![]() ![]() So the miserable loitering grounds - not Times Square itself, mind you! - rank with the city’s noblest architectural achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Or this howler regarding the Times Square plazas: “We had won the public-relations campaign, as the plazas immediately became as much a part of New York as Central Park or Rockefeller Center.” Sadik-Khan takes a victory lap in her new book while New Yorkers continue to dodge speeding bikes. Really? New Yorkers historically have a near-religious bond with their streets - places to nosh on the run, make deals, fall in love and take in the human spectacle all around. “People are unaware that streets can be a powerful force in urban life,” she writes. The arrogance Sadik-Khan displayed at DOT bleeds through her book. While a boon to Upper East Siders who might have a shorter wait for General Tso’s chicken, it spells slower progress for the zillion cars, trucks and buses trying to inch their way uptown. ![]() In nearly every case, just about the only riders most times of day are food delivery people. They make it harder for anyone on foot to see what’s on the other side of the street. Cars parked far from the curb resemble a parking lot. In Sadik-Khan’s telling, this stroke of genius not only created a safe passageway for bikers, it did motorists a favor as well by forcing them to drive more slowly, and thus more safely, through lanes reduced from three or four to two. ![]() Or take any block with a bike lane “protected” by a line of cars parked in the middle of the road. Confusing bike lanes and “pedestrian plazas” on the eastern side estranged the storefronts from the rest of the boulevard and sucked the life out of them - leaving vacancies everywhere. Or walk up Broadway from West 48th to West 59th streets. Sadik-Khan and Michael Bloomberg in July, 2013. (The job nearly done, they look only marginally better than the originals). To “beautify” the tourist zoo of Times Square “plazas,” which former mayor Michael Bloomberg for some reason allowed Sadik-Khan to impose, the city has spent nearly $50 million on resurfacing - only to see them overrun by costumed hucksters who helped chase Conde Nast downtown. She even taps lessons gleaned from ancient Rome and Athens to help explain why cars in Manhattan should be parked in the middle of the street.īut the hideous results are there for all New Yorkers to see. Sadik-Khan’s account of her six-year DOT ride might win over readers who live in Vancouver, Copenhagen and Medellin - cities whose traffic-taming experiments provided her inspiration. So is ham-handed traffic rerouting, which was implemented, notwithstanding her innumerable additional justifications, for one main purpose: to realize avid, lifelong bicycle enthusiast Sadik-Khan’s dream to turn New York into “one of the world’s great biking cities.” Everyone else be damned. Plazas for idle lounging thrust into the teeming urban fabric are suburban. Left-turn lanes are so confusing that no one - walkers, cyclists or drivers - knows what to do!Īs a lifelong New Yorker who walks more in a week than self-described “pedestrian advocates” likely do in a year, may I offer a gentle observation: strolling in any part of town cluttered by Sadik-Khan’s plazas and bike lanes is less fun than it was. “Plazas” are occupied mainly by tourists and bums. “Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution” by Janette Sadik-Khan (Viking)įor the rest of us, it’s a streetscape that is more disorderly looking than it was in the crime-wracked decades from the 1970s-’90s. New York City’s 8.3 million are a happier citizenry, blessed with fewer traffic fatalities and a more humane environment for everyone moving from here to there. If you believe Sadik-Khan’s new book, “Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution” (Viking), something wonderful. Three years since Janette Sadik-Khan left her post as the city’s commissioner of Transportation, what has her ruinous tampering with historic traffic patterns wrought?
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