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Home » Diets that Work » Streetsies 2019: The Best Transportation Project of the Year – Streetsblog St. Louis

As Streetsblog readers know, we mark the end of the year with our annual Streetsie awards for the best and worst people, projects, ideas and efforts in the livable streets movement. Well be rolling out our year-end awards every day until New Years Eve, so sit back,look back, and enjoy

Two thousand nineteen was a year in which Not in My Back Yard groups fought vital transportation projects tooth and nail often taking to the courts to stop them.

Yet even so, the citys Department of Transportation inaugurated some sterling additions to the urban landscape that will make New York safer, cleaner and faster-moving. Heres a review of the most exciting transit projects of the year:

At some points this year, the busway appeared mired in court as NIMBY lawyer Arthur Schwartz and his band of wealthy-neighborhood associations plotted to foil the rollout of a transit project that benefits thousands of daily riders by brandishing specious claims about the need for environmental review. The project debuted in October and has not caused the massive traffic spillover onto side streets that its opponents predicted.

Its the exact kind of stand-out project that urbanists hope will revive the fortunes of cities by cutting carbon emissions, eliminating parking, and reclaiming streets from single-occupancy vehicles.

The results have been even more exciting than we thought, and its lifted our spirits to see the positive response, not just that the buses are moving faster, but the street feels calmer, DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said. Amen!

Finally waking up to the streetscape changes wrought by e-commerce and for-hire vehicles, DOT gingerly began a program designating some curb space in residential areas for trucks to load or unload all the parcels that people have been ordering. The need for such zones everywhere is obvious the glut of double-parked delivery truck, private vehicles and taxis, often blocking bus and bike lanes, has contributed to noise, pollution, crashes and even a number of traffic deaths.

Even so, some car-loving residents of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, complained loudly enough about losing a few places where they stored their private cars for free that the DOT backed off on some streets. But Trottenberg defended and strengthened the program. It should be expanded citywide.

Along Morris Park Avenue in the Bronx, a small group of business owners led by anti-street safety Council Member Mark Gjonaj won a court order that for a time halted the DOTs safety redesign of a roadway where 426 pedestrians and cyclists have been injured, with one fatality, since 2010. The road diet plan to tame speedway-like conditions would make it more difficult for residents and delivery trucks to unsafely double-park.

But, again, residents and some business owners objected to a loss of parking on the specious grounds that the city had not conducted enough of an environmental review. But the city prevailed, and an overjoyed Trottenberg heralded the safety benefits.

As we have seen dozens of times under Vision Zero, simple road diets like this save lives, she said.

Fat, fatal Eighth Avenue in Manhattan went on a road diet that will give its pedestrians and cyclists more protection by taking room away from drivers on the Theater District thoroughfare.

The DOT is transforming the area between 38th and 45th streets by reducing car lanes by 20 feet, extending a northbound protected bike lane that ended at 39th Street, and widening, by 10 feet, the overcrowded sidewalk from 39th to 41st streets.

The changes cant come fast enough for the deadly roadway. Between 2013 and 2017, drivers killed one pedestrian on the70-foot-wide avenue between just 38th and 45th streets, and severely injured 15 pedestrians and five cyclists. There were 220 total injuries in those five years on just seven blocks! Cyclist Chaim Joseph was killedat 45th Street earlier this year.

In yet another instance of the few NIMBYs car owners blocking progress for the many transit riders, some Queens residents (again represented by Arthur Schwartz) took to the courts to try to stave off a part-time, dedicated bus lane on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood because it would take some metered parking.

But a sensible judge didnt take their word for it. He went to the street and looked for himself, andruled for the city. Now thousands of riders are enjoying bus speeds that have risen from the snails pace of 2.6 m.p.h. to 6 m.p.h, a 125-percent improvement.

The Central Park West protected bike lane which now extends north from Columbus Circle to 77th Street, despite the hindrance of a NIMBY lawsuit was a blood issue for safe-streets advocates. The death in 2018 of cyclist Madison Lyden, who was forced out of the streets then-unprotected bike lane by an illegally parked cab, then run over by a truck galvanized the bike community, which came out in force to protest the NIMBYs action.

Not only was the NIMBY crowds well-funded suit thrown out of court, cars were kicked from the curb through the repurposing of public space that many drivers think belongs to them. Now activists are asking DOT to make the lane even safer, by installingsplit-phase turning, a design that gives pedestrians and cyclists a separate signal phase from drivers so they can get through intersections, and bus boarding islands, to ensure that northbound buses can safely pick up passengers without having to fight through traffic.

The busway! Nothing gets Streetsblog more excited transportation-wise than this ultimate win-win: a road design that banishes cars in order to help bus riders. May it be the template for further such efforts.

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Streetsies 2019: The Best Transportation Project of the Year - Streetsblog St. Louis

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Home » Diets that Work » Streetsies 2019: The Best Transportation Project of the Year – Streetsblog St. Louis