Comments on: New York: Leadership in Transportation Design

By: anon

anon — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:11:17 +0000

I don’t think not having cool bike racks is a sign that a city lacks vision, or that having them mean your city is really on the right track.

Mayor Daley is sort of out of ideas though.

By: Alon Levy

Alon Levy — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:29:25 +0000

The traffic speed was a post hoc justification. The same engineers, or perhaps a parallel team, produced a map of Manhattan streets showing where road closures would reduce congestion and where they would not. It turns out most of the streets that create more congestion than they relieve are various arterials and connectors in Lower Manhattan, which the city has no plans to pedestrianize.

The real reason for the road closures, if you read the NY Mag article Aaron links to, is that Sadik-Khan wants to turn Broadway into a full-length linear park for.

By: Nathanael

Nathanael — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:04:22 +0000

The closure of Broadway around Times Square was actually designed to speed cars up.

NYC traffic engineers are apparently smarter than those in most of the country, because they recognized that Broadway was mangling the otherwise orderly grid-system traffic. Closing it has actually *sped up the cars*.

The pedestrian plaza was simply the logical thing to do with the closed road.

By: The Urbanophile

The Urbanophile — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:29:30 +0000

lapsangsouchong – thanks for the Paris info.

Lynn, I agree. I think there are layers of identity: American, Chicagoan, Logan Squareite. We can have branding that is distinct to each level. Having some city wide common design elements I don’t think precludes unique neighborhood elements as well. For example, pair the standard bike rack with some limited number of art bike racks chosen to express neighborhood identity (sort of the way Byrne did with his).

By: anon

anon — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:37:59 +0000

When the High Line was abandoned it turned into real nature. Now it has been transformed into a fake nature. Real nature costs little. Fake nature means big money for architects and contractors. When will we stop degrading our natural world for a few dollars? Still the High Line is nice, but it is less now than when it was free.

By: lapsangsouchong

lapsangsouchong — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:18:08 +0000

Oh–and Paris’s attempts to improve provision for bikes (and, indeed, _of_ bikes) have been remarkable in the last few years. With the caveat that ‘Paris’ proper is, like Manhattan, just the centre of a much larger conurbation, and the bike improvements are very ‘centre-centric’, so to speak. Still, plenty of ideas there.

By: lapsangsouchong

lapsangsouchong — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:08:59 +0000

Regarding antecedents to the High Line (which is now on my list of things to visit), the “Promenade plantée” in the 12th arrondissement of Paris was also created from a disused, mostly overhead railway line. It opened at the end of the 1980s, and is–as a friend of mine pointed out while we walked down it one day–always full of people: his gauge, and mine, of a successful bit of urban improvement. And, vide Aaron’s article on NewGeography.com, not all of those people are white.

(Now–I wonder if anything could be done with the surviving bits of the old overhead railway line in my hometown, Liverpool? Not even sure if enough of it remains to turn into a park.)

By: Lynn Stevens

Lynn Stevens — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:30:03 +0000

What’s that quote? “Details are all that matters….” or “The smallest details matter most….” (paraphrasing here and I don’t know attribution).

But with regard to the details, I think people strive not to be like everywhere else. That extends within a city too. If neighborhoods are stuck with bike racks or street lighting or (like now) bus shelters like everywhere else in the city, what’s their distinction? especially if/when they all have the same chain stores. Cost is not the only factor to consider.

By: WoofWoof

WoofWoof — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:35:17 +0000

Comparing what NYC has done in the last 8 years to Chicago’s much-vaunted Bike 2015 program is just kind of sad for this Chicagoan. Chicago had the perfect opportunity to do something interesting with bike racks when the parking meters were removed, and they simply blew the chance. Small, cheap regulatory changes, like NYC’s access to buildings law or DC’s required bike racks in parking garages law, could make a huge difference here. There are, AFAIK, no planned bike tracks; even green-colored bike lanes would make them much safer.

This goes along with your recent series on the CTA: Chicago as a city frankly just lacks vision these days. Daley can gear up for big splashy expenditures like Millenium Park or the Olympics bid, but the more mundane things are generally uninspired.

By: The Urbanophile

The Urbanophile — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:00:41 +0000

Transit in NYC is a whole other post. The problem I think isn’t per se a New York one but an American one. We’ve created a system here with the most ridiculous cost profile in the world.

The Second Ave. subway has bedeviled the city for decades.

A lot of the problem is that we simply lack the will. A lot of the original NYC subway construction was cut and cover, despite probably worse street congestion than what exists today. But would anyone dare even imagine something like that today?