Urban Planning

The second phase of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 outreach campaign, which has been soliciting feedback from the public through meetings with community leaders and on PlaNYC's website, has been completed, and the word is in: People in New York want to do something about traffic congestion.

After Mayor Bloomberg's December announcement of his PlaNYC initiative to prepare for a sustainable New York of 9 million people by 2030, New York New Visions, the group of architects and planners originally organized around Ground Zero rebuilding, announced it was expanding its scope to tackle the new challenge. Last night, in a stark white room in the basement of the American Institute of Architects building in Greenwich Village, a collection of almost equally stark white faces began reimagining the New York of the future.  

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this weekend by Conor Dougherty on the municipal move toward charging more for parking. It's available online to paid subscribers only, but here's a taste:

Sam Schwartz, aka "Gridlock Sam," is best-known to many New Yorkers through his Daily News column about the city's quotidian traffic woes. Schwartz is the president and CEO of Sam Schwartz LLC, a traffic planning and engineering firm that has worked on projects including the JFK AirTrain, the IKEA project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the World Trade Center Memorial.  Before he moved to the private sector in 1990, Schwartz served as NYC traffic commissioner and as deputy commissioner of transportation in the Koch administration. He sat recently with Mark Gorton, president and founder of the Open Planning Project, to discuss congestion pricing, cars in parks, and the way pedestrians in this city don't get much respect from traffic planners. As the city begins looking for a new transportation commissioner to replace Iris Weinshall, this interview is worth watching:

On Thursday, as New York City's highest ranking transportation officials argued before City Council that the city's increasing traffic congestion and automobile dependence is "an indication of the vitality and the growth of the city of New York," London's Mayor Ken Livingstone was in Davos, Switzerland announcing that he aims "to make London the world's leading center for research and financial development on climate change." Livingstone said:

Mayor Bloomberg's Office of Long-Term Planning & Sustainability is running a series of meetings with community groups. Though the meeting times are posted publicly on the PLANYC 2030 web site, no locations are listed and word has it these borough-wide "Community Leader" meetings are going to be pretty strictly invitation-only.  

Chris Smith has an outstanding story in this week's New York Magazine pointing out that New York City has fallen behind other world cities in addressing climate change and challenging the Bloomberg Administration to do more. An excerpt:

Monday night was the first meeting of the Ninth Avenue Renaissance project. About 130 neighborhood stakeholders filled the gym at the Holy Cross School in Midtown to begin a process to transform Ninth Avenue from a dysfunctional, traffic-choked, polluted highway into, what organizer Christine Berthet says should be "a neighborhood Main Street" for Hell's Kitchen and Clinton.

Some of us at Streetsblog headquarters were talking about putting together a sidebar listing of recommended books to reinforce the commentary you find on the blog. I put together a few brief recommendations of five of my favorites, but we're also interested in learning what you've all been reading and what you'd suggest to others, so treat this as an open thread on livable streets-related books now that we're in the midst of the holiday gift-buying season.