Urban Planning
New York New Visions Tackles “Sustainable” New York Future
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.
February 6, 2007
The Price of Parking: Let the Free Market Decide?
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:
February 5, 2007
Streetfilms: An Interview with Sam Schwartz
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:
February 2, 2007
New York City 2030. London Today.
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:
January 29, 2007
PLANYC 2030 Community Leader Meetings
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.
January 16, 2007
Uncool New York: NYC Lags in Combatting Climate Change
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:
January 16, 2007
Making Hell’s Kitchen Less Hellish
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.
January 10, 2007
Holiday Book Recommendations Open Thread
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.
December 18, 2006
Futurama 2030 Speech: News Round-Up
Map from the city's PlaNYC web site. See more maps at Gothamist.
December 13, 2006
Futurama 2030: Bloomberg Outlines Ambitious 10-Point Agenda
Only a couple of hundred yards from the rusting remains of the 1964 World's Fair, Mayor Michael Bloomberg laid out his own vision for the future of New York City this morning. In a speech entitled "New York City 2030: Accepting the Challenge," the mayor introduced a broad plan for creating a sustainable city "making room for 900,000 new residents, upgrading aging infrastructure, cleaning up pollution, and coping with the effects of global climate change."
December 12, 2006