflict with other people on every street. This disequilibrium is itself a daily

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streetfight, with taxis, pedestrians, bikes, buses, pedicabs, deliverymen, trucks and street
vendors in an uneasy dance for space, pace and safety. Cars and trucks double-park to
make deliveries, blocking lanes and forcing dangerous and traffic-inducing merges.
Millions of hours of peoples lives are spent stuck in traffic, getting nowhere fast while
emitting dangerous gases into local neighborhoods. The Partnership for New York City
estimated in 2007 that congestion cost the region $13 billion each year in economic and
health costs.

While there is no active congestion pricing policy in effect in the United States,
paying tolls to use bridges and roads is still a rich American driving tradition. I remember
fumbling for change to throw into the toll basket on the New Jersey Turnpike or Interstate
95, a step up from handing over a crumbled bill and coins to a toll collector. By the late
1980s, paying tolls was a cinch with electronic toll collection like E-ZPsss and today,
high-speed toll gantries snap up your toll without you having to hit the brakes. Even
today, many roads and bridges are tolled, but most are not. Yet for some reason, the idea
of paying a toll to enter an area, as opposed to merely a bridge or road, is as foreign as the
idea of paying for driving at all.

The original congestion pricing plan in New York City included an $8 charge for
cars entering Manhattan below 86th Street on weekdays. And part of the impetus of the
charge was to raise a projected $500 million a year to improve transit options in more
parts of the city and reduce crowding and upgrade on the most heavily used parts of the
transit network.

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The task was all the more daunting owing to the seeming randomness surrounding
who runs New York Citys transportation network. DOT operates the citys streets,
sidewalks and the 788 non-tolled bridgesthe Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge
among themplus the Staten Island Ferry. The bi-state Port Authority controls all
bridges and tunnels between New York City and New Jersey, such as the George
Washington Bridge and Lincoln tunnel, plus the regions airports. The state-dominated
Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) operates the citys subways, buses and regional
commuter rails, plus all the tolled inter-borough crossings, like the Robert F.
Kennedy/Triborough Bridge and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Staten Island.

Got that?

Every bridge and tunnel owned by the Port Authority and the MTA is tolled, yet
the citys four East River bridges are as free as New York City tap water. Queens
residents must pay a toll to cross an MTA bridge to the Bronx via the Throgs Neck or
Whitestone bridges, but they can conveniently avoid that toll if they instead cut into
Manhattan via the city Transportation Departments free Ed Koch/Queensboro Bridge
and connect to its free bridges to the Bronx.

Inconsistent tolls at Port Authority and MTA crossings induce millions of drivers,
many of them in large trucks, to use the free Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges and
local streets to reach the Port Authoritys Holland Tunnel and its free one-way trips to

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New Jersey, instead of traveling via Staten Island, where a toll at the MTAs VerrazanoNarrows Bridge awaits that can run $50 for a five-axle truck. The road is telling people to
drive through Manhattan for free, including through Jane Jacobss former stomping
grounds. Charging vehicles to enter Manhattan would send a different message

Opponents framed the debate not in terms of trafficwould it or wouldnt it

succeed in reducing congestionbut in terms of equity. Congestion pricing might sound
like a noble, environmental feel-good move, but it was actually an attack on poorer New
Yorkers, or so the populist appeal went. Elected officials railed that New Yorkers who
were less well-off had no choice but to live in less expensive neighborhoods, which are
further from subways or where bus and transit service doesnt effectively serve. Paying a
daily congestion pricing fee to get to work in Manhattan in this sense can add up to a
$2,000 annual tax that hits those who can least afford to pay it. Wealthier New Yorkers,
meanwhile, wouldnt flinch at the toll and would continue to drive.

I didnt buy that those 1.6 million car-owners entering Manhattan were all
lumpenproletariat any more than I was surprised that the chief spokesman making that
argument was a state legislator from Westchester County, one of the states five
wealthiest counties (the four wealthiest counties all border New York City: Nassau,
Putnam Suffolk and Rockland, all of whom would have been likely to pay a fee if
traveling to Manhattan). Still, elected officials within the city and particularly in the
boroughs outside of Manhattan spoke intensely against the proposal. This was despite the

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fact that relatively few of their constituents drive to Manhattan and far greater numbers of
them would benefit from the revenues raised for better bus and subway service.

Residents from Queens, Staten Island, Bronx and Brooklynthe populations it

was targeted to helpalso railed that it was unfair that their tolls would be used to serve
a public transit that they did not themselves use. Yet in one boroughs example, in
Brooklyn, 57 percent of households dont even own a car, according to Census data. The
households that did own cars enjoyed a median household income a full 100 percent
higher than those without cars. And while we may think of Manhattan as the sole
business hub in town, about two-thirds of Brooklyn workers dont even commute to work
in Manhattan. Those who do commute regularly to Manhattan overwhelmingly take
public transit. When you add together all these figures, the net result is that 97.5 percent
of Brooklyn residents wouldnt have had to pay a congestion charge to get to their jobs.

The equity argument seemed to me to end where congestion pricings balanced

toll proposal began. Different motorists pay different tolls depending where they enter
Manhattan. Its free to cross the East River via the Brooklyn Bridge but a $14 cash roundtrip toll (paid one-way) when taking the Holland Tunnel from Jersey City to Lower
Manhattan. By charging everyone a toll, and by deducting tolls already paid at other
bridges and tunnels from the toll to enter Lower Manhattan, the cost could be
electronically equalized so all drivers paid the same price. If congestion pricing
opponents were truly appalled by regressive tolling, then they should be horrified that so
few people are allowed to drive into Manhattan and congest its streets every day without

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contributing any money to the citys transportation system while millions of transit-riding
New Yorkers are forced to pay fares to board packed subways and buses to reach
Manhattan. New Yorkers backed the proposal 67% to 27%, provided that the proceeds
would be used to improve transit service. Even the typically raucous editorial boards at
New York Citys newspapers supported the plan or at least hedged.

But the decision on congestion pricing wasnt the Mayors or even the New York
City Councils. And like so much of transportation planning, decisions are made in the
political realm instead of the world of transportation planning, funding or even public
opinion. New York states Constitution prohibits New York City from a range of revenue
collection practices without authorization from the legendarily ineffectual state
Legislature, which, true to form, empanelled me with a 17-person commission to study
the plan. After an intense national competition for federal funds under the Urban
Partnership Program, which was started under US Transportation Secretary Mary Peters,
New York City was offered $354 million to implement a congestion pricing program,
conditioned on the state Legislatures approval of the plan by spring 2008.

Another major obstacle lay in lack of public confidence in the citys ability to
manage the program. I served on the board of the Center for Transportation Excellence,
which conducted polling on public attitudes about how to fund transit. Most Americans
polled said they would support significantly increased fees if they could be guaranteed to
fund transit through some kind of lock box mechanism. Absent an ironclad guarantee,
support starts to evaporate. And at the time, many New Yorkers simply didnt believe that

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any revenues raised from a congestion fee could be guaranteed to support transit. Transit
users even today are weary of perpetually looming financial crises and have endured
numerous fare hikes without commensurate improvements in service. Creating a new
revenue stream would just be offset by other cuts in funding and no improved service,
leading to cycle of higher fares and worse service that repeats itself every few years.

The political battle was a six-month full-court press, a blur of meetings, charts
and statistics. In a revised plan, the northern charge zone boundary was moved
downtown, from 86th Street to 60th Street. The state-empanelled commission voted
overwhelmingly to adopt the plan. A City Council vote to authorize congestion pricing
wasnt really close, but the atmosphere in the chambers was no less dramatic when it
yielded a 30-20 yes vote.

But elation turned to dejection when New York State legislators in April 2008
smothered the plan without even taking a vote, typical of the byzantine cowardice of the
institution, led by Sheldon Silver, who stepped down in disgrace from the assembly
speakership in 2015 following his arrest and charges of corruption. Even though the
battle was lost, the conversation changed how New Yorkers look at how they get around
and who pays for it. The latest iteration of the tolling proposal is called the Move NY
Plan and is being discussed at editorial boards, community boards, and political meetings.
The proposal takes a five-borough view by lowering tolls at crossings where drivers dont
have good transit alternatives while instituting tolls at others so that motorists pay more

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or less the same toll wherever they crossand whenever they enter Manhattan below 86th
Street.

I remain convinced that its not a matter of if some kind of tolling plan will be
introduced in New York; its a matter of when.

The smothering of congestion pricing also revealed a strong urban streak: New
Yorkers arent unique in their resentment of being planned to. This applies both to be
being told whats good for them by bureaucrats and also being given false hopes by
idealistic officials bearing futuristic images of infrastructure that never materializes. And
they dont like the idea of governments experimenting on them or socially engineering
the population by incentivizing people to engage in healthier but impractical behavior,
like taking transit. Maybe its the hangover from the Moses era of neighborhooddestroying megaprojects. More than likely theres a little bit of Watergate-era cynicism
that government can be taken at its word. And then there are the occasional reminders of
government ineptitude and leaders who can barely plan for or respond to emergencies
like Katrina, let alone socially engineer a city to a brighter future.

Bloomberg brought a steadier rhythm of credibility, efficiency and transparency to

the officedrumbeats that hadnt been heard in years. New York mayors traditionally
had larger-than-life personalities from central casting, like Rudy Giuliani, the combative

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former prosecutor who as mayor relished attacking his critics, and Ed Koch the
consummate politician and city cheerleader who continually sought the publics public
approval. Bloomberg was less interested in the politics and impassioned anecdotes
surrounding controversial issues than he was with the goal, the strategy and the data. City
agenciestransportation, police, parks, fire, environmental protection, design and
constructionare run by commissioners with varying goals, temperaments and sharpness
of elbows. The resulting policies can vary tremendously and sometimes conflict with one
another, leading to internecine resentments and staff-level battles. Bloomberg brushed all
that aside with his textbook disdain for silos: All agencies will work together, they will
work nice and they will work toward a common goalor else. He didnt have to raise his
voice about it. We all knew that he meant business.

As I took the reins and first sat in the commissioners office, it wasnt lost on me
that the most controversial goals in PlaNYC would be hammered out on the desk where I
now sat. Congestion pricing was just one of them, and there were plenty of others. We
had to launch bus rapid transit. We had to start building 1,800 miles of bike lanes. We had
to bring our streets and bridges into a state of good repair. Thirty years ago, a mere plan
for New York City would have been impossible. Starting on this day, we had no choice
but to work fast.

The job for me started with translating the goals of PlaNYC into a strategic and
action plan for the 4,500-person agency. Setting the vision for any large organization isnt
just a matter of creating a generic mission statement for a web site or creating categories

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where we hoped to improve. We needed specific goals. One of my first hires was Jon
Orcutt, a former advocate who headed some of New Yorks largest transportation
advocacy organizations--and who had the steady judgment and rapid-fire grasp of the
inner workings of government. I also appointed Lori Ardito as First Deputy
Commissioner, empanelling her more than 20 years of experience in the agency in the
position where she was most needed: overseeing the operational arm of the agency that
kept the roads paved, signs and signals up and the Staten Island Ferry running on time. If
we didnt care of the basics, New Yorkers wouldnt give us the chance to be creative.

Working through them and the agencies deputy commissioners, I led a top-tobottom audit of the transportation department to plan our path forward instead of lurching
from emergency to emergency. Within the first year we produced the agencys first-ever
strategic plan, a conversion of PlaNYC at the operational level, and with goals and
benchmarks for a better city. We set a first-ever goal to cut traffic fatalities by half, to
bring bus lanes and bike infrastructure across the city. The more sustainable future
outlined in PlaNYC for DOT meant more recycled asphalt, more bridge investment,
increasing the number of plazas and bike lanes, more cleaner-burning fuels and lights on
our streets, and, critically, creating an entirely new neighborhood communications
strategy.

For years the transportation department communicated with communities through

a curt exchange of letters; for example, a resident or civic group requested a stop sign or a
traffic signal. After an official transportation department study of traffic volumes and the

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number of pedestrians crossing the street, the agency usually wrote back a letter saying
No, the traffic signal did not meet guidelines for installation. From the citizens view,
the government failed in a basic responsibility, one based on their limited expectations.
But the underlying problem that the community wanted solved probably wasnt the rightof-way. It may have been speeding, and they believed that a traffic signal would stop it.
People didnt feel safer letting their children cross the street. In many instances like this,
the request didnt match the solution to the problem. There are 12,000 intersections in
New York City with traffic signals and those intersections are no less prone to dangerous
speedingsignals can spend more than half their time green and drivers who see green
lights almost instinctively hit the gas to beat the red light. You can put up a sign or a
signal at every intersection and not make a dent in the underlying problem.

So instead of just sending a letter denying the traffic signal request, we started to
ask different questions: What was the problem that the community was trying to solve?
Was there another strategy that might solve that problem but that was not considered
since it was not specifically requested? If the problem was speeding, a better bet than a
traffic signal might be traffic calming with narrower lanes, speed bumps and parking
restrictions near the corner so stopped cars wouldnt block the visibility of crossing
pedestrians. Creative street design, not stop signs, could change a street, but people
werent even familiar with the idea of traffic calming. We developed workshops to train
elected officials, their staffs and community board leaders and staff so they would know
what kind of projects they could choose from instead of just signals and signs. We set up
standard operating procedures so that communities could request specific types of traffic

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treatmentsresidential slow zones, improved signs, improved road markings, sidewalk

extensionstailored to a location.

Following the strategic plan, which was inward-focused, we looked outward and
noticed that we werent the only City agency in the street business. The departments of
Design and Construction, Parks, Buildings, Environmental Protection and others all
developed projects that touched the streets. Though we had created a new internal
playbook for road design and the palette of concrete and configurations of streets,
fixtures, new paving and sidewalk materials, many other agencies standard operating
procedures were different or nonexistent. Working among 11 agencies we created New
Yorks first-ever Street Design Manual to put all agencies on the same street-design page.
The result isnt just better streets but more attractive and sustainable ones. Street designs
would now contain built-in ideas for making streets safer by reducing traffic speed. They
included the latest in designs that had been tested in other citieslike bioswales that
channel flooding rainwater from streets into landscaped tree pits, curb extensions that
decreased crossing distances for pedestrians, and new techniques in thermoplastic
imprinting.

Embedding PlaNYC into a citywide street-design protocol was the first step in
turning its bold sustainability visions into executable projects on city streets. It also
provided the source code for looking at streets differently. The substance of the plan was
thoroughly New York, but it was an immediate inspiration to others cities: Mayor Gavin
Newsom in San Francisco released a sustainability vision in 2008, Mayor Michael Nutter

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created Greenworks Philadelphia.

In retrospect we had to ask ourselves, why was it left for cities to figure this out
on their own, and why werent the same principles also being applied to avert suburban
and exurban sprawl? Regrettably, there is no PlanUSA to address national growth and the
invasive development that has drained huge populations away from city centers. On
balance, the interstate highway system was the last and greatest transportation idea to
come from our federal government, connecting cities over incredible distances yet also
creating harmful impacts that cities are still saddled with today. Despite the rise of cities
and the primary directive to connect them with megaprojects, there hasnt been any
organizing principle within cities themselves, much less a unified policy that takes the
view from the street.

Transportation is one of the few disciplines where 33,000 people can lose their
lives in one year and no one in a position of responsibility is put in danger of losing their
job. Transportation is one of the only places where you can complete a multibillion-dollar
megaproject that does little to nothing to improve congestion, safety or mobility and not
be subject to consequences. Managing internal politics and the smoothness of city roads
tend to be more reliable gauges of job security than innovation or accomplishments in
safety or congestion. In this job, its those who attempt new strategies, fight against
established but outmoded ideas and who actively work to reduce congestion who are the
ones who are putting their jobs on the chopping block. Those who do transportation as
usual, who avoid controversy and keep things as they are tend to have jobs for life, even

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as traffic problems stagnate or worsen. The answer to that is not to fire all the city traffic
planners. City residents must have a fuller sense of whats possible on their streets and
start demanding that they be safer and more accommodatingand demanding
accountability and action when there are no results. The public has generally had little
interest in change and has few expectations beyond filling potholes and a general concept
of speeding traffic. As long as planners hear that the public has no appetite for change, it
reinforces the behavior to do nothing.

Just as citizens dont always know what to ask for, the city agencies that have
jurisdiction over streets continue to operate by inertia, tradition and out-of-date planning
standards. In the United States, federal manuals with car-focused diagrams are the
blueprint for the design of the nations 4 million miles of paved roads. These 1950s
standards from the era of Moses are still in binders on the desk of every road engineer in
the nation and part of the reason why our streets have been frozen in time ever since.
Traffic planners often claim that theyd like to try new designs but that their hands are
tied. Theres been no basic restructuring of the official guidelines that American cities use
as the basis for their street design plans. Planners are afraid to innovate for fear that safe
but not specifically sanctioned designs will be dismissed as risky, liability-laden
treatments, or that non-standard designs might jeopardize sorely needed federal funding.
Instead, those tasked with street design take their operating guidance from the Federally
blessed Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), or in guidelines in the
Green Book from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation
Officials (AASHTO).

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The clip-art of signs, stripes and signs on the cover and the words highway and
uniform in the title tell you everything you need to know about the manual. First
published in 1971, the MUTCD has had a more obvious and lasting impact on American
city streets than any single document. It establishes the process to determine how many
cars over how long a period at a variety of different types of intersection shall result in a
stop sign, traffic signal, or turn lane. It provides standards on roadway width and lane
size, gradations of shoulders and length, color and characteristics of striping and signs.
They are bare-minimum baselines for the installation of streets, markings and signs
which, in practice, help streets to operate like highways and less like neighborhoods.
The documents give planners the leeway to leave good enough alone by simply making
sure that streets have the primitive elements they need to serve basic functions. The
guidelines stifle innovation first with their silence on pedestrian- and bike-friendly
treatments. No examples are given of real-world street experience or road typologies that
can be tailored to reflect the human perspectivethe kind of usage that cant be
measured by traffic volumes or travel time. In the 816 pages of diagrams, human beings
are conspicuously absent from any representations of the street.

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Like Mosess Futurama exhibit, the streets in the federal manual on street
design features no people

These manuals are as instructive in designing streets as the car owners manuals in
a new cars glove compartment is in teaching people how to drive. Theres no
imagination in these documents and sense of how street design works, only a background
notion of how to keep cars moving. The typology for protected bike paths is nowhere to
be found in the MUTCD, even as 200 miles of these new treatments have been installed
nationwide in Chicago, Washington DC, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Portlandmore
than 50 cities in total in nearly half of all 50 states. New York Citys 42 miles of protected
paths installed by 2014 led to dramatic decreases in traffic injuries by all street users, not
just bike riders. Despite this widespread acclamation and results, AASHTO failed to
include protected lanes in its 2012 updated bicycle facility guidethe first update that
the group had made for the guide in 13 years. These standards have led state
transportation departments astray. In Virginia, state transportation officials virtually

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eliminated trees along major roads because they were deemed fixed object hazards.
While its true that many cars may have veered off the road and into a tree, removing the
tree may not solve the problem of people running off the road. While they were at it,
maybe they should have removed pedestrians.

What we need to revive city streets arent minimum standards. Our cities need
maximum options for street design. As more cities have gone off the reservation and
experimented with more innovative and bold street treatments, the heads of the
transportation agencies of the nations largest cities created their own playbook,
incorporating designs that are now being perfected in cities across the continent. The
Urban Street Design Guide, an urban how-to guide produced by the National Association
of Transportation Officials (NACTO), a group that I ran while transportation
commissioner and which I now serve as chair, provides a compendium of real-world
street innovations. The guide details a broad range of protected bike paths, curb
extensions that shorten crossing distances for pedestrians, and versatile lane treatments
that reprogram a street to reduce the speed of passing cars and to make pedestrians, bikers
and transit riders feel at home.

With cities acting on their own, more are rising to the challenge not with
megaprojectsbuilding ballparks or Olympic stadiums. Instead, they are thinking big by
thinking small, with projects that can be implemented quickly and inexpensively, without
having to build a bridge or a new road. As of this writing, seven states and more than 40
cities have endorsed the NACTO Urban Street Design Guide and the federal government

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endorsed it with its imprimatur in 2014, thanks to the leadership of then-US

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. The guide gives cities a permission slip to try
new things and is a statement of imagination on what streets could be. But within cities,
the inertia is still weighted toward street designs that dont provide the kind of versatility,
technique and inspiration that streets need to make them more accessible for people who
bike, walk, drive or take transit. Where guidebooks provide the technical know-how,
theres no substitute for real-world experience.

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Ch. 3: How to Read the Street

This looks like Carvana!

It was May of 2014, and an exuberant Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti stood
with transportation officials on a Getty Center balcony overlooking the Sepulveda Pass
and a four-and-a-half year project to build a 10-mile carpool lane on the northbound 405
freeway. Following an extended construction nightmare and opening 18 months late and
$100 million over budget, just finishing the $1.1 billion job was as close as you could get
to car-based nirvana in this town.

If theres any city thats a punch line for car-based planning and traffic, its Los
Angeles, and the 405 (Southern Californians always use the definite article) holds a
special stature as one of the worst-of-the-worst roads in the hemisphere. Its a
transportation facility where peace of mind dies faster than you can say, Have a nice
day. An average of 300,000 vehicles daily cruise that stretch of the Sepulveda Pass at
speeds that dip well below 20 mph. A study of GPS data estimated that Angelenos spend
90 hours a year stuck in traffic, or suffering through about 39 minutes of delay for every
hour of commuting time. Transportation officials wanted to chip away at that time.

By dedicating a northbound lane for carpool vehicles only, and not for use by
people driving alone, the project filled the final gap in a 70-mile continuous carpool lane.
At best, the five-mile extension was expected to cut peak travel times on that section of

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the 405 by 10 minutes. While that may not seem like a lot of time in a commute that can
easily take more than an hour, every minute saved from the frustration of stop-and-go
traffic is a welcome reprieve from to the driver, and evidence that planners are doing
something about traffic. Officials also hoped that the carpool lane would encourage
more people to share rides and benefit from the less-congested lane, removing a few cars
out of the general traffic lanes, reducing congestion and saving the planet. Those
expectations turned out to be grossly misplaced.

Six months after the lanes grand opening, a study by a private transportation
data-analysis firm found that travel times on the 405 had barely changed or had actually
gotten slightly worse during the peak rush hours of 4 to 7 p.m. Travel on the northbound
405 from the 10 to the 101 freeways took 35 minutesone minute longer than the same
period in the previous year. With an added lane, everyone expected traffic to improve at
least on an order of magnitude commensurate with the added lane. Yet traffic remained
just as bad. So what happened? Did an engineer miscalculate?

Regrettably, this result on the 405 was only the latest example of a global traffic
phenomenon that transportation planners have ignored during a century of road building.
When it comes to transportation, you get what you build for. What happened on the 405
wasnt an isolated incident or just an engineering snafu. Building more lanes creates more
traffic. While this is a fundamental planning principle for large and growing numbers of
urban designersand as decades of evidence has mounted with diminishing traffic
returns for every mile of new road builtthe lesson hasnt worked its way into state

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transportation departments, which are filled with people whose primary mission is to
build and maintain more roads. As long as planners widen roads and build new ones; as
long as drivers have poor transportation options and remain insulated from the full cost of
their trips; and as long as government policies encourage people to live in far-flung
suburbs, we will have an even more sprawling urban future and many more 405-level
Carvanas to come. As of this writing, and as I bury my face in my hands, Californias
transportation department is mulling a $5.6 billion tunnel to extend the 710 freeway, a
process that could take six years of Carmageddon construction and street closures. To
understand how this counterintuitive reality works, we need to start at the core of the
core, a city street through the heart of downtown, and understand what it means to be a
street.

Like highways, the streets and sidewalks where the majority of the worlds
population now live are largely bleak, utilitarian corridors, and sidewalks are what remain
after space was carved out to move cars. For most people who have spent their entire
lives in cities, these utilitarian streets are invisible, one of the millions of unprocessed
systems and pieces of information gathered by the senses every day. Despite their
invisibility, streets are the universal networks that connect cities and their inhabitants
physically, commercially, psychologically and emotionally. Virtually all city denizens
spend at least some of the day on, along or crossing the street. Schoolchildren and
deliverymen. Commuters heading to work, residents and visitors heading to shopping
districts. Tourists threading through the city to local attractions. They walk, they jog, they
bike, they travel in cars, minivans, buses and box trucks. And they typically move along a

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grid matrix designed by engineers, playing out the outdated calculus defined in
engineering manuals, surrounded by the standard-issue traffic controls that double as
default urban design: zebra-striped crosswalks, hash-marked lanes, stop signs and bright
yellow school crossing signsand the functional, often ignored, almost ornamental
traffic signals and streetlights. This is effectively urban design for most of the worlds
population.

And despite this design for things that move, you can see peoples expectations
for their streets transcend mere transportation. People talk to each other on the sidewalk;
they lean against buildings or parking signs while talking on the phone. Co-workers eat a
slice of pizza or a sandwich together sitting on a fire hydrant or leaning on a parking
meter. Joggers and walkers jockey around families with little ones in strollers. People are
inspired by their lights and sounds, and the thrill of merely being in the presence of
others. Regardless of how they are ignored or overlooked, savored or squandered, streets
tell people how to use them, and theyre sending a very dangerous message. Wide streets
with poorly defined lanes tell people in cars to speed and offer enough roadway for them
to drive recklessly. Once the daily rush hours pass, the now-empty street tell them to
drive as fast as possible. This design reflects the drivers perspective. It tells people on
foot or on a bike that theyre not welcome. Streets that provide poor space for pedestrians
tell them to get to where theyre going as quickly as possible and not to linger on the
sidewalk.

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On our busy urban avenue its almost impossible for most people to see past the
buses, the taxis, ambulances, pedestrians, delivery trucks, parked and double-parked cars
to start to read the street and understand what its saying. Were conditioned not to notice
the street unless it changes. But beyond the moving parts, the streets underlying design is
hidden in plain sight. Its a kind of engineering archaeology, as what we see is not just the
street as it is today, but also what planners thought the street was when they designed it
50 years ago or longer.

Fig. 1 A model street: One-way, four 12-foot lanes, countless road design
possibilities (NACTO Urban Street Design Guide)

A lot of people would glance at the street in Fig. 1 and say It looks like a street.
But lets take this model street apart and read between the lanes. This particular example
is a one-way street with four 12-foot lanes. Its similar, give or take a lane or a foot or
two, to thousands of miles of streets that city dwellers live, walk or work on. Its Spring
Street in Los Angeles, Pitt Street in Sydney, Tremont Place in Denver or Cherry Street in

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Downtown Seattle. Add a lane and its Fell Street in San Francisco or Dearborn Avenue in
Chicago. Two parking lanes flank the road, one on each side along the curb. The two
center lanes are dedicated for moving vehicles. Where our model street meets an
intersection, pairs of parallel lines perpendicular to the flow of traffic mark the crosswalk
where people on foot can cross the 48-foot street with the pedestrian signal.

We havent even begun to notice the parking signs, streetlights and pedestrian
ramps, or why the street is even one-way in the first place, but lets start by looking
closely at these 12-foot lanes. Twelve feet isnt a random number. Its the standard width
of many interstate highway lanes as prescribed in the federal road design guide. That
recommendation is meant to make highways safe and provide lanes deemed adequate for
the widest semis. So whats good for the highway must also be good for city streets,
right? Not so much. A 2014 Toyota Camry is only about six feet wide and the vast
majority of trucks and commercial vehicles are less than eight and a half feet across.
When you multiple the six feet of excess lateral space built into every traffic lane, you
can begin to see how this street is grossly overbuilt. This model street alone can easily
have more than 20 feet of excess road space not actually needed to move or park
vehicles. Multiply that by tens of thousands of lane-miles in hundreds of urban areas
around the world and youll find literally hundreds of thousands of miles of sidewalks,
bike lanes and public spacesentire citiestrapped within our streets.

Why are streets and their lanes so wide in the first place? The theory, if someone
would explain it, might go something like this: Wider streets mean more room to move

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more cars, and wider lanes give cars a buffer so they dont hit each other. So in reality, all
this excess space is hidden within thousands of streets simply to give cars breathing room
24 hours a day, 365 days a year. With that much buffer, streets should be the safest places
on earth, yet there is no place more congested and dangerous. The highway hypnosis that
makes planners treat city streets like highways also makes them divvy up lanes like
turnpikes under the theory that bigger is better. And once the street is laid out, the space
between sidewalks is presumed to be the domain of the motor vehicle. Each of these
concepts only compounds the wrongness of the problem that preceded it.

But if you can read the street, you can make it safer and function better not by
totally reconstructing it but just by reallocating the space thats already there. Two of the
four lanes on our model street are reserved for parking and the remaining two for moving
traffic. No room for bikes and pedestrians, right? Look again: Without eliminating any
traffic lanes, there is more than enough room on this street to add a bike lane and to
shorten the distance that pedestrians must cross by two full lanes. We can even dedicate a
lane for buses without having to ban parking or ripping out sidewalks, just by using the
space thats already there. How is this possible?

First, we can expand the use of a street by narrowing its lanes. Reducing the
parking lanes that flank both sides of the street from 12 to just nine feet wide leaves more
than enough room to park an even larger-than-average vehicle. And we can reinforce
these dimensions by painting a line on the street marking where the parking lane ends.
This simple change can yield six full feet of space on the street that can now be

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reprogrammed for other uses. Six feet is more than enough room for a bike lane, and we
havent even touched the moving traffic lanes yet. Now, where will this new bike lane go
between the lane of parked cars in the left of the picture and a lane of moving traffic?
Lets try something different. Look at the parking lane on the far right. You might be
accustomed to seeing only parked cars along virtually every curb in every city, but theres
no lawlegal, moral or otherwiserequiring that it be there. Its a choice. If we place
the bike lane where the parking lane used to be, the parking lane becomes a floating
lane, parallel to but not alongside the curb. By the bike lane on the left side of the road,
we also keep riders away from the bus stop on the right side so that bus and bike traffic
dont cross paths.

Fig. 2: Same street, different way: The same number of traffic lanes, but with
added room for a protected bike path, curb extensions for pedestrians that
reduce crossing distances from four lanes to two, connecting with a planted
refuge island. (NACTO Urban Street Design Guide)
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So now we have a bike lane at the left curb and a parking lane next to it. Next,
lets narrow the two moving lanes from 12 to 10 feet each. This leaves enough room for
moving traffic and lets us reclaim an additional four feet of roadbedspace that can be
added as a buffer between the bike lane and the parking lane so the doors of those getting
out of their cars dont swing into the bike lane and door a passing bike rider. The
remaining two 10-foot traffic lanes are better organized and, by there very narrowness,
safer. Clearer, more aggressive markings reinforce these changes and tell motorists how
to drive, telegraphing that they shouldnt speed or change lanes unnecessarily.

Now lets move closer to the intersection. For the cost of concrete, we can easily
extend the sidewalk out into the curbside lane adjacent to the crosswalkand where
parking isnt needed. Known as a bulb out or neck down this creates space for
passengers to board and get off a bus without the bus having to pull over to the curb. By
extending the curb into the roadbed on one side and building a pedestrian refuge island
on the other, weve reduced two full lanes that pedestrians must cross, cutting nearly in
half the territory where people on foot and those in cars are in each others paths.

The surprising thing about the remaining 10-foot travel lanes is that they are safer
than 12-footers. Highway-sized lanes induce the highway speeds and lane-changing
tendencies that go with them, and those wide-open lines provide more room for drivers to
wind up in anothers blind spot. The biggest consideration in how fast people drive isnt
the posted speed limit, but the design speedthe vehicle speed that the street was

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designed to accommodate. By changing the streets geometry and reducing the size of
individual lanesand therefore bringing vehicles closer togetheryou might think that
there would be more collisions and jostling of cars. But a funny thing happens when
people driving cars suddenly find themselves in closer quarters on the road: they tend to
exercise more caution and drive slower, and lower speed is more effective than wider
lanes in averting and reducing the severity of crashes on city streets. Narrower lanes and
design changes that physically narrow or abut travel lanes are a visual and somewhat
unconscious cue for motorists to slow down and stay in their lane. From the drivers
perspective, the road seems slimmer, tighter and more clearly defined, hence the
nickname for this kind of intervention: Road diet, or traffic calming.

Extending the curb at the crosswalk also corrects one of the most basic design
flaws inherited from generations of planners: the rounded, right-angled corner. The grid
makes sense to the human sense of order, but theres no reason that should apply to the
corner itself. Something literal and symbolic happens when people step off the curb
once they enter that street, the domain of the motor vehicle, they lose their status as
people and become mere pedestrians. Speed and distraction erode visibility, so when
pedestrians step off the curb into the crosswalk, they immediately enter road space where
a turning car may have already claimed dibs. This is part of the street where pedestrians
are most likely to be legally walking, and where motor vehicles rarely have a need to
drive. It is also the spot where pedestrians are hardest to see, their sightlines often
blocked by parked vehicles and obstructions, and having lost six inches of height by
stepping from the sidewalk into the road, it needlessly increases their risk of being struck.

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The very wideness of the crosswalk itself provides no cues to drivers to slow
down, practically inviting them to cut corners at high speeds while turning intoyou
guessed itanother crosswalk, and it offers no protection for pedestrians against turning
trucks and buses. In the vast majority of street designs, allowing vehicles that close to the
curb in the crosswalk serves little traffic engineering purpose, and future streets should be
built to a different standard.

Fig. 3 Curb extensions, highlighted in this image, decrease crossing distances for
pedestrians, reclaiming crosswalk space not needed to move traffic to better
establish the presence of people crossing the street and provide a cue to reduce
speeding. (NACTO Urban Street Design Guide)

Instead, the missing links are curb extensions, which should be the standard at
crosswalks where the curbside lane is not used for moving traffic or transit access. Curb
extensions on both sides of a street can give people about to set foot in the street nearly

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20 fewer feet of moving vehicle space that they have to cross. The extended sidewalk
also enhances the pedestrians profile on the street, making them more visible to drivers
as they are about to enter the crosswalk. The narrowing of the crosswalk may not
physically narrow the traffic lane, but the double-sided extension, known as a
neckdown, sends a powerful message to drivers to ease up on the gas.

Two-way streets offer similar challenges and opportunities. Fig. 4 shows a street
with three moving lanes in both directions with parking lanes on both sides.

Fig. 4, A common, two-way, eight-lane street: More than meets the eye. (NACTO
Urban Street Design Guide)

On wide and complex multi-lane streets, many cities are discovering a design
principle that has widespread applications: When it comes to lanes, less is more. Having
fewer but more efficient lanes can move traffic better than more lanes that are poorly

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designed. Without lanes dedicated for turning vehicles, a street with three-lanes of traffic
in each direction may be little better than a street with only one traffic lane for both
directions. For example, a car moving in one direction may be stopped in the leftmost
lane, waiting for a break in traffic travelling in the opposite direction before making a left
turn. That single, stopped car may block an entire line of cars behind it for a whole light
cycle, forcing those drivers to inch their way around and into the middle lane, and
slowing that middle lane as well. The same thing may happen at the same time in the
rightmost lane, with a vehicle waiting for a break in pedestrians to cross before turning.
When you add the real possibility that a vehicle may already be double-parked or stopped
somewhere in that right lane, you have that much more traffic trying to get around these
stopped vehicles via the middle lane. None of the three lanes are functioning efficiently.
The street falls apart.

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Fig. 5 Less is more: Two efficient lanes plus turn lanes at intersections can be
better than three for everyone on the street (NACTO Urban Street Design Guide)

Reducing three lanes to two lanes doesnt reduce the amount of traffic that the
street can process; in another counterintuitive traffic principle, fewer lanes can sustain or
even increase traffic capacity. At the intersection, turn lanes can segregate turning cars
from traffic in the main two lanes, letting them proceed straight through the intersection
smoothly. The two lanes removed from through traffic can be reassigned for protected
bike paths on either side plus a median in the middle of the road to make the street more
attractive. Pedestrian islands provide safe stations during the long walk across the street,
and one designed to accommodate passengers getting on and off the bus.

In old cities in the northeast and even on the Pacific Coast, not all streets are
designed on a perfect grid, but they can still offer opportunities in their angles. Many
cities have irregular intersections where a street crosses a grid on an angle or where
multiple streets meet and create complex crossings. These oblique angles create the
potential for public space and to better organize the intersection. In Fig. 6, three roads
converge, one of them just short of an intersection, leaving a large triangle of empty
space not needed to move cars. This effectively creates a three-way intersection, which is
difficult to organize and creates confusion and unsafe conditions.

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Fig. 6: Three roads converge in downtown hood. Irregular angles make for
abundant unused road.

There are infinite ways to redesign this kind of intersection. In Fig. 7, we can
merge the two lower legs of the intersection in order to make all crossings two-way. This
simplified design creates pedestrian space at two different corners. The space on the
upper left is particularly interesting in that it expands the available sidewalk area where
there is already open space adjacent to a building, activating that space and providing
room for food vendors, tables and chairs and foot traffic. Bulb-outs, sidewalks extensions
and neckdowns complete the design at all corners of the intersection.

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Fig. 7 Reconfiguring complex intersections can activate un- or underused road

space, as in the lower plaza, or create new space, as in the upper plaza, all while
better organizing traffic and providing room for pedestrians and bike riders.

These are just a few basic examples of the limitless possibilities hidden within
streets. Not all streets are the same, and there thousands of ways to tailor the design to the
specific geometry and needs of the road. The most important factors are observing and
how a street is being used and building that use into the street itself.

For most people, a traffic problem means traffic congestion. Its one of the most
vexing issues affecting quality of life in cities. Busy streets and highways are ugly, noisy
and inconvenient. Nobody wants to live near them yet many cities make it hard to live or
get around without being near one. No one likes to be stuck in traffic with no idea how

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long it will take to get to where theyre going. Yet millions of people around the world
spend days of their lives every year sitting idle in their cars in trafficAmericans
average 101 minutes a day a sign that they are faced with unattractive alternative
options for getting around. Roads arent just literally built for cars, they also reinforce
against vital human behaviors like social interaction and spontaneity. Driving eats into
the little free time that we have for our personal relationships and health, and as it extends
the distance we are able to travel between home, work and play, it also turns in-between
neighborhoods into drive-through corridors.

But ask anyone driving a car and stopped in traffic what should be done you may
get the clear answer: More and wider roads! Compared to most controversial public
issues, traffic seems like the simplest problem to address. When in the drivers seat,
people see traffic congestion as a sign that the infrastructure supply hasnt kept up with
traffic demand. There are too many cars and the road isnt big enough to accommodate
them. Just build another lane to accommodate all the volume of cars and the traffic will
go away. Problem solved, right?

Remember what happened with the 405 at the beginning of this chapter? As
weve seen traffic congestion isnt a matter of too little supplyroadsits largely a
product of overabundant and increasing demand of too many people driving. Increasing
the supply of road space doesnt alleviate traffic, it almost always allows more people to
drive more. If building roads actually resulted in less traffic then surely after 60 years of
interstate highway construction we would all be cruising at highway speed by now.

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Instead, the experience of thousands of road-building and widening projects

shows that adding more lanes or roads virtually never results in less traffic on those
roads. You can see it on New York Citys Gowanus Expressway, where a third lane added
in both directions to the five-mile straightaway during the 1950s is bumper-to-bumper
every rush hour today. The New York State Transportation Department added bus and
carpool lanes to the Staten Island Expressway starting in the mid 2000s from the
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to the Goethals Bridge with no end to the traffic. And
evidence has mounted showing that spending billion of dollars on road projects is no
more effective at stemming congestion than building nothing. Thats right, cities that built
no new highways had no more (or less) congestion than cities that spent billions on
expansions like the 405. A 2009 study by Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner, two
economics researchers with the University of Toronto, looked at driving data from cities
that invested in new roads from 1980 to 2000 and those who didnt. The data suggests a
fundamental law of road congestion where the extension of most major roads is met
with a proportional increase in traffic. Not just a close correlation, but for every one mile
of road built, vehicle miles travel increased by one mile.

The term of art for this lock-step growth in traffic is induced traffic. Its a
tedious topic for those who have seen city after city around the world apparently
oblivious to this fact and eagerly ignoring the increasingly real impact its having on our
cities. In factoring in the impacts of a project that will increase capacity, traffic planners,
through sheer convention and, even more likely, to stack the deck in favor of building,

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assume that roughly the same number of people driving on a street today will use the
street after the new road or lane is built.

When infrastructure-building agencies build an eight-lane highway in a major

urban area, that city almost invariably finds itself with eight lanes of slow-moving traffic
soon thereafter. When, in an effort to ease that traffic, the same agency expands the eightlane road by 25 percent to 10 lanes, the city will eventually have 10 lanes of traffic and
nearly 25 percent more traffic, not an order of magnitude less. Whats most dismaying
about this planning principle is that it has been almost universally ignored over the last
half-century. Writing in 1955, at the dawn of the Interstate age and the Moses era,
urbanist Lewis Mumford made the immortal observation: Trying to fix congestion by
building more traffic lanes is like trying to prevent obesity by loosening ones belt.

As we have seen, the road tells you how it wants to be used, and conventional
traffic studies dont factor in what invariably happens when motoristswho are people,
not mathematical constantsare greeted by a wider road: They drive more. Once
motorists see that a road has been widened, more people will be inclined to drive more
frequently, confident they wont hit traffic. Meanwhile, others who were previously
reluctant to drive because of congestion will see the extra capacity and conclude that now
the road is fixed. The number of miles traveled by car goes up, hitting capacity soon
after the road is opened. When combined with natural growth in local population, more
people will drive on that road. Maybe they are people who would have lived closer to
their job, but once the road opens, the range they are willing to drive increases. By

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building more and wider highways, cities are not building your way out of congestion.
They are literally building how many lanes of congestion they will have.

So if the capacity of road isnt the underlying problem behind congestion, what
can we do about the volumethe supply? Managing people in cars isnt a matter of
managing, modeling adjusting streams as you would taps of water. Traffic volumes are a
result of the peoples transportation choices among the alternatives offered them. If
millions of people are driving, its not necessarily because they want to. In fact, they may
have few or no alternatives based upon the options provided by a transportation network.
Cities are designed to be accessed by cars not because it is the only efficient mode, but
because most other options have been rendered impossible following planning decisions
made 50, 75 and 100 years ago. Instead of building new roads, urban planners need to
start with building new choices that give city residents an efficient way to opt out of
driving alone. If cities truly want a future where more people choose to take buses or
trains, to bike or walk, then cities must invest in trains and buses, bikes and better streets.
Yet, as the New York experience has shown, this concept is counterintuitive. It is in fact a
transportation Copernican revolution. And as in the Renaissance, the battle is not just
with the science, its within the culture.

Entire populations have been inculcated in the auto-centric view that

transportation is a car, and that transportation infrastructure refers only to the streets and
bridges that move them. Streets belong to cars, and pedestrians, bike riders and public
transitall street lifeare natural enemies of this order. It wasnt always this way but a

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concerted effort promoted by the automobile industry and associated interests in the early
20th century. Frightened by the arrival of fast-moving automobiles on city streets in the
1910s and 1920s, city residents, schools and civic associations reacted with horror as cars
brought street casualties and congestion. The automotive confederacy, which historian
Peter Norton refers to collectively as motordom, saw this shock and alarm as a direct
threat to its existence, with growing calls for lower speed. To combat this, motordom
offered an alternate version of events: pedestrian deaths werent innocents, they may have
been to blame for their own casualties. Norton records how motordom brought the word
jay walking into popular use and groups such as the American Automobile Association
created safety campaigns and free materials for schools that reinforced an idea that streets
are for carsand that pedestrians should take responsibility for their own safety by
avoiding it. So streets starting in the 1930s were increasingly designed based on the
principle that might makes right of way and that pedestrians could be kept safe only by
barring them from the street. In order to save lives, the street as it was previously known
had to die.

To this day, the street is viewed as exclusively belonging to cars, and all other
users are viewed as threats to the streets order and to blame for their own mounting
casualties. The very idea of accommodating people other than those in cars is seen as
dangerous for the city, whose economy, life and operation will cease without car traffic.
So the only cure for congestion, safer streets and improved transportation options is
wait for itmore car-based infrastructure.

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But what if no new roads are built? Would cars eventually pile up in the middle
of the street like so many dirty socks in a laundry hamper? Another way of looking at it:
If California transportation officials didnt build the new lane on the 405, would the cars
have stopped coming? And if cities tore down old roads instead of repairing or replacing
them, what would happen to the traffic? A look at San Franciscos Embarcadero finds a
charming promenade, streetcar corridor and bike lane. Theres no sign today of the
70,000 cars that formerly used the Embarcadero Freeway before it was damaged in the
1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The Embarcadero was one of numerous road structures in
the Bay Area that experienced catastrophic failure or collapse during the quake. Mother
Nature had made a reality something that San Francisco residents had contemplated but
were too afraid to actually try: tear down the eyesore elevated highway along the
picturesque waterfront and improve access for people to their famous waterfront.

While it may have taken an Act of God to change the transportation network 25
years ago, more cities today are choosing different paths for their elevated roads instead
of spending billions to rebuild what has failed or become obsolete. Madrid tore down a
freeway and created in its place an underground complex of highways, turning over six
miles of space to be converted into parkland, called Madrid Rio (Madrid River). Officials
in Seoul razed an elevated highway to reveal the humble, hidden Gaechon creek beneath
that has been programmed with art installations and public events. What was once
shrouded in darkness is now an attraction where thousands of people snap selfies.

In Los Angeles, the streetscape of the future may be less like the 405 and more

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like Broadway in downtown. Mayor Garcettis transportation department, under the

leadership of Seleta Reynolds, is revitalizing its downtown with pedestrian space painted
onto the street itself along its own Broadway, and with bike lanes and city-backed
curbside patio seating in former parking spaces along Spring Street. A bike master plan is
taking shape and Garcetti and Reynolds have embarked on a Great Streets program to
redesign corridors in 15 neighborhoods to make them safer, more walkable communities.
The administration of President Obama committed $330 million to help Los Angeles
extend its Purple Line subway and create a downtown regional connector system, and a
$2-billion, 8.5-mile light rail along Crenshaw Boulevard to Los Angeles Airport. Still,
residents of Beverly Hills protested the planned West Side subway expansion beneath
Beverly Hills High School, saying the tunnel was close to an earthquake fault and would
create a possible explosion hazard conflict with their expansion plans. A judge threw out
the case.

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Broadway, Downtown Los Angeles. Credit: Melendrez Partners

Downtown Los Angeles may also be first in line for a bike share program, and
its progress could easily be a model for pedestrian-friendly and place-making projects in
Hollywood, seven miles away. In 2012, Then-councilmember Eric Garcetti worked with
his predecessor, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to alter zoning regulations in Hollywood and
would allow high-rise residential and commercial buildings. Higher density buildings
would provide needed housing and take advantage of the recently extended subway
system, decreasing dependence on single-occupant vehicles that have made Los Angeles
a punch line for sprawl and traffic.

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Despite these virtuous-sounding aims, neighborhood residents opposed the plan,

using language that Jane Jacobs herself might have used but which was absent from the
public dialog over the building of the 405: More is not better, bigger is not better, the
president of the Hollywoodland Homeowners Association said at a pubic hearing, quoted
in The New York Times. Hollywood needs limits, protections and preservations, not
destruction and high density. Please save Hollywood. Once its lost it will be gone
forever.

The upzoning succeeded. Los Angeles may yet have a chance of developing
more like a city and less like a dense and ever-sprawling suburb. But it wont be without
controversy and people fighting tooth and nail to maintain streets exactly as they are
even if they are broken, dangerous, congested and underperforming.
While there is seemingly no end to how far suburban Los Angeles is capable of
sprawling, other cities long ago took a different approach. In Oregon, the city of Portland
long ago established a principle of living within its immediate and intermediate needs.
Inspired by urban development models from early 20th century England and led by
visionary governor Tom McCall, the Oregon state legislation in 1973 required cities to
establish boundaries outside of which development for commercial or residential uses is
prohibited. Every five years cities can assess their land use needs for the next 20 years
and, if they believe there is a compelling need, they can make their case before the
legislation to open new tracts of green space for housing or business.

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By concentrating new growth within city boundaries, critics argue that the
boundaries inflate real estate prices that would adjust themselves if left land use were left
to free market. But something else has happened too. Portland has become a model for
transit and human-powered transportation. Its bike rate of 6.1% of commutes, while
laughably small by European standards, and even with commuting trips representing only
a fraction of overall bike trips, is the closest thing to Copenhagen among American cities
of more than a half million people. Bike commuting tripled from 2000 to 2012. Streetcars
ply the car-free streets of downtown.

In 2015, Portland officials opened the Tilikum Crossing, a 1,720-foot bridge

that was the first span over the Willamette River in 40 years. The bridge, known as the
Bridge of the People, was designed to carry trains for Portlands light rail MAX system,
streetcars, buses, bikes, pedestrians, ambulances and fire trucks. Private cars are
specifically barred from the bridge. The pedestrian and bike paths are designed with
belvederesrecessed areas where people can stop and admire the view without blocking
other people walking or riding bikes.

By designing infrastructure and developing real estate to support people who

walk, ride bikes or take public transit, cities arent merely meeting existing demand, they
are creating a demand for the kind of growth the city wants to see and needs to survive. If
planning past is prelude, cities that invest in sustainable transportation will get what they
build for.

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Ch. 4: Desire Lines: Following the Footsteps

Before there was a New York City, there was a Broadway. Originally breede weg
in pre-Colonial Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam, Broadway was one of the islands original
roads at a time when there was a literal wall built at Wall Street to keep out native
incursions and Five Points was a pond within a swamp. What is today Broadway
followed the outline of the Wickquasgeck Path, formed by the feet and the bushwhacking
of the Native American inhabitants, who made Manhattan an original walking city. The
earliest Colonial streets followed no set pattern and New Amsterdam was built atop, over
and through existing footpaths in building a new settlement akin to a medieval European
town, with short buildings and narrow, curved streets. Roads emanated in every direction,
sometimes coming to an end at the edge of a farm, with activity concentrated around
miniature villages through the 18th century.

In a sense, Broadway was New York Citys original desire line. Desire lines are
naturally occurring travel patterns that reflect where people naturally want to travel,
regardless of what the street, architecture or built (or un-built) environment offers. What
we call Broadway today originated with a path worn by thousands of feet centuries ago,
not from a developers review of population and growth data or with a surveyors plan for
a road. There were likely practical reasons why Broadway took the path it didit may
have been the shortest distance between pre-Colonial settlements in Manhattan, avoiding
hills, rocky outcrops and geographic features, rivers and swamps. But even before Times
Square, Broadway was the way that people wanted to go.

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In modern urban planning, desire lines refer to natural, spontaneous way that
people use public spaces, often contradicting the way the space was designed. These
signatures are usually direct and practical lines and they can leave physical evidence: A
footpath worn into a patch of grass where pedestrians cut a corner to get from a sidewalk
to a park path or bus stop.

Worn grass illustrates where a sidewalk, bus stop and crosswalk should be on Mosholu
Parkway in the Bronx, left, or in Philadelphia, where Rocky could have used a
crosswalk before running up the stairs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, right, in the
1976 film. (Left, NYC DOT; Right; TK)

For urban planners, desire lines speak volumes about the street. While the design
of a street tells people how it wants to be used, people can vote with their feet how it
should be used it. They are highly localized expressions of where and how a public space
doesnt work for the people for whom it was designed. Its not always as obvious as a

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footpath. If you observe people for an extended period, you may notice them walking in
ways that contradict the design of the space. Bikers ride against the direction of traffic for
one block to the entrance of a bridge instead of taking a three-block route along one-way
streets. And while desire lanes can seem charming, they can sometimes be dangerous. If a
street tells pedestrians to cross at marked crosswalks hundreds of feet distant, the
pedestrians may instead opt and to cross, illegally, midblock to reach their destination.

Fig X: A desire line on 51st Street between 6th and 7th avenues in Midtown
Manhattan, where hundreds of pedestrians daily cross midblock to reach the
entrance of a pedestrian arcade (at left) instead of walking hundreds of feet to
the corner crosswalks. Similar pedestrian traffic patterns emerge near transit
stops or institutions located far from crosswalks. (TK Insert After picture in
subsequent graf)

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And theres more that meets the eye when you observe the street. In a kind of
urban koan on New York Citys streets, the sight of tens of thousands of people sitting on
fire hydrants and leaning on streetlight poles, buildings and railings daily made a silent
but profound statement: There was no place on our streets and sidewalks where people
could do nothing. Yet doing nothing is paradoxically one of the animating forces in a city.
Its why people in residential areas gather on stoops and why public parks are so popular.
Its why people pay to sit in a caf long past the duration of their latte. Conversely, people
perched atop fire hydrants is a sign of sidewalk desperation. The street was telling
pedestrians that they werent important. Pedestrians themselves often feel undervalued, as
if theyre not welcome on the street. How could the citys planners have overlooked this
basic need? It was the same highway hypnosis that we discussed in Chapter X. In
maximizing the citys streets for cars and removing obstacles, planners didnt spend much
time looking for organizing principles for the sidewalk beyond just getting from place to
place. Aside from parks, benches were viewed as sidewalk clutter and at odds with New
Yorkers desire to get where theyre going. We found that these assumptions were
misplaced or at least not absolute.

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Understanding how the sidewalk fits into the urban plane is critical to the
livability and vibrancy of cities. As a complement to our streets our shared space,
sidewalks arent just a collection of transportation corridors. Life isnt just what happens
at the destinationat home or the officeits also what happens while traveling from
place to place. Whether neighborhood sidewalks or commercial corridors like Fordham
Road in Manhattan, Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, Victory Boulevard on Staten Island,
Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, the warren of narrow streets in Chinatown and Little Italy
or even a pedestrian median where a subway station entrance is located, such as at Astor
Placethese in-between places are a stage for New Yorkers, the urban filament where
people sense and connect to the citys energy. Streets and sidewalks are an integral part of
what people think of when they think of a citys energy, connecting to its buildings and
landmarks in ways that are just as important as the destinations. A street may look too
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busy or chaotic to give street life but what if there were space to do nothing? What would
pedestrians do if they were given an opportunity to stop?

Desires fulfilled. By following where people were crossing the street, a new
crossing came into being between 6th Avenue and 7th Avenue. We called it 6
Avenue, in a nod to Harry Potter, even creating street signs the hinted at the
simple magic that paint and planters can provide for pedestrians.

When viewed from eye level and at walking speed, the street takes on a different
meaning. Outside of the confines of a car, people experience the street with all five
senses, and there are simple ways in which that experience can be influenced. Is the street
too loud, are the buildings very tall or land their faces small or do they go on for an entire

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block, are there a lot of people on the sidewalk, are there trees? What is the quality of the
material used to construct the sidewalk? These are some of the basic elements that
comprise Jane Jacobss ideal human scale. Are the streetlights spaced according to the
needs of vehicles or pedestrians? And, critically, is the sidewalk wide enough that one
could stop for a phone call, to look in a shop window or to place benches or caf tables
and chairs?

FIG XX: SIDEWALK DESIGN: The sidewalk is where city residents interact and
where businesses serve their communities. Designs that create high quality
experiences at the street level will add to the quality of life in neighborhoods and
support local commercial districts.
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Sidewalks play a vital role in city life. In walkable cities they are conduits for
pedestrian movement and access and investments in them can enhance connectivity and
promote walkingeliminating the need for cars to run multiple errands. As public
spaces, sidewalks serve as the front yards for city dwellers, activating streets socially and
economically. Safe, accessible, and well-maintained sidewalks are a fundamental and
necessary investment for cities, and have been found to enhance general public health and
maximize social capital. Just as roadway expansions and improvements have historically
enhanced travel for motorists, superior sidewalk design can encourage walking by
making it more attractive.

The sidewalk is the area where people interact with one another and with
businesses most directly in an urban environment. Unlike a street, a sidewalk is a varied
and multipurpose pedestrian environment, which, because of the slow but still varied
speed of strollers, has the potential to hold a much more diverse purposes. While there are
fewer rules to the sidewalk than the roadpeople walk in both directions, not necessarily
staying to the right, they stop and turn around without causing pileupsthere are pretty
clear zones where there are different uses. Most of these arent necessarily designed this
way but natural usage patterns emerge. Closest to the building, on the left in our image, a
frontage zone functions almost as an extension of the building; people can stop here to
finish a conversation on entering or leaving a building, or contemplate the next move, or
wait for a date or a ride. This area is often occupied by sidewalk cafes or business
sandwich boards to draw pedestrians attention to a storefront. Then there is the

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pedestrian zone in the center where people walk in either direction. These zones ideally
should be five to seven feet wide in residential settings and eight to 12 feet wide in
downtown or commercial areas. Actual sizes can vary tremendously; some cities have
vast sidewalks with little foot traffic, others narrow passages crawling with people. Next
to the pedestrian zone is the street furniture or curb zone. This is close enough to the curb
where pedestrians arent likely walking but they may be stopped, trying to stay out of the
way of passersby. This zone may already be lined with parking meters or streetlights and
thus ideal places to place other street furniture. We dont usual think of benches or
planters as furniture, in the same way as a Lay-Z-Boy or a potted ficus in the living
room. But there are increasing numbers of amenities that can line this area, including bike
racks or bike share stations, newspaper racks and, if youre lucky, tree pits.

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The next zone, number 4, is immediately next to the sidewalk, on the plane know
as the street, As we saw in the last chapter, this has traditionally been the plane of parked
cars, but it could be composed of any number of enhancements to improve the sidewalks
aesthetics or to insulate it from cars cruising by. It could be a bike lane, a curb extension,
bike racks, bike share stations, and curbside bike lanes or cycle tracks, among many other
possibilities.

This is an ideal sidewalk, but a lot of city sidewalks dont look this good. So how
do we get to there from here? By observing how sidewalks are used. In the case of most
cities, we are not designing a new street as much as we are redesigning a new street from
what is already there. The best way to do that is start by observing the space and see how
people are using it. While some desire lines are visible or leave evidence, some are
invisible, intuitive or even counterintuitive.

Working with the urbanist Jan Gehl in New York City, we undertook a study to
understand how New Yorkers were actually using their streets. This was a radically
different approach, requiring observation and qualitative measurements to assess the way
that the streets and sidewalks were being used, which could be achieved only by sending
out trained observers to focus on the qualities of the interactions that people had with the
public realm. How many people were stopping? How long did they linger? How long
were streets so crowded that they impeded business and transportation? How many
building fronts were closed, dilapidated or uninviting?

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In observing millions of people using a space over time, the study found a
wisdom expressed both by New Yorkers movements and by their stillness. When we
eliminate the traffic glare from our focus on pedestrian a picture emerges that streets were
almost entirely dedicated to keeping things moving without nurturing the life along it. By
looking at these almost invisible behaviors our observers could measure how New
Yorkers were imposing their own desires on the public realm. New York City was a city
alive with pedestrians and yet its streets had few places to stop or to sit down.

Our study focused on some of the New Yorks streets busiest streets, many of
which are far from famous. On Main Street in Flushing, Queens, hordes of pedestrians

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outnumber all vehicle passengers by 2-1, yet they have less than one third of the street
space allocated to them. Exacerbating the crowded sidewalks are with newsstands,
vendors and other obstructions that cut the walkable space in half and its a recipe for
pedlockgridlock for pedestrians. The street is designed in the opposite proportion to
its actual use, and this design exacerbates all the worst consequences. By giving the least
space amount of space to greatest number of people using it, the sidewalk forces
pedestrians to spill into the street, blocking cars and transit, and it encourages driving by
providing most of the street space to be used by the fewest numbersvehicle passengers.
The street is telling people on foot that they are not important.

A living study of Main Street in Flushing, Queens can

show how a streets unbalanced design can contradict its
use and prevent it from being a great public space.

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The study opened the door to the many incredible opportunities and an entirely
new way at assessing the street. We knew that we wouldnt succeed in making the street
better by gouging out more room for cars. But by reprogramming the street, we knew that
we could reveal more of the energy thats already there. And by following the footsteps
of the people and tracing an outline over the way they use the street today, you will see
the design of the city you need to build tomorrow.

With this report completed and with the agenda set and the clock ticking, I
assembled the Transportation Departments senior staff to assess the 4,500-person
agencys operations, personnel, materiel and strategy for changing the way that the streets
operated. I didnt realize at first that a key part of the strategy for building a new city
would be paint. Yes, paint.

Transforming a car-clogged street into inviting shared space doesnt always

require heavy machinery, complicated reconstruction or millions of dollars. Planners can
reorder the street without destroying a single building, double-decking a street or building
a streetcar or light rail system or highway interchange. And it can be accomplished in real
time and by using just the basic materials that every city has access toin New York
Citys case 6,300 miles of streets, some of the most valuable real estate on earthand the
basic stock that all city transportation agencies already have in their supply depots or
available through existing contracts.

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I mean paint. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of it. Whether its off-the-shelf

industrial paints and thermoplastic (a polymer cooked directly onto pavement) or epoxymodified acrylic coatings, paint has an amazing ability to telegraph through color, texture
and geometry how public space should be apportioned and used. Combined with the
other basic transportation tools, like concrete lane dividers and plastic stanchions and
reflectors, these simple materials can be the stuff of the most innovative projects if
theyre applied just slightly differently.

In our very first months, even as we were learning all the levers of the agency, we
were already assembling meetings and workshops with the business improvement district
and residents in the picturesque DUMBO neighborhood, reimagining how to use the
roadbed at the Brooklyn anchorage of the Manhattan Bridge. At the base of one of the
bridges arches, a frontage street runs on an angle against the grid, creating triangles of
unused space, not unlike what we saw at the complicated intersections in chapter tk. In
this triangle of underused space at Pearl Street, more than a dozen cars used parked on a
site that was on the short list for the Worlds Most Picturesque Parking Lots. Where some
local problems are hard to detect, this one was obvious, in a location with little car traffic
and growing numbers of residents, workers and strollers below the bridge.

The mere fact that the city transportation representatives were even talking about
reordering a space like this was itself a sea change. The department was viewed largely as
a signs-and signals bureau, making few headlines that werent related to fundamental
traffic management. Major accomplishments included turning restrictions for vehicles on

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Midtowns crosstown streets to speed rush hour traffic. On Queens Boulevard, dubbed
the Boulevard of Death for dozens of pedestrian fatalities along its seven-mile stretch, the
agency put up dozens of signs and pedestrian barriers to prevent midblock crossing.

But what started in DUMBO in the summer of 2007 was a different practice.
Working with community representatives, we developed a plan to reprogram the parking
spaces as a pocket plaza, cordoning the area with space-defining thermoplastic in the
language of traffic management to keep cars out. To give an equal cue to pedestrians that
the triangle was intended for them, we used a vibrant green epoxy acrylic coating,
mimicking an open green space, then furnished it with patio tables and chairs. Added
along its periphery were immense soil-filled pots planted with saplings, and arranged
with surplus granite blocks from bridge projects. These multi-purpose amenities gave
needed shade in the summer, made the cobblestone neighborhood seem more humane,
and the granite blocks doubled as high-visibility space definers and also as seating. The
topper was that the local business improvement district agreed to fund the maintenance of
the spacecleaning and sweeping the space and taking in the seats and tables every
evening, and then putting them back out in the morning.

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Pearl Street plaza in DUMBO, New York Citys first place-changing project
by the New York City Department of Transportation, in 2007. Not a
rendering. It required only the basic tools already in every transportation
departments arsenal: Paint, and the street space already there. Even years
later, people still believe that these before-and-after pictures are a designers
renderings, too vivid and appealing to be actual images.

Almost immediately after the paint dried, the space went from somewhere to park
to a place where people wanted to be. People who worked at nearby buildings brought
their lunches to the tables and chairs or ate sheltered beneath the plazas umbrellas with
coffees and snacks purchased at local cafes and food trucks. The transformation was also
so fastjust a couple of weeksand the impact so easily integrated into the
neighborhood that we questioned whether it was just beginners luck. Maybe these
interventions could work in a traffic enclave like DUMBO where there is little through-

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traffic. But would it work at a free-for-all intersection in the heart of Manhattan? We

quickly proved that this intervention was no fluke.

The intersection of 9th Avenue and 14th Street was the next proving ground. The
complex and traffic-choked street design was left over from the mid-twentieth century
when the area was alive with meatpackers and old-world industries. By 2007, the
neighborhood was alive with new office space, the Chelsea Market retail complex and
nightlife. Preparations were underway for the High Line Ninth Avenue and it was
becoming clear that the area would be more like the upscale Village and the rest of
Chelsea than it was its bleak past as an after-hours drug-scoring and cruising strip. Ninth
Avenue was a one-way downtown street for almost its entire length from 59th Street until
it suddenly became two-way for just two blocks, between 14th and 16th Street.

That kind of access may have been needed in the 1930s when the Port Authority
occupied a building between 15th and 16th streets and when hundreds of trucks used the
facility daily to cart containers to and from nearby freight rail depots. The last rail freight
lines were long closed by the 1980s, but nobody updated the street; it remained
programmed for its outdated purpose, and creating a traffic conflict at 16th Street where
uptown and downtown traffic came at each other head-on and forced to turn onto the side
street.

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Figure X. 9th Avenue and 14th Street, on the border of Chelsea and the Meatpacking
District. In the left you can see the remnants of markings for uptown traffic. The
consolidated downtown lanes on the far right in the picture left an asphalt triangle big
enough for a community-maintained plaza. This project solidified the instant plaza design
palette and showed how smart traffic management could reprogram street space without
causing traffic congestion. Soon after, an Apple store opened at the location and Google
moved in just up the street.

As we saw in chapter X, a street tells you how it wants to be used, and people
show through their paces how they want to use it. Its stunning to see how thermoplastic
stripes serve to telegraph the roads rules of order. Lay down some paint and former
roadspace becomes a public place. Give a street three moving lanes and cars will speed.
Remove a lane and make the those two lanes clearer and more defined and cars will stay
in their lanes, calming traffic, a key discovery that was built into hundreds of projects.

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At Ninth Avenue and 14th Street we reversed the two uptown lanes to downtown
only. By doing this we no longer needed the three downtown lanes in the center of the
street, so we cordoned off the triangle of suddenly unneeded space with thermoplastic
paint and texturized gravel (Fig. X). What happened to the traffic that used those two
blocks? The grid happened. Given the relatively low traffic volumes, the few numbers of
cars dependent on this two-block stretch of uptown traffic on Ninth Avenue could be
more than easily accommodated on sidestreets and delivery trucks could reach businesses
just by changing their routes slightly. The more important judgments though was from
New Yorkers, who, aside from the pedestrians in the plaza, barely noticed the change.

Again, in just a matter of weeks, what used to be an outdated and nonessential

traffic lane was changed simply using insights into the context of the space, the basic
tools of traffic engineering, just applied slightly differently. People immediately occupied
the space and traffic moved better than before and its now filled with people hanging out
and maybe drawing free a wifi signal from the Apple Store that opened there just two
months later, part of a neighborhood renaissance that includes DOTs pedestrianization of
large swaths of the Meatpacking District the following year and the High Line opening in
2009.

Like DUMBO, the transformation in Chelsea went almost unremarked upon in the
media. The support of local institutions and the absence of traffic complications led to a
kind of public acceptance. The way we saw it, once you changed a space, it becomes that
space, obvious and unassailable, and people are delighted and immediately forget

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whatever attachments they had to the way it used to be. This helped develop the strategy
of starting with the change instead of change being the conclusion. The transformation of
a street itself is the best example and catalyst for its acceptance. Instead of city agencies
trying to convince every skeptical neighborhood resident to accept a new road order
sight-unseen, its more efficient only to get permission to implement it on a provisional
basis, using materials that could be easily rearranged if it didnt work as expected. The
upside is that if it a street intervention worked, it worked. And having the proof on the
ground was an incredibly valuable selling point to other neighborhoods that would see
these changes and come to covet them. This strategy, the process and the tools used in
Chelsea and in DUMBO provided experience, confidence, and thus the street-design
template for hundreds of projects to come in New York and around the world, with the
greatest transformation of all yet to come: Broadway.

The problem with modern Broadway started in 1811 when New Yorks planners
laid out the citys grid system but opted to retain diagonal Broadway. Modern Broadway
changes dramatically along the 13-mile length of Manhattan. It varies in width and also
runs in two directions and is wider north of 59th Street, but one-way downtown and
narrower in its remaining run to the south. The roads diagonal across the grid results in
three-way intersections wherever Broadway intersects both an avenue and a cross street,
creating the iconic traffic gorges today we call Times Square, Herald Square, Madison
Square and Union Square. Less beloved than the squares (seen from above, Times and
Herald resemble bowties more than European-style squares) are the triangular-firingsquads of traffic where these three streams of traffic meet. First, theres downtown-bound

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traffic on Broadway; then theres either uptown or downtown-bound traffic on the oneway avenues; and finally two-way traffic on the cross streets cuts across both those
planes.

Three traffic streams create a compound transportation engineering problem of

time and space that could dumbfound astrophysicists. While many city traffic signals are
on a 60-second cycle, providing, say, 30 seconds of green light time to one direction of
traffic at a time, then you can appreciate what happens when you must assign green light
time for a third stream of traffic: Either an engineer gives only 20 seconds of green light
time to each direction or keeps the existing intervals and just add green time to the third
direction. This in turn adds to the time that cars in the other two streams will have to
remain stopped at red lights waiting for the green to cycle back to their direction.

Another problem for traffic: People. Pedestrians have a tendency to walk, and
they dont respond to traffic signals and crosswalks in predictable ways. They move at
different speeds, they walk against traffic signals and they block vehicles from turning
and generally make the light cycle more unpredictable from a motorists point of view.
And as we saw earlier this chapter, they tend to take direct routs and cross streets even
where there are no crosswalks. New York City has some of the densest pedestrian
volumes anywhere in the world, with streets filled by thousands of people at any moment.
So if youre behind the wheel of a vehicle, these things on two legs cease to be people
with lives and families and they turn into almost torturous obstacles between you and
getting to where youre going. Its almost fantastically dangerous to have so many

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millions of people near so many cars, and while drivers have their seat belts, theres
nothing between a car and a pedestrian but for the few millimeters of cloth in their
clothing. Is there any way to change a streets design could do to reduce this risk at these
hot spots where multiple streams of traffic collide?

This was one of the questions we had in mind while looking at Madison Square,
where Broadway meets 5th Avenue and 23rd Street, in the shadow of the landmark Flatiron
Building. Traffic on 5th Avenue and on 23rd Street was heavy enough that cars could rarely
make it through the intersection on a single light cycle. Having to factor Broadways
through traffic into the traffic pattern made it only more toxic. The traffic pattern also
meant that motorists on Broadway had two options: to turn slightly onto Fifth Avenue or
weave their way left through the square and back onto diagonal Broadway. Fifth Avenue
drivers had similar options, but managing these different transitions required signal time
one and two blocks north of 23rd Street, and this in an area of intense pedestrian activity
around Madison Square Park and snapping pictures of the Flatiron.

From the pedestrians view on 23rd Street, crossing the combined streams of
traffic from Fifth Avenue and Broadway was a harrowing 170-foot, seven-lane journey. In
reality, a configuration this large tells pedestrians to fend for themselves, crossing against
the light when they see breaks in trafficand often getting stranded on refuge islands in
the middle of the road as traffic sped past them. The confusion and long wait times for a
signal also frustrated pedestrians into abandoning the crosswalk and cutting across the

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street midblock. In the dangerous maneuvers of the pedestrian was also the outline for a
safe new street design.

Madison Square: Follow that man! His life may be in peril but in his
steps are the outlines of whats needed at this 170-foot-wide expanse
of asphalt.

The solution was elegant and began not at the intersection itself but one block
upstream at 24th Street where Broadway and Fifth Avenue first intersected. Creating an
almost perpendicular intersection there allowed traffic to reach either southbound Fifth
Avenue or Broadway as any ordinary intersection.

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Southbound traffic through Madison Square at 23rd Street

went from three streams of traffic to two. This opened
space for pedestrians and simplified the intersection for
cross-traffic.

This alteration didnt fundamentally change the traffic pattern, it consolidated it

and made the street easier to use. The upshot of rationalizing traffic at 24th Street was that
it forced people in cars to wait their turn and to pick a lane. By better regulating this
merge upstream, fewer vehicles would still be changing lanes by the time they reached
23rd Street, so we no longer needed so many lanes for through traffic at that point, letting
us also reclaim three full lanes of roadbed just below 23rd, east of the Flatiron. In the
immense wedge created by this change above 23rd Street we outlined a plaza in
thermoplastic and filled in the remaining space a texturized gravel treatment adhered to
the asphalt, similar to the pedestrian areas in Pariss Jardin de Luxembourg.

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The most powerful proof that you can design the street by following the people
wasnt when the project was complete but the instant that construction started on the
plaza. Minutes after workers set out the first construction barrels to detour traffic and start
to build the plaza, a group of art students materialized and sat directly on the blacktop to
start sketching nearby buildings. A stretch of asphalt merely empty of cars was all the
invitation necessary for human-scale street life to emerge. I think this was one of the most
moving examples in the history of urban place-making and it illustrates just how hungry
people are for public space. If you look at what the people are doingand where theyre
placing their feet and posteriors todayyoull see the outline of the of city we need to
build tomorrow.

Fig. XX: Madison Square in progress: Following the footsteps of

pedestrians, we created 65,000 feet of pedestrian space in former roadbed

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at Madison Square, which was instantly occupied by New Yorkers from

the first moment that construction barrels were placed on the street.

By September 2008, the plazas were readylight speed by municipal standards.

Mayor Bloomberg and representatives of local merchants associations cut the ribbon on
what totaled 65,000 square feet of pedestrian space and the most significant reconfiguring
of lanes that Broadway had seen in decades. Less noticed was that the project also
removed one of Broadways three moving traffic lanes south of 42nd Street all the way to
25th Street, placing both a bike lane at the curbside and pedestrian plazas in former
parking spaces. And it worked. Traffic moved as well as beforeBroadway itself wasnt
so much a conduit for large volumes of cars as it was a more a direct route for cars and
trucks making deliveries and specific point-to-point trips. The north-south avenues were
the real urban highways by comparison.

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The square returned to Madison Square: Bonded gravel, tables, chairs

and umbrellas create an urban oasis where cars once roared.

Madison Square before, on left, with seven

lanes of traffic and after, with five lanes and
16,000 square feet of new plaza space.

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By fall of 2008, in the span of a little more than a year, paint, gravel and tables
and chairs had quickly transformed these spaces DUMBO, Chelsea and Flatiron. Some
New Yorkers used to the way the street used to be stopped in their tracks in disbelief,
others, true to their New York natures, barely noticed and kept walking. Each step in this
evolution seemed monumental, but it was clear by the time we cut the ribbon at the
Flatiron Building that all of these collective tactics spreading uptown along Broadway,
would ultimately reach one of the most famous patches of real estate in the world: Times
Square.

In Times Square today, a wide-angle camera lens can capture thousands of

pedestrians spread across 2-acre ribbons of pedestrian space with a right angle of traffic
cutting through it. Its difficult to recall that just a few years ago, this balance was
completely reversed and Times Square was a Gordian knot of traffic. When I first started
walking through Times Square with the eye of a Commissioner, 89 percent of the
183,000 square feet of the space between buildings belonged to cars, even though 90% of
the people passing through365,000 a daydid so on foot.

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Though Times Square was one of the worlds great landmarks, beneath the showbiz glare of its lights lay a fundamental transportation problem: One hundred thirty-seven
percent more pedestrians were struck by cars in Times Square than on adjacent avenues, a
fact not surprising considering the masses of pedestrians within inches of sometimes
aggravated drivers passing through in cars. The streets themselves were old and warped,
pooling with water every heavy rain. The current road was really a layer of many streets,
with the remnants of bygone streets buried beneath them. It was a classic transportation
problem that was hidden in plain sight.

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Times Square had already outgrown its legendary seediness, with lurid theaters
that were the backdrop for Midnight Cowboy giving way to tchotchke shops. Times
Square remained home to one of the worlds largest New Years celebrations and local
cultural institutions wanted to build on the improvements instead of sliding back into the
bad-old-days, and by the 2000s, the Times Square Alliance, led by Tim Tompkins, and
the theater, hotel and restaurant owners that he represented had ambitions for what the
area could be but had gotten used to thinking that sweeping change was unattainable.
Even transportation advocates barely invoked the area, which seemed too crowded, too
notorious. The biggest change to come to the area in decades were bans on turns from 7th
Avenue to Broadway and vice versa, and putting out plastic markers in the street where
pedestrians were forced into the street.

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In February 2009, few outside of the narrowest circles seemed to be even

thinking about it until the day that we announced not only would we would correct this
anachronism but that in the process it would create one of the worlds most
transformative and rapid redesigns of a public space in urban history. No longer would
pedestrians be forced to walk in the street or risk their lives trying to snap a picture of the
tanning-bed-intense lights of Times Square. The plan, not yet public, would open
Broadways three traffic lanes to pedestrians while simultaneously adding a fourth lane of
traffic to 7th Avenue to handle the overflow. The engineering genius of the plan was its
simplicity: More space would mean a more vital experience for pedestrians; fewer but
better-designed lanes on Seventh Avenue with more green time (because Broadway no
longer took a third of the light cycle) would work better than more lanes on more streets.

By closing diagonal Broadway to cars at Times and Herald squares, we could

restore the right angles of the traffic grid that motorists know and love. Traffic signals
could be retimed for two directions of traffic instead of three, giving motorists more
green time. The clearer signaling and two-way gridded intersections would also mean
safer streets for pedestrians who didnt have to guess where the next car was coming
from. All traffic on southbound Broadway would be redirected east at 48th Street at the
north end of Times Square to Seventh Avenue, then travel a half block and make an
immediate right to continue downtown on Seventh Avenue.

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Out modeling showed that most of these vehicles would remain on Seventh
Avenue to get further downtown, draining almost all traffic volumes from Broadway
below 42nd Street so that there would be little traffic remaining on Broadway as it
approached 35th Street. For the true three-way intersection at Herald Square, we projected
an even more dramatic increase in vehicle travel speeds than Times Square. Instead of
having signal time sliced up to serve three different traffic streams, there would be just
two streams and potentially over 50 percent more green time for cars. On 6th Avenue,
green time would increase from 32 seconds to 53 seconds; on 7th Avenue it would
increase from 45 to 54 seconds. In both cases, the simplified timing also meant shorter
waits at red lights. We estimated that travel times through Herald Square would improve
by a whopping 37 and by 17 percent through Times Square.

For a change to the streets of this magnitude, we knew that New Yorkers
wouldnt be sold simply on the idea that we were creating pedestrians plazas. The
changes at Madison Square met with surprisingly little opposition and only a few raised
eyebrows from the skeptical press corps. Looking at the Times Square plan in the
preliminary stages, Mayor Bloombergs communications director Jim Anderson knew
that Times Square would be scrutinized more intensely. Jim focused on the green time
that the plan would give to those poor souls unfortunate enough to be driving in Midtown
and built a public relations strategy around it: This wasnt merely a plaza project to give
people a nice place to walk; this was a traffic improvement project, and thats the
argument that would convince New Yorkers. By simplifying the intersection for cars,
pedestrians also benefited, yes. But while we could count on the support of pedestrian

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advocacy groups, it would be the drivers, cabbies and hard-boiled New Yorkers who
would need more convincing.

New Yorkers thought of Midtown as the worst of the worst of traffic, with
streets turned over to taxis with blaring horns, packed buses and cars crawling along with
oblivious tourists and drivers cutting across town to get the Lincoln Tunnel or bust. A
lethal combination. For New York Citys native and drive-through populations, there had
to be something in it for them than just a loss of already poorly functioning road space.
We sat around a table in an alcove at City Hall, just outside the conference room where
Id had my interview nearly two years earlier, brainstorming what to call this project.
Jims deputy, Farrell Sklerov, blurted out what would become the name for the project:
Green Light for Midtown highlighting its traffic and safety benefits.

Less emphasized was that pedestrians would get 2 acres of space created out
of thin asphalt. At a project cost of $1.5 million, a tiny fraction of what it would cost to
resurface a little-used street in Brooklyn for cars, and again using only paint, markings
signs and planters, this was the bargain of the public space centuryless than $14 per
square foot of real estate at the Crossroads of the World. A bargain that probably rivaled
the Dutch purchase of Manhattan four centuries years before, adjusting for inflation.

If youre lucky, youll have the fortune to work for a leader with vision and
political courage. For me, this was the experience of working for Michael Bloomberg,
and had he been a traditional politician this never would have happened. The decision to

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move ahead came just as the political season was heating up. The mayor and the City
Council had simultaneously enraged opponents and elated supporters with a controversial
and successful effort to reverse term limits to allow the citys elected officials to run for a
third term, citing the urgency posed by the economic crisis of 2008. It was a heated
campaign when many were beginning to get used to the idea that there would be a change
in leadership. During one of the critical meetings for Green Light for Midtown, most of
Bloombergs advisors objected to the closing Broadway to car traffic, citing the political
risk of tinkering with traffic in the middle of the city and the potential for disaster.
Bloomberg bristled at the idea: I dont ask my commissioners to do the right thing
according to the political calendar, he said, I ask my commissioner to do the right
thing, period. It still gives me goose bumps.

That didnt mean that Bloomberg just took the proposal at face value. He was
just getting started. The original plan called for a lane reduction along Broadway and a
plaza at every square from Columbus Circle and 59th Street all the way down to Union
Square at 17th Street. The Mayor re-worked that draft, wanting to see if the plan would
work before extending it south of 23rd Street. This still left the hardest parts, Times
Square and Herald Square, where the Macys Thanksgiving Day parade concludes next to
its flagship store. And he was right in that if the project worked at Times and Herald
Squares, there would be even less traffic on Broadway by the time it got to Union Square
so that making changes upstream would eventually make the changes obvious
downstream. Union Square and Broadway south of 23rd Street was axed from the first
phase of the plan, and with that change, we got the green light.

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Bloomberg was also reassured by the fact that the project would begin as a pilot
and reassessed after six months to ensure that it did what it said it would do. Its one thing
when some skeptical residents or interests generally oppose a change, but its very
difficult to litigate an argument before Bloomberg not even to attempt a change in the
first place. Having created his own financial data and information empire, Bloomberg had
little patience for people arguing not even trying something new. He was on my page and
in my corner.

On a cold morning, February 26, 2009, in a hotel dining room overlooking a

Times Square pulsing with high-wattage LED screens and billboards, the mayor declared,
This midtown traffic mess is one of those problems that everyone always talks about,
and you always say theres nothing you can do about traffic. Well were not going to just
sit back, were going to try to do something about it. This was a bold declaration in front
of the New York City media which, while having laid relatively low over much of the
previous two years, now suddenly was paying very close attention. This was designed for
tabloid headlines: The mayor and his transportation commissioner thought they could
close one of the citys major arteries through the heart of the citys densest and most
chaotic locationsa virtual black hole of traffic.

In the three months between announcement and implementation, public

disbelief set in. How can closing one of the busiest streets in the world make traffic
better? The idea seemed insane to many observers. New York is a town where everyone

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and everythingincluding bullshitwalks. Once public, the plan for Times Square
became as much a public relations campaign as a transportation engineering or
construction challenge. The race was on to present the project to everyday New Yorkers
and particularly to those who lived and worked in the neighborhood before they could be
preemptively spooked by headlines appearing daily.

On one track, we scheduled a packed calendar of public meetings, most of them

positive and constructive as we presented the plan to community boards and theater and
property owners, holding their hands and explaining how traffic would still be able to
find its way to, through and around Times Square. On the other track, newspapers started
to predict the End of Times Square. Dead End Streets and The Wrong Crusade
screamed the headlines in just one of the tabloids, where a writer forecast The
experimental scheme will create a broad loitering zone along the Broadway side of the
bowtie, where we can avail ourselves of such dubious pleasures as noshing alfresco on
benches. Never mind that New York's climate is suitable for that less than half the year.
Never mind that sidewalks are meant for walking, not idling. New York Citys cabbies
predicted a gridlock end-of-times, and that drivers would be unable to find fares. Other
papers and editorial boards were skeptical but didnt begrudge the attempt. But in classic
New York fashion, they wanted to reserve the right to gloat if it went horribly awry:Lets
give Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan enough rope to hang themselves. If it all works,
another newspaper editorialized, Sadik-Khan will be a small hero. If it fails, shell be a
goat.

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The project was an unruly symphony of parts in the three months between
announcement and first steps. There were hyperventilating comments from taxi cab
drivers, businesses that feared the changes would block their delivery trucks. We
modified the plan a dozen times, adding a turn-only lane onto 45th Street to make it
marginally easier for theatergoers to take cabs to side street theaters. But it was the
Mayor who was the projects toughest critic, sending me back to the drawing board again
and again and making me deliver still more numbers, predications and models to show
that traffic wouldnt saturate Midtown.

Then, suddenly, there was no one left to stop it from happening and nothing left
but to do but to do it. At about 7 p.m. on Memorial Day eve, surrounded by DOT road
crews and curious onlookers, we looked at one another as if to say, How hard can this
be? We then held our collective breath and started to grab the blaze-orange traffic
construction barrels and rolled, dragged, slid and shifted them into the space. With just a
few pieces of these inexpensively produced, factory fabricated plastic containers, the
traffic-choked legend of Broadway was officially closed to cars through Times Square.

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Broadway at 46th Street

Broadway at 34th Street

In a moment of panic in the hours before the closure, we thought about those art
students who immediately sat down on the street in Madison Square: Where are all the
356,000 people who walk through Times Square daily going to sit down once we open
Broadway to pedestrians? We had caf chairs and tables on order, but the wheels of
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municipal procurement didnt move as fast as our traffic barrels, and it would be weeks
before they arrived. The moment called for creativity and a bit of dumb luck. The idea to
fill the space with beach chairs saved the day and Tim Tompkins of the Times Square
Alliance made feverish phone calls to find cheap seats. He found and ordered 376 beach
chairs in lollipop colors at $10.74 each from Brooklyns Pintchik hardware store.

Within minutes of the closure there wasnt a free beach seat in the house.
Families plopped down with their shopping bags, shared a laugh reminiscing about
seeing 9 to 5 at the Ahmonson Theater, and many just gazed up at the lights as if the
chairs had always been there. People could do something as simple as stop and take a
picture without fear of being run over or mowed down by a taxi or surly New Yorker.

A beachhead for livable streets

The change was an immediate Broadway sensation. Tap dancers and musicians
filled the street with music as crowds gathered to watch. Hot dog vendors handed out free

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franks, some brought baseball gloves and played catch in the suddenly open space. Faced
with the sudden but not unexpected change, the media debated not the merits of the
change, but whether the beach chairs were too kitschy. Ive had people say to me both
that its a stroke of genius and that Im the kind of trailer trash, Tim Tompkins told the
New York Times. The lawn chair decision is far and away the most controversial
decision Ive made in my seven years as head of the alliancePeople seem to be
jumping right past the issue of whether this should be a pedestrian space to what it should
look like. Late-night television host David Letterman, whose studio was on Broadway
just uptown from Times Square, was nonplussed. Times Square had become a petting
zoo, he said, that encouraged [tourists] to bring coolers and sit in the intersection.

The fact that beach chairs made headlines and not traffic an unremarked victory in the
global movement for public space. Once completed, there was no longer much argument
about whether it was a good idea. We were rearranging the lawn chairs on Times Square.
The chairs lasted barely a month before they were replaced with more durable but elegant
bistro chairs and tables commonly seen in public spaces. Those that survived the sit-fest
were sold on eBay, but I keep one of the original beach chairs by my desk at my office. I
smile whenever I look at it. Its a profound and simple affirmation, not just for New York
but for any city: In a city without seats, a beach chair can be king.

Unfortunately, smiles, enjoyment and humor arent themselves metrics for a

successful transportation project. We needed data. Our pre-project computer modeling for
Times Square projected that traffic would move up to 37 percent faster on 6th Avenue past

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Macys, and 17 percent faster on 7th Avenue through Times Square, where Broadway
didnt cut nearly as drastically across the grain of the grid. We had won the public
relations campaign as the plazas immediately became as much a part of New York as
Central Park of Rockefeller Center. But how did it stack up as a traffic project?

It was during the months following the project that we discovered the usefulness
of the best traffic measurement device a transportation commissioner could ask for: the
humble yellow taxi cab. Data collection for a project was traditionally accomplished by
having a trained transportation professional drive a car dozens of times through an area
before and after a project and seeing how fast they went on averagea technique known
as the floating car technique. Its not very efficient and its subject to variation. Traffic
can change dramatically from minute to minute, and it requires incredible and expensive
manpower to have technicians drive a route dozens of times and log the time traveled and
average speed. Maybe a floating car driver would hit an unlucky string of red lights or a
lucky sting of greens, skewing the results even if there was no real change in overall
traffic conditions. Maybe the driver would deliberately drive slowly before the project
and then floor it after to prove that the project worked.

Approaching this problem, my Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller

discovered an existing trove of data that could be stanch the gaps in the floating car
technique: The GPS units already embedded in each of New York Citys 13,000 yellow
taxis. A sizable number of them are driving in and around the Times Square area at any
moment, transmitting data about trip distance, time and average speed, providing a virtual

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MRI of what real-time traffic was like. This was counterintuitive, and the irony delicious,
because if you had asked any taxi driver how closing Broadway to car traffic impacted
travel times through Times Square, youd get a unanimous, almost violent answer: It got
worse, dammit! Cabbies told any reporter who would listen that the reworking of
Broadway through Times and Herald squares caused traffic jams, slower speed and fewer
fares. Imagine their surprise when the data from 1.1 million taxi trips through the
Midtown project area showed that traffic was moving seven percent better through the
project area than before the Broadway was closed. On Sixth Avenue at 34th Street in
particular, the change was like night and day. Simplifying the intersection from three
streams of traffic to an orderly two helped improve travel times by 17 percent. So traffic
was moving better, despite the fact that we had created 2 acres of pedestrian space out
of asphalt, along with a 63% reduction in injuries. The Times Square Alliance did its own
survey, finding that 68 percent of Times Square retail and hotel managers in the area said
the plazas should be made permanent. An independent poll by Quinnipiac University
found that 58 percent of New Yorkers thought the Green Light for Midtown project was a
good idea.

But just as beach chairs became a proxy for negative feelings about the
redesigned Times Square, data became a shell game for critics. The issue critics had was
not that it didnt improve trafficit did, as measured by more than a million Midtown
GPS-tracked cab trips, despite what drivers claimedit was that the project didnt
improve traffic enough. We had forecasted a much greater traffic improvement and, next
to the cardinal sin of hypocrisy, the next most devastating sin is that of unmet

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expectations. Had we merely promised that the project would not diminish travel times,
we could have claimed victory. Instead, some reporters immediately concluded that the
project was disappointing and fell short of its goals.

But there were no disappointed barbs from Mayor Bloomberg. We had been
jubilant since the day we implemented the project. In the coming weeks and months the
projects benefits were further reinforced by unexpected discoveries in the economic data
that had never before been used to evaluate local traffic projects. Retail rents documented
by the Real Estate Board of New York found that per-square-foot rental rates for groundfloor properties fronting Times Square literally doubled in a single year, half of which
included the change. Five major retailers opened new stores in Times Square within one
year of the project. By the fall of 2011, Cushman & Wakefield announced that for the
first time in its rankings, Times Square was one of the top 10 retail districts on the planet.
These kinds of data exploded the claim opponents had been making all along: that the
plazas would somehow kill Times Square. In fact, the plazas saved a Times Square that
had been lagging behind other commercial parts of the city. What started as a public
realm innovation succeeded as a traffic and safety project. Only then would another longterm benefit as an economic development tool become apparent. This startling discovery
would have international implications, not just in the New York City area, and it created
new ways to talk about these projects. They werent just quality-of-life improvements.
They opened a city to its people and through that expanded its economic prospects.

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And all this was accomplished not in years but in months, with hundreds of
thousands of dollars and not millions. It was done despite withering skepticism and
criticism that would have broken a lesser mayor than Bloomberg, and the case was
ultimately proven by doing something and with the GPS units within the taxis of the
projects biggest critics. We were given every reason not to try this project. We were
called crazy. We were promised that there would be traffic chaos, city-paralyzing traffic.
Carmageddon. We were told that no one would want to walk in the plazas or visit Times
Square anymore, that the change would strip the area of its character. Today, those critics
have moved on and are peddling their invented rage about imagined urban injustices. Few
even remember what it used to be like and no one is calling for it to be changed. This is
the new before.

In other cities, I hear people claim that What happened in Times Square could
never happen here because______ and some explanation of politics, traffic or a dynamic
that no one outside that city would appreciate. My response is that I heard all the same
arguments with a New York accent, and had I listened to them, what happened at Times
Square would never have happened in the first place. Instead of paying attention to critics
and the self-defeating strategy of leaving their streets unfixed, city residents and their
leaders should instead pay attention to what the street is trying to tell them. There are
plenty of excuses why a street-saving strategy may not work. There is no excuse not try.

Had we tried to convince everyone that the project would work, answered every
doubt and checked every political box, I have no doubt that it would have taken five

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years just to break ground. Instead, on December 23, 2013, at the last press conference
that Bloomberg held as mayor and I as Commissioner, we cut the ribbon on a new Times
Square. After the success of the project, we set in motion a redesign from the ground up.
Times Square had already been scheduled for a road reconstruction to replace water
mains and sewers, even the asphalt that had been warped from decades of freezing and
thawing and remove the streetcar tracks that had been buried beneath layers of asphalt for
more than half a century. As long as city contractors would be rebuilding the street, we
could rebuild the plazas as real, world-class plazas and not just as reprogrammed street
space. The former roadspace, designed by the powerhouse architecture firm Snohetta,
would be rebuilt building to building without curbs, giving pedestrians the run of the
place without the possibility of cars returning. Instead of asphalt there are pedestrians
paving stones lined with strips of metal, which glint with the lights of Times Square,
reflecting its energy and giving Broadway an excitement and an intimacy it never had.
Today there are 480,000 pedestrians, up from 356,000 a few years earlier. As work
continues on the plazas, theres room for many more.

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Ch.5:BikeLanesandTheirDiscontents

We are here today to talk about bicycles. The speaker was the chair of the New
York City Councils Transportation Committee, and the place was a packed public
hearing room on 15th Floor of 250 Broadway, a municipal building across the street from
City Hall. Reporters that day far outnumbered members of the public, most of whom
were sent to an overflow room down the hall to follow the proceedings on television.

And believe it or not, few issues today prompt more heated discussion than bike
policy in New York City, the speaker continued in an accent that revealed his Bronx
origins, concluding, Biking is a good transportation alternative, but I do not believe that
making it impossible to drive should be a policy our city pursues.

By December of 2010, the two-year, two-mile transformation of Broadway into a

pedestrian and bike boulevard was complete from Columbus to Union Square. The citys
protected bike lanes by this moment already threaded streets beyond Manhattan into
Williamsburg on Kent Avenue and, just five months before the council meeting gaveled
to order, transportation crews installed a soon-to-be-infamous bike lane along Prospect
Park West at the explicit request and support of the local community.

But this was hearing wasnt a victory lap. It was a cross-examination. Just weeks
before I hobbled into the hearing room, recovering still from foot surgery the day before,
the New York Times used the B-word with the headline blared: Expansion of Bike Lanes

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in City Brings Backlash. Surging bike ridership has created a simmering cultural
conflict, the story claimed, with bike lanes in particular leading to unusual scenes of
friction. To put it into blunter, tabloid terms: Bikes were New Yorks Public Enemy No.
1.

It was almost one year into Mayor Michael Bloombergs third and final term, an
inconceivable prospect when I joined the city in 2007 thinking that we had only 32
months the clock ran out on his second term. Instead, a charter revision suddenly allowed
term-limited elected officials run for another four years, and Bloombergalong with
many Council Members at this hearingwon and was sworn in for a third and final term

Its probable that as we spoke, attorneys at a white-shoe Manhattan law firm were
waiting to read the transcript of my testimony as they prepared a legal challenge to the
Prospect Park West bike lane. Two avowed foes in that suit were on the hearings list of
speakers that day, including Brooklyns borough president. What happened in that
hearing room that day was not just a debate about this or that bike lane, the loss of
parking spaces or a War on Cars. The hearing and its testimony was cross-examination in
the fight for New York Citys streets and a challenge to an idea about what and who city
streets are form in any city.

Youd be forgiven for thinking that New York City had bigger issues to confront:
Maybe there would be heated debate around transportation issues like the chronic
underfunding of the public transportation network and the need to increase tolls. Or

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hearings focused on safety and the more than 250 New Yorkers who died in traffic
crashes that year. But there were no transportation committee hearings about traffic safety
that year. The focus was the Bloomberg administrations alleged obsession with bike
lanes, of which I was the chief architect. The obsession, such as it was, amounted to
about $24 million invested over five years to creating the nations best bike lanes. During
the same period that the Transportation Department built those bike lanes it was also
spending more than $500 million just to paint the Brooklyn Bridge and rehabilitate its
approaches. Another $600 million went for the replacement of the little-known Willis
Avenue Bridge crossing the Harlem River from Manhattan to the Bronx. At this rate, it
would take 125 years of bike-lane building just to equal the cost of painting the Brooklyn
Bridge. By the year 2260, give or take a decade, we will have spent the equivalent on
bike lanes as the $1.1 billion we spent on just these two bridges.

But nobody asked about the $1.1 billion bridges in the carnival atmosphere that
morning. The cross examiners were onto something: New Yorkers held very strong
opinions about cyclists and the bike lanes they ride on. And what kind of argument could
answer the most quoted testimony from that day, that of Brooklyn Borough President
Marty Markowitz, who sang his statement to the melody of My Favorite Things:

MARTY MARKOWITZ: [singing]

Lanes fit for Fido and lanes made for lovers,

hikers and bikers, significant others.

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A lane just for Santa, but please don't complain.

These are a few of my favorite lanes.

Strollers and schlepers and skaters and joggers,

holiday lanes just for all the egg noggers,

Let's not forget cars, it's getting insane.

Welcome to Brooklyn, the Borough of Lanes.

When the horn honks, when the dog bites, when the bikers stray,
I simply remember by favorite lanes and then I just say, "oy vey".

Thank you, members of the committee.

The backlash was about to get a lot worse before it got better. Just three weeks
later the most disabling snowstorm in many years would cripple the entire region and
embroil the administration in questions about its readiness. A long, dark winter was about
to lit up by blaring media headlines, in a snow-encrusted backlash.

Oy vey indeed.

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Thousands of miles away from New York City, the headlines were shocking, the
story horrifying. A 71-year-old man crossing Castro Street in San Francisco at around 8
a.m. on March 29, a Thursday, was struck and leveled by a bicyclist, Chris Bucchere.
Police later would estimate that Bucchere was traveling 35 miles per hour, hitting the
pedestrian, Sutchi Hui, with enough force to send him sprawling across the crosswalk
before coming to a rest 20 feet away and leaking a river of blood. A man claiming to be
Bucchere later posted on a local biking blog following the incident: Short story: I'm fine.
The pedestrian I clobbered? Not so much.

The reaction to this case was almost as stunning as the grisly act itself. San
Franciscos district attorney filed manslaughter charges against Bucchere, a 36-year-old
software developer. The pedestrian was in the crosswalk legally, the district attorney
said, according to the Los Angeles Times, one of the hundreds of national and
international news outlets reporting on this otherwise local incident. It does not appear
that Mr. Bucchere was attempting to stop. He was trying to beat his own record in
complete disregard for the safety of anyone else.

And perhaps most offensive, it seemed as though Bucchere didnt care enough
about the consequences of his actions to prevent them. On the local biking blog, the man
claiming to be Bucchere claimed that the light turned red only after he was already in the
intersection and that he was unable to stop as pedestrians immediately swarmed the
crosswalk as their signal turned green. I couldn't see a line through the crowd and I

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couldn't stop, so I laid it down and just plowed through the crowded crosswalk in the
least-populated place I could find, he wrote. He wished well to his victim but seemed
unrepentant, dedicating the story to my late helmet, which broke in the crash. She died
in heroic fashion today as my head slammed into the tarmac.

The debate, festering for months in the media and on blogs proved a point that
many held: That cyclists are predatory reckless marauders who flout the rules and blame
others for the danger that they cause. Cyclists protested that they were being unfairly
blamed for the actions of one but that pedestrians and drivers dont pay enough attention
to them on the street. There's a thinking now that the public realm should be for people
to be in, not just to drive through, San Franciscos transportation director, Ed Reiskin,
told the Los Angeles Times about the incident. But as cycling has increased and our
infrastructure has not kept up, there are conflicts and tensions. I'm no cyclist hater. But
theres a lot of bad behavior out there. Seemingly unmoved by the controversy, the
judges sentence disappointed many: 1,000 hours of community service and two years of
probation.

Buccheres case seemed to resemble an incident when a cyclist struck a pedestrian

in New Yorks Central Park in August 2014. Tabloid headlines covered the tragedy for
weeks, identifying the allegedly reckless riderapparently proven by the fact that he
rode a $4,000 racing bikeas a menace and tarring law abiding riders with the same
brush. But the antipathy doesnt end with cyclists, it extends even to the painted lines that
they ride on. Bike lanes dont simply deprive motorists of driving space that by rights

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belongs to them, it rewards bike riders for their bad behavior. And bike lanes are a
dangerous lure. Many believe that they give would-be bike riders a false sense of security
that its safe to ride a bike on streets. Streets are dangerous places for cars, the thinking
goes, and they must be kept that way!

What I compare bike lanes to is swimming with the sharks, then-Toronto

councilmember Rob Ford said in 2010. Sooner or later you're going to get bitten. And
every year we have dozens of people that get hit by cars or trucks. Well, no wonder: roads
are built for buses, cars, and trucks, not for people on bikes. My heart bleeds for them
when I hear someone gets killed, but it's their own fault at the end of the day.

After being elected mayor and having the power to act on that sentiment, Ford in
2012 bragged about ordering the erasure of a bike lane on Jarvis Avenue, a task that was
estimated to cost $300,000 and, by designating the bike lane for cars, would save
motorists two minutes in travel time. That removal was delayed only briefly by protestors
who lay in the path of the vehicles sent to scratch the lanes from the pavement. Ford
wasnt unique in his belief that city streets belong to cars and should be maximized for
their benefit. But the thinking, while rarely this blunt, reveals a particular view of the
street: A place for cars and where bikes and pedestrians have to be banished for their own
safety. Instead of doing something about the sharks, Ford and transportation departments
around the world have ordered people out of the water. Mind you, this was before Mayor
Ford left office amid tabloid headlines about alcohol and crack use, no doubt the fault of
some cyclist. But the street-as-insurmountable-danger view remains.

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Lane reversal in Toronto: Protestors delay

but dont deter the removal of a bike lane
on Jarvis Avenue (Credit: Streetsblog)

Cultural and political backlashes or entrenched opposition to bike lanes are a

global phenomenon, with residents railing against lane projects in Seattle, New Orleans,
Chicago, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Vancouver ad London. San Francisco has largely
recovered from its bike lane hiatus and today is building some of the most innovative
bike infrastructure anywhere, with protected lanes in busy Golden Gate Park and on Polk
Street. Yet plans to install bike lanes even in progressive cities reliably produce some of
the most controversial newspaper headlines in almost every city where they installed,
often with the claim that they make streets more dangerous, more congested and are part

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of some kind of ideological war on cars or a nave attempt to socially engineer people
to take buses and trains.

What you see on city streets depends on how you get around. Drivers see the
street as an efficient system needlessly interrupted by signs, signals, jaywalking
pedestrians, clueless cyclists, lane-blocking buses and lollygagging drivers. If only they
kept out of my way Id get where Im going faster, drivers tell themselves. Drivers see
themselves as victims of the transportation networks failure. They dont have good
options for getting around and are forced to drive. As they innocently drive from place to
place, a small series of unrelated interruptionsmissed lights, no breaks in the traffic to
make a turn, and the rudeness of other driversquickly amass and are magnified into
what seems like a cruel joke perpetrated on them. The system doesnt work! But at least
Im not trapped in someones armpit on the bus or train.

Wherever brake lights appear on the road, blood pressures rise, eyes dilate, the
jaw clenches arms flex as one hand grasps the steering wheel while the other slams the
horn. Driving alone and insulated within a comfortable, climate-controlled steel, glass
and velour envelope is a basic form of personal transport for billions of people
worldwide, yet there is probably no more stressful way of getting around. Americans
coined the term road rage, an angry state where the worst human traits come alive
while steering two tons of mass capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 in seconds. Within
their powerful car drivers paradoxically feel trapped, powerless to escape congestion and
frustrated by not being able to control how long it takes to get from place to place. From

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a transportation officials perspective, however, the drivers innocence isnt the whole
story: Drivers are never stuck in traffic. They are the traffic that they are stuck in.

Enter the pedestrian. They are the antithesis of the car. Their only protection
against the two cars tons of mass attention and the centimeters of flesh that protect their
bones. Where cars are fast, pedestrians are slow. From the perspective of the driver,
pedestrians dont follow rules. They cross the street at the last second after a car has been
waiting a whole light cycle just to make a turn. They walk between cars, stand in the
street while waiting for the light to turn green, then walk obliviously checking their
Twitter feeds while cars snake around them. Pedestrians in big cities have largely tuned
out cars and the dangers they pose. Drivers are insolent oafs who are in a hurry and think
theyre entitled to get where theyre going faster than everyone else. But me? Hey, Im
walkin here! Pedestrians have learned to read, and listen to, the street and they know
when to dash across the street between waves of traffic. More or less. Cars pose
tremendous danger to pedestrians270,000 were killed in 2013yet the term
pedestrian rage hasnt yet caught on.

Enter the bike. Drivers and pedestrians may hate each other, but if they can agree
on just one thing its that they both hate cyclists. Every pedestrian has a story about being
nearly killed by an aggressive cyclist tiding the wrong-way through the crosswalk like a
Lycra-clad ninja. Part of this perception is experiential. From the view of a pedestrian
stepping into the street, bikes are simply too slow, too sleek and too silent to give riders
the physical profile of cars on the road and be easily noticed. Pedestrians have learned

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how to know if a car is coming, relying perhaps unconsciously on very subtle cues from
the peripheral vision or hearing the engine of an approaching vehicle. But they dont
know how to read the presence of bikes on the street. Ive startled pedestrians on my bike
even when Ive been completely stopped waiting for a red light, and Ive been cursed at
for appearing out of nowhere even when Im riding with the signal and in a bike lane.

Similarly, drivers dont see bike riders. They dont hear them, arent expecting
them or just arent looking for them. Bikes exist on a totally different frequency. They
move at speeds incompatible with other cars, theyre hard to see on the street. But worse
than anything is the bike rider him or herself: They dont follow the rules! From a driver
stopped at a red light or caught in traffic, riders seem to be cheating by cruising past,
weaving through or blocking law-abiding drivers. They ride the wrong way, they hog the
lane and block cars. And they seem so smug about it.

So even when a jaywalking pedestrian is buzzed by a bike rider they did not see,
or when the motorist has to slow down or change lanes to pass a bike, the cyclist may
have done nothing legally wrong, but that still doesnt make it right, and the pedestrians
anger, fear and frustration is no less real. And from the view of those on foot or in the
drivers seat, theres certainly no arguing whose to responsible for creating disorder on
the street: F@$!ing cyclists!

In the car-dominated first world of North America and Australasia, biking and
walking arent what a lot of people would consider transportation. Most cities in the

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second half of the 20th century were designed to easily drain people in their cars from city
centers to their quiet and remote suburban communities. Biking isnt a big mode of
suburban transportation, and biking doesnt really fit in with the self-image of many city
dwellers, New Yorkers chief among them. Almost everybody has walked, taken the
subway or ridden in yellow taxis. About 46% of New York households own a car. Bikes,
on the other hand, are another transportation species. Biking may have been something
you did as a kid in the park or when on vacation, but its not a way to get around.
Certainly not on these mean city streets. That would be crazy! This lack of experience
contributes to a lack of understanding. People dont sympathize with the bike rider in the
same way they do with car commuters, typically because its not how they themselves get
around and they may not know anyone who bikes for transportation.

And then therere the cyclists themselves. The stereotype of the urban biker in
many peoples minds is a daredevil with a lock and chain slung across his shoulders like a
battle sash. This enemy is viewed as a hipster zealot who believes that rules are not cool
and that cars are mortal street enemies. They ride fixed-gear bikes, often without a helmet
and are not innocent commuters but holier-than-thou, two-wheeled lifestyle protestors
with their One Less Car T-Shirts.

And the cultural antipathy towards cyclists and the lanes they ride on creates
entertaining headlines but obscures serious issues of traffic safety. For every Sutchi Hui
in San Francisco there are thousands of pedestrians killed each year by people driving
cars, yet rarely with the same intense reaction. It is likely because of the rareness of

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pedestrians being killed by cyclists that the media are so shocked. Yet after a century of
casualties, Americans have grown so dulled to the traffic crashes on our streets that kill
33,000 people a year that we reflexively blame the victims.

In Ch. X, we saw how bikes dont have a natural home on most city streets. While
600 lane-miles of on-street bike lanes may seem like a lot, in a city like New York this
amounts only one percent of its streets. As with most cities, New York Citys streets were
not designed to accommodate bikes. This lack of planning and street design frustrates and
forces bike riders to ride in ways that endanger themselves and it conflicts with the way
that people want to drive and walk on their streets. Bike riders pedal along in lanes with
drivers of cars, buses and trucks who are not particularly interested in sharing the road.

Just as people walking and driving have different ways they use the street, so too
do people on bikes. It requires significantly more time and exertion for a cyclist to reach
cruising speed from a dead stop than for a car, or to maneuver around a stopped or
double-parked car, so they dont really belong on a street within touching distance of
passing multi-ton vehicles. Cycling also requires maneuvering a bike in ways that even
riders themselves may not be happy with and that drivers do not understandsuch as
suddenly swerving to avoid potholes, cracks in the pavement, doors swinging open from
parked cars, manhole covers. From the drivers perspective, while bike riders have the
visibility and profile of pedestrians, they move far too fast and are less maneuverable to
be at home with pedestrians on the sidewalk. In cities with one-way streets, cyclists are
often forced to decide between biking legally three blocks to reach a mid-block point a

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half-block away, or to salmon the wrong way up that street. This tension is literally
designed into the road. So when you see a bike rider in the wrong place at the wrong
time, its often because the road told that rider to be there.

Just as Mayor Rob Ford declared in Toronto, many city residents think that riding
a bike on city streets is just plain crazy or even suicidal. Bikes dont belong on the road. I
think whats crazy is that most people seem just fine with their city streets being so
dangerous that only a lunatic would ride on them. If a street is so dangerous that the only
bike riders youre seeing are death-wish speed racers, your problem is a lot bigger than
bike riders. Theyre just a symptom of a street that is toxic to safety and street life. It is a
society as a whole that is homicidal when it accepts streets overrun by cars and that the
only way to protect seniors, schoolchildren and bike riders is to ban them from the street.

No, the fault is not in our cyclists, but in our streets. Arguing that a street is too
dangerous for people to bike on it is actually an argument for the placement of bike lanes
on that street. Instead of telling people on foot or on a bike that avoiding streets is their
best defense against them, transportation leaders should redesign their streets so that it
doesnt depend on armor or avoidance to survive it. Bike riding shouldnt be an act of
bravery or a political statement. This undervalues one of the most important
transportation options in rapidly expanding cities, and designing our streets to welcome
them is one of the most important things that city leaders can do to transform cities into
safer places.

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In fact, bike lanes and bike riders help civilize the street and they make it safer by
bringing more eyesand bodiesto the street, making them more visable to drivers . Yet
bike lanes and the cyclists who ride in them still dont have a clear transportation identity
and are often blamed for the underlying issues that the lanes are supposed to help fix. Its
confounding to see motorists channel their anger at those who represent the best hope for
the roads future.

Were not Amsterdam! Were not Copenhagen!

Quick, which city is famous for making this quip? Trick question, of course.
Chances are that no matter what city or continent you live in or on, youve probably
heard the same comment at a community meeting about bike lanes. Maybe you read a
similar quote in a news article, attributed to an upset resident or even an elected official
bemoaning a bike lane, or seen it online among the trolling comments attached to news
articles. Washington DC, London, Auckland, Sydney, Pittsburgh, New York and dozens
of cities big and small have all heard this seemingly self-evident claim that biking just
didnt fit with the citys culturebiking and bikes just doesnt reflect who its people are.
American exceptionalism extends to how we get around, and we can all agree that were
not like those fruity Europeans, right?

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Having biked around Amsterdam and Copenhagen and seeing the creative ways
that those cities have built biking into the street, Im moved to ask, Whats not to like?
Putting aside the arguments fallacy for a second (dozens of cities that are not Amsterdam
have bike lanes), why would a city be proud not to attempt something that has been so
successful elsewhere? Imagine refusing clean water or medical attention with the same
protest and you can see how ridiculous it seems. Another fallacy is that these two biking
cities are so freakishly well organized that their practices just dont apply to rough-andunready car-based cities in the North America and Down Under.

But that reality is quite distorted: Even Amsterdam and Copenhagen werent
always Amsterdam and Copenhagen, bike-wise. Both cities were maximized for carbased growth following World War Two. It was only after the oil crisis of the 1970s and
public disgust and protests over traffic deaths that national leaders started building bike
lanes and bike parking facilities in earnest. This in turn stimulated growth in ridership and
additions to infrastructure over decades. These changes include bike lanes that are
completely segregated from car lanes and pedestrian traffic, and regulated by dedicated
traffic signals, some of which are timed so that cyclists need never come to a full stop.
Copenhagen today is experimenting with bike ramps and flyovers that enable them to
avoided congested intersections. The Dutch are even testing heated bike lanes that keep
them from icing over and encourage winter riding. Today, these improvements are the
backbone for the incredible 38% of all trips in Amsterdam and 36% of trips in
Copenhagen. Its important to note that neither of these biking nirvanas were built in a
day.

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Bike commuting in most non-European countries by comparison seems so small

that its like a foreign fantasy, some kind of semi-socialistic novelty perpetrated by riders
who bear a strong resemblance to Heidi. Portland, Ore. has by far the highest bike mode
share among big American cities with 6.1 percent of commuting trips by bike. A lot of
people see in these numbers all the proof that they need that they can get along just fine
without bikes and that leaders shouldnt even bother trying to catch up with the rest of the
world. So the Were not Copenhagen/Amsterdam trope is more an angry declaration
than an observation: Were not Amsterdam, dammit, and we dont want to be. So cut out
this bikey stuff!

Despite the weighty burden of not being Amsterdam, dozens of cities in the
United States and around the world have launched ambitious plans to create vast bike
networks through some of the worst urban territories. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel
announced plan to build 100 miles of protected bike lanes. Los Angeles and San
Francisco are building dozens of miles a year. Even Tucson and San Diegonot thought
of as bike citieshave hundreds of miles of on-street lanes. Auckland is trying to reverse
the development that has emptied out the city center with many changes, including bike
lanes and transit reinvestment. But in launching these programs cities have also embarked
on some of the most controversial polices a government can undertake: taking street
space that for decades has been used exclusively by vehicles and daring to do something
else with it.

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For a lot of elected officials, bike lanes are an annoyance and an opportunity for
political advantage. Pedestrians and transit users dont view themselves as a voting bloc
and few cities have an effective political culture where they band together to lobby for
changes. But people who drive somehow are part of a kind of aggrieved group and are
quick to decry the war on cars the second that someone tries to install a bike lane. Do
not underestimate their anger at the mere sight of a cyclist or at the suggestion that they
share the road. A Facebook community named God I fucking hate cyclists using the
road claims 1,262 members as of February 2015 TK. There are hundreds of blogs,
articles, essays and other postings titled with variations on I Hate Bicyclists. A New
York State Senator posted some revenge advice to an unknown cyclist on her Facebook
page: Hey, find a fucking bike lane and get in it. A columnist for the Washington Post
found widespread sympathy when he debated running down loathsome cyclists in the
District of Columbia: Its a $500 fine for a motorist to hit a bicyclist in the District, he
wrote, But some behaviors are so egregious that some drivers might think its worth
paying the fine.

If you take out the word cyclist from and instead say I hate pedestrians, I
hate drivers or I hate bus riders, the statements suddenly are revealed as the bizarre
extremism it is. Yet its become socially acceptable to blame bike riders and bike lanes
for underlying transportation problems. The New York City Council speaker, while
running for mayor in 2013, and against the guy who promised to rip out Bloombergs
bike paths, said that she put bikes in the category of things you shouldnt discuss at
dinner parties. Mention something about bikes and the person youre talking to may

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erupt in paroxysm of anger and a story about how they were almost run down. News
reports often note if a cyclist killed by a car was wearing a helmet, regardless of who was
at fault in the crash or if a helmet could have done anything to save his or her life. Some
municipalities still have bike helmet laws, purportedly for the benefit of bike riders.
Again, this is the swimming with the sharks mentality. If the street is so dangerous that
people cant ride a bike without a helmet, then make the street safer first. More cyclists
on the street would make that street safer, while helmet requirements strongly depress
bike riding, depriving streets of the safety benefits that bike riders provide. And if
legislators really think that helmets are a prerequisite for safe streets, they would require
that every pedestrian wear one. After all, some 270,000 pedestrians die each year after
being struck by cars. As far as I know, none was wearing a helmet.

New York was never Amsterdam or Copenhagen, a fact that has been proven
repeatedly in the citys long and bumpy relationship with bike lanes. The city designated
the nations very first lanes in 1894 along five miles of pedestrian walkway on Ocean
Parkway, a tree-lined Brooklyn boulevard. Bikes were still viewed as recreation, not as a
mode of transportation in Mosess era, when most new bike paths were built in parks and
scenic roads where riders could tool away the weekend.

New York City Mayor Ed Koch in 1980, a longtime advocate for bikes as a West
Village advocate (he supported Jane Jacobs in her fights against Moses), laid the start of a

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bike network with new lanes on Broadway and on Sixth, Seventh and Eighth avenues.
The barrier-protected lanes came during the first year of the first of Kochs three terms,
when images of burnt out lots in the Bronx and the brink of bankruptcy were still fresh in
local memories and a transit strike had just paralyzed the city for 10 days in April. Bike
lanes just didnt seem to be what New Yorkers were looking for in the hangover from the
1970s economic, transportation and cultural crisis. New Yorkers spat the lanes right back
out with a Bronx cheer as motorists protested the loss of a traffic lane and resulting
traffic. Koch ripped them out just a few months later, a reversal repeated toward the end
of his second term when he unsuccessfully attempted to ban bikes from midtown avenues
in Manhattan. Bikes werent seen as good politicsthere was little constituency aside
from the urban pioneersand bike programs were easily jettisoned if they were
inconvenient. By 2007, what few bike lanes existed on paper rarely corresponded to
markings on the street as years of wind and weathering had erased them.

By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, the worlds cities started to become
biking cities. Biking infrastructure had become basic features of cities like Paris, which in
2007 launched its Vlib bike share system with 7,000 bikes, or Portland, which more
than doubled the number of bike commuters in half a decade. PlaNYC in 2007 didnt
mention bike share but it was specific about building lanes on New York City streets at a
rate of about 50 miles a year. We would soon discover that this was easier said than done,
and that achieving even half of that goal would require a more ambitious reprogramming
of city streets than had occurred in the previous quarter century. Drivers believed that the
bike lanes amputated a street of the space it needed to process traffic and to park. Some

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businesses feared that the lanes would re-appropriate parking spaces and make it harder
to make deliveries by double-parking (illegally) in front of a store or restaurant. Others
made existential objections, claiming that the lanes disrupted the essential street code,
confusing where pedestrians and cars were supposed to be even for lifelong New Yorkers.
Most were so used to their streets the way that they were that they had no idea that they
could be changed. The mere idea of altering it seemed jarring. The street may be
dangerous, it may be inefficient, oppressive and counterproductive, but were used to it.

New York wasnt Copenhagen, granted, but it was New York, and it had a small
but growing number of people biking. New Yorkers are known for a superiority complex
bordering on arrogance, so why should we let European cities eat our lunch and leave us
behind on creating safer streets? I wanted to see for myself what the magic was behind
these bike lanes.

In my first months on the job in 2007, I visited Copenhagen with my deputy

commissioner for traffic management, Michael Primeggia, to see firsthand how the Danes
crafted out their streets. Michael I toured the city with Jan Gehl, the globally influential
architect and urban planner, who sees within cities a combined experience called the life
between buildings, a world apart from the usual Point-A-to-Point-B approach to
American streets. Jan really embraced the idea of building a city up from the point of
view of people on the street, not looking down like a traffic manager. From his point of
view, every decision for the street must be taken from the perspective of the pedestrian,
creating and encouraging the kind of street life that makes cities into attractive places.

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One of the first things that captured my imagination was a radically simple bike
lane design everywhere on Copenhagens streets: curbside bike lanes protected by a lane
of parked cars. Most American city streets allow parking along the curbside lane
probably even the street in front of your house or on the route to workwhile a
traditional bike lane is placed on the moving-traffic side of a parking lane. As weve seen
in earlier chapters, parking-protected lane reverses the traffic syntax, placing the bike
lane at the curb while moving the parking lane into what used to be a moving traffic lane.
This puts bike riders next to a sidewalk on one side and parked cars in the floating lane
on the other.

Michael seemed skeptical about this approach. With more than two decades at the
transportation department Michael was steeped in decades of the kind of standardized
transportation engineering that was defined in manuals and reinforced by decades of riskaverse practice.

But that didnt mean thats what he wanted to do. He had always been asked to
operate by the book, and that book didnt have concepts like protected bike paths. With a
new directive and a new commissioner (me), it was as if the shackles were being taken
off. This was no small conversion. An intimidating presence, Michael had long,
Raphaelite locks and a gray beard, resembling an edgy architect more than a hardboiled
traffic engineer. He had an affection for the Grateful Dead and Italian shoes that he
adored so much he slipped on driving slippers when he got into his car to so he wouldnt

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scuff them. And more than almost anyone in New York City he had strong opinions about
how the citys streets.

Thats how the future of New York Citys bike renaissance emerged on the streets
of Copenhagen during that trip: Michael knelt down and took the dimensions of a
protected bike path along a main street. I could see the wheels turning in his mind as he
mentally compared the Danish dimensions to New Yorks avenues. Cars parked along the
curb were as common as parking meters in New York just as they were in most big cities.
I asked Michael if there as anything in his manuals requiring that parking be along the
curb in New York. Michael said it was a time-honored convention that made sense. There
was nothing that explicitly barred this design. But there was nothing explicitly
authorizing it. Michael knew the issue with making the parking-protected lane work in
New York City wouldnt be with the engineering or with the manuals. It would be with
New Yorkers. Would they accept this design?

As expected, when we brought this idea home, many thought it was crazy, even
within the agency. But having just seen it work well in another city, Michael and I were
convinced and continued to design what would become the first bike lane in North
America built along the curb. The location was Ninth Avenue, in the Chelsea
neighborhood of Manhattan, west of Union Square . Ninth Avenue wasnt as famous as
its avenue cousins Fifth, Madison or Lexington, yet it was a traffic workhorse that was
wider and had very high capacity for moving vehicles on the section running from 23rd to
16th streets, just north of where we built one of our first plazas. Simply describing the

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bike lane design to the local community was difficult. I found myself miming the design
with my hands and fingers but eventually realized there was no avoiding the need to roll
out a street design or rendering to show how it was supposed to work.

By proposing that the parking lane be relocated 14 feet away from the curb we
also had to prove to a skeptical Fire Department officials that fighting a fire from a wide
curbside bike lane was better than sending out ladders over a row of cars that would
otherwise be parked along the curb. The protected bike lanes and accompanying
pedestrian islands were designed to be wide enough to allow fire trucks, ambulances,
garbage trucks and the largest emergency vehicles. But reality and testing is even more
important than theoretical designs, so our engineers met fire officials out in the street and
monitored turning tests of their engines and ladders to ensure that they could make the
turns that worked on paper.

We also had to get the buy-in of the police department, which raised questions
about signs, traffic flow and enforcement. If a car were parked 11 feet away from the curb
in a floating parking lane where there is a fire hydrant, would it still violate the
prohibition of parking within 15-feet of a hydrant (it did). Did protected bike lanes
require installation of bike traffic lights (not necessarily; we built them on 9th Avenue but
not on 1st Avenue and both ways seem to function well). After many staff meetings and
personal discussions with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the department signed off too,
the first in what would be many strong stands Kelly took to support our programs.

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We presented the design to the local community board, which agreed to the
change on a pilot basis. They wanted to see if it worked and appreciated that the design
could help that seniors crossing the street to nearby housing complexes. While the intent
was initially a bike lane, it provided an opportunity for much more. Manhattan Borough
Commissioner Margaret Forgione explained to the community board and other groups
that the plan wasnt just for bike riders. In the crosswalks, the plan included the
installation of pedestrian refuge islandssmall concrete medians within the street to give
pedestrians a safe place to wait for a break in the traffic. This meant that instead of
having to cross four lanes of cars and a lane of bikes before reaching safety, pedestrians
had to content only with three lanes before reaching a refuge island, then would cross
single bike lanea net decrease in the number of lanes and number of feet exposed to car
traffic.

By October 2007, just five months into my appointment, the first parkingprotected bike in North American continent took shape, changing the geography and
geometry of the city not just for bike riders but for everyone on the street. Pedestrians
could cross the bike lane and wait for the light at a refuge island. Drivers had a more
clearly marked street. And that was one of the unexpected benefits of that first lane. We
knew that the parking protection would change the profile of the street. But because it
was a new design knew we had to make all of the lane markings as clear as possible, so
we slightly narrowed and aggressively delineated all the lanes, including dashed lines
through the intersection to give cars to provide visual cues that kept them from drifting

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Lane change on 9th Avenue

The successful installationand the initial lack of oppositionled to a series of

rapid-fire projects, with new bike lanes set in motion on nearby 8th Avenue, Vernon
Boulevard along the Western Queens waterfront, on 9th Street through the heart of Park
Slope in Brooklyn, on Hylan Boulevard on the remote South Shore of Staten Island, and
a series of bike lane connecting among the East River Bridges and the local bike lane
networks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. By 2009 we had completed the fastest installation
of bike lanes ever executed in any city, repurposing former car space to create 200 miles
of bike lanes in just two yearsnearly the equivalent of a lane from the Grand Concourse
in the Bronx to the Boston Commonand more lanes than were built in 60 years in bikefriendly Copenhagen, as Jan Gehl later noted to me. I guess Copenhagen isnt New York!

Another appeal of bike lanes was their street value. We staffed up to make the
most of federal funding, particularly transportation clean-air funds that could be used to
help build bike lanes. Federal funds that paid for 80 percent of most of our bike lane
expenditures, the rest paid for with a local match. For 20 cents on the federal dollar,

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millions of New Yorkers could enjoy redesigned street for a fraction of the price of a
single subway car.

While most of the first 200 miles of bike lanes were welcomed by New Yorks
neighborhoods and were unremarked, the exceptions highlighted the tension between
New Yorks diverse communities and portended the coming bike backlash. The battles
caught fire on Brooklyns Kent Avenue at the same time as another started on
Manhattans Grand Streeta cluttered crosstown street that cut through SoHo and into
Chinatown. Grand Street had one moving traffic lane, two parking lanes and a bike lane.
The problem was the too-large travel lane, which was big enough to invite double
parking, which forced cars, trucks and bikes into risky maneuvers around them, and
causing that lane to break down. Creating a parking protected bike path was one of the
least radical changes we could have made because in this case it wouldnt even remove a
travel lane; we just made the existing on-street bike lane into a protected bike path,
placing it on the curbside and creating a floating parking lane. So the street was still had
one moving lane, two parking lanes and a bike lane, just in a different order and
eliminating the possibility of illegal and dangerous double-parking.

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Grand Ole Bike Lane

But thats not what a lot of people said. Merchants and local residents claimed
that we had removed a traffic lane and also eliminated a parking lane. And some claimed
that the change was made unilaterally and without notice A mayoral candidate declared,
sensing an easy political win declared, I'm in favor of bike lanes but you can't put bike
lanes in without speaking to the community. In fact the bike lane was presented to the
local community board and supported in a 33-1 vote. We sent reporters electronic copies
of the authorizing resolution from the community board. Locals protested that the boards
didnt represent their views. And the point bears repeating: the street had the same
number of traffic and parking lanes before and after the project, just better organized.
Reporters quoted people saying that the design eliminated a lane, despite our providing
photographic evidence that this wasnt the case. Others claimed that the safety change
created an unanticipated safety hazard by narrowing the streets beyond what an
emergency vehicle could negotiateexactly the kind of potential problem that we had
anticipated and engineered out of our plans.

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Still, the headlines blared Grand FDNY Pain and Bike path puts squeeze on
fire engines Despite official FDNY statements to the transportation department and to
the press that the lane had no impact on their trucks response times, anonymous sources
at local firehouses allegedly claimed that the bike lane is a problem, it's something we've
been talking about. We been changing our routes when we're driving around this area. In
reality, the changes on Grand Street only made that street a comparable width as
thousands of other streets around New York City. If this design really created a problem
that emergency workers couldnt surmount, then the same problem is created by hundreds
of miles of parking spaces on one-lane streets. But nobody was proposing eliminating
parkingthat would be crazy, right?only bike lanes. Meanwhile, daily vehicle traffic
routinely blocks fire trucks and ambulances yet rarely does any source complain to the
press about that, anonymous or otherwise. Fortunately, these concerns got no further than
the tabloids, nor did the political candidate get any traction from his comments.

Meanwhile, across the East River in Brooklyn, a lopsided 39-2 community board
vote supported building a bike path on Kent Avenue. Kent is a border avenue that
parallels the rapidly developing Brooklyn waterfront at the edge of the Williamsburg
neighborhood. Historically populated by Hasidic Jews, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans
Williamsburg during the 2000s was growing with younger, hipster population that loves
to bike. We had just built the citys first bike corral, eliminating three parking spaces next
to the Bedford Avenue L Train station and installing racks that were immediately
swarmed daily by bikes. The Kent Avenue bike lane would be less a utility route for local

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Williamsburg trips than a bike commuting superhighway to and from nearby DUMBO,
Fort Greene and Greenpoint. The lane would also be a local link in a greenway that one
day would link the many neighborhoods along Brooklyns TK-mile, difficult-to-access
waterfront. Kent was known as a late-night speedway. It was too wide for two-way
traffic, particularly at night, when the long, dark corridor lures thrill-seeking drivers. Yet
it was too narrow to add bike lanes in addition to having parking on both sides. The plan
for Kent called for a lane like Ninth Avenue or Grand Street, but more elaborate,
physically protected from moving traffic with curbs and plantings and with the lane twoway instead of operating in just one direction.

Despite the overwhelming vote, some in the community proved not quite prepared
for the first step. Because the kind of physically separated lane we wanted to build would
require long-term construction, we implemented in its place an interim bike lane project
that eliminated 200 parking spaces overnight, replacing them with bike lanes.
Immediately, many of the manufacturing industries along Kent protested, saying they
couldnt make or receive deliveries and had nowhere to load trucks.

Even worse, there was the issue of women. On bikes. They were being lured to a
neighborhood of observant Jews who were forced to watch. With each year, more riders
were pedaling through one of Brooklyns most strictly observant Jewish neighborhoods
in Brooklyn, its high-rises full of large families in conservative, body covering outfits
year-round. HASID LUST CAUSE, read the headline, It's the Hasids vs. the hotties
in a Brooklyn bike war. Reporters from several media outlets fanned out all along Kent

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Avenue to shoot pictures of the ladies of the lanes, no doubt because the lanes are
popular with North Williamsburg hipstersmany who ride in shorts or skirts.

Bikes: A transportation lust cause

The brouhaha would have been funny if only the community werent dead serious
about its objection. A cultural and political battle with the neighborhood ensued before
our staff realized: The communitys objection on Kent Avenue was about the loss of
parking, not the configuration of the street. They just wanted their parking spaces back.
But what about all the scantily clad shiksas? Despite the lurid headlines, we eventually
discovered, the scantily clad issue wasnt on Kent Avenue but on parallel Bedford
Avenue, a bike lane installed well before my tenure. The Bedford bike lane had became a
hipster bike superhighway running even more directly through Satmar Williamsburg. In
meetings with the agencys community leaders, locals openly admitted they would think

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nothing of turning Kent Avenue upside down so long as it took the tank-topped and
stretch-panted women cyclists away from Bedford.

With traffic deputy Michael Primeggia, we mapped out a redesign to the Kent
Avenue redesign. This one was a parking-protected, two-way bike path that would also
establish two parking lanes. In a single stroke, the plan reinstated hundreds of parking
spaces and restored loading zones. At first we thought there would be pushback to the
proposal, which changed Kent from one traffic lane in both directions to a one-lane, oneway car traffic street northbound. But that fact didnt seem to phase neighborhood
opponents in our face-to-face meetings once they saw how much parking they would get
back. Through community consultation, we had successfully negotiated a project that was
more radical than the one it replaced. Had we started by proposing what we ultimately
built, we would have been tossed from the Williamsburg Bridge.

The downside to this agreement was the controversial erasure of the bike lane on
Bedford. It was hard to explain how this seeming retreat actually advanced the
sustainable streets agenda. But on Kent, we would have the best bike lane in Brooklyn
just two blocks parallel to the one wed remove from Bedford, and also connecting to the
foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. Today it remains a bike superhighwayone of the most
heavily used sections of bike infrastructure anywhere in the city. I would have loved
nothing more than to have won every battle and side-skirmish. But this single action
instantly stanched a potentially deep political wound and made hundreds of miles of
future bike lanes in New York City possible. And to this day, hundreds of people still bike

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down Bedford Avenue daily in the blank space where the lane used to bejust as it is
legal to bike on any city street. Stretch pants, short-shorts, miniskirts and all.

Along Prospect Park West on a cold, damp November morning, the rage boiled
down to a few signs, most seemingly written by the same hand on the same-quality poster
board:

Bike Lane = Fewer Parking Spots.

Prospect Park West Bike Lane Dangerous to Seniors & Grandchildren.

Dont be Conned by Sadik-Khan.

Changing Our Lanes Is Risking Our Lives.

The rally of a couple of dozen people took up a small part of the sidewalk. Still,
police were called and barriers erected to keep comic order in the face of an arriving
stream of about 200 counter-protestors walking or seated atop bikes, pedaling past them
and clutching their own signs with variations on the message: We our New Bike
Lane.

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It was the largest public confrontation of bike lane opponents and supporters in
New York Citys history, and, in 2010, it was also the single largest public demonstration
regarding a single transportation project since Jane Jacobs held the line against Robert
Mosess Lower Manhattan Expressway half a century earlier.

The green paint marking the two-way, parking-protected bike path had long since
dried four months earlier and the lane had quickly become one of the most used bike
routes in the city. It had also become, in the words of a local paper struggling to keep
pace with the escalating rhetoric that the tabloids were using, the most controversial slab
of cement outside of the Gaza Strip.

An 18-block, nine-tenths-of-a-mile stretch of road jutting out southwest from

Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Park West along Prospect Park was designed by Frederick
Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the creators of Central Park who also designed parks in
dozens of cities across the nation. The avenue was built on a grand scale to insulate the
park and the Park Slope neighborhood that runs along the park. Tree-lined and shielding
the park with its five lanes and broad sidewalks, the street somehow never feels crowded
even when its full of families pushing strollers, strollers heading out on weekend charity
walks or hipsters checking out a show during the parks annual summer concert series
and food festivals.

But like many New York City streets, Prospect Park Wests three lanes of moving
traffic had long outlived their useful lives. This street was functionally obsolete, and the

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traffic math was telling. Just a few miles away, dismal and perpetually congested Canal
Street in Manhattanwhich Moses wanted to replace with a 10-lane highwaytakes
only two lanes of traffic off of the Manhattan Bridge and toward the Holland Tunnel.
Flatbush Avenue, one of Brooklyns backbones, sees some of the most intense traffic on
its side of the bridge, and yet has just three moving lanes at the foot of the bridge. So
what was a beautiful street like Prospect Park West doing with enough traffic lanes to
service the Manhattan Bridgeand what possible use could a residential neighborhood
like Park Slope have for that many traffic lanes in a neighborhood where less than half of
households own cars?

The corollary problem with this equationa 49-foot wide street without many
cars driving on themis that it invites a basic transportation imbalance: speed. A wide
street with little traffic looks to a driver as inviting as a race track and sends an
unconscious message: You are the jet, this is the tarmac. Prepare for liftoff.

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Prospect Park West Before and After. Two lanes of traffic and timed
traffic signals work better than three lanes, where cars race around each
other. The two-way bicycle lane takes bike riders off the sidewalk,
where 46% of riders on Prospect Park West would ride illegally among
strollers

Speeding on Prospect Park had been an issue for years and alternatives had been
floated to convert the street to two-way traffic, or to make nearby streets one-way so that
fewer would rely on Prospect Park West. This notion so incensed members of the
community that Michael Primeggia was all but tarred and feathered when he proposed
the idea at a raucous community meeting. Residents understood the need for change but
no proposal seemed to hit the mark.

By the time that I became Commissioner, and as neighborhoods started to see the
changes coming to city streets, new generations of urban idealists were starting to
percolate into the New York Citys community board system. These unelected bodies are

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appointed by borough presidents and given authority to conduct meetings in the public
interest on local issuesthough they lacked the actual authority to approve or veto
projects, their support is widely viewed as essential.

These were communities that were in many ways far ahead of the city in
promoting progressive policies. Concerns about the safety of streets and other interests
bubbled up regularly at board and committee meetings, ending with letters and
resolutions addressed to the agencies demanding action and not just acknowledgement. It
was at one such meeting that the community board that encompassed Park Slope called
for a bike lane to be implemented immediately on Prospect Park West, with an eye on
upgrading it to a protected bike path to calm traffic.

Thats when the idea took root at DOT. The plan was one of the last germinated
under Primeggia in his 25 years with the city, though it would eventually be developed
and implemented by a thoughtful young engineer, Ryan Russo. Ryan bikes everywhere
and was as idiosyncratic as his previous boss and similarly tended toward longer hair,
more resembling an architect than a traffic engineer. His fans in the livable street
community lovingly referred to him as Bike Primeggia.

After receiving the resolution calling for a bike lane, Ryans team went to the
community board with a proposal that also looked at the traffic problem on Prospect Park
West. Seventy-five percent of cars we monitored on the street were speeding, making the
street feel more like a highway than a grand boulevard. Forty-six percent of bikes that

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used the one-way street rode illegally on the sidewalk. It wasnt that those cyclists wanted
to be on the sidewalk. They were frustrated onto it because the street didnt provide them
the route they wanted to usetraveling north toward Grand Army Plaza and against the
direction of traffic on Prospect Park West. The presence of bike riders on the sidewalk
was as much a frustration line as a desire line. The board supported the proposal and we
started planning, proceeding with explicit, written community board support, a petition
signed by 1,300 people and public open houses to present the changes. This kind of
support on its own would have been more than enough community involvement to
implement a project in any other neighborhood. But not this time.

She is a zealot, came the voice on a local radio station one morning. The deep
Brooklyn-blunt words were unmistakably that of the boroughs president, Marty
Markowitz. The she, I realized over my morning coffee, was me.

I have supported bicycle lanes, throughout the borough, he continued, But

where I feel bicycle lanes would have an adverse affect my job is to speak up for it.

Uber-cheerleader, demi-celebrity, quasi-elected-official, Brooklyn Borough

President Marty Markowitz is known for his mouth. Whether hes sinking his teeth into a
Juniors cheesecake, extolling the virtues of the Brooklyn Nets, or, in this case, taking up
the mantle of bike lane opponent, Markowitz used the same vocal intensity and volume to

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cheer on projects or to bury them, with all the subtlety of a shovel in the face. Borough
presidents have little actual authority, legislative or otherwise, save for a small
discretionary budget, but then, there was his mouth.

The language he used I this interview was hardly surprising. This was the same
guy who would sing his mocking testimony to the City Council to the tune of My
Favorite Things eight months later. But what he did in this interview was shift the terms
of the debate. The impending construction of a bike lane on Prospect Park West,
Markowitzs former front yard, wasnt a safety issue or a neighborhood-requested project.
It was about me and my personal war against cars: Im acutely aware that she wants to
make it hard for those that choose to own their automobiles, Markowitz said. She wants
to make it difficult, their life difficult. I really believe that.

With one well-timed, well-modulated bark into an all-too-wiling reporters

microphone, the rules of this game were established: It was my bike lane in his backyard.
Here was a salt-of-the-earth outer-borough homeboy standing up for his turf against the
limousine liberal Manhattan commissioner who doesnt understand how the other half
lives. The caricature of the crazy bike lady would play into virtually all of the
thousands of stories, editorials and editorial cartoons to come.

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The dread Prospect Park West bike lane

Despite Markowtizs pre-construction denunciation, the building of the bike lane

in Prospect Park West in the early summer of 2009 went by with little drama. I heard
reports that my predecessor as transportation commissioner, a Prospect Park West
resident, expressed some skepticism about the lane to a DOT staffer surveying the street
as she prepared to hop in her car to drive to work one morning.

Just as with Times Square, the project was a sensation from the moment work
started, not when it finished. The design reassigned one of Prospect Park Wests two
parking lanes t into a two-way bike path. The parking lane was shifted into the floating
position, taking one of the three travel lanes. This redesign of the street, combined with
re-timed traffic signals meant that the same amount of moving traffic would have to rely
on two lanes instead of three. Having seen the less is more model work well in
Midtown, and with so many streets in Brooklyn like Flatbush moving so much more
traffic on fewer lanes, we had little doubt that the new design would still provide more

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than enough room for the number of cars moving through the area. By reducing the
number of lanes we were reducing only the speed of traffic and its impact on the
neighborhood, not the streets capacity. And this remedy provided a broad lane for riders
to and from Park Slope, Prospect Heights and points in-between previously accessible
only via an out-of-the-way ride along sidestreets and down and up hills.

By July, when the paint on the lane was still barely dry, Prospect Park West was a
different street. There were no traffic pileups, no chain-reaction crashes, no reports of
people being mowed down by bike riders in the lane. Anyone standing on the street might
be lulled to sleep by the gentle cycles of bike riders and vehicle traffic cruising down the
road. From the earliest days, this looked like project that worked, not a traffic nightmare.

Enter two groups: Seniors for Safety and Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes. These
two groups formed for the single purpose of opposing the Prospect Park West bike lane.
They saw in the lane a violation of the aesthetics of the grand avenue along the park, one
that created traffic, invited bike riders to tangle with families crossing the street and
formed a barrier for people trying to reach the park. A more obvious alternative to many
opponents was be simply to create a two-way bike lane along roads within the park itself,
where riders could tool around without upsetting the status quo on the street. There were
two major holes in this seemingly modest alternative. First, and most importantly, putting
the lane inside the park would have done nothing to reduce speeding and sidewalks
cycling on Prospect Park West, which were two of the original goals of the project. And
then there was the fact that there was only one entrance for bikes along the 1.1-mile

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stretch of street. Riders would need a bike lane on the streets around the park just to reach
the compromise bike lane in the park. This wasnt a much of an alternative.

In the months following the installation, and despite the peaceful status quo on the
street itself, these two groups managed to cobble together a small but strategic campaign,
targeting specific reporters and news outlets that reported on every new allegation. They
were egged on by a former deputy mayor, who penned a letter protesting the lane and
calling for it to be relocated into the park. While some opponents claimed that so many
bike riders would use the lane that it would create extreme hazards, others claimed that so
few riders used the lane that it should be removed. Others claimed the bike lane caused
the elimination of a bus route (which was the result of budgetary moves, not the bike
lane).

Opponents also alleged that we had dodged community notification and

approvals. Yet this was the most thoroughly vetted bike lane in the history of
neighborhood bike lanes. We had explicit requests from the community and broad
support from elected officials and civic groups. But had we informed and convinced
every last person in Park Slope? There are some 65,000 people estimated to live in the
neighborhood. Its likely that a chunk of them didnt know who the president was and
some may have not been convinced that he was born in the United States. We were
convinced that the issue wasnt so much that we hadnt done enough outreach. There
were just some who were upset to find themselves on the losing side of the argument.

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There must be ample time for people to have their say, but after all the facts are in,
needed safety projects cannot be paralyzed by doomsayers peddling fear instead of facts.

We had promised the community we would report on the results of the Prospect
Park bike lane project after six months. And after six months of constant monitoring and
in the preliminary data we released, we already had pretty strong indications that the
street was functioning just fine. We had registered very few traffic crashes at all, certainly
nothing you wouldnt find on any other street in the city. A survey released by a local
councilmember in the days before a winter hearing found that most people surveyed who
lived near the park supported the changes, though some wanted to make adjustments that
retained the lanes, such as by installing pedestrian refuge islands, adding raised stripes to
the bike lane that would cause bikes to rumble as they approached crosswalks and
changing some parking regulations to provide more parking.

It was one month after my City Council cross-examination when Ryan Russo
walked into the meeting in a cold church on a damp night in January in Park Slope, just
two blocks from the lane, ready to answer questions from the community board that
requested the project, from the dozens of bike lane supporters who came out in force, and
also to face down the cadre of anti-laners as he delivered the data.

About halfway through the meeting, my predecessor as commissioner, Iris

Weinshall, walked in, taking a seat behind most of the people assembled. The wife of
New Yorks powerful U.S. Senator, Chuck Schumer, Weinshall lived in a Park Slope

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apartment building that fronted directly onto Prospect Park West. We had heard through
back channels that Iris had opposed the bike lane and that she and her law student
daughter were advising or at least lending moral support to a group of local bike lane
opponents, even though her husband, the senator, was an inveterate bike rider as known
for his Saturday bike rides as he was for his Sunday press conferences.

Just weeks earlier, Weinshall had co-signed a letter to the New York Times
declaring that When new bike lanes force the same volume of cars and trucks into fewer
and narrower traffic lanes, the potential for accidents between cars, trucks and pedestrians
goes up rather than down, she wrote. At Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, for instance,
where a two-way bike lane was put in last summer, our eyewitness reports show
collisions of one sort or another to be on pace to be triple the former annual rates.

In support of their claim, they also said they had videotaped use of the bike lane
from the penthouse apartment of an anti-bike-lane confederate showing that the lane
wasnt as well-used as believed. The video, taken during cold weather at one extreme end
of the path, was also far from where the path connected with other side-street paths. It
was the equivalent of counting subway passengers by how many got off at the last stop.
And while speeding and sidewalk riding were rampant before the project, one thing
Prospect Park West never had much of were serious collisions. So we werent terribly
surprised to see that crashes went from low to somewhat lower.

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But what was more interesting were the number of crashes resulting in an actual
injury, which dropped 63%, from an average of slightly more than five for every sixmonth period to just two in the six-months since we installed the lane. Ryan clicked
through the presentation as reporters lurked around the auditorium. Speeding on the
corridorthe entire impetus behind the projectbottomed out tremendously, from 74%
of cars on Prospect Park West speeding to just 20%. Sidewalk bike riding dropped from
46% of bike riders on the sidewalk before the project to just 3% aftermost of the
remaining being children allowed to ride on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, traffic volumes
and the length of time it took to drive down the street remained unchanged. Before, cars
sped from red light to red light. Now they cruised at a moderate pace with few if any,
stops. Prospect Park West remained the fastest route through Park Slope.

Dozens of bike lane supporters were members of the public at that meeting. The
board asked a lot of questions but they never asked that the lane be removed. We were
surprised that the opponents did not land any punches or even appear dejected at that
meeting. We celebrated that night that the meeting was even better than our best-case
scenario. The next morning we realized that the bike lane opponents may have taken
comfort with their earlier conversations with the New York Post, which could be counted
on to amplify any grievance targeting a bike lane or plaza.

Bikes 'inflated': Bklyn nabe disputes lane success data, read the next days
headline. The story continued: A battle over a Brooklyn bike lane is in high gear, with a
group of well-organized residents accusing the Department of Transportation yesterday of

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fudging the numbers of bicycles using the lane to support the city's drive to make the
pathway permanent. There was no mention of the community request or of the overall
support for the lane at the previous nights meeting. The headlines were written by the
losers in this round of the streetfight.

Once again it was clear that having the data was not and would never be enough.
The issue was cultural, political and, as we would find in the coming months, irresolvable
except by a court of law.

I fell face-first into that backlash, and the worst part of my entry was that it was
my own doing, and it is one of my greatest regrets. Not just because the mistake was
unnecessary, but because I dragged one of my closest allies into a battle he had nothing to
do with. That ally was Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

Unexpected events can throw even the most organized city into a Gordian knot of
trouble. Thats particularly true when it comes to snow. Snowstorms are a common
event in the Northeast and most of the time they pass with minor inconveniences (school
closings, transit delays, roads filled with piles of snow and ice-covered cars). You depend
on the weather forecasts to assign the right number of sanitation plows, de-icing
equipment, agency personnel and traffic agents to keep the city safe and mobile. The
City has had lots of experience in managing snowstorms and every politician in New

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York knows the folly of not being on top of the situation. A blizzard jeopardized Mayor
John Lindsays 1969 re-election campaign after his administrations failed efforts to clear
snowdrifts in Queens.

On Christmas Eve 2010, the City prepared for the expected snowfall of a foot to a
foot and a half with a usual deployment of people and equipmentsome 2,230 sanitation
collection trucks, 365 salt and sand spreaders, 294 front-end loaders. I had joined a
conference call the night before with the agencies involved in snowstorms City Hall,
Sanitation, DEP, Parks, Schools and Police. A call on Christmas morning confirmed the
forecast from the National Weather Service. This snowfall, while significant, was nothing
out of the ordinary.

I drove back to the city after a wonderful holiday dinner with family in
Connecticut. Light snow dusted the trees, houses, rocks and roads. It was a pristine,
poetic, peaceful landscape. As we drove back into the city the snowfall was light and
unremarkable. But what did seem unusual that afternoon was that the snow didnt appear
to be stopping. And it was certainly heavier than predicted as was clear by 4 p.m. that
day.

The agency heads responsible for the operational aspects of snow events met at 5
p.m. that afternoon at Pier 11, one of the Department of Sanitations salt depots, for a
press conference to give the public notice about the storm and information about what to
do, affected services and ongoing preparations. I met up with John Doherty, the

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Sanitation Commissioner, Joe Bruno from the Office of Emergency Management, MTA
Chair Tom Prendergast and representatives from Police, Parks and the Department of
Education. The snow was continuing to fall which was not as predicted. Mayor
Bloomberg came to the presser and advised New Yorkers not to panic and go about their
usual activities, and even take in a Broadway show. In hindsight, always 20-20, that
probably wasnt the best advice but its not as odd as it sounds. The first rule in dealing
with emergencies of any kind is to reassure the public and provide detailed information
about what to do and what is expected. In this case the unexpected was nipping at our
door.

As we awaited the Mayor, I spoke with Doherty about declaring a snow

emergency. We agreed that it was not the right thing to do. While the DOT typically
plays a small role in snowstorms, in NYC there was a law on the books giving the DOT
Commissioner the responsibility to call a Snow Emergency. The Snow Emergency
regulations give the Commissioner the power to order people to move their cars off of
designated snow routesseveral hundred miles of main corridors citywide. In fact, the
emergency declaration was a relic from a much earlier era when moving cars may have
made sense if there were other parking spaces to move them to. But the idea of a
panicked game of parking musical chairs was so far from anybodys mind that there was
no question of invoking it. Sanitation Commissioner Doherty, and others agreed that the
last thing we wanted were people leaving the safety of their houses and driving amid
gathering flurries.

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The snow grew faster and thicker than anyone had expected. Thousands of cars
and buses were stranded, which in turn stranded hundreds of Sanitation snow-removing
vehicles. Ambulances and fire trucks couldnt get through. The city was snowbound for
days after as sub-freezing temperatures continued. The botched response to which would
threaten the hyper-competent image of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And attention
eventually settled on one arcane point: The non-declaration of a snow emergency.

Speaking with a reporter from the New York Post about why I hadnt called a
snow emergency, I challenged her on why she was even focusing on me. I had attended a
multi-hour hearing before a City Council committee and had gotten all of one question on
this topic. Yet the reporter could not answer why she was focusing on me with this nonquestion.

The Police Department could have called a weather emergency, and Ray Kelly
wasn't there, I blurted out.

My press secretary, sitting silently next to me as I spoke into the handset, threw
up his hands as if to say Block that kick!

Within minutes, we had a message from Ray Kellys press deputy: NY Post is
alleging unfriendly fire from DOT Commissioner.

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We tried to walk it back, explaining that we werent suggesting that Ray Kelly
should have done anything. Everyone agreed that making people move their cars was a
bad idea. This was just a botched attempt to call out a reporter for blaming me for making
the right decision. Should I have told John Doherty, the Sanitation Commissioner with 50
years experience, To hell with what you and your snowplows want, Im going to put
50,000 cars in your way?

The headline was self-inflicted ballast in the Sunday paper: Wrath of Khan:
Kelly taking heat.

By seeming to impugn him publicly, I became a finger-pointer seeming to blame

one of the people I most respected someone who most New Yorkers and a fair share of
elected officials had great admiration for. And by giving them license to criticize me, it
opened up other lines of attack, on my character and policies. Bad timing.

The headlines, editorials and rants came as thick and immobilizing as the frozen
snow drifts from the blizzard, all with the same theme: A Commissioner, as loved by
some as she is loathed by others, is facing criticism for her radical bike agenda. One local
magazine put my face on the cover with multiple choice boxed for checking: Love or
Hate. I began to worry about what the Mayor thought about the tsunami of bad press and
asked Marc La Vorgna, our media contact at City Hall who became the Mayors press
secretary, what he made of the Love/Hate dichotomy.

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Whatever. I checked love, he shot back. The article says you have big ideas
and dont accept the status quo.

It was hard to take comfort in these kind words as a series of unflattering news
stories landedin New York Magazine and the New York Times, which itself was
followed by the filing of legal papers in the Prospect Park West lawsuit in March 2011.

We provided reporters electronic copies of community resolutions and letters

documenting votes, requests and resolutions of support for projects that made
neighborhoods safer, reduced street crossing distances for kids and seniors. The annoyed
rebuke we got back from a member of the editorial board of a major New York City
newspaper was, verbatim, You can dismiss this all as inaccurate if you like, but people
are saying this.

Throughout all the controversy and backlash the strongest support came from Mike
Bloomberg who despite relentless criticism, had my back. Keep going was his
response to the stories, and his political courage kept me going even in the darkest
months.

And having lost patience with the bickering after reading yet another love
em/hate em story in New York Magazine, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson drafted a
record-correcting memo, which he blasted out to reporters.

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MEMORANDUM

To: Interested Parties

From: Howard Wolfson
Subject: Bike Lanes
Date: March 21, 2011

In light of this weeks New York magazine article about bike lanes I thought you might find the
below useful.

The majority of New Yorkers support bike lanes. According to the most recent
Quinnipiac poll, 54 percent of New York City voters say more bike lanes are good
because its greener and healthier for people to ride their bicycles, while 39 percent say
bike lanes are bad because it leaves less room for cars which increases traffic.

Major bike lane installations have been approved by the local Community Board,
including the bike lanes on Prospect Park West and Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn and on
Columbus Avenue and Grand Street in Manhattan. In many cases, the project were
specifically requested by the community board, including the four projects mentioned
above.

Over the last four years, bike lane projects were presented to Community Boards at
94 public meetings. There have been over 40 individual committee and full community
board votes and/or resolutions supporting bike projects.

Projects are constantly being changed post-installation, after the community provides
input and data about the conditions on the street. For example:
o

The bike lane on Columbus Avenue was amended after installation to

increase parking at the communitys request.

Bike lanes on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg and on Father Capodanno

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Blvd. in Staten Island were completely removed after listening to community input
and making other network enhancements.

255 miles of bike lanes have been added in the last four years. The City has 6,000
miles of streets.

Bike lanes improve safety. Though cycling in the city has more than doubled in the
last four years, the number of fatal cycling crashes and serious injuries has declined due
to the safer bike network.

When protected bike lanes are installed, injury crashes for all road users (drivers,
pedestrians, cyclists), typically drop by 40 percent and by more than 50 percent in some
locations.

From 2001 through 2005, four pedestrians were killed in bike-pedestrian accidents.
From 2006 through 2010, while cycling in the city doubled, three pedestrians were killed in
bike-pedestrian accidents.

66 percent of the bike lanes installed have had no effects on parking or on the
number of moving lanes.

We noticed right around then that things started to change and that the memo had
helped turn a conceptual corner, telegraphing to reporters that City Hall had our back,
that bike lanes worked and that there would be no talk about changing direction.

As the winter thawed, we no longer woke afraid to check our email or crack open
the paper to see what new outrage we had yet to learn we had to answer for. There were
fewer hit pieces and broadcast media moved on to other drive-by topics.

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Newspapers that hoped to harass Mayor Bloomberg or his aides into a froth to get
rid of me were bitterly disappointed, and the Mayor himself put my status bluntly: I've
always said that if you want lifetime employment in our administration, you just get The
Post to demand that I fire you."

Since that was exactly that tabloids goal, and since it was becoming obvious that
the Mayor made decisions based on facts and data and wouldnt be making policy or
personnel decisions based on headlines, the Post responded in kind with a sarcastic,
reverse-psychology editorial, We Janette, demanding that I be retained.

This one's a keeper, it concluded. Pleeeeease don't fire her.

He didnt, and I kept that editorial pinned at my desk for the remainder of my
tenure.

There may have been a more practical explanation for the end of the media
frenzy: The polls started coming in.

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By March 18, days before spring started, a poll found that 54% of New Yorkers
said that bike lanes were a good thing. This was the first of many polls that would be
released in the coming months putting bike lanes popularity as high as 66%--higher than
the approval numbers for most New York politicians.

The way the polls told the story, most New Yorkers either didnt read the papers
or didnt relate to the controversy. What sounded like a chorus of opponents was really
just a small but determined section of the population, not the general will. Most saw the
changes on the street and probably just shrugged their shoulders. But some influential
columnists also began to take notice. With headlines from the New York Times saying
Thank You, Bicycle Visionary creeping into their vocabulary.

It also became clear that in the end, the fight wasnt about me or Bloomberg, and
we didnt win the public debate by outwitting the opposition. The battle was won by New
Yorkers themselves. New Yorkers were way ahead of the press and the politicians. They
took to the changes on the street with an enthusiasm immune both to advocates pushing
for the changes and to the opponents against them. They were just looking for new ways
to get around and appreciated the option that riding a bike provided. Or they were people
who would never ride a bike but who saw in the changes to the street the fulfillment of a
long dormant promise. New Yorkers, men and women, teenagers and octogenarians,
filthy rich or just getting by, met on a newly democratic street, equal on their bikes. They
werent Lycra warriors, they werent out for blood, and in fact there was less blood on the

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street than there was at the start of the process. And it wasnt about bike lanes. It was
about an idea about our streets and who they are for.

ThebiggestmischaracterizationabouttheinfamousNewYorkCyclingWaris
thatthere'sawaratall,wrote a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Look all around
you. The bikes have won, and its not a terrible thing.

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Ch.6:Bikeshare:LeveragingthePoweroftheStreet

Bikesharesystemsarethebindingreceptorintransportationnetworks,settinga
newstandardforconvenience;Byintegratingthetransportationecosystem,bikeshare
explodesthedemandfortransitandwalkingandprovidesthelowcostmissinglinkfor
citydevelopment;TheexperienceoflaunchingCitiBike,thenationslargestbikeshare
program,andbikeshareprogramsinothercities(Portland,LosAngeles,NACTOcities).

DRAFTTOCOME

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Ch. 7: Transformative Transit

Among the planets 7 billion people, the city of Medellin probably doesnt ring
many bells. And one doesnt think of it as the cutting edge of transit innovation. Wedged
in the cleft Aburra Valley formed by a river between two ridges of the Andes mountains,
the population of 2.4 million paisas, as Medellin residents call themselves, is the most
populous city in Colombia after Bogota but is at the tail end of the 100 most populous
metropolitan areas in the world.

Those who recognize Medellins name probably know it by reputation more as a

the epicenter of the drug wars than for its culture, geographical beauty and transportation
innovation. During the 1980s, Medellin was the seat of Pablo Escobars drug cartel, the
cocaine trafficking empire that epitomized the bloody drug wars. Medellin was governed
as much by the cartels terror campaign than by the government, able to outgun the police
and holed up within impenetrable urban drug fortresses that not only couldnt be
penetrated, cartel prisoners couldnt escape them. Street murders, kidnapping and
extortion were rampant as Escobar offered bounties for the heads of police officers and
other rivals. In 1991, two years before federal authorities gunned Escobar, 6,800 paisas
were killed in largely drug-motivated homicides, a rate of 380 people for every 100,000
inhabitants, at the time the highest rate of any city in the world. By 2014, that number
was one-tenth that figure658 people killed, or 26.9 per 100,000 inhabitants.

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The leaders who have run Medellin over the last decade have worked to change
its reputation with a strategy of transportation and public realm improvements. Like
many cities in many developing nations, Medellin still has cinder block, corrugated metal
and scrap wood barrios that crawl into the Andean ridges. Thirty years ago, a child
kicking a soccer ball or skipping rope around the rooks of the Santo Domingo
neighborhood would have looked up and seen only a hazy sky and tree-topped ridges and
her future was far from certain. The narrow and steep roads there are barely wide enough
for buses or fire trucks to navigate. A single stopped car can bring the entire network to a
halt. There is only one way in and out of some neighborhoods giving no reliable way to
reach the city for work, school, doctors appointments if youre lucky enough to have
medical insurance or to pay bills if youre lucky enough to have utilities.

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Today, a child kicking the ball or riding a bike around Santo Domingo looks up
and sees a gleaming transportation gondola gliding along a cable 50 feet overheadthe
Metrocableand doesnt give it a second glance. This is not a DisneyWorld novelty, its
public transportation as the gondolas rise 1,300 feet up from the streets below and one
mile into the barrios. They make stops along the way, at clean, well-lit stations and
people pay fares and pass through turnstiles, hopping on and off with bags of groceries.
The gondola on Line K, which stops in Santo Domingo, connects that neighborhood with
stops at the Acevedo Metro station, where commuters can easily transfer to a train and be
whisked along the river into the commercial core. By connecting these inaccessible
barrios with the metro, the Metrocable cut in the 90 minute commute in half . Since the

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system started operation in 2004, the streets near the stations have flourished with new
shops, banks and vendors serving a steady stream of customers.

An open secret among transportation and planning professionals and a few

sophisticates, Medellin today is a vivid inspiration of a enlightened social urbanism that
could provide a model for cities twice its size, 10 times its average income and 100 times
its density. A big part of Medellins success stems from perfecting the practice of
transformative transportationinvesting in people by investing in the networks people
use to get around.

In Comuna 13, a hillside neighborhood in the western part of the city, three and
half miles from the central Plaza Mayor, residents had to descend and climb 330 steps
just to get to and from their homes. Their lives have changed dramatically not with new,
municipally-backed roads, diesel belching buses or upscale high-rises atop formerly poor
housing, but with connected banks of simple electric escalators that whisk thousands of
people 1,360 feet up the mountain face to their neighborhoods. Four escalator batteries,
covered with tinted glass to keep out tropical sunrays and downpours that could short
circuit its electronics, are connected to landings adorned with beautiful murals done by
neighborhood artists, making the commute one that even attracts tourists.

The gondolas and escalators might seem like an old-fashioned technology, but
their quiet banality allows residents to contemplate a commute to the city center and
valley neighborhoods with the same kind of blas attitude other commuters tend to think

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about their daily bus ride. (To be sure, Medellin in 2011 introduced its first bus rapid
transit system, which today carries 60,000 passengers a day on two routes). This
extraordinary view of the public space and infrastructure treats these investments not as
simply physical mobility but as instruments for social and economic mobility. The
network wont just take you to the next station, it can take you to a better station in life.

Banks of escalators provide a cost effective and simple solution to a transportation

problem of dense, vertical living.

Public space is the space of equality, Mayor Anbal Gaviria Correa told me,
standing in the sunlight on a roof deck atop Medellins city hall. Gaviria spoke to me in
early 2014, nine months before his last day in office, a time of rapid transformations and

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building atop the progress of his predecessors. Mayor Gaviria calls the attention to the
quality of choices and equal access to transit and freedom from bleakness as the ethics
of aesthetics, an attempt to restore equity and dignity through inclusive and strategic
public works programs. Everybody wants beautiful things, Gaviria says, People want
their homes to be beautiful, not ugly. I want that for the entire city.

Urban ugliness is often a byproduct of municipal structures and utilities that were
built with function in mind, not people. In the barrios, desolate lots with massive cisterns
that did nothing but hold clean water for the community for decades have over the last
decade been turned into landscaped community centers called UVAs (in Spanish, the
anagram cheerfully spells the word for grape), or Articulate Life Units, with outdoor
water spouts where neighborhood kids can splash around, recreation rooms for arts and
crafts, dance lessons and computers where kids can surf, research and write to their
hearts content (though to my eye, most at those computers on a day that I visited were
content playing video games). This could have been just a project dropped in the
neighborhood by elected officials seeking easy votes and ribbon-cutting. But most
astounding is that these UVAs were built with labor-intensive community sourcing for
ideas, enthusiasm and with the support and physical labor of the community. The UVAs I
walked through were some of the most attractive spaces in the entire cityagain built not
for tourists or for show, but for the people who live there, and providing a sense of place
and pride.

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An Articulated Life Unit in Medellin, activating a municipal water cistern, one of

20 such centers being developed in dense, poorer neighborhoods to serve as
community centers for recreation, education and supervised cultural activities.

Making the barrios such accessible and attractive options for a growing number of
residents might have led to a future with more remote barrios but Mayor Gaviria and his
planners anticipated this possibility by looking both at the citys core and its periphery. If
Medellin were like Mexico or many other cities, development would continue to sprawl
into the mountain forests. Medellins leaders have instead worked to halt that sprawl by
establish a greenbelt that preempts development from both the forces of gentrification
and of sprawling poverty. Visible from the nearly alpine slant of streets leading to the
barrios is a Hollywood-style sign Jardin. It refers to the Jardin Circunvalar, a lush,

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Andean envelope that is starting to wrap the entire city. Instead of more development, the
greenspace will provide a continuous foot and bike path, connect barrios and recreational
areas where locals can play basketball, soccer, and secure agricultural areas where local
residents can grow fruits and vegetables to supplement their diets as well as their income.

Almost all of the casual labor for the construction of the Jardin itself came from
local laborers, helping solidify a literal and metaphorical commitment to the greenbelt
while eliminating the isolation of hillside communities. The jobs also represented the first
time that many people emerged in the formal economy after years or even decades of
working locally, under the table, and doing odd jobs. The work provided health benefits
to thousands of people for the first time in many residents lives.

When they first started work on the garden, many workers didnt show up for
their first day, Said Juan Andres Munoz Airey, who works in the economic development
arm of the citys public works department. We were worried that they wouldnt come
back to work but we discovered that the first thing they wanted to do was to see a doctor
now that they had a real job. Instead of firing the no-show workers, officials just waited
for a day or two for them to return after a day or two at doctor and dentist appointments,
now very motivated to keep the new opportunity going for as long as possible for the
sake of their families.

Downtown Medellin is an almost textbook showcase of first-world urban features:

An innovation district, plazas decorated with sculptures by Colombian artist Fernando

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Bottero, green architecture, and art spills from the museums with public art on streets
almost everywhere. Medellin now has many fine upscale new restaurants serving ostrich
steaks and banh-mi Vietnamese sandwiches. A few blocks away there may be a Hooters
restaurants and a caf where expats can chill to electronic music and nurse one of the few
cups of robust artisanal coffee in the city (Colombia is famous for growing coffee, not
brewing it).

Before you wave all this away as transportation and developmental gimmickry,
lets point out that Mayor Gaviria and many of leaders and civil servants themselves are
the first to admit that they have far to go to retrofit their city for a new age. Medellin has
agonizingly bad traffic and circulation ceases if a single truck suddenly halts, blocking
the entire street to make a delivery.

We are endangered by our own success, admits Jorge Perez, the citys planning
director. Despite their world reputation for urban transformations, he says, Many
questions remain about building a good city. While their accomplishments are the stuff
of glossy of a micro tomorrow, the number of cars has nonetheless increased an
astounding 15% a year, a symbol of success to many paisas.

The city is also on a tear to build flyover bridges so that cars dont have to stop at
intersections. This approach frequently leaves pedestrians with no place to cross and
people often dash across lanes of traffic and climb over medians rather than walk what
could be a 15 minute detour to drab pedestrian bridges over roads. Hundreds of buses

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swarm the streets, belching an ashy cloud of exhaust that envelopes any passerby. And
despite a nascent bike share system, Medellin has few bike lanes and the few cyclists I
saw were mostly race cyclists or road warriors.

And far away from the MetroCable and greenbelt, seas of upscale apartment
towers sprout in the mountainside, accessible almost exclusively by private cars. If he
had his way, Hernan Lopez, director of the regional transportation planning authority, told
me that The cable would reach the rich people, and not just the poorer barrios. Public
transit isnt just an amenity for less affluent, he says, it should be an option for those who
drive daily.

The biggest wall Mayor Gaviria sees to social equity in the city is the outdated
land use along the Medellin River. Like many cities, development in the 19th and 20th
centuries turned the waterfront into industrial areas lined with highways. In his final
months in office, Gaviria set in motion a billion-dollar elaborate plan to redevelop the
waterfront and dismantle the waterside highways. In their place, Gaviria wants to sink the
road not unlike Bostons Big Dig which buried I-93, the chief highway through the city,
and created 1.5 miles (2.4km) of parks and green space atop the tunnel platform. The
first phase of Mayor Gavirias project would provide 80 acres of landscaped public space,
including four miles of walking and bike paths atop the highway. Near the park, instead
of warehouses, holding stations and parking lots, Gaviria wants to see mixed income
housing and the removal of physical and social barriers to public space. The entire project

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will be 12 miles along the river, connecting to 44 neighborhoods across 808 acres of
former roadway.

Perez sketched out how he wants to transform the city through hosing on the river
park project. Drawing on a beer coasterwhich I furtively pocketedhe showed how by
building mixed-income housing near the waterfront it would force people of all classes
together in the border neighborhoods. But the highway itself wouldnt merely be
underground, its seven lanes would increase by three the net number of lanes and increase
the number of cars that it can process (see induced demand, Chapter X).

Medellin, more than almost any other city in the world, shows how social and
economic mobility are entwined with the act of getting around. Its impossible to know
how much of its success is attributable to its public realm expenditures, but key indicators
increases in school enrollments alongside dramatic decreases in poverty,
unemployment and inequityshow that transportation can help cement a society with the
dignity that comes with making it easier to get around, and with streets that reflect the
communities and tells the people who live in them that they are important.

Medellin isnt the first city to be transformed socially, economically and

politically by its transportation systemits not even the first city in Colombia to
undergo such a transformation. One of my first trips abroad as commissioner was to
Bogot, Colombias capital, about 275 miles south of Medellin, a place where most New
Yorkers wouldnt expect to see the future of transportation. Their bus rapid transit system,

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TransMileneo, essentially works as a surface subwaybuses operate in dedicated lanes,

separated entirely from cars. Passengers pay their fare before they get on the bus,
avoiding delays of fumbling for fares; they board from any of three doors on the bus,
speeding boarding; and they board at stations where buses dont have to exit and then
remerge into traffic. All at one tenth of the cost of a traditional mass transit project and in
an infrastructural blink of an eye. Since launching in 2000, TransMilenio has grown to
carry 2.2 million daily passengers on 11 routes, which is a large market share in a city of
7.7 million people.

TransMilenio was one of the pillars of Mayor Enrique Penalosas administration,

and, like Medellin, the effects resonated for off the bus route. Inspired by Mayor Jaime
Lerners successes with bus rapid transit in Curitiba, Brazil, Penalosa combined
TransMilenio with strategies to increase public space, reduce the circulation of cars on
city streets, traffic got better in Bogota. A lot of people heard about these successes and
thought to themselves, Buses?

Buses arent very sexy, and most commuters might regard them as vehicles of a
different era. When writers and film producers dream of an urban future they typically
imagine hovercraft cruising through sleek cityscapes. Never lines of cars. Certainly no
people walking or biking. And buses would truly be science fiction. A dazzling transit
dream in many cities today still means a modern, driverless metro, streetcars or highspeed monorails and commuter trainsmaybe a streetcar or high-speed rail connecting
major cities. Realizing any of these dreams requires feasibility, political will, years of

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planning, review and, crucially, funding, a balance of which is rarely in supply and which
can be terminated at any time.

In fact, the future of intra-urban mass transit has already arrived and is somehow
embedded in every big city. As big ideas rise and fall and founder after years without a
single railroad tie laid, most cities already have the two essential building blocks for an
instant, new transportation system: Buses and the streets they drive on. For all their
conventionality, buses offer the fastest, most cost-effective way to bring mass transit to a
citys streets in months instead of years and without becoming a casualty of changing
priorities.

Every workday, the worlds BRT systems carry 31 million people along 3,100
miles of streets in 190 cities, overwhelmingly in Latin America and Asia. Part of the
system is the infrastructure: Bus stations instead of stops, where passengers pay at
turnstiles just as at subway stations. No fumbling for change or a fare card, holding up the
entire bus. They board at the level of the bus floor, eliminating the need to mount or
descend a few stepsa breakthrough for people with mobility problemsand they can
enter at any door, not just at the front.

While New York is famous for its subways, there are vast sections of the city,
particularly outside of Manhattan, that are far from the nearest stop or that dont have
routes to get from neighborhood to neighborhood within the borough, since subways are
geared only to take people to and from Manhattan. Yet millions of people still depend on

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these buses on little-known but no less populous corridors like Fordham Road in the
Bronx, Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, and Hylan Boulevard on Staten lslandstreets that
will probably never see a subway along them.

New York City has by far the largest bus fleet in North America and the highest
ridership some 678 million people in 2013, or about 2.6 million passengers on an
average weekdayand it also has the slowest average bus speeds of any big city. On
some streets you can walk faster than taking the bus. In 2011, a comedian riding a childs
big-wheeled tricycle outpaced a bus traveling crosstown along 42nd Street. His average
speed from 10th Avenue to Madison Avenue? 4.7 mph. Mike Primeggia used to tell me the
only way to get crosstown was to be born there. The jokes would be funnier if it werent
so sad that taking public transit would be slower or less reliable than not taking it.

To address the perennial slowness of the citys buses we worked with the MTA to
develop the citys first rapid bus network in all five boroughs, a network we called Select
Bus Service (SBS). With SBS we translated this seemingly foreign concept of dedicated
bus lanes for New York, using common and low cost materials much the same way that
we had started building bike lanes and plazas. Over a quarter of the delay in bus times
comes from people boarding and fishing for money or cards to pay. DOT and MTA
combined to set up a system for people to pay at the bus stop with a swipe of the fare card
(getting a receipt before they board). DOTs roadmarking contractors painted highvisibility red lanes on city streets, and worked with the MTA to get low-floored buses that
people could board at any door. Instead of protected lanes partitioned off from general

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traffic, DOT lined the SBS routes with bus-enforcement cameras to keep cars from
driving, stopping and dawdling in the lanes. We also installed the citys first transit-signal
priority technology aboard buses and traffic signals, which used infrared signals to hold
green signals longer or turning a red light green faster for buses approaching an
intersection.

As we had discovered with Times Square, most New Yorkers have an idea about
34th Street. That idea may be miraculous, it may involve Macys or the Empire State
Building, but the street has its own gravity in a city with a lot of gravity and, as 34th Street
is one of the few two-way corridors across town, most people in New York City will wind
up crossing it. It seemed logical to fix the street that carried them all.

Some 300,000 people work within a quarter-mile of 34th Street and nearly 900,000
transit riders start or end their trip at subway stations along 34th or at Penn Station, one of
the best-served transit corridors in the entire city. That single station provides access to
the Long Island Railroad, six subway lines, the PATH train to New Jersey and Amtrak
trains serving cities up and down the Northeast. Above ground, the scene changes. Buses
averaged 4.5 miles per hour and spent a third of their time stopped just so people could
board and pay their faresnot even counting the time spent stuck in traffic or at red
lights.

We started by painting red bus lanes on 34th Street to speed the way for the 33,000
passengers who use the local buses daily. Then came real-time bus information posted on

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electronic signs at bus shelters. It was an evolution of an idea that culminated in three
different options for what 34th Street could become. Among these was an option that had
never been attempted in New York City: Closing 34th Street entirely to cars between Fifth
and Sixth avenues and creating a transitwaydedicated lanes where only buses could
run, and letting pedestrians use the remaining space, designed for their use. Outside of
that one-block stretch, two-way bus lanes would occupy one side of the street and the
other would be used by one-way car and truck traffic.

Up, up and a Transitway

Though it was one of three options, this proposal became the only one that
resonated with the public and local developers and building owners and not in a good
way. Locally businesses and residential properties became terrified that they wouldnt be
able to get deliveries and that tinkering with traffic on this crosstown corridor linking the
Queens-Midtown Tunnel would cause a traffic chain reaction. With little public support

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and no elected officials in favor of the transitway, newspaper columnists saw an

opportunity to seize on the alternative as an example of overreach. We tried to defend
both the merits of the planthat the transitway and the reconfiguration could work
while also fighting back on the process, which included other options like bus lanes that
didnt run along the curb in some locations, loading zones and a lighter touch that could
speed buses without the dramatic sweep of a car-free transitway. We realized that the
proposal was way ahead of its time and that without any local support, continuing even to
consider it would be a bus lane too far and would halt any discussion. We scrapped the
plan.

The loss stung, even more than the still-fresh headlines from the bike backlash.
Reporters, columnists and editorial boards gloated when we reversed course. But once we
made that decision and focused only on the alternatives, the going immediately got easier.
Reinstated parking zones and offset bus lanes looked far more appealing for residents,
who eventually approved the alternative plan, with expanded curbs that allow bus to pick
up passengers without leaving a travel lane (below).

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234

34th Street Select Bus Service helped transform a corridors mobility, economic
vitality and connectivity through transit, without major construction or years of
planning.

The approved option was installed just eight months after we scrapped the
transitway plan, showing that SBS offered faster service in just weeks and months, not
years and decades. We had also established the routes on Fordham Road in the Bronx, its
lanes immediately recognizable by the terracotta color. It was a big success from the start:
10% faster travel times, 10% increase in ridership. A first. Then came paired SBS lanes
on 1st and 2nd avenues.

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On Webster Avenue in the Bronx, Select Bus Service brought rapid connections in
a transit trough that planners had ignored in favor of high-profile projects. On paper, the
area was served by local buses and theoretically by the B and D subway lines, much of
the neighborhoods were just beyond walking distance. Yet some 200,000 residents live
within a 10-minute walk of Webster Avenue, and as 71% of households dont own a car,
it wasnt surprising that about 61% of residents commuted by transit, even if it wasnt a
great option. Webster Avenue used to be lined with trolley tracks. And on nearby Third
Avenue, an elevated subway linelast known as the No. 8 trainstopped service in
1973.

Though the train was replaced by a fleet of buses, this corridor never fully
recovered its transit legs without that connection. One person quoted in a 1973 newspaper
story said the train made the trip from the Bronx Hub to East Gun Hill Road in about 20
minutes and estimated that the buses that replaced it would take 45 minutes.
Unfortunately, he was right. But he was talking about the buses of yesterday. Today, SBS
is New Yorks surface subway, and the streets are its rails.

The reason why rail systems work isnt just their capacity, its also about their
reliability. Buses work better when they have dedicated space on the road, fewer stops,
fewer service interruptions and when buses run reliably. And thats what SBS delivers.
Our fifth collaboration MTA/NYC Transit has created a red river of dedicated bus lanes
along Webster Avenue from East 165th Street all the way up to East Gun Hill Road. And
by shaving off up to eight minutes from the average commute, it started to save Bx41

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riders a cumulative 100,000 minutes a day100,000 more minutes these Bronx residents
can spend with their loved ones, shopping, eating, going to school, and not stuck just
getting there.

As part of the plan, we also resurfaced the road and laid down fresh markings on
more than 15 lane miles of Bronx streets, creating a smoother surface for everyone using
them. For people on foot, the redesign 11 pedestrian safety islands at key intersections
along the corridor, shortening crossing distances. These targeted improvements, along
with refreshed markings, clear signage and re-timed signals help to better organize traffic
and improve mobility and make safer streets all around.

While New Yorkers were 80 years into their wait for the 2nd Avenue Subway, we
launched six SBS routes in four boroughs. By the end of our fifth year of implementation,
we had taken one of the oldest forms of transportation on a city street and updated it, and
these six routes alone spanning five boroughs had saved more than 550 years of
cumulative travel time among 60 million annual passengers who ride these corridors. The
combined cost of these six lines was just barely $100 millionjust 1/20th, or 5 percent of
the $2 billion spent over nearly eight years to extend the No. 7 subway one stop from
Times Square to 11th Avenue and 34th Street.

The rebalancing of the street is itself the greatest form of transit equity. A portion
of the street is dedicated to the most efficient means of travel along itbuses. In
provided designated lanes for buses, the street tells transit riders that they are important

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and puts cars into their place while also streamlining their movements through the
network.

And we sharpened our community outreach even further to rebut bogus claims
that community approved projects were being implemented without enough outreach.
Webster Avenue, like hundreds of other safety and mobility projects in somewhat less
controversial corridors was accomplished and successful not in spite of community
wishes but because of it. The community advisory committee created for this transit
redesign involved more than 20 meetings, open houses, community board meetings and
countless more one-on-one sessions and meetings and walkthroughs with local
businesses, elected officials and those who run institutions along the corridor. So it was
no surprise when the results came in and SBS riders give the service nearly unanimous
rave reviews and why ridership has grown on SBS routes even as citywide bus routes
have seen ridership declines.

Passenger satisfaction surveys found that 98% of riders were satisfied with
service on Select Bus Service along Fordham Road. Further downtown, along 34rd Street
in Manhattan, Select Bus Service ran 23% faster than the regular local buses that the
service replaced. Along the one-way pair of 1st and 2nd Avenues, the number of people
riding the M15 Select Bus Service increased 10%, and with speeds increasing up to 18%
with the addition of dedicated lanes and fewer stopsaided by cameras that issue tickets
to people who drive in the lanes. Ridership increases on SBS routes came amid an overall

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decrease in bus riders citywide, a sign that reliability, not route coverage or capacity was
the missing link.

The extraordinary success of the program led local city councilmembers who
were previously skeptical to demand SBS service in their districts, almost unimaginable
before the it began. And NYC Mayor DeBlasio, who once opposed SBS, is now
supporting the planned expansion of the program. Success has 1,000 mothers

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On the other side of the planet, Auckland, New Zealand is tapping into the
transformative power of investments in its transportation network and public realm.
Located on a harbor on New Zealands North Island, Auckland is home to 1.5 million
people, or nearly one-third of the nations population. Its moderate climate combines with
beautiful, dramatically hilly urban geography created by volcanoes. High annual rainfall
supports lush greenery on par with the Pacific Northwest and world-class vineyards on
nearby islands. If you were looking for a beautiful place to build a city it would be hard
to top Auckland. But instead of just being a beautiful city, Auckland is known for the
worst kind of development in the second half of the twentieth century. By the early 2000s
more, there were more than 60 cars registered per 100 Aucklanders, and with a staggering
85% of commuting trips completed by car, the city had to have worked exceptionally
hard to gain its reputation as a City of Cars.

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The city in the 1950s ripped out its comprehensive streetcar system to make way
for car-based suburbanization, with a network of roads that divided the city. But this
growth quickly outgrew the new network, with the number of vehicles quickly saturating
the Auckland Harbor Bridges four lanes, built in 1959, in half a decade, which city
officials responded to by doubling the spans lanes in 1969, accelerating the problems it
was having.

After growing by 10 times since 1950, Aucklands leaders are anticipating a

population of nearly 2.5 million by 2040. Instead of responding to this increase by again
doubling the capacity of the Auckland Harbour Bridge and with 15,000 more cars being
added annually to the streets of Auckland and its suburbs, Mayor Len Brown and the
Auckland Council in 2012 unveiled The Auckland Plan to reverse demographic patterns
that have depleted its downtown and transform it into a vibrant, attractive and walkable
destination.

Officials plan to double Aucklanders use of public transit and in late 2015 [TK]
broke ground on a major expansion to the citys metro system, City Transit Link, with
new stations in downtown and eventually connecting to the citys airport and north shore.
Under the leadership of planning director Ludo Campbell-Reid, Auckland is furiously
pedestrianizing key commercial streets in downtownQueen Street and OConnelly
Streetwhile extending Albert Park with a strip of walkable green footpaths built into
the middle of Victoria Street. In the heart of its lively downtown, Auckland has closed

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progressively increasing streets to car traffic, allowing for greater concentrations of foot
traffica 140% increase, which led to a 430% increase in retail.

Credit: Ludo Cambell-Reid

Campbell-Reid is qauarterbacking a plan to convert underused or redundant

highways into greenways and bike and pedestrian paths. Campbell-Reid and other
planners are also working on a proposal to retrofit the Harbour Bridge, this time to
accommodate people who walk or ride bikes. These changes, Campbell-Reid tells me,
whether in the streetscape or how people are getting around, has helped turn around the
city of cars to become more of a city for people.

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Ch. 8: Blood on the Streets

It was shortly before 8 a.m. on a Thursday in late February. Six-year-old Amar
Diarrassouba and his older brother approached the intersection 116th Street and First
Avenue in East Harlem, the final crosswalk in their daily walk to Public School 155.
When the light turned green, the driver of a tractor trailer on 116th Street started to turn
right onto 1st Avenue, and into the crosswalk where Amar simultaneously started crossing
with his brother. The driver claimed he never saw Amar and didnt notice anything as he
drove through the intersection and continued driving two blocks before anybody flagged
him to stop him and tell him what he had done.

The Times published an account of a doctor who happened on the scene moments
later.

As I approached First Avenue, I saw a boy standing in the middle of the

avenue. A small boy lay motionless on the pavement beside him. The intersection
was empty of cars, trucks, pedestrians, and I heard the standing boy yell, Help!

I jumped from my bike, leaned it against a light pole and ran over. The
boy was face down on the pavement, and as I bent down to lift his small body off
the ground, still supple and warm, I saw the blood pooling on the street.

Is this your brother? I asked the older boy. Whats his name?

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Amar.

What happened? I asked. The brother had no reply.

The tragedy of Amar was heartbreaking, but not unusual on New York Citys
streets. Anar was just one of 177 pedestrians killed by people driving motor vehicles in
New York Cityand one of 293 dead when counting those driving those cars and
passengers. What was unusual in Amars case was that the New York Police Department
truck driver was issued two citations, one for failure to exercise due care for his vehicle
and the second for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, both punished with fines
comparable to parking tickets. A drivers claim that he or she never saw the person who
they hit and killed with their vehicle is often all thats necessary to be excused from
criminal prosecution.

Another feature of the death of young Amar was that it was news at all. New
Yorkers read detail on only a handful of the most heartbreaking stories, usually the ones
with the most awful and least typical circumstances. Maimed pedestrians run down on
sidewalks or cars overturning on the way home from a holiday, children days from their
graduation or birthday. Traffic crashes, injuries and deaths are so routine in cities that
they rarely make news. We learn little about the crashes beyond the body count and the
effect on local traffic. Circling choppers during urban rush hours matter-of-factly describe
roadside wrecks and arrival of emergency crews but there is rarely any accounting for the

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causes and the emotional horror that these crashes inflicts on the victims and witnesses.
Smartphone apps and computer maps translate crash investigation scenes into cute
graphicsand offer alternative routes around the scene of the crash. Many local radio
stations reinforce this notion of traffic-as-immovable-force by bundling traffic and
weather together, as on one of the local AM radio news stations here in New York City.
And in many ways, we experience traffic violence the same way we do weather, as a
passing, potentially inconvenient condition on our roads. In this environment, its not
surprising that people have regarded streets with a sense of bored, normative danger. We
are conditioned through socialization and through endless, bloody repetition in the media,
that death by automobile is a tolerable and unavoidable feature of modern life. Even the
word we use to describe these deaths, accidents, blunts the impact of these deaths and
obscures the causes and our responsibilities to end them. Too often a closer look at each
incident reveals specific human factors that contributed so directly to the incident that it
doesnt warrant the euphemism accident at all. They are preventable deaths.

Nearly 17,000 American servicemen were killed in 1968, the single bloodiest year
of the Vietnam War. In the United States in 2012, more than 33,000 American lives were
snuffed outnot by war but in ordinary car crashes. Numerically, this death toll is the
equivalent of 110 jetliners each packed with 300 passengers falling out of the sky every
three days for an entire year. Its three times more people in one year than were killed on
9/11 and servicemen killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in more than a
decade since. The death toll is nearly three times the number of Americans killed in
homicides by guns. Yet there is no corresponding national conversation, soul-searching,

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humanitarian campaign or even sustained outrage at the persistence of needless and,

critically, preventable death. Its unimaginable that such a toll would blend almost
unnoticed in any other field, industry, profession or practice.

In New York City, from 2002-2006, 2,464 people died in crashes with motor
vehicles, about one person killed every day. But looked at different way, the numbers in
New York City are more optimistic in the largely context. While some 275 people die
annually in traffic crashes in New York City, this rate is just a fraction of the national rate
and it is by far the safest big city in America, practically within European standards. And
the number of traffic deaths is going down, by more than one-third since 2001. This
enviable safety profile wasnt despite all the pedestrians, it was because of them.

Recognizing that New Yorks density and the sheer number of people on the
street was a natural traffic-calming presence, we developed strategies to leverage that
strength for safety and, in 2008, resolved to cut traffic fatalities in half, to 135, by 2030.
The goal, the centerpiece of the first chapter of our 2008 strategic plan, was the first time
that the Transportation Department expressed a specific goal to launch safety plans and
provide specific metrics for reducing traffic fatalities in New York City.

More than many other parts of modern life, what city residents fear and what is
actually dangerous to them are not the same thing. As we saw in earlier chapters, what
people see depends on how they get around, and whom they blame for making streets
dangerous hinges more on emotion and snap judgments than on data. Clueless or drunk

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pedestrians texting in the street, marauding wrong-way cyclists, too-large trucks, crazy
cabbies, red-light runners, cracked roads, brake failures. There are headlines in the media
to provide evidence to bolster almost any opinion.

In the same way urban motorists believe that more roads can solve traffic
congestion problems, the gut instinct is that traffic signals and signs can solve the safety
problems that motor vehicles have on the street. Where a girl was killed crossing the
street on the way to school, a traffic signal, stop sign or School Crossing sign will solve
the problem of the speeding or reckless driver, or so the thinking goes. Yet signs and
signals on their own have been shown to be poor at regulating much more than the right
of way and ineffective at resolving the worst crashes. When all you have is a hammer,
then every problem represents itself as a nail. Instead of nailing a signal at every
intersection, planners need to change the geometry and outline of the street to physically
slow down drivers to life speed. Knowing how and where to do that takes the right kind
of data, and an almost forensic analysis.

We launched the largest traffic safety study of a city ever undertaken and
implemented an action plan targeting what was killing New Yorkers. The 2010 study
looked at 7,000 serious crashes over five years, not just fender benders year by year that
can skew results. While New Yorks traffic fatality rate is the smallest of any American
big city, pedestrians represent half of those deathsfar higher the rate than other cities.
That may seem like a no-brainer considering how swarmed New Yorks streets get during
the busiest times of day. But the study revealed a different hierarchy of blame. Most

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deaths were caused not by lack of signals and signs, they occurred after people have
ignored these controls and violated numerous other rules of the road. No, crashes
overwhelmingly simply involved speed, alcohol, driver inattention and the failure to yield
to people in crosswalks.
We immediately recognized what these numbers told us: These crashes were
overwhelmingly being caused by human behaviors that were almost 100% preventable.
New York could eliminate the overwhelming majority in traffic fatalities simply by
changing the way they drive. And a review of data from the US Transportation Data
helped us estimate the true cost of traffic crashes: $4.2 billion in property damage,
medical costs and lost wages annually. If a city were hemorrhaging that kind of money
over any other chiefly human activity, auditors, investigators and prosecutors would
demand accountability.
Some other details in the study were less intuitive. The way that many
transportation departments and the media have traditionally talked about danger is in
terms of the Top 10 Most Dangerous Intersections or similar snapshots. The data-based
view looked beyond this frame for two important reasons: First, safety studies often look
at raw crash data that includes everything from an incident when one car dinged another
while parking to an incident where a pedestrian is run over by a drunk driver. Second,
looking only at specific intersections can obscure high rates of serious crashes dispersed
over many miles of a particular street, not concentrated at any specific intersection.

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The report took a corridor view, geocoding only crashes that resulted in death or
serious injury and heat-mapping their locations with the severity-weighted injuries per
mile of street. This resulted in maps that turned seemingly less-dangerous corridors into
clearly visible danger zones, and inspiring blocks-long redesigns instead of just
intersection by intersection. The data also showed serious crashes by Zip code, or by
community or City Council district. This helped our community outreach coordinators in
public meetings. Each presentation would start with a slide showing the crash rate in the
district. While people might have shrugged off claims of serious safety crashes or vague
citywide numbers, presenting highly localized numbers helped demonstrate the problem
that we were trying to solve and helped win support on many needed safety projects.

As important were findings, or lack of them, for other presumed causes of

crashes. Taxis, trucks and bike riders are typically viewed as the destabilizing bte noire
of city streets, yet 79% of crashes involved private automobiles as opposed to cabs, buses
or trucks. A lot of New Yorkers might have expected that more bike riders would mean
more crashes, but not only was there no increase in crashes for bike riders, simply by
accounting for the fourfold growth in riders meant that the crash rate was dropping fast.
And streets with bike lanes, the report found, were 40 percent less deadly for pedestrians.

Perhaps the most sobering statistic was the overrepresentation of older New
Yorkers among traffic deaths. While seniors were less likely to be hit by car while
walking, they are far more likely to die from their injuries if struck. The study found that
while they comprise just 12 percent of the citys population older New Yorkers 65 years

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old or older accounted for 38 percent of pedestrian fatalities, far higher than the national
rate.

No doubt some New Yorkers were run over by driver ignorance in addition to
inattention. The study also revealed that most New Yorkers didnt know that the city
speed limit was 30 mph, unless a sign said otherwise. While that speed might seem like a
fantasy on the citys choked streets, theres an elastic traffic tension as congestion builds
and then suddenly snaps into speed the moment that someone driving a car sees a clear
100 yards of roadway.

The report was a transformational moment for the agencyat the press
conference with Mayor Bloomberg announcing its release, I called it a Rosetta Stone
for safety because it provided the language and the framing of the urban problem in a
way that would translate into all of our projects. It was also the first time that traffic
safety in the five boroughs had made front-page news in the New York Times, which we
viewed as a sign that public opinion was shifting toward viewing traffic safety as a public
health issue instead of a boring news staple.

Taking the essential elements of our operationsmarkings, signs, asphalt and

speed bumps -- we launched the largest traffic calming campaign every undertaken in an
American city, establishing the citys first-ever residential and senior safety zones,
reducing the speed limit to just 20 miles per hour, stenciling in speed warnings and
posting eye-catching signs at the gateways to the zones. The first call for applications for

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residential slow zones yielded nearly 100 responses from neighborhoods from Staten
Island to the Bronx.

Delancey Street on the Lower East Side at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge
was a nexus for crashes, with pedestrians forced to cross streams of traffic onto and
around the bridge. On the corridor leading to the bridge, 742 people were injured in car
crashes from 2006 to 2010, a combination of cars flooring it to get to the bridge or
impatiently wading through traffic as it crawls away from the bridge. A 2012 redesign
brought 21,000 square feet of space atop massive tracts of former asphalt space and by
shortening crosswalks at 14 locations.

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Crossing Delancey Street, Then (top) and Now (bottom)

These are not renderings

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Just as communities are adamant in demanding safety improvementsusually

traffic signs and signalsthey can be just as adamant in delaying or fighting changes that
would actually address the problems they want solved. That was the case with Adam
Clayton Powell Boulevard, as Manhattans Seventh Avenue is known north of Central
Park in Harlem, which was one of the most dangerous avenues in the city. Though no
individual intersection along Seventh Avenue would have cracked the top 10 it did rank
in the top 10 percent according to severity-weighted corridor rankings. In seven years
from 2006 to 2012, 12 pedestrians died in motor vehicle crashes, many of those crashes
later in the evening, when fewer cars combine with wide, straight roads. Despite repeated

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DOT proposals over several years, the local community board objected to proposals that
would remove one of three lanes of through-traffic to create a better organized street.

Board members claimed they needed more information or some kind of proof that
the project would work before moving forward. Some worried that redesigning the street
with one fewer lane for through traffic would create congestion, possibly contributing to
asthma. Some suggested that a redesign was unnecessary since pedestrians were often at
fault for walking recklessly. We just dont understand it yet, a community official told
the New York Times. One self-styled Harlem historian questioned if painting a bike lane
would strip the street of its historical character. This was despite whole-hearted support
from residents associations, churches and senior groups along the corridor and after
revising the project several times to revise designs. After four years of inaction, we
moved ahead with the support of these groups and implemented a 43-block redesign,
changing the street from three lanes in two directions to two lanes each direction, with
turn lanes. Speeding and serious crashes went down by one-third. I have no doubt that
had we continued with more outreach we would have gotten nowhere and the street
would still be as deadly as it was a decade ago. The project itself was the proof that we
needed.

The claim I never saw somebody before hitting him or her should not be an
excuse for destroying that with your car. There are very few crashes that simply reducing
ones speed, paying attention and staying sober wouldnt eliminate. I never saw them
should be seen as an admission of responsibility in a crash. If you didnt see the person

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walking, biking or driving, you should have, or you should have been driving slow and
safe enough where not seeing them was not possible.

While cities try to use safety as a basis for safety projects, opponents often make
the claim that safety projects or more people using the street will make the street less
safe. They ascribe this to confusion over the proposed change, or claim that the change
will frustrate people driving into unsafe behaviors, or that by accommodating people on
foot, on bike and in cars or transit the street is mixing them up and creating chaos. The
safety objection is often used against bike lanes and riders, and arises worldwide in the
form of mandatory helmet laws and perennial proposals to register and insure bike rider
all solutions in search of problems and attempts to legislate against perceived
annoyances.

In New York City, large segments of the population objected to the development
of bike infrastructure and to increasing the number of riders on safety grounds. A
professor at Hunter College repeatedly tasks his students with observing how many
people riding bikes also wear helmets in midtown Manhattan. Merely not wearing one is
given as evidence of unsafe behavior, yet there is no evidence that this is the case.
Another professor, from Rutgers University in New Jersey, who often works with the
Hunter professor, boldly declared to the collected New York City media in 2012 that,
with the imminent launch of bike share in New York City, he expected a doubling or
even tripling of bike deaths. He provided no evidence to support this claim, only the
unfounded assumption that helmets equal safety risk, so therefore more people riding

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around without helmets would be splitting their heads open in increasing numbers. In
fact, the opposite happened. In 2013, the year that bike share was launched and added 6
million trips to the traffic mix of New Yorks densest business districts, bike deaths
plummeted to a 30-year low.

There is much hyperventilating about this in cities around the world, but there is
no evidence that requiring bike helmet use has decreased injury and death rates among
people who ride bikes anywhere. On the contrary, there is growing evidence that cities
that encourage cycling without helmet laws have fewer deaths and that cities with
mandatory helmet laws succeeded only in significantly decreasing the number of people
riding bikes and the safety benefits that more people bring to the street. Australia and
New Zealand have the worlds most stringent helmet laws, which is partly the reason for
the failure of bike share programs in Melbourne and Brisbane, which have a fraction the
use of similarly sized bike share systems elsewhere in the world. Meanwhile, other cities,
such as Mexico City, Tel Aviv and Dallas, specifically repealed helmet laws in order to
encourage use of their new bike share programs, with great success. In the United States,
commuter bike riding more than doubled from 2001 to 2012, yet the number of cyclists
killed has remained stable, despite there being no adult helmet laws in any but a few big
cities (come on, Seattle, youre on the Left coast!).

In the more than 30 TK million bike share trips in the United States as of TK,
none has resulted in a traffic fatality despite none of these bike share cities not requiring
helmets. The reason may be counterintuitive: More bike riders make city streets in

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particular safer as safety in numbers increases riders profiles on the street. Bike
ridership in New York City quadrupled from 2000 to 2012, and there was no increase in
severe injuries or deaths, and numbers went down dramatically following the launch of
Citi Bike. We did support the requirement of helmets, lights and reflective gear and
numbers for delivery cyclists, which the industry and riding public generally supported.
While its understandable that a government would try to protect its citizens and
encourage helmet use, actually requiring the helmets is a barrier to bike ridership,
discouraging spontaneous trips and forfeiting the health benefits that having millions of
bike trips would bring for citizens. If you dont have a helmet handy when you suddenly
decide you want to take a ride after a work meeting, you cant grab a bike share bike.

Governments forsake not only the traffic-calming benefits that more riders bring
to the road not just for themselves but also for pedestrians and drivers. If governments
sincerely believe that streets are so dangerous that bike riders cant be allowed the
discretion to use helmets, they should instead take heroic efforts to make their streets
safer so that people wont get killed instead of requiring that people armor themselves
against the street. Failing that, municipalities that are so concerned about bike riders
heads should therefore be as concerned about pedestrians heads and enact and enforce
laws requiring them to wear helmets too. After all, 270,000 pedestrians died globally
every year after being hit by cars, 4,743 of them in the United States. None was wearing a
helmet.

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The same kind of dissonance between fear and actual danger arrives on the
handlebars of bike riders. We heard the fears at the city council hearing at the height of
the bike backlash. Bike riders were safety menace to pedestrians. Bike riders are
demonized with an intensity reserved for the lowest societal castes. And it is based on
nothing.

As we saw earlier, streets with bike lanes were not simply safer for people on
bikesby factors of 50% on streets with protected pathspeople on foot in New York
City were never safer than when the number of people riding bikes skyrocketed from
2009 to 2013. During that nearly five-year period, from July 2009 to December 2013,
during the height of the biking book in New York City and as millions of new bike trips
added to the traffic mix, there were no pedestrians killed at the handlebars of bike riders.
Overall, traffic safety was never better, with two of the safest years in a century of
recordkeeping recorded, in 2009 and 2014, and with 35% fewer pedestrians killed by cars
than in 2001.
If more bike riders means more death and danger, there are no numbers to support
it. From 2001 to 2013, the number of serious crashes involving people riding a bike in
New York remained statistically unchanged, (there were 392 serious injuries and deaths
in 2001 versus 405 in 2013), a statistical stalemate despite the quadrupling of people
riding bikes in the city.

And while what people fear and what endangers them are often vastly different,
there is also a chasm between what is safe and what feels safe. Safety isnt just an

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absence of threats on the street. Its an emotional frame of mind where people on foot feel
that they are recognized and respected on the street.

There is a school of safety among some people who ride bikes that bike lanes are
counterproductive. People on bikes should assertively take a lane and ride in the center
of a car traffic lane in order to be seen, safe and respected. This concept, espoused in the
1970s, is known as vehicular cycling. Relegating bike riders to separate lanes sends a
message that they arent traffic and dont belong on a street without protection. While
bikes are unequivocally part of city traffic, and while bikes in New York and most cities
are allowed on any street with or without bike lanes, I think the view that bike lanes are
somehow more dangerous is wrong and misguided.

First, that feeling of safety is one of the greatest barriers to people riding in the
first place. The first few rides are nerve-racking for inexperienced riders as they learn
how to weave around stopped cars, make themselves visible to buses and trucks,
negotiate turns and navigate at city speeds. Advising timid, would-be riders just to suck it
up and get up to speed isnt much of an inducement to riding and its no surprise that
significant increases in riders occurred only alongside increased bike infrastructure.

Second, relying on people on bikes to take the lane can be a lost opportunity to
improve the street for everybody. Bike lanes are not just instruments that apportion space
to people on bikes, they more clearly define road geometries and tell people in cars to be
on the lookout for other people using the street. Curb extensions pedestrian islands,

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medians and narrower traffic lanes can shift the traffic profile of an entire street simply
by reallocation a few feet and without increasing traffic congestion. If you look at a road
and see the bike lane as totally separate, youre not seeing the entire street.

Nothing states surrender of the streetscape to cars with as much inconvenience as

a pedestrian bridge. Walkways and ramps that cantilever over thoroughfares are the
pedestrian equivalent of trying to build your way around congestion, cluttering the
streetscape and providing an obstacle that divides neighborhoods. The Moses-built
Sheridan Expressway divided adjacent neighborhoods in the Bronx from Starlight Park
along the Bronx River. Though technically connected by bridges or paths along
Westchester Avenue, nearby neighborhoods and the park may as well have been in
different counties. In Mexico City, pedestrian bridges force people to walk across
uncomfortable distances, often a quarter-mile out of their way, either to a long, circuitous
climb up stairs inaccessible to those who have difficulty walking.

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Bridges can be second-class transportation for pedestrians by forcing people on

foot them to walk long distance to make hair-raising crossings over noisy, fumy
highway lanes. (Credit: Nick Mosquera)

These inconvenient crossings (above) compromise safety instead of enhancing it,

as they frustrate people on foot to cross illegally, and dangerously, via the most direct
route (below).

The reality is that pedestrians frequently flout footbridges in favor of the most
direct route, putting themselves in danger and compromising traffic (Credit: Nick
Mosquera)

Guardrails and pedestrian bridges belong in the category of desperate denial.

Many crosswalks compel people walking to press a beg button, without which they will

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never get a signal. Its not surprising to find many people get tired of waiting or dont
realize theres even a button to press. These are very tangible ways that attempts to
accommodate pedestrians do nothing to reverse

Pedestrian fencing on Oxford Street, London, may cause more injuries in strained
hamstrings that it prevents in traffic crashes. (Credit: http://www.hamiltonbaillie.co.uk/index.php?action=details&do=publications&pid=15)

When urban planners dream of sidewalks, they dont wish for guardrails.
Guardrails are similarly a barrier that is more suited to keep people from plunging from
unexpected heights than a qualitative street safety amenity. Cities like London and even
New York City have sited them where the number of people walking threatens to surge
into the street. But relegating pedestrians to cattle pens can be only a temporary measure
until traffic calming measures can organize traffic better.

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Above all, streets should be safe and simple to use no matter your age or ability. If
youre not comfortable with the idea of your child or parent crossing the street or riding a
bike a long it, put at least as much effort into telling city planners to fix it as you do into
worrying about your loved ones safety. People shouldnt be defenseless against their
streets. They shouldnt be afraid to cross a road, or forced to press a button to get across
the streetor wave a neon flag as they cross [[*The first time I heard about
municipalities installing safety flags at crosswalks, I thought it was another farce from
The Onion. The joke, however, is on the pedestrian, as these flags are now installed in
places like Salt Lake City and in TK Florida. They may as well provide white surrender
flags.]] Abandoning the street to its own danger only reinforces the problem your children
and grandchildren will face, and it will also be one that we all will face as we get older
and less able to get around.

But there is something behind this idea of claiming the lane. Changing the way
the street is laid out is a critical first step in changing its safety and shattering the ideas
about who streets are for and how they should be used. It is also necessary to shatter
through the banality of news reports and confortable routine of crashes and wake people
up to the reality of traffic violence. Changing cultural perception is a tough proposition
because it calls attention to something people are defensive about: Their behavior and
complacency. Everybody probably thinks theyre an above-average driver, and people
dont respond well when others suggest that they should be more concerned by something
like traffic crashes.

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Whereas safety used to be the stuff of low-budget, easy-to-ignore Public Safety

Announcements during TV after-school specials, we made safety history with an
aggressive 30 mph anti-speeding campaign, noting the deadly physics lesson that if
youre hit by a car moving 40 mph, theres a 70 percent chance that youll be killed; if
youre hit by a car moving 30 mph, theres an 80 percent chance that youll live.
Humorous television and Internet ads scolded riders Dont be a Jerk, while bus and bus
shelter ads targeting drunk drivers and told pedestrians and motorists to get their heads
out of their smart phones.

But the most astonishing statistics were regarding safety. At locations where
engineering changes had been made, fatalities dropped 34%

The six years I served as commissioner recorded the six fewest traffic fatalities of
any year since records were first kept in 1910. If people still died on city streets at the

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rate they did in 2001, there would have been 1,000 more New Yorkers killed over the last
decade. Thats more one thousand lives saved. Of all of the achievements in New York
City, this is the one that I am proudest of, and the results provide more than enough proof.
Mayor De Blasio and Transportation Polly Trottenberg, my successor and longtime friend
and collaborator from the US Transportation Department, doubled down on these gains
with the announcement of Vision Zero: The goal of eliminating traffic fatalities entirely.
They have encountered many of the same objections in attempting to implement safety
projects. And theyve been criticized, both for their successful lobbying of the state
legislature to authorize lowering the city speed limit to 25 mph, and also for the citys
subsequent efforts to enforce it. But theres no doubt that the public outrage over the
carnage on our streets from traffic violence has changed the status quo. Vision Zero
campaigns and goals have been adopted in TK cities and softer, safer street designs are
becoming the new norm. Its just surprising that its taken so long.

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Ch.9:MeasuringtheStreet

Measuringtheimpactofprojectsrequiresaforensicapproachbeyondtraffic
volumesandtraveltimes;Datasolvestheproblemnotjustofdeterminingaprojects
impactbutalsohowtocommunicatethatimpactandwinningsupportforsimilar
programselsewhere.Discussionofsimilarresultsinothercities,includingTransportFor
Londonstudyonpedestrianization.

DRAFTTOCOME

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Ch.10:SignsandDottedLines

Parkingsigns,streetsigns,pedestriansignalsandcountdownclocks.Streetsare
filledwithabewilderingforestofcomponentsthatwebarelynoticeandareatbest
misunderstoodandignoredatworst.Thischapterlooksattheirrationalandcontradictory
policiesgoverningparking,thefutilityandconfusionofsignsandsignals,andhowcities
mightbebetteroffwithoutanyofthem.

DRAFTTOCOME

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Ch. 11: What we Talk About When We Talk About Streets

How can city governments communicate the transformative power of changing

city streets and win public support for projects? Among the many cities where we have
traveled, there is often unanimity among citizens and leaders alike that things need to
change. But the moment that leaders propose specific changes to streets, the effects can
be immediately polarizing to the public and even fatal for getting them implemented.
Thousands of bike lanes have been defeated with the objection, Were in favor of bike
lanes, just not this particular one. This makes winning public opinion one of the hardest
parts of the job.

Having a good street projecteven one that would saves livesisnt enough.
Urban media tend to portray changes to the street in terms of the controversies they
generate and not the problems they solve or the opportunities that they create.
Communications strategies therefore must be as balanced, diverse and nimble as the
changes being undertaken, and these two tracksoperations and communicationsneed
to be intertwined before a project even starts.

Every city faces confronts the same challenge: that streets today are seen as static
and change represents a disruption in something that people may have unconsciously
assumed is permanent. Disputes over territory are the stuff of skirmishes and empires,
and changes to streets turf battles. A street may be overlooked, misunderstood or ignored,
but the second that you try to change it, watch out!

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This dynamic is made for the media. Reporters dont like the story so much as
they like the story behind the story. In journalism schools they teach the principle that
Dog bites man isnt news. Man bites dog is news. So when it comes to streets, trying to
increase safety or transit options by making streets easier to walk or bike along isnt itself
newsworthy. If people oppose that change, if a bike bites a man, stop the presses!

A strong communications strategy for cities needs to start with the projects
themselves. They must be well-researched and well-designed. A street with just a bike
lane might be a wasted opportunity. Is there a way to build in pedestrian improvements
like high visibility crosswalks or curb extensions, even if theyre painted? Can buses be
accommodated? Can the changes be combined with turn lanes for vehicles, parking
restrictions that open up delivery windows for local businesses? Can meters be installed
or parking regulations updated on side streets to improve customers access to local
retailers? Can the project bring benches, wayfinding or other pedestrian improvements
along the sidewalk? Instead of having a project that looks like a bike lane, its better to
have a project that looks like it has something in it for everybody.

Show, dont tell. The greatest benefit of change-based urbanism is that it

transcends arguments. People will argue endlessly that a bike lane or a plaza will or wont
improve safety, business or traffic. But a project speaks for itself. When change becomes
real and in the street and operating well, it sends a powerful message with its very
presence. Transportation departments must therefore document their work with before

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and after pictures to show how dramatic and obvious change can be. There is no arguing
with a before-and-after picture, and even unflattering stories in the media lose their punch
when the projects look so good.

The most important advice on how to message these projects is, first, to talk about
the changes to the street using your terms, not theirs. Improved transit and street designs
that encourage walking and bike riding provide transportation options.

When it comes to convincing a skeptical public, cities and the advocates and
citizens who support them dont talk about bike lanes simply as nice, green, healthy and
environmentally conscious ways to get around. They are not simply for fun and
recreation. They are not based on an anti-car ideology. To move large numbers of people
behind these changes, they must be communicated as necessary and practical steps that
make dangerous streets safer and provide people with more and better transportation
choices for getting around. And they can do this while maintaining mobility and
improving the economic performance of a street

Street interventions arent about removing cars or getting people to do something

healthy or environmentally sustainable. They are transportation choices that provide
practical and simple alternatives. Street redesigns arent just about making it easy for
people on foot or bikes. The changes make it easier for everyone to get around, no matter
how they do it.

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Opponents will claim that street changes snarl traffic, hurt business, will imperil
seniors and children while going underused, create pollution and violate environmental,
historical preservationist and other rules. The more time city press offices and advocates
spend refuting ridiculous claims like these the less time they have to make their own
assertions.

Where opponents talk about lost parking spaces, highlight the benefits and new
economic opportunities. Where they talk about traffic chaos, underscore safety. Where
they talk about reversing a painful change, talk instead about choices. When they talk
about confusion, you can describe the adjustment period traffic transitions to adapt to
new uses that accompany all street transformations.

Make your data your news. Once a street is changed people will quickly forget
how bad it used to be. The data may be needed to defend the project itself, but it is
equally important to have ready data for making the case for subsequent projects and to
provide evidence that phantom fears didnt come true in earlier cases.

Great Myths of Great Streets

No matter what city we visit we find many universal myths about transportation
that have become stubborn, urban legends in every language. Heres a sampling of the
most common ones weve encountered:

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Myth: Bike lanes, bus lanes and plazas are a war on cars.
Reality: These projects bring balance to the street. If theres a war, its the people on
foot or bikes who are its refugees.

In his inspiring work, Walkable City, Jeff Speck devoted the first chapter not to
banish the car as some kind of ethical evil, but to put the car in its place. Jeffs view,
one that I share, is that even in a walkable city like New York, that cars will remain an
integral piece of cities future for years to come. Instead of banning cars and forcing
people out of cars, a more effective strategy is to give people real transportation choices.
As weve seen, where congestion, pricing, traffic management and building wider roads
have failed, providing bike infrastructure, bike share, better pedestrian space and transit
options for people to get around can create more efficient patterns of development and
transportation between places than bans or transportation prescriptions. But for all of the
claims that bike and bus lanes take space and dollars away from car-based infrastructure,
the reality is that federal and state subsidies for cars have in fact amounted to a war on
people who walk and ride bikes or buses. Building streets that prevent people from
walking, biking and taking transit deprives millions of people opportunity to get around
without having to own a car and drive. Whenever I hear the claim that a strategy is anticar I correct them that it is actually pro-choice. People should have the option living in
a city and not needing to drive everywhere.

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Theres also a gross misunderstanding over just how out of balance our streets are.
Many city roads are inequitably distributed, giving disproportionate room to cars. Forty
people in cars can clog an entire city block. The same number of people on a bus or on
foot looks like an empty street.

Looking at the street this way, city planers have to ask themselves if theyre making the
best use of their streets. And if this were anything but transportation, would we accept
such an inequitable apportionment of public space? If you look at the street full of cars
and think theres no room for anything else, youre not looking hard enough.

As we saw in chapter X, pedestrians on Flushing Avenue in Queens and in Times

Square dramatically outnumbered people in cars, yet they had the smallest fraction of
space. While congestion seems like a lot cars, its a smarter decision by counting the

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number of people and apportioning street space that way and not based on the square feet
of their mode of transport.

Myth: Taking away lanes for buses, pedestrians and bicyclists makes traffic worse
Reality: These changes can make the street work better

If you got all your news from tabloids, youre probably under the impression
NYC choked to death on traffic sometime around 2009, and that we had reverted to a
hunter-gatherer society, chasing after squirrels in Central Park. Not exactly. Yes, a lot has
changed on our streets in recent years: 26 acres of pedestrian space that had been mostly
underused asphalt; some 400 miles of new bike lanes spread across the boroughs;
hundreds and hundreds of redesigned intersections that are unequivocally safer and easier
to cross.

Some drivers said it would be the end of days, and in some ways, you cant blame
them. Before this new generation of street design, cities had been stuck in stasis for so
long with every square inch of space given over to cars that people in our city forgot
how much is possible on their streets. All they ever knew was asphalt.

Engineers used to just count many cars are using a road, do some quick math, and
make some changes to the curbline, add to fit all those new SUVs in. When we came
along and said that taking out that travel lane and replacing it with a turning lane will
actually make traffic move more sanely and more swiftly, it was akin to highway heresy.

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This heresy led to some useful findings. In Union Square where we installed
protected bike lanes and expanded the pedestrian space, the median speed decrease by
14%, and reduce dangerous speeding by 16%.

And on 1st and 2nd Ave, when new proteceted bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes
were installed, bus speeds increase by 18% while general traffic speeds and volumes
actually increased by comparable margins on long stretches of the route

Even on Times Square, when we cut off access to Broadway where it sliced up the
street grid and created some very irregular intersections, travel speeds were maintained
even in the most congested part of Midtown Manhattan. In the same part of town, speeds
actually increased by 10% thanks to our investment in a hi-tech traffic monitoring
system.

We know all of this in part because we had access to GPS data from every cab in
New York City, which provided one of the most important data streams in the history of
city planningand let us see what was working and what wasnt. This data driven
mindset was instilled by Mayor Bloomberg, and allowed us to move beyond conjecture
thanks to actual calculations, so we could counter gut instinct with something a little
smarter. With smart traffic calming and tools like dedicated turning lanes its possible to
make streets safer, more livable and easier to travel at the same time. Anyone who says
otherwise hasnt been paying attention.

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Myth: Taking away parking hurts business

Reality: Businesses thrive in foot, bike and transit traffic

Have you ever seen a car stop into a caf for a sandwich, or window shop at the
boutiques downtown? Me neither. Cars make lousy customers. Its people you want.

This is screaming out for even more data and the detailed studies it deserves, but
the already substantial body of evidence shows exactly the opposite: better streets mean
better business. Changes that make it easier to take transit, walk or bike create more foottraffic and combat congestion. They also make for more interesting and walkable streets,
which are much better for the bottom line, not to mention our waist lines.

This isnt an either-or proposition. This isnt a question of whether we eliminate

all parking or make everybody walk or take transit. You can get a lot of foot traffic out of
our streets if you design them just a little bit differently.

Times Square was the premier example of this. People were predicting the end of
times when announced the plan to pedestrianize Broadway. If you looked at the street,
youd think it was impossible: 89% of the space between buildings was for cars and only
11% for pedestrians, and still the cars crammed every available scrap of road space. But
looked at another way, 80% of the 365,000 people passing through Times Square were on

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foot, not in those cars. So we were giving the maximum amount of space to the minimum
number of people.

Closing Broadway created not just great pedestrian space but also a platform for
the local economy. Retail asking rents in Times Square tripled, major retailer after retailer
opened up there instead of the usual revolving door of tchotchke shops. Cushman and
Wakefield named it one of the top ten retail locations on the entire planet for the first
time.

And its not just big projects like Times Square In New York City, we heard
howls from small business owners that our miles of protected bike paths would smother
their shops and restaurants. But when we looked at actual tax receipts from retail
businesses, the opposite was true.

At Pearl Street Plaza, the very first plaza project we did way back in 2007, retail
sales went up by 172%, Borough-wide, they went up just 18%. After laying down bus
lanes on Fordham Road in 2008, revenues there increased by 71%, and just 23%
elsewhere in the Bronx.

On 9th Avenue, the site of the first protected bike path, retail sales increased
49%, and just 3% borough-wide. And at Union Square, commercial vacancies were
halved following the expansion of park and plaza space, though they actually increased
by 5% elsewhere in Manhattan. Seeing a pattern here yet, folks?

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Yes, its true that despite any hard data, reporters will never have trouble finding
a shopkeeper to claim that their profits dropped dramatically. More than likely these are
the same folks that one Toronto study found were overestimating the percentage of
customers that arrive by car by roughly 100%, and were somehow blind to 70, 80, 90%
of people that arrived on foot, bike or transit.

If anecdote were reality, New York City would have seen a mass extinction of
small business. As it happens, our economic ecosystem has never been healthier.

Cities are waking up to this, fast. There is a global competition for the best and
the brightest and a lot of younger people are thinking twice about moving to places where
their entire lives are dependent on cars. Transit ridership is at all-time highs nationally.

Once a birthright or a rite of passage, driving is the choice of fewer young

Americans who even bother to get drivers licenses, dropping from 87% of 19-year-olds
licensed to drive 30 years ago to less than 70% today. Car sales to Americans younger
than 35 dropped by 30% from 2007 to 2012.

There are a lot of other options, including car share and riders share networks
like Lyft and uber. These all are signs that people want more from their cities than just a
backdrop as they drive from place to place.

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You know those old Hanna Barbera cartoons like the Flintstones when they
would be driving or running and youd see the same background repeat over and over?
People dont want that in real life. They want their cities and all the spaces in between to
be real places. So if cities want to be that city, they need to make the kind of investments
in their streets that attract and invite people to stay, not just move them along.

Myth: Red light and speed cameras are plot to raise revenue:
Reality: Its a plot to save lives. Dont do the crime if you cant pay the fine

1.2 million people die in traffic crashes worldwide every year. Thats 141 people
die every hour. One person every 30 seconds. The chief causes of traffic deaths are
speeding and unsafe driving. So when I hear people say that cameras are only about the
revenue, I think theyre missing the point.

But I think this shows a larger issue that people dont take traffic violence
seriously. They dont recognize traffic safety as a global health crisis, one thats moving
up the list of the top 10 causes of death globally. There are few fields where we accept
this much death with this much unconcern. Its the equivalent of a packed 747 dropping
out of the sky every five days. You dont see drivers organizing around that issue. Red
light cameras and speed cameras, now, thats a problem that needs solving.

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Unlike disease, traffic deaths are the only cause of death in the top 10 that
people have complete control over. We could stop traffic deaths tomorrow if we decided
use our streets in ways that prioritizes safety and human life.

Unfortunately, people choose not to use our streets safely. Speed is the number
one contributor to traffic deaths, along with failing to yield to pedestrians and drunk
driving.

So if we cant eliminate traffic deaths just by appealing to our better angels,

maybe we can eliminate them by appealing to our better accountants with consistent
enforcement against behaviors like speeding and red-light running that people dont take
seriously.

Red light cameras saved lives in New York City. Intersections where cameras
were installed saw a 56% decline in serious injuries, a 44% decrease in pedestrian
injuries and a 16% decrease in all injuries. And most plots dont usually come with a
100% get out of jail free card: You wont get one if you simply dont run red lights and
dont speed.

Cameras deter people from dangerous driving, and when they work well people
stop speeding and running red lights, and cities dont collect any revenue. Red-light
violations have dropped by 40 to 60% at locations where they were installed. If you cant
pay the fine, dont speed all the time.

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Myth: This will never work in my city!

Reality: With proper planning, these interventions can be adapted to almost any urban
environment

When we started to reshape New York City streets, the most common complaint
we heard was that bike lanes, bike share, plazas would never work here, because this isnt
Amsterdam, or Copenhagen or any other European cycling capital that happened to come
to mind when ranting about parking spots.

Funny thing about that is that they were right. NYC is not Copenhagen. In fact,
NYC built more lanes in just seven years than Copenhagen built in its busiest 20 years.

Can you imagine if someone in 1900 said "You can't build subways here, this isn't
London? Or you cant build skyscrapers here, this isnt Chicago? Give me a break.
We didnt actually invent the stock market either, but theres a reason they call it Wall
Street. We didnt become the Big Apple by finding reasons why we couldnt accomplish
something, and we certainly didnt earn a worldwide reputation for shying away from big
ideas and being too timid to try new things.

The trick of it is to figure out what your city needs, see what other cities are doing
to solve similar problems, and adapt their lessons to your own streets. True, no two cities
are exactly alike. Each has some unique conditions - political, climate-based, cultural,

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economic that make it different and the execution of projects is going to be different
than someplace else.

But like Newtons law of physics, Einsteins relativity or Kevin Bacons six
degrees, there are some universal truths: If you design streets so cycling, walking and
transit choices are attractive, safe, efficient and convenient, people will use them -- and
youll be well on the way to snapping your city out of its car-centric stupor.

While pervasive, maddening and successful in slowing, halting or eviscerating

safety projects, these myths dont even approach the myths that attach specifically to
biking in cities. Heres a sampling of the most pervasive myths about bike riders and the
lanes they ride on:

Myth: Bikes dont belong on the street

Reality: This is an argument for bike lanes

A lot of people tell me that they think its crazy that people would bike in the
street. Their image of a bike rider is a cross between a Lycra ninja and Mad Max. I think
whats crazy is that most of these people seem just fine with their streets being so
dangerous that only a lunatic would ride on them. If a street is that dangerous, and if the

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only people youre seeing are death-wish speed racers, your problem is a lot bigger than
cyclists. Theyre just a symptom of a street that is toxic to street life, not the cause.

What we found in New York though was that when you design a street for people
who ride bikes, you do more than create a bike lane. By redesigning the street youre also
making it a better place to drive and to walk, to shop and to do business. The sign of a
healthy street is when its safe enough for a mother and child to bike on it.

So the next time you think that keeping bikes off the street is the only way to keep
them safe, take another look at the street and I think youll see the real problem that needs
solving.

Myth: More bike riders means more bike deaths

Reality: Even a dramatic increase in bike riders has no impact on bike deaths

This is like the rumor of kids who choked after washing down Pop Rocks with
soda. I think to myself1.25 million people die in car crashes every year, or 1 person
every 30 secondsand its the bike riders youre worried about? This claim that more
bikes equal more crashes and injuries ignores everything thats already happened in New
York City and others around the world.

When bike riding quadrupled in New York City from 2001 to 2013, there was no
increase in cyclist crashes that caused death or serious injury. Adjusting for the fourfold

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increase, that means that there was a nearly 75% reduction in the average risk. A large
reason for that may have been the increased cycling infrastructure that prioritized bikes.
Another is the safety in numbers phenomenon, where increased numbers of riders
increases their visibility and profile as drivers get used to more riders, know where to
look for them on the street and drive more safely. In 2013, the year that Citi Bike
launched, system users made more than 6 million trips.

Citywide, the number of bike rider deaths decreased 50%, that year from 18 in
2012 to just 12 in 2013. That was the fewest bike deaths in nearly 30 years. In the first
two years of operation and more than 20 million TK trips, not a single Citi Bike rider
died in a crash with a car, and no pedestrians were killed by Citi Bike riders. And no, this
is not a NYC-specific quirk of fate. Last year the 35+ systems nationwide hit 23 million
cumulative trips with 0 fatalities. If you want safer streets, you want as many cyclists on
your street as you can possibly get, and you definitely want bike share.

The next time someone bends your ear about cutthroat cyclists crashing through
intersections: during a five-year period from July 2009 to July 2014, the height of the
bike boom in New York City, no pedestrians were killed in crashes with bike riders.
During the entire 14-year period from 2000 to 2013, eight pedestrians were killed in bike
crashes while in that same period, 2,291 pedestrians died after being hit by people in cars.

At this rate of 0.5 bike deaths per year, it will take 327 years for as many
pedestrians to die in bike crashes in New York City as died in just one average year of car

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crashes this century, a figure youd be hard pressed to find in any tabloid newspaper. If
youre a pedestrian wagering how to make a street safer, bet on the bike.

The next time someone sitting behind a windshield tells you cyclists are making
the streets more deadly, remind them to check their blind spot. Sadly, what these drivers
dont know, can actually hurt us.

Myth: Nobody uses bike lanes

Reality: Way more people are biking despite the fact that there are few bike
lanes

The antithesis of the previous argument. If nobody uses them, how is the street
more dangerous? No data. Also, the bike lane is part of a street design which makes the
remaining lanes safer. There are pedestrian islands that shorten the crossing distances,
particularly for older people. Lane widths get narrower, reducing speeding and trafficcausing lane-changing. You dont just want safe streets part of the year. And nobody says
Lets get rid of the park, nobody uses it in winter, or Lets make the school a parking
lot; no ones there during the summer.

Even Census data, which is probably the worst indicator of cycling trends because
it eliminates all bike trips that are specifically for people commuting to work, show that
bike riding is up dramatically in American cities. Our counts showed bike riders

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quadrupling in New York City over the last decade. And this is despite the fact that streets
not only arent designed for bike riders, they are specifically designed to frustrate them
and keep them off the road.

Myth: Pedestrian and bike projects are a waste of resources

Reality: Bike and bus lanes are the cheapest infrastructure in town

New York Citys expenditures for new bike lanes and plazas equaled less than one
percent of the $6 billion we spent on our core infrastructure of roads and bridges. At the
breakneck pace of bike lane installation from 2007 to 2013, it will take nearly 125 years
to spend an equivalent sum as we dedicated for the repainting and rehabilitation of the
Brooklyn Bridge.

Myth: Not wearing a bike helmet is dangerous.

Reality: Not having cyclists is way more dangerous.

Evidence should be required before making this claim! I wear a helmet. I

encourage others to wear helmets. Some of my best friends are bike helmets! And Ive
observed a significant increase in helmeted riders on bike lanes. There is much
hyperventilating about this, usually by people who dont ride bikes, but there is no
evidence that requiring bike helmet use has decreased injury and death rates among riders
anywhere. On the contrary, there is growing evidence that cities that encourage cycling
without helmet laws have fewer deaths and that cities with mandatory helmet laws saw

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only a significant decrease in bike riding and the safety benefits that more riders bring to
the street. Australia and New Zealand have the worlds most stringent helmet laws, which
is partly the reason for the failure of bike share programs in Melbourne and Brisbane
which have a fraction the use of similarly sized bike share systems elsewhere in the
world. Meanwhile, other cities (Mexico City and Tel Aviv, for example) repealed helmet
laws in order to encourage use of their new bike share programs, with great success. In
the United States, commuter bike riding more than doubled from 2001 to 2012, yet the
number of cyclists killed has remained stable, despite there being no adult helmet laws in
any but a few big cities (come on, Seattle, youre on the Left coast!). In the more than 30
million bike share trips in the United States, none has resulted in a traffic fatality despite
none of these bike share cities not requiring helmets. The reason may be counterintuitive:
More bike riders makes city streets in particular safer as safety in numbers increases
riders profiles on the street. Bike ridership in New York City quadrupled from 2000 to
2012, and there was no increase in severe injuries or deaths, and numbers went down
dramatically following the launch of Citi Bike. We did support the requirement of
helmets, lights and reflective gear and numbers for delivery cyclists, which the industry
and riding public generally supported.

While its understandable that a government would try to protect its citizens and
encourage helmet use, actually requiring the helmets is a barrier to bike ridership,
discouraging spontaneous trips and forfeiting the health benefits that having millions of
bike trips would bring for citizens. If you dont have a helmet handy when you suddenly
decide you want to take a ride after a work meeting, you cant grab a bike share bike.

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Governments also forsake the traffic-calming benefits that more riders bring to the road
not just for themselves but also for pedestrians and drivers. If governments sincerely
believe that streets are so dangerous that bike riders cant be allowed the discretion to use
helmets, they should instead take heroic efforts to make their streets safer so that people
wont get killed instead of requiring that people armor themselves against the street.
Failing that, municipalities that are so concerned about bike riders heads should therefore
be as concerned about pedestrians heads and enact and enforce laws requiring them to
wear helmets too. After all, 270,000 pedestrians died globally every year after being hit
by cars, 4,743 of them in the United States. None was wearing a helmet.

Aside from the transitional concerns about bike lanes causing congestion or
endangering street users, the legends about urban biking take on almost comical angles
and are blamed for any manner of urban ills. A reporter in New York City questioned a
bike lane project on Second Avenue, which ran near the Israeli Consulate, because
Imagine if the man on the bike was a terrorist! When a 74-dock bike share station was
proposed for Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the United Nations, some residents invoked
the 2008 bombings in Jaipur, India, where terrorists housed bombs in bicycles. The
resident mentioned this case Because it appears that bombs inserted on or in bike parts
could become a tool of global terrorists in our city under a citywide massive bike
program, he told a local online news site. As the controversies spread, the talk doesnt

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stop with the bike lanes. Bike riding and riders themselves are caricatured as menaces to
society

Regardless of how well a project works or how good your quotes and talking
points, bike lanes remain subject to the court of public opinion and to press scrutiny.
These often are not the same thing! What you read in newspaper articles may not be
public opinion so much as the opinion of a select few in the public. Expect that any
change that truly changes the use of the street and that alters the status quo in new and
essential ways will engender opposition and that those negative voices will be what is
represented in news reports. When that happens, you can assess the merits if the claims,
but you dont have to assume that naysayers speak for everybody.

We had a saying around the press office: Alls well that ends. Often a single
news story was the apotheosis of a controversy and, once past, reporters and the
underlying story move on and the story doesnt return. This was the case with 95% of our
bike lanes. For every Prospect Park West or Grand Street or Kent and Bedford Avenue,
there were dozens of unremarked projects that brought bike lanes and paths or that just
made it easier to walk or bike on New York Citys streets. Merely being reported on did
not bring a bike lane to the level of reversal. We often biked on Prospect Park West, even
during the height of the media firestorm and there was a tremendous disconnect. There
were no protestors, no scenes of carnage. The reality on the ground, where the bike lanes
lay and the cyclists and pedestrians play, were far more placid than the fights depicted in
news reports. The temptation is to overreact to the exaggerated depictions.

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In New York City, the Transportation Department built nearly as many bike lanes
in the two and a half years before the backlash than in the more than three years before.
We also launched the nations largest bike share program, 7 new Select Bus Service
routes, 60 plazas, and these projects held high approval ratings among the public as we
left office

We encountered thousands of arguments against bike lanes over the yearsmore

arguments than were used to support or deny any other projects that we had done. We
heard that bike share bikes were too blue and the stations were eyesores in historical
districts (nobody claimed the same thing about yellow taxis or bright red SUVs parked
along the curb, just bikes). We were sued by a hotel that claimed the stations would be
too loud as people docked and undocked bikes. Never mind that this was within earshot
of 5th Avenue and a cacophony of cars and buses roaring by, taxi horns, horse carriages
and thousands of tourists babbling. Bike lanes, bike share stations and plazas were
accused of slowing emergency vehicles, blocking peoples access to their apartment
buildings. Some themes came up that we dealt with repeatedly, and having dealt with
them successfully, we collected a couple here to help cities around the world defend bike
lanes from the superstitious, the ridiculous and the just plain misinformed:

When they say: Im not opposed to bikes or bike lanes, just this one.
They really mean: I support bike lanes as long as they are not built

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Some of the most significant opposition to bike lanes and street-transforming

projects comes from people who claim that they love bike lanes. LOVE them. They just
happen not to love this particular bike lane, or just not on this particular streetor not
until scofflaw bike riders can first be reined in. The alternately hilarious and truthspeaking author of the Brooklyn Spoke Blog, Doug Gordon, calls this the But some of
my best friends are bike lanes, syndrome, inspired by the carbon-copy quotes made to
various New York media about different bike lane projects in different parts of the city
over several years. A small sampling:

Were not opposed to bicycle lanes however, not the way theyve been
implemented in this city.

Im not against bike lanes, I believe theres a place for them. But when we place
them, we have to have input from the community boards, from people in the
community.

Were not opposed to bike lanes. Were opposed to this one and the way it was
done.

Im not anti-bike, but I follow police statistics: About 90 percent of the bicyclists
killed in this city died, in part, because they were not following the rules of the
road.

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We are not against bike lanes, but there are a lot of senior citizens, public schools
and day-care centers in this area and children are going to get hurt.

Im not against bike lanes per se just the way D.O.T. handles them.

Judging by these self-descriptions, most of the people in New York City who
spoke out against bike lanes were true bike lovers who reluctantly opposed our brand of
lanes. Our mistake!

With a simple Google search you can find the same claims made in Portland,
Boston, Miami, Halifax, New Orleans. In New York, as we tried to understand the
argument better that the specific reasons to be opposed to this particular bike lane would
apply to virtually any other street. While governments must take public concerns
seriously, they should take a strictly rational approach to the arguments. The argument
that a community didnt have input shouldnt go very far with city officials who
presented the plan at meetings and have resolutions and letters of support from
community groups. The mere fact that a few holdouts claim there was no community
process may be evidence only that they were on the losing side of the argument.
Consensus wasnt required to build dangerous, chaotic streets in the first place. It must
not be required to reverse it. Opponents often claim that a bike lane, bus lane or bike
share station is too close to a school/senior center/playground/hospital, etc. In New York
its difficult to find any street which at some point doesnt pass by one of these
institutions. To follow that logic is to not build bike lanes. But why would any

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responsible transportation agency hold bike lanes to an astronomically higher safety

standard and not cars, which pose far greater risk to children and seniors?

What they say: This project needs more community outreach

What they mean: I want to delay or prevent the project with the process.

From plazas to road diets and crosswalk changes across the boroughs, we
heard the claim that the project may have been acceptable but that there just wasnt
enough outreach. People didnt know it was happening, didnt have a chance to weigh in.
If only we in the our municipal ivory tower had held more public meetings or open
houses, the argument goes, then the project might have had a chance to move forward.
For long periods than these arguments deserved we took these claims seriously but
eventually confirmed by listening closely to the arguments that in most cases there was in
fact a very robust community processmore extensive than for many even larger public
projects. What people apparently were saying was that there was a process but that they
did not know about it, did not participate in it, or that they did participate and were
outvoted and do not accept the outcome.

The first part is the toughest one. Short of mailing notices to tens of thousands
or even millions of people in homes and offices, theres no established way to get out the
message of something as simple as installing a stop sign or traffic signal, much less
painting a few lines to create a bike lane or road diet. Then again, theres no onerous

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notification protocol that requires that the city publicly notify residents when someone
was killed in a motor vehicle crash.

But we operated under the principle that projects were stronger when they had
broad supportand best when the projects originated with the communities themselves.
To streamline the process, we worked directly with community boardsNew York Citys
charter-designated municipal advisory bodies. These groups are the designated
clearinghouses between neighborhoodstheir businesses, institutions, civic and block
organizationsand officialdom, and their decisions carry weight if, technically, only
advisory. We created online portals for specific projects so that people could comment on
them and make suggestionseven negative ones. However its almost impossible to
reach everyone, and therefore difficult to show that you did enough outreach. Given the
balance of media, one person is all the proof needed to show that community outreach
didnt hit its markat least one person didnt know!

The perceived lack of process is used almost exclusively to torpedo projects,

not to save them. I dont recall any opposition along these lines that ever led to another
bike lane built elsewhere that met their criteria. If opponents are sincere in their claim
that its only the process, lets see the agenda that solves the problem instead of simply
denying a solution.

In my experience, after a robust public development process, requests for

more outreach almost invariably means more delay and virtually never resulted in

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more understanding or acceptance. If anything it needlessly delayed projects that should

have been implemented much sooner. That was the case with Adam Clayton Powell
Boulevard in Harlem in Manhattan, which was one of the most dangerous avenues in the
city. Twelve people died in car crashes from 2006-2012. Despite repeated DOT proposals
over several years, the local community board still objected, claiming the need for more
information or some kind of proof before moving forward. We just dont understand it
yet, a community official told the New York Times. One self-styled Harlem historian
questioned if painting a bike lane would strip the street of its historical character. This
was despite whole-hearted support from residents associations, churches and senior
groups along the corridor and after revising the project several times to revise designs.
After four years of inaction, we moved ahead with the support of these groups and
implemented a 43-block redesign, changing the street from three lanes in two directions
to two lanes each direction, with turn lanes. Speeding went down, serious crashes went
down. I have no doubt that had we continued with more outreach we would have gotten
nowhere and the street would still be as deadly as it was a decade ago. The project itself
was the proof that we needed.

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Ch.12:Conclude

DRAFTTOCOME

-30-

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