Janette Sadik-Khan

Seth Solomonow

A former New York City transportation commissioner maps out her adroit street design blueprint for alleviating traffic congestion and improving urban aesthetics. With the assistance of her former chief media strategist Solomonow, Sadik-Khan chronicles her role in the urban transformation of Manhattan streets and how the architectural improvements she drafted eased gridlock and boosted urban sociability. After years with the NYC Department of Transportation, her creative work as commissioner began in 2007 with the appropriation of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's green, congestion-busting, sustainability-driven urban plan PlaNYC, which, under Sadik-Khan's leadership, became a citywide rebalancing effort transforming clogged streetscapes from "a place where people wanted to park into a place where people wanted to be." She writes passionately about these projects, including the massive reinvention of Times Square, which was so successful it became a design model for other cities. The author includes pages of photographs effectively illustrating traffic-calming intersection designs and pocket plazas, which transformed "a car-clogged street into inviting shared space" and was just one part of the new street improvement plan for New York.

Handbook for an Urban Revolution

Streetfight

PG Gonni

A closer look at each [car] incident reveals specific human factors contributed directly to them such that they don't warrant the euphe mism "accident" at all. They are preventable deaths.

Traffic engineers must instead place safety at the center of street designs and change the geometry of urban streets to slow drivers to the speed of life.

But focusing on helmets for all users perpetuates the misimpression that biking is an inherently dangerous activity and obscures the underlying problems with our streets. When it comes to the hard-core mechanics of what makes people safer, we had learned long before that the answer lay in the design of our streets and not in how well we wrapped our heads.

This is the most unhinged shit I’ve ever read

Asking pedestrians to carry high-visibility flags like these in Salt Lake City is seen as a way to increase safety at dangerous crossings but they obscure the underlying street design problems that make the crossing dangerous.

You can propose amazing design solutions, but you always have to contend with human emotion, especially fear.

The new design of the corridor could address the majority of the concerns being expressed, but could never overcome all of their fears.

In 2007 there was no public vocabulary in New York City for public space design, for bike lanes and bike share, or for innovative transit and safety. By 2013, when this picture of Madison Square was taken, millions of New Yorkers were fluent in their streets and the changes were just another part of the streetscape. Today, these transformations are being translated around the world.

They found that while people who drove cars to shop spent more on each individual visit, people who arrived on foot or by bus or the tube shopped more frequently and collectively spent almost five times more than those who drove over the course of a week or month.

Even the future isn't what it used to be. It won't be a Jetsons world of private spaceships cruising around a stratospheric dome. It may look a lot more like a city street from the early twentieth century, with kids playing on the sidewalks, people hanging out, meeting friends in plazas, walking to and from the store, and living life at street level.

If this book does nothing else but remind planners to follow the people, then they should also be able to see how new technologies are driving a new, shared economy in transportation that holds the key to creating safer, more accessible, and softer streets.

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