Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Quality of Life

Meat Market Plaza is Open for Business

By Aaron Naparstek | | 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 […]

A Gehl Dispatch From Down Under

By Brad Aaron | | 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 […]

A Streets Renaissance in Lower Manhattan

By Brad Aaron | | 10 Comments
Last weekend the New York Times published a nice piece about a resurgence in downtown Manhattan street life. Optimism abounds now among developers and merchants, who are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into real estate along the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan. They are counting on the district, in its next incarnation, to be not […]

New “People’s 311” Site Maps Street Hazards

By Jason Varone | | 5 Comments
Carrie McLaren and Steve Lambert are working on a public service photo project called "People’s 311." They want New Yorkers to submit shots of things like potholes, bike lane hazards, dying trees and broken traffic signs. People’s 311 is a "crowdsourcing" response to the Street Conditions Observation Unit (SCOUT) program, a new team of inspectors dispatched […]
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