The 2013 NYC Streetsies, Part 3
Happy New Year, and welcome to the third and final installment of the 2013 NYC Streetsies, also known as the Streetsblog Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
Lifetime Achievement
We take it for granted these days that NYC DOT is primed to make change happen — that every year, the department will roll out a fresh new batch of projects devoting a greater share of our streets to walking, biking, transit, and public space. It wasn’t always that way. Before Janette Sadik-Khan took over in 2007, the defining traits of NYC DOT were stasis and rigidity. Change happened, but the pace was glacial, and modern ideas about designing and managing streets failed to take hold.
DOT was a place where ambitious bike planners quit in frustration. Where grassroots pedestrian safety initiatives languished for a decade. Where mayoral campaign proposals for faster busways gathered dust. Then-DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall deferred to engineers who believed the agency’s prime directive was to move cars. There were no strategic goals to improve the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of the street network. As late as January, 2007, Weinshall resolutely opposed legislation requiring DOT to evaluate its performance according to a new set of metrics that prioritized walking, biking, and transit.
Fast forward to April 2008. Sadik-Khan had led the agency for a year, bringing with her a new team of top deputies and giving fresh directives to the department’s career-long engineers. By that point, her DOT had already implemented the first stretch of on-street protected bike lane in any major American city and begun to experiment with quick, low-cost public space projects like the Pearl Street plaza in DUMBO. That month, in step with the Bloomberg administration’s citywide sustainability blueprint, PlaNYC 2030, the agency put out its first strategic plan, setting specific benchmarks to implement transit-priority corridors, reduce traffic deaths, and increase bicycling. It was, in retrospect, a key benchmark in and of itself. This is what it looked like for a big-city transportation department to commit to values other than moving traffic. There weren’t many other precedents, if any, in the country.
The strategic plan, the protected bike lanes, and the nimbly-built plazas were emblematic of the wave of innovation during Sadik-Khan’s tenure. But “innovation” didn’t necessarily entail invention. The city had been left in a position where it had to play catch-up with global leaders in transportation policy. By trying out proven ideas in New York for the first time, DOT could show that overhauling city streets was not only possible here, but also effective and desirable.
Before long, DOT teamed up with the MTA to implement New York’s first enhanced bus route with off-board fare collection. Then came the first demand-responsive parking prices on neighborhood commercial streets (not the sexiest innovation, but a solid one). The first on-street bike parking, the first “pop-up cafes,” and the first neighborhood-scale 20 mph zones. In the final act, DOT launched the nation’s largest bike-share system.
Once DOT hit its stride under Sadik-Khan, it became fairly common for the press (and even more common for anonymous blog commenters) to invoke Robert Moses when describing her tactics. But the comparison always seemed incongruous. Not only was DOT merely reshaping the public right of way (in many cases with nothing more than paint and planters!) as opposed to seizing people’s homes and property, but the public process that had been institutionalized in reaction to the excesses of Moses formed the backdrop for every single DOT project. “Robert Moses,” more often than not, was just code for “there’s less free parking than there used to be.”
What the opponents of DOT’s street redesigns never understood — or, perhaps more accurately, never admitted — was that their own neighbors, not city officials, were the most committed supporters of change. For years, DOT had been infamous for telling street safety activists “No.” That wasn’t the case at Sadik-Khan’s department, where New Yorkers who wanted safer streets could get a hearing. Neighborhood groups like the Clinton/Hell’s Kitchen Coalition for Pedestrian Safety, the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, and Brownsville’s bike lane activists saw many of their ideas turn into major improvements for walking and biking. Change didn’t always come promptly to everyone who asked for it, but under Sadik-Khan, DOT became an agency that often said “Yes” to residents who wanted more livable streets.
Did those changes please all New Yorkers? Hardly, but as the poll numbers on bike lanes and plazas began to pile up, it was clear that most of us liked them just fine.
There is one respect in which Sadik-Khan’s legacy does resemble Moses’s: She is an exporter of ideas. Through her leadership of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, NYC DOT’s pioneering street designs turned into templates for other cities. Nowhere is this influence more apparent than in the rapid adoption of protected bike lanes. A few years ago, this type of street design was basically non-existent in America. Today, dozens of U.S. cities have built bike lanes with physical protection from motor vehicle traffic.
Generally speaking, Sadik-Khan’s work with NACTO is the antidote to the suburban and rural bias that pervades American street design standards. The nation’s urban streets tend to be designed like highways because that’s what the dominant engineering guides call for. NYC DOT and other pioneering transportation departments have created proof on the ground that city streets should be built to a different standard. Thanks to NACTO’s design guides, cities around the country are starting to realize that they have “permission” to tailor streets for the urban context.
Yesterday was Sadik-Khan’s last day as NYC transportation commissioner. As much as she’ll be remembered for Citi Bike, the Midtown plazas, and other physical changes to the city, an equally important part of her legacy is how we think about streets. Expectations are higher now than they were six years ago. Transportation policy occupies a more prominent position in our local press and public discourse. After all the changes that have unfolded on her watch, there’s a greater understanding that so much of what we want out of our city — to feel safe, healthy, happy, and part of a community — is bound up in our streets. This will be invaluable as New Yorkers continue to fight for a city that’s safe from traffic violence.
Janette Sadik-Khan would be the first to say that NYC DOT’s accomplishments in the past six years have been a team effort. It’s not possible for me to personally acknowledge everyone at the department who’s contributed to these tremendous successes, but I hope this Streetsie conveys gratitude to them as well.
Turnaround of the Decade
It’s hard to remember this today, after four solid years of tabloid attacks on bike lanes, but transportation was almost a non-issue for Mayor Michael Bloomberg during his first five years in office.
Despite early intimations that East River bridge tolls might be on the table, Bloomberg didn’t really touch the status quo on NYC streets in his first term. The underwhelming “Thru-Streets” program was the big transportation innovation of those early years. When he mobilized his administration to lead on climate change midway through his second term, though, his transportation proposals got much bolder.
Congestion pricing didn’t get enacted, but the campaign for it set off a big public discussion of NYC’s transportation problems — and how to solve them. The basic idea that “something needs to change” anchored the next six years of NYC DOT transportation reform.
Bloomberg wasn’t perfect on streets and planning issues. It will be up to the current mayor or his successors to improve NYPD’s prevention of traffic violence, eliminate parking minimums, build better transitways, and compel the EDC to develop buildings that don’t belong in the suburbs. But once he was convinced of the merits of an idea, Bloomberg stuck with it, and throughout his third term he stuck with the street redesigns that his DOT implemented.
A transportation commissioner like Janette Sadik-Khan needed a mayor like Bloomberg, who gave his deputies relatively free rein and always had their backs. With so much of NYC’s political establishment — including Democratic Party royalty — taking umbrage at the reallocation of a small fraction of street space to bikes, buses, and pedestrians, Bloomberg’s ability to withstand intense lobbying was the key to DOT’s success.
The language of livable streets did not come naturally to Bloomberg. He is, after all, the same guy who casually said, at a public event in 2006, “We like traffic, it means economic activity, it means people coming here.” Four years later, though, he seemed more attuned to the idea that city streets aren’t just for cars. Sparring with reporters at the announcement that the Midtown plazas would stay in place, he asked rhetorically, “Are the roads for multiple uses — everybody, pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists, or are they just for motorists?”
It was toward the end of his third term, at the launch event for Citi Bike, that Bloomberg really started to nail this stuff down. At this Q&A, the mayor swatted away one objection to bike-share after another. No single quote really does the cumulative performance justice. However, I did especially enjoy his response to one reporter who asked about all the space bike-share stations would consume: “Bike racks do take up space, but the parked cars they replace take up a lot more space.” This is the Bloomberg I’m going to remember.
The Streetsblog Medal of Honor
Howard Wolfson‘s tour of duty during the long, dark winter of 2011 — when the NYC livable streets movement was getting strafed from all sides, every day — was the stuff of legend.