Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Livable Streets

Doubts About DOT Congestion Prescription in Jax Heights

By Sarah Goodyear | Oct 3, 2007 | 1 Comment

Community activists in Jackson Heights have been complaining about congestion at the corner at 73rd St. and 37th Ave. (right) for years. A major traffic study of the area is underway, but according to a DOT spokesman, the department didn’t want to wait to implement "short-term initiatives" that could ease the problem. Problem is, some […]

Meat Market Plaza is Open for Business

By Aaron Naparstek | Sep 27, 2007 | 7 Comments

The interim redesign of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street is done. Tables, chairs, planters and some of those giant granite blocks from DOT’s Bridges Division have been set out as multipurpose bollard-bench-tables atop a gravelly, earth-tone pavement surface. What was very recently one of the longest and most hectic pedestrian crossings in Manhattan, and no […]

Making the Case for Compact Development

By Sarah Goodyear | Sep 21, 2007 | 8 Comments

From the people at Smart Growth America comes word of a new book, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, just out from the Urban Land Institute. In the book, researchers argue that more compact development (such as Atlantic Station, a mixed-use complex in Atlanta built on reclaimed industrial land, shown at […]

Seeing Myrtle Avenue With Fresh Eyes

By Sarah Goodyear | Sep 18, 2007 | 6 Comments

The folks over at the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership have unveiled the results of a collaboration with the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) undertaken over the last couple of years. Two public workshops were held to get community input on the plans, which address four different areas of Myrtle Avenue, one of the main commercial […]

German Town Chooses Human Interaction Over Traffic Signals

By Aaron Naparstek | Sep 14, 2007 | 8 Comments

Driving (carefully) with Dutch "shared space" guru and traffic engineer Hans Monderman. While battles rage here in New York City over signs and markings and the segregation of the public right-of-way for different types of users, yet another Northern European town is ditching its traffic control devices altogether. Spiegel reports that as of September 12, […]

A Gehl Dispatch From Down Under

By Brad Aaron | Sep 13, 2007 | 2 Comments

We reported yesterday that noted Danish urbanist Jan Gehl will soon be surveying New York streets with an eye toward improving them for human use. Gehl has been working in Sydney, Australia as of late, and an essay he wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald offers insight into what he may be looking for here in […]

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