New York
Basics
Life-Saving Truck Design Fix Sidelined By Federal Inaction
This is the second post in a Streetsblog NYC series about safety features for large vehicles. Part one examined the case for truck side guards and New York City's attempt to require them for its fleet.
December 22, 2014
Why Aren’t American Bike-Share Systems Living Up to Their Potential?
As policy director at the New York City Department of Transportation from 2007 to June, 2014, Jon Orcutt shepherded the nation's largest bike-share system through the earliest stages of planning, a wide-ranging public engagement process, and, last year, the rollout of hundreds of Citi Bike stations.
November 24, 2014
Peak Sprawl? The Fringes of the New York Region Are Shrinking
A new report out of Rutgers University [PDF] reveals that since 2010, the fringes of the New York region have lost population as the core has grown, a reversal of the sprawling pattern that predominated starting in 1950, when the suburbs grew and the city shrank.
October 2, 2014
Census Finds DC and NYC Bike Commuting Has Doubled in Four Years
Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.
September 18, 2014
EPA Rejects New York’s Clean Water Money Grab for Highway Bridge
This morning, the Environmental Protection Agency rejected the $510.9 million federal loan New York state had requested from a clean water program to pay for the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project. Only $29 million worth of TZB work is eligible for clean water money, the EPA's regional office ruled, averting a dangerous precedent that could have let governors across the country raid environmental funds to pay for highways.
September 16, 2014
Are There Any Affordable Cities Left in America?
Are Washington, San Francisco, and New York the most affordable American cities? A new report from the New York-based Citizen's Budget Commission [PDF], which made the rounds at the Washington Post and CityLab, argues that if you consider the combined costs of housing and transportation, the answer is yes.
August 27, 2014
Talking Headways Podcast: Poor Door Von Spreckelsen
In this week's podcast, Jeff and I take on the infamous New York City "poor door," designed to keep tenants of affordable units segregated from the wealthy residents that occupy the rest of the high-rise at 40 Riverside. In the process, we take on the assumptions and methods that cities use to provide housing, and by the time we're done, we've blown a hole in the whole capitalist system.
August 4, 2014
William H. Whyte in His Own Words: “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”
When I first got started making NYC bike advocacy and car-free streets videos back in the late-1990s on cable TV, I didn't know who William "Holly" Whyte was or just how much influence his work and research had on New York City. A few years later I met Fred and Ethan Kent at Project for Public Spaces. I got a copy of Whyte's 1980 classic, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which in its marvelously-written, straightforward style is the one book all burgeoning urbanists should start with.
July 25, 2014
Talking Headways Podcast: A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings In the Metro
The metro is coming to Loudon County, Virginia. Eventually.
June 13, 2014