Meanwhile the 2nd avenue subway (begun in tnhe 70’s)
is now supposed to be concluded by 2018 and the date
for an east side connection for the Long Island Rail Road
is now 2015 (another 70’s idea)

The MTA now teeters on the edge of bankruptcy so noone
knows if these decades delayed , way over budget projects
will be further delayed.

Let’s not let a few meager street or sidewalk enhancements
obscure the big picture when it comes to New York – a city
dominated by greedy unions and excessive government spending which leaves no room for infrastructure improvements.

While New York has stagnated new systems and new lines have been built nearly everywhere, even in economically challenged places like Cleveland and St. Louis.

American cities are great to live in despite government, not because of it. If you think about which areas are considered the most entrepreneurial – India, Israel, Ireland, the US – they’re the places where government is so offputting good people don’t want to work for it.

Bloomberg’s management could learn some things from the Urbanophile consulting. Bloomberg’s a master of the not-invented-here syndrome. Come to him with a matching software that could save the city $20 million on finding substitute teachers, and he’ll find some excuse to brush you off. Come to him with a grassroots upzoning idea, and he’ll ignore you in favor of a big business-friendly plan. And so on… being a good CEO at one company doesn’t always make a businessman a good CEO at another company; why should it make him a good mayor?

I think the difference between her and Robert Moses would be that she advocates for small-scale “improvements as experiments” and then using those to build consensus. Moses just wanted his own grand vision and damn the consequences. Moses had no opportunities to gather feedback, whereas JSK integrates it into the process.

The idea that “no government in the US is competent” is just plain silly. Our cities could always be better, but they are still great places to live.

Creating great places and great transportation design might attract people AND make it liveable given the role that design plays in our everyday lives even when we don’t realize it (sometimes the best design is seemless, unnoticeable, and well-designed because of it). Keeping the train stations clean and the buses running on time, though, are what make it liveable and may keep people from leaving. A great education system may both attract and keep people from leaving.

As someone with some experience on both sides of zoning disputes (not in NYC), this is far from rare behavior by both NIMBYs and project advocates.

The Streetsblog guys have some great quotes from Bloomberg’s early days when he seemed to embrace traffic as indicative of a strong economy. But people made the case to him for a better approach, he saw the value in the that, and embraced it.

At any rate, my reference to authoritarianism isn’t just a feature of the political system. It’s a feature of process. Partly in response to Jacobs’ criticism of city planning, New York instituted the 197a process, allowing community boards to make plans for zoning. But the 197a plans are just a suggestion, and city practice is to ignore them and instead hand off large amounts of land to developers for megaprojects. The city isn’t siding with the majority of the community, but with a tiny minority. A standard practice of JSK is to stack rooms with supporters to create the pretense of community approval.

Giving the community a voice does not mean stagnation. On the contrary, some community boards have embraced positive change, when the people made the correct pitch. For example, the community leaders of western Queens are still reeling from Moses’s freeway plans. Thus, the community is very receptive to traffic reduction ideas on QB, such as widening the sidewalk; needless to say, JSK has not tapped into this support, as Queens is not part of the gentrified zone. Conversely, the community is less receptive to traffic calming ideas that close down intersecting streets, believing those are a precursor to turning QB into a freeway; however, even those got support when the street calming activists made the correct pitch.

Dan Hill at City of Sound made a nice post about the topic of resident veto recently, I see Jarrett has also commented there.

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2010/02/emergent-urbanism-or-bottomup-planning.html

FYI Aaron, Dan Hill came up with the “street as platform” theory that you mentioned in an earlier post. The original post can be read there.

http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2008/02/the-street-as-p.html

In my home town of Melbourne, the same story can be told in the development of Swanston St. Gehl was the basis again, the project was pushed by the head of urban design Rob Adams and championed by the Mayor Robert Doyle. Doyle was advocating re-introducing car traffic to Swanston St prior to election. Not only has he seen the light but is valiantly promoting further changes to restrict vehicle access.

Gehl uses Copenhagen as a basis for work and often makes the point that Copenhagen was a series of small adjustments starting back in the 1960’s rather than a single grand project (the need for a long term vision not withstanding). A lot of small scale efforts have paid dividends for them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_ndC07C2qw&feature=related