In 2009, NACTO launched its Cities for Cycling project, through which the organization studies and champions best practices in bikeway design, and began crafting an urban-oriented manual to guide cities who want to invest in bike-friendly roadway infrastructure and traffic engineering. The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide puts forth solutions for incorporating bicycle transportation options into the urban streetscape, based on a comprehensive understanding of the many bureaucratic restrictions and practical needs that dictate the design of our streets. In the face of design standards based on interstate highway travel, liability concerns, battles between State and City and competition between numerous stakeholders for use and right of way, this effort to overhaul our established ideas of how streets should work promises to be a struggle. And the folks at NACTO are dedicated to the challenge. In the following piece, Vega-Barachowitz looks at the example of the “cycle track” — a bikeway that is physically separated from motor traffic and is distinct from the sidewalk (such as the 9th Avenue bikeway here in New York) — to explain why our transportation networks are the way they are and how they should evolve. 

- V.S.

Photo by Harmony Blackwell, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

In the taxonomy of city streets, the cycle track is the platypus. Sandwiched between the sidewalk and the parking lane — neither a trail, a sidewalk, nor a travel lane — it defies the conventional spectra of classification and challenges where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.

In spite of their curious and (as of now) sporadic cameos on American city streets, cycle tracks have long tradition in Northern Europe, and have more recently emerged on streets from Seoul to Seville. Since 2007, when New York City cut the ribbon on its inaugural Ninth Avenue cycle track, the movement for separated bikeways has accelerated in the United States; and culminated in 2011, with the publication of the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a catalogue of innovative bikeway design concepts for US cities.

The NACTO Guide heralds a new era of thinking about our streets and public spaces, discovering in the asphalt tundra of the American metropolis an unlikely well of creative potential. Along with a growing cadre of city street design manuals, the guide beckons the twilight of the motor century and upholds the growing sentiment that the antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself. Today, as an emerging generation of designers and engineers rise to challenge the traditional rubric and protocol of traffic engineering, the first highly visible struggle will be that of the cycle track.

What follows contextualizes the cycle track in the lineage of transportation in the United States. Three persistent themes stand out: the tension between rural and urban transportation policy; the question of dedicating versus sharing road space; and the interpretation and limitations of conventional design standards and criteria.

This brief history will hopefully accelerate the launching of a new paradigm in urban transportation and street design, and thus engender more aggressive and creative streetscape interventions in the progress of design process and theory. This movement reinforces and reflects the recent cross-disciplinary shift from object to ground and from freestanding built form to landscape (set forth by architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton in 1990). It inverts the opportunity for design intervention from the built fabric of floors and facades to the dynamic spines and landscapes that weave around them and shape their context. City street design, though perhaps the least glamorous subfield in the dialogues surrounding landscape urbanism (or ecological urbanism), just might be its most highly contentious and politically volatile element — and therefore one of its most interesting.

Ocean Parkway bicycle path, c. 1894 | Courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive

The Gospel of Good Roads
The first separated bikeway in the United States was constructed along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn during the bicycle fad of the 1890s. The bicycle craze produced many follies, including a short-lived, elevated, bicycle toll road between Pasadena and Los Angeles named the California Cycleway. Though the impact of the bicycle at the turn of the century was truncated by the emergence of the private automobile, an early group of bicycle advocates, the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), successfully lobbied Congress for smooth, well-connected country roads at the height of the bicyclist era.

The California Cycleway | via bike.arroyoseco.org

Catering to the populist sentiments of the day, LAW published a series of tracts in Good Roads Magazine, including one called The Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer. The gospel, along with other materials issued by the League, called upon Congress to build a system of well-paved roads connecting towns and villages. Their literature appealed to farmers whose livelihood was compromised by inadequate road conditions and sought to leverage more effectively the railroads upon which they relied to get their goods to market. Though the energy behind the movement came primarily from groups of cyclists in cities, their political appeal to the peasant farmer struck a sympathetic chord with congressmen distrustful of city bosses and railroad tycoons.

The agrarian sympathies of a federal government reeling from a financial crisis sparked by railroad speculation set in motion the inequitable balance in transportation policy and funding geared away from cities towards rural areas. This bias persists to this day. Beginning with the establishment of the Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) in the Department of Agriculture in 1893, the government set a precedent for road and highway construction as a rural program based on rural needs and rural access — a decade before the advent of the automobile. As a consequence, from the early 20th century onward, the Bureau of Public Roads and its successor agency the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) charted a course that would spell the dissolution of railroads and urban transportation systems in favor of federally funded toll-free highways dominated by state interests and agencies.¹

League of American Wheelmen rally, 1880 | via ocbike.org

The establishment of the landmark Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 carried with it a provision that enabled each state to establish a highway department to handle grants and funds allocated from the federal government. The highway departments, assembled from an already forceful and emergent group of regional highway lobbies (backed by national automobile associations), formed the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) in 1914 — a group which, over the course of the 20th century, “developed into ‘one of the most important, least known political groups in the country…part lobby, part professional association, part quasi-political agency. No effective national highway policy could be enacted without its agreement.’”²

Evolving Guidelines and Standards for Roads and Bikeways
AASHO’s lead role in the federal highway program was underscored by their publication in the 1920s and 1930s of a series of road design standards, which eventually came to be known as the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets and the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The former, a set of guidelines commonly known as the AASHTO Green Book (AASHO was renamed AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, in 1973), is often referred to as the “bible” for traffic engineers. The MUTCD is a federally mandated set of codes intended to create standardized roadway signs and markings. The Green Book guides a road’s geometric proportions, such the minimum width of a travel lane (typically 10 feet, though engineers prefer 11-12 foot lanes), while the MUTCD mandates its signage and markings, such as the appropriate dimensions of a stop sign or a striped buffer.

The antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself.As cars became ever more prevalent on America’s roadways, the Green Book, guided by state highway engineers, continually added “safety” buffers to their street design standards to account for the growing frequency of accidents and driver errors. After 1966, based on the presumed inevitability of driver error,³ traffic engineers “became principally concerned with how to engineer [a] second line of defense, shifting the profession’s focus away from driver behavior and towards vehicles and roadside hardware.”⁴ Trees were routinely chopped down to improve sight distances on historic streets, sidewalks were narrowed to improve a car’s crumple zone, and intersection curb radii were altered to insure that trucks and other large vehicles could make smooth turns.

Ever more prohibitive traffic engineering standards regulated and regimented the city streetscape in the name of safety, even as these standards simultaneously eroded the urban realm and transformed ordinary commercial thoroughfares into high speed / high traffic urban arterials. Since only state-designated collector or arterial routes were eligible to receive federal funding, cities had an incentive to designate more of their city streets as state routes, and in doing so conform to AASHTO standards that compromised pedestrians, street life and commerce in favor of vehicle throughput.^5,6

Why AASHTO Excluded the Cycle Track
Among AASHTO’s supplemental publications released in the ensuing decades of the Interstate era was the 1975 AASHTO Guide to the Development of Bicycle Facilities. Demand for a better design policy for bicyclists emerged during the bike boom of the late 1960s and peaked in 1974, the year when, for the first time in decades, more bicycles were sold than cars.

Surging interest in the bicycle, then as now, sparked a reconsideration of the bicycle’s place in the roadway — specifically under what circumstances bicyclists ought to ride with or apart from traffic. At this juncture, despite a wealth of strategies being deployed in Europe, including the cycle track, the American standard fell curiously under the spell of John Forester, the champion of the vehicular cycling movement and author of Effective Cycling. Vehicular cyclists espouse the principle that cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.

In the early 1970s, Forester successfully fought (and continues to fight) against the inclusion of cycle tracks in the AASHTO Bike Guide. Though the vehicular cycling principle has many adamant advocates, the outright embrace of a behavioral approach to cycling coincided with a tacit rejection of the behavioral approach to traffic safety. In other words, as the engineering profession began to safeguard the built environment for terrible drivers and faster cars, a dominant group of bicyclists rejected the principle of separation in favor of “bicycle driving.”

At a point in history when the primary engineering solution was to segment users by grade and function, Forester may have seemed like a luminary. In practice, while cycling rates had a resurgence elsewhere, in the US, they stalled. 

9th Avenue, Manhattan | via NYC DOT's Street Design Manual

The Ninth Avenue Revolution
From the bike boom of the 1970s until today, efforts to make bicycling a mainstream form of transportation (rather than a child’s toy or an exercise regimen) have often focused on policy and education rather than engineering or roadway design. The few cycle track experiments that did take place were either situated outside of a large urban context, in left-leaning college towns like Madison, WI or Davis, CA; or quickly succumbed to political winds, such as New York Mayor Ed Koch’s infamous Midtown cycle tracks in the 1980s. A small but vocal group of engineers from the vehicular cycling community vehemently objected to changes to the AASHTO and MUTCD standards, propagating the philosophically sound but practically unrealistic “Share the Road” dogma that bicyclists should be accorded all of the rights and responsibilities of motorists.

Today’s call for cycle tracks differs, in part, because these interventions have been integrated into a bolder and more comprehensive reawakening and reconsideration of streets as public spaces for people. In 2007, when New York City constructed the city’s first protected bike lane pilot project on Ninth Avenue and transformed Times Square from a tumultuous interchange into a public commons, the city not only created a safe space for cyclists and pedestrians, they set a new precedent in the design of city streets. Cycle track projects, along with a host of bold engineering and communications strategies, have helped to revive the notion of the street as a place not solely for cars, but a front yard in which commercial and pedestrian activities may thrive.

In most cities, changes to city streets, beyond repaving or filling potholes, occur in geologic time. Transportation agencies and public works departments are (understandably) reluctant to attract bad press and political controversy by eliminating traffic lanes, and in much of the country, have little to gain from widening sidewalks or adding bike lanes. Moreover, innovation has often been discouraged by the threat of liability, as innovative cities and engineers fall back on prevailing standards (AASHTO guidance) rather than the immunity of good engineering judgment.⁷ In the 1970s, John Forester coerced the state of California and the federal government to withdraw proposals for cycle tracks by citing a lack of safety research and suing the city of Palo Alto for having mandatory sidepath⁸ laws — injecting a sword into the tender belly of the system.⁹ A steadfast reliance on research and the threat of liability created an untenable cycle, which New York City, by building the cycle track as a pilot project in 2007, may have finally broken.

The current movement to build cycle tracks and other innovative designs reflects a paradigm shift in the urban political-engineering-planning framework under which cities typically operate. City transportation agencies and public works departments are transforming themselves into public space departments to cater to a new generation, and are in turn finding that the dialogue of controversial new steps — such as an ambitious bike network expansion —helps them to transcend the business-as-usual approach to city streets and to forge new partnerships with community groups, businesses and advocates. When New York City built its first cycle tracks (as part of its larger complete street design initiative), it made the cycle track into an object of political capital, setting off a domino effect that now involves cities from Memphis to San Jose.

Excerpt from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

The quiet revolution of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide
The story of the cycle track does not end with the trials and successes of New York. In fact, despite the turmoil of the Prospect Park West Bike Lane in the winter of 2011, the imperative for cycle tracks has garnered even more momentum nationwide, with cities all around the United States prepared to lay their first miles of protected bikeways in 2012 and 2013. While controversy has a way of heightening interest and visibility, the publication in March 2011 of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide set forth for the first time an accepted, long overdue national standard off of which cities could base their designs.

While the cycle track is what makes the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide pioneering, the manual actually includes guidance for bicycle signals, bike boxes, buffered bike lanes, and a host of other new traffic engineering strategies now being deployed across the country. The designs in the guide draw on the European experience as well as existing projects and precedents in the United States. Following the official release in March 2011, NACTO undertook an unprecedented endorsement campaign for the document, drawing the support of countless city transportation officials, as well as US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. These developments have set the stage for a thorough reconsideration of roadway design standards in cities across the country, and reflect the long-recognized fissure between the reality of urban design and the tenets of state highway design.

Whether or not federal transportation policy and state highway design evolve to achieve a more representative balance between state and local interests remains to be seen. Nonetheless, the recent emergence of the cycle track and the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets a positive precedent for the future of urban streets and spaces. The modern solution to traffic congestion is no longer a multi-billion dollar highway or tunnel, but a recalibration of investment away from traffic and towards people, and away from highways and towards transit and public plazas. It is through the reinvention and re-imagination of this ubiquitous public asset, the street, that the American city may discover its latent potential. While cycle tracks may be an ephemeral protagonist in this evolving drama (as their late 19th century counterparts were for the Good Roads movement), this subtle traffic operation sets the stage for a more ambitious reconquest of the street — its place, purpose and future in the American city.

Bikebox at a signalized intersection, from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

David Vega-Barachowitz is the Sustainable Initiatives Program Manager at the National Association of City Transportation Officials and coordinator for NACTO’s Cities for Cycling project. Mr. Vega-Barachowitz joined NACTO in 2011 to develop and disseminate the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a national design guide which compiles innovative bikeway and street design in the United States. Prior to joining NACTO, he undertook a Henry Evans Travelling fellowship granted by Columbia University to study urban design, with a focus on bicycle and infrastructure planning and design, in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and France. His interest in bicycling as sustainable transportation was inspired by his time studying architecture and urban design in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008-2009, Mr. Vega-Barachowitz worked at the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked on a State of Good Repair initiative to improve system-wide asset management and systematic rehabilitation for stations. He is a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Urban Studies with Architecture.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

SOUTH BRONX RISING
This week, The New York Times new architecture critic Michael Kimmelman took a walk with NYC’s planning commissioner Amanda Burden through the South Bronx. They discuss the area’s long journey after decades of disinvestment and neglect and cite the importance of Nos Quedamos and Yolanda Garcia’s vision of what the South Bronx could become in driving its apparent resurgence, alongside the Bloomberg administration’s smart decisions about the physical elements that make a neighborhood: maintaining a street wall, ground floor retail, street trees and density. The walking tour ends with a followup to Kimmelman’s review of a new residential development in the neighborhood, Via Verde. Check out the video and the write up of the tour.

WHERE TO SHARE?
A couple of weeks ago, Janette Sadik-Khan announced that New York City was starting a new bike share program, set to open with 1000 bikes and 600 docking stations, and asked New Yorkers to suggest where to the stations should be placed. But how will the final locations be selected? The Atlantic Cities reports on the complexities of deciding exactly that. Working with Alta Bike Share, the company selected to implement the program, the city will  ”first target optimal service areas using detailed data models and public suggestions, then approach community boards that govern these areas with at least three possible locations, and last allow the neighborhoods themselves to make the ultimate decision.” In order to reveal the complex methodology of locating the nodes of this new infrastructural system, the article goes on to explain in detail the three “pillars” of a successful bike share program, “high density of stations, close proximity to transit and community feedback.” The public presentations begin next week. Check out the schedule of community meetings and other events at the bike share program’s timeline, and head over to Streetsblog for up-to-date coverage as this program unfolds.

TOO MUCH PARKING!
When people complain about parking in New York, the gripe isn’t usually that New York City has too many spaces. Yet, according to an article in Crain’s New York this week, Robert Moses-era zoning laws dictate that in new residential construction outside of Manhattan, the developer must build four parking spots for every ten residential units, despite New York’s comprehensive mass transit system. Building owners are losing money on predominantly empty parking garages. And even facilities that draw large crowds, like Yankee Stadium, have parking lots that remain mostly empty much of the time. The Yankee Stadium example is now prompting fears that the parking allotment for the contested Atlantic Yards Stadium in Brooklyn will also remain under-utilized. The prospect of a giant blacktop hole adds to an increasing number of concerns about the new development.

PEANUT PARK
New York City is becoming increasingly dependent upon public-private partnerships to maintain its parks. Central Park and Bryant Park have both been arguably saved by such partnerships, to name only two. This week, a new park has opened, this time sponsored by Planters, of nut fame. Mr. Peanut made the requisite appearance at the opening, monocle and all. While there may be something built into the premise of corporate sponsorship of public, even semi-public parks, that smacks ominously of corporate encroachment into civic life, the results are encouraging. Planters Grove, one of three such parks sponsored by Planters and designed by Ken Smith, was built for The Wald Houses, a public housing development in the East Village. The garden allows residents of the project access to the herbs planted there, and will also be open to the larger neighborhood. Read more of the coverage in The New York Times.

EVENTS and TO DOs

CINEBEASTS’ GOWANDERLUST!
This Saturday evening, Cinebeasts is hosting Gowanderlust! with Nathan Kensinger, photographer, documentary filmmaker and film festival programmer. Kensinger will be leading a “zig-zagging tour-screening” — part walking tour, part short film screening — along one of the cities most historied and fascinating industrial landscapes, the Gowanus Canal. Buy your tickets here and then join them Saturday, October 8th at sundown in front of the Bell House, 149 7th Street. A reception, including refreshments provided by Brooklyn Brewery and Cabinet Magazine, will follow at Cabinet Space. For more information, check out Cinebeasts.

OPENHOUSENEWYORK
The 9th annual openhousenewyork, when some of the city’s most spectacular and hard to access spaces and structures open their doors/gates/elevators/ladders/trap-doors to the public for viewings, takes place the weekend of October 14th-16th. Many talks, tours, and workshops are free; some require advance reservations (with a $5 fee). As usual, people are snatching up reservations fast, so be sure to plan your weekend soon. Here’s just a sampling of what you can find in the slate of events: the Holly Whyte Way Arcade Parade, a walking tour along the Old Croton Aqueduct (in both Manhattan and the Bronx), a walking tour on Shaping Urban Design and Policy: The East 96th Street Corridor, Brooklyn Bridge Park (previous coverage of BBP here), Elastic City’s Monumental Walk (previously), Pier Luigi Nervi’s George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, AVAC System on Roosevelt Island (previously), the final days of the BMW Guggenheim Lab (previously), Lyn Rice Architects, Architecture Research Office (ARO), East Harlem School (previously), the Arsenal, Noguchi Museum (stay tuned for more on this next week!), the Digester Eggs at Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the Little Red Lighthouse, Fresh Kills by Bus, Build It! Architecture Workshop, Urbanitis East Harlem Tour, Chris Pellettieri’s Stone Carving Workshop at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, East 4th Street Cultural District Tour (previously), El Puente South Williamsburg Walking Tour, the Eldridge Street Synagogue, Melrose Commons, or tour the city on bikes with either the NYC DOT, a historian Exploring the Street Grid, or with Velo City’s high school student guides teaching you about urban design. Download a PDF event guide here or click through to make reservations on the OHNY site.

ILLUMINATING THE CITY
Last weekend’s Bring to Light, New York’s second Nuit Blanche festival, brought light sculpture, installations and video to the walls, streets, alleys and public spaces of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tomorrow, the New Museum is hosting a panel discussion to consider the potential of the Nuit Blanche model to reimagine public space and catalyze dialogue. “Illuminating the City: Site-Specific Art as Urban Activator” will start at 4pm and will feature Ethan Vogt and Ken Farmer of Nuit Blanche New York; Eva Franch, director of Storefront; Stephanie Thayer, executive director of the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn; David van der Leer, assistant curator for architecture and urban studies at the Guggenheim; with more panelists to be announced. Buy tickets or find more information here. And if you missed Bring to Light last weekend, check out photos from the event in Time Out,  Flavorwire and on the Bring to Light website.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Rendering by MIR and Snohetta, courtesy of NYC DOT

TIMES SQUARE PLAZAS MADE PERMANENT
On Tuesday, September 27, Manhattan’s Community Board 5 met with Craig Dykers of Snøhetta to review their plans for the Times Square pedestrian plazas of the not-so-distant future. No more lawn chairs, no more paint as marker for where the car space ends. The plan calls for a leveling of the streets and curbs, to create a continuous pedestrian surface of dark concrete. Inlaid into the pavers will be steel rivets to reflect the bright lights of the big city. Benches and street furniture will provide seating as well as space demarcation to aid pedestrian flow, making the plazas useful as lounge spaces and as thoroughfares. The intent, according to Dykers, is to make the space seem larger and less cluttered. NYC’s Department of Design and Construction hopes to get started next fall with a completion date of 2014. Check out more of the coverage from DNAinfo and the A|N Blog.

WEEKENDS WITH VIGNELLI
The Vignelli map is back. In 1972, graphic designer Massimo Vignelli created a subway map for New York City that was a favorite of designers but, because it eschewed geographic faithfulness for legibility, was deemed too geographically inaccurate by some. With the release of the MTA’s new Weekender website, the MTA has brought the Vignelli map back into use. The Weekender is a website devoted to helping people plan their weekend subway trips with ease despite service changes. The site features a trip planner, so that the MTA can “do the navigating for you – around any service change”, tabs to look up service by station, line or borough, and visual navigation through an interactive version of the iconic map.

fasttrash.org

FASTTRASH.ORG
Fast Trash is now a website! Last year we spoke with architecture, writer and curator Juliette Spertus about the exhibition of Fast Trash, an exploration of Roosevelt Island’s pneumatic trash collection system and her ongoing project to expose and document complex infrastructural systems. Now the exhibition has become a website that gives readers access to Spertus’ research and documentation of the exhibition and provides a space for discussion of larger questions of how we can radically rethink how garbage is moved through our city. Check it out at fasttrash.org.

EVENTS and TO DOs

VELONOTTE NYC
How do you “turn cities into nocturnal open air museums experienced on a bike”? Velonotte! On Saturday, October 1, the Storefront for Art and Architecture will host the kickoff of VELONIGHT NYC. In the early hours of Sunday, October 2, from midnight until 5:30am, a bicycle tour of the urban and cultural history of New York City will take cyclists to 20 planned stops throughout the city. An audio guide led by architects, architectural historians and cultural historians will be broadcast live over a proprietary radio frequency straight into participants’ headphones. Contributors to the tour include Jean Louis Cohen, Peter Eisenman, Ken Jackson, Rem Koolhas and Guy Nordenson, among others. Read more about the kickoff event here, and more about the tour here.

The Archtober Calendar

ARCHTOBER
What day is it tomorrow? Why, it’s Archtober 1st. New York’s Architecture and Design Month — Archtober — is a month-long festival of architectural design activities, programs and exhibitions that kicks off tomorrow. The initiative was spearheaded by the AIA NY Chapter, openhousenewyork and the Architecture & Design Film Festival, and plenty of cultural institutions from across the city are participating, including us here at the Architectural League and familiar faces like the BMW Guggenheim Lab, the Design Trust for Public Space, Friends of the High Line, the Institute for Urban Design, MoMA, Storefront, Van Alen and many more. Find out more about the dozens and dozens of events taking place over the next 31 days here and start planning your month around celebrating all things architecture and design.

Freshkills Park+ in action

FRESHKILLS PARK+
This Sunday, October 2, from 11am to 4pm, Freshkills Park will be open for the second annual Sneak Peak, complete with kayak tours, walking tours, biking, kite flying and making, a craft market, live music, public art, games and food trucks. This year’s event also marks the release of Freshkills Park+, a new augmented reality application. Because of the landfill infrastructure that lies beneath the park, signage can’t be installed. The Freshkills Park+ app allows visitors to learn more about projects under construction, nearby activities or surrounding natural environments and serves as a wayfinding tool throughout the 2,200-acre site.  Read more about the app here, the event here or check out photos of last year’s event here.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Suggest a Bike Share Station | via nycitybikeshare.com

SHARING IS CARING
New York City is joining the bike share club! Learning from the mistakes of other pilot programs across the country, NYC Bike Share will open big with 600 stations and 10,000 bikes. The city has chosen Alta Bike Share, of the successful Capital Bike Share program in Washington D.C. and the New Balance Hubway program in Boston, to run the program. Annual membership will cost “less than one monthly MetroCard” and will stretch from the Upper West and East sides down and into Brooklyn, according to an op-ed Janette Sadik-Khan wrote for The Daily News. Best of all, the Department of Transportation has launched a website on which New Yorkers can request docking stations at specific locations — the response has been impressive, with suggested spots already blanketing the city (see screengrab above). Some people are thinking creatively about how to implement these stations (2nd Ave. Sagas suggests activating disused bus stops) and bike share demonstrations will be held throughout the fall (including one in DUMBO tomorrow, Saturday September 17), with plans to launch the network sometime next year. Read more of the coverage at The New York Observer, and, of course, Streetsblog.

LIGHTS OUT NEW YORK
“I don’t know of any architects out there who want to kill birds,” said Brendan Owens, vice president of the Green Building Council, but that’s exactly what’s happening. Everybody loves glass. More specifically, everybody loves having big windows in their offices and homes. But the growing number of glass towers across the city are killing birds. New York City is in the path of the Atlantic flyway and every year 90,000 birds die flying into buildings. Solutions range from angling or curving glass to treating windows with netting, patterning or ultraviolet reflectivity that only birds can sense. Or, you can turn out the lights. Just under 100 buildings, including the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center and the Time Warner Center, to name a few, are taking part in the Audobon Society’s Lights Out New York program. According to the Audobon Society, “In the dark, and especially in foggy or rainy weather when birds fly at lower altitudes, the combination of glass and light becomes deadly.” The buildings will turn out their lights at night during major flyover times to prevent the loss of any more bird lives. Read more coverage in the Times.

Photo by Varick Shute

SUBWAY POWER
Running the subway uses a lot of energy. Stopping trains expends a lot of energy, mostly in the form of heat. What if we could recapture the energy lost by stopping trains and return it to the subway system’s electrical grid? Vycon Energy is putting forth a plan that will ostensibly do just that. By using flywheels, energy will be harvested and returned not only to subway cars, but potentially to the city’s larger power grid. Read more at Fast Company and Inhabitat.

ATLANTIC CITIES
Chances are, if you’re reading this site, you’ll want to check out The Atlantic Cities, a new online project of The Atlantic that’s all about understanding the way we live, work and play in our urban environments. According to the introductory article by site editor Sommer Mathis, the site has four main goals: to offer reported features about the past, present and future of cities; to deliver news reports about current events in cities around the world; to facilitate a big-picture, ideas-based conversation about urbanism; and to tell these stories using a variety of media. Read more of The Atlantic Cities here.

National Design Awards 2010 | Photo by Richard Patterson

MAKE IT WORK
This week Michelle Obama teamed up with Tim Gunn to present the National Design Awards, put on by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Architecture Design winners Architecture Research Office (ARO) are perhaps best known to Omnibus readers for their work with Guy Nordenson on the 2007-2009 Latrobe Prize Fellowship study On the Water: Palisade Bay, which was one of the motivating forces behind MoMA’s exhibition, Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront. ARO’s project in the exhibition, “A New Urban Ground,” a collaboration with dlandstudio, sought to mitigate the flooding of Lower Manhattan due to rising sea levels by breaking up the edge of the island and reimagining sidewalks as soft infrastructure. Other NDA winners include typeface designer Matthew Carter, who received the Lifetime Achievement award; Seattle-based Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, the recipient of the award for Landscape Architecture; and author, editor and educator Steven Heller, who received the Design Mind award. Read more about the National Design Awards here.

INTERVENTIONISTS TOOKLIT: PART 3
Over on Places, Mimi Zeiger offers the third essay of her fine series “The Interventionists Toolkit.” In this installment, Zeiger ponders the challenges of evaluating the authenticity and effectiveness of certain interventionist tactics, such as urban agriculture projects, mobile food trucks or ephemeral marketplaces, when corporate or institutional interests either generously expand their reach or cynically co-opt their principles (depending on whom you ask). She adapts the architectural methodology of post-occupancy evaluation to grassroots efforts at local or temporary urban improvement, but finds that measuring impacts can be as slippery as identifying the agenda behind any strategy of urban change. Read the full piece here.

EVENTS and TO DOs

URBAN DESIGN WEEK  Earlier this week, Institute for Urban Design Executive Director Anne Guiney told us about the inspiration and intentions behind Urban Design Week, six days of events dedicated to celebrating and increasing understanding of the public realm of New York City, currently underway. The Week kicked off last night with a launch party at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and between now and September 20th, there are plenty of events to choose from. Today is Park(ing) Day, an annual event that invites urban dwellers to transform auto-focused street space into people-friendly public space. Other social occasions include the launch party for the People Make Parks toolkit, an exhibit opening at Studio-X on urban design mixed media representations, and a street vendor picnic in the Financial District hosted by the Design Trust for Public Space and the Street Vendor Project. Talks include Cities in History, a conference exploring the development of urban identities; a discussion with Chris Ward of the Port Authority on the security and design concerns of the World Trade Center memorial; and the concluding debate for City Sessions on the “practice of tactical urbanism and socially active design.” GOOD will be hosting a presentation on design solutions for quality of life in cities to celebrate their new initiative, GOOD Ideas for Cities. For those interested in getting their hands dirty, check out Drawing the City (exactly what it sounds like); 72 Hour Urban Action, a public workshop in anticipation of an upcoming live-action design-build competition; Architecture for Humanity’s call for ideas on how to redesign the Manhattan Bridge Skatepark; and an illuminated version of the “Insert ____ Here” project created by 350.org and artists Eve Mosher and Paul Notzold. Or tag along on some walking tours: Women and the Brooklyn Bridge highlights contributions women have made and continue to make in shaping the bridge, and our friends at Elastic City will lead participants on a walk that creates musical scores from graphic features of downtown Manhattan. The week wraps up with the New York City premiere of Urbanized, a new documentary film by Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica and Objectified fame). If you’re not exhausted yet, check out the full list of events at urbandesignweek.org.

Reflecting the Stars

REFLECTING THE STARS  Last month, filmmaker Ian Cheney spoke with us about light pollution and the disappearance of the night sky in dense urban environments. This month (and next, as long as the LED lights hold out), take advantage of an opportunity to see the night sky recreated in the Hudson River through “Reflecting the Stars,” a light installation that projects the starscape onto the deteriorating posts of Pier 49. The lights twinkle throughout each night, but visitors can also press buttons to highlight constellations that, without the ambient city lights, would otherwise be visible overhead. This is the first New York City project for Jon Morris of the Windmill Factory, who developed the installation both to raise awareness of the disappearing night sky and to give urban-dwellers a rare opportunity for stargazing in the middle of the city. The installation will be on view through October 25 and, according to the project’s website, special events are in the works in conjunction with Climate Week NYC, which runs from September 19-26. Find out more here.

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Proposed Applied Science and Research Campus |

THE NEXT TECH CAPITAL: NYC
This past March, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) solicited a request for expressions of interest (RFEI) to global research institutions for ideas to establish a future “applied science and engineering research campus” somewhere in New York City. NYCEDC received 18 proposals from top schools that included designs on four recommended 40-acre sites, including the Navy Hospital Campus at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Goldwater Hospital Campus on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, areas on Governors Island, Farm Colony on Staten Island and some privately owned sites. Stanford University unveiled a particularly interesting plan for an institute on Roosevelt Island, which, if constructed, could open in 2015. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser wrote on the topic for The New York Times, reflecting on whether or not an applied science center in New York City even makes sense. Read Glaeser’s piece here and see the full coverage of the Stanford proposal in The Architect’s Newspaper, here.

Proposed Fourth Avenue Zoning Area | Image via Department of City Planning

DCP PROPOSES ‘ENLIVENED’ FOURTH AVE
The New York Times’ City Room blog covered the Department of City Planning’s latest proposal to rezone the commercial strip of Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, between Atlantic Avenue and 24th Street (from Park Slope to Sunset Park), in a effort to ban new developments from constructing parking lots, apartments or any block-long stretches of unfriendly walls on the ground floor. The proposal eliminates streetside parking and residential use, requires “a minimum of 50 percent street wall transparency” on Fourth Avenue, from two feet above the sidewalk up to 12 feet, and calls for all owners to devote at least half the space for retail. After 1993, when it was partially rezoned for residential use, Fourth Avenue began a “visible and dramatic transformation from an auto-oriented, heavy commercial and industrial avenue, to one with a significant residential presence.” The proposal is currently in public review, and will be assessed by affected Community Boards for the next 60 days.

Gotham Greens Greenpoint Greenhouse | Image via Gotham Greens

GOTHAM GREENS: BK GREENHOUSE
Gotham Greens, Brooklyn’s first commercial greenhouse farm facility, will begin their first Greenpoint harvest this month! The hydroponic greenhouse will provide year-round production of vegetables and herbs soon to be sold at a select list of restaurants and retailers in NYC. This hyperlocal commercial facility is another in a string of urban farm businesses including Brooklyn Grange and Eagle Street Farm. Check out Gotham Greens’ site for updates on where you can buy their locally produced veggies in the near future.

WALL STREET JOURNAL: “THE BIKES HAVE WON!”
The Wall Street Journal published an optimistic piece on the city’s ongoing “war” over the value of bike lanes, bike culture and the future of biking in New York City. Author Jason Gay adeptly claims that biking is far from the cultural fringe of our city, asking readers: “Email your friends. Ask how many of them own bikes. Then ask how many of them own cars. If more of them say they own cars, look out the window. You live in Connecticut.” Gay believes the so-called bike war is actually an enormous mischaracterization by the media, and draws salient points about the outcome of the momentum built by bike advocates like Transportation Alternatives and DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik Khan. “The bikes have won and it’s not a terrible thing.”

Amtrak Acela Train | Image via Amtrak

THE END OF AMTRAK?
Last week, Chairman of the House of Transportation and Infrastructure Committee John Mica proposed legislation to privatize Amtrak, denouncing the system’s forty-year track record as a “costly and wasteful Soviet-style operation.” The proposed Competition for Intercity Passenger Rail in America Act hopes to “end the Amtrak monopoly,” involving a competitive high-speed rail network between New York City, Washington, DC and Boston. First the act would transfer ownership of the railroad to the US Department of Transportation, after which the Transportation Secretary would seek bids from private companies “to design, build, operate and maintain intercity passenger rail service, including high-speed rail” in the Northeast Corridor. Check out Infrastructurist’s ongoing coverage of the issue, and see the Chairman’s press release on the proposed legislation here.

CITIES vs. SUBURBS
This week’s issue of The New Yorker includes “Get Out of Town,” a piece by Nicholas Lemann discussing the age-old city vs. suburbs debate that draws on several books to assess the factors behind a successful city. “In the United States right now, after a long run of ‘urban crisis’ (punctuated by periodic hopeful reports of revitalization), cities are viewed positively again,” he writes. Through Richard Florida’s The Great Reset, Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, John D. Kasarda/Greg Lindsay’s Aerotropolis, Doug Saunders’ Arrival City, James S. Russell’s The Agile City and more, Lemann looks at the prevalence of celebrations of urban dynamics in current society and touches on questions still unanswered as we move into an increasingly urban world. Read an abstract of the article here, or pick up this week’s New Yorker on newsstands to read the complete piece.

Rendering of Interboro’s “Holding Pattern” | Image via PS1

TO DO: INTERBORO’S HOLDING PATTERN
This year’s PS1 summer courtyard installation is now open! “Holding Pattern” by the Brooklyn-based Interboro Partners will be on view through September 26 in Long Island City and will act as the environment for PS1′s Warm Up music/performance/sound/dance series every Saturday from July 2nd to September 3rd. As part of the installation, Interboro conducted a survey asking local businesses and organizations what objects they would like to have or most need that they don’t already have access to. Based on the results, the team constructed a set of simple but elegant objects, including foosball tables, lifeguard chairs and a rock climbing wall, all of which will be donated to the neighborhood organizations after the installation is taken down. The hope is that this process will strengthen the connection between PS1 and its surrounding community, a goal that inspired the physical form of Holding Pattern. The undulating plains of rope, taut from wall to wall, create a dialogue between the courtyard and the surrounding environment by integrating without obstructing. Find out more about “Holding Pattern” and the MoMA Ps1 Young Architects Program at ps1.org.

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From the Topographical Atlas of the City of New York, 1874 | via nypl.org

FIND OF THE DAY: MAPS
Do you like maps? We do! The New York Public Library has compiled digital versions of some of the oldest and most beautiful maps of the city on its website — 7,100 pages from 124 historical atlases of New York. The list includes fire insurance maps, topographic, zoning and property maps and more. Browse through the digital gallery here and click through to purchase prints of many of them in the NYPL store. (via @urbnscl)

Mediamesh | via ag4 mediatecture

.MEDIAMESH WRAPS PORT AUTHORITY
By the end of June, the Port Authority Bus Terminal will be wrapped in Mediamesh, a metal weave peppered with LED lights developed by GKD-USA, a joint effort of a German lighting engineer firm and an American metal manufacturer. This new “fabric” can be wrapped around buildings without disrupting interior views to the outside and, in the case of the Port Authority, will allow permeability for exhaust fumes to escape. Mediamesh can be used as advertising space or for art installations and, as the Architect’s Newspaper’s A/N Blog notes, its concealment of the terminal’s façade is seen by many as a bonus.

EVENTS & TO DOs:

KNOW YOUR LINES: Next Wednesday, May 18th, head over to McNally Jackson Bookstore at 7pm for a talk on the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s Making Policy Public Series with CUP Executive Director Christine Gaspar and Erika Wood, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, moderated by our own Cassim Shepard. The latest iteration of the series is Know Your Lines, a look at the largely invisible redistricting process and why it matters. For more information about Making Policy Public, which uses graphic design to explore and explain complex urban policy, check out CUP’s MPP website or look back at two Omnibus features on previous editions: Vendor Power! and Predatory Equity.
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Haas&Hann proposal for New York City

PAINTING URBANISM: Dutch artists Haas&Hann are known for their bold, colorful, large-scale murals and favela paintings that aim to activate the urban fabric through public art created by the residents of the communities themselves. Their urban interventions are now being featured in an exhibition, opening tonight at Storefront for Art and Architecture, titled “Painting Urbanism: Learning from Rio.” Paintings, documentary footage, pictures, sketches and plans of past, present and future projects — including a series of proposals for New York City, Paris and Cairo — will be on display at Storefront through July 30th.
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PARSONS FESTIVAL: Parsons New School for Design launched its first art and design festival on May 7th. The festival, with over 200 events, is going on through May 23rd and includes a day-long block party on Saturday, May 21, from 11am to 5pm on West 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Some upcoming talks include: scientists, scholars, and technology experts talking about where Transhumanism Meets Design (May 14-15), a symposium on technology’s potential to radically transform the human condition; Water Fight: Fracking, Food, Art and Economy (May 16), in which a panel, moderated by Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, will address industrial hydrofracking (drilling rock formations for oil and natural gas) and tools for protecting ecosystems and building a green economy; and many, many more. See the full schedule here.
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Roberto Mollá Ricochet at CHRISTINA RAY

RICOCHET: Check out Valencia-based artist Roberta Mollá’s latest exhibition, Ricochet, at the CHRISTINA RAY gallery. This new series of paintings marks the first major presentation of Mollá’s work on canvas. For more information about Mollá’s work, look back at our Omnibus artist interview with him: Symmetrical Mud and the Floating World. (May 12th – June 12th)
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Janette Sadik-Khan at Shared Streets

Recently, the discourse surrounding sharing New York’s streets (or perhaps more specifically, how to share them with cyclists) has become, to put it mildly, heated. Cycling in the city and the deployment of bike lanes has garnered widespread attention in the press, with The New York Times, The New Yorker and New York all thoroughly covering the unfolding drama of the contentious Prospect Park West bike lane. Having gained notoriety through media outlets across the nation, the issue has now hopped the pond, with the Guardian offering its own take on the debate. All this for what one might otherwise assume is an innocuous street improvement to accommodate cyclists.

Given this context, the Municipal Art Society’s second annual Streets Month — a month-long series of lectures and tours presented with support from the Rockefeller Foundation — is timely. Last Monday evening marked the first of several lectures this April, a lecture/panel discussion entitled “Shared Streets” that explored the challenges of sharing New York’s 6000 miles of streets, our largest public space. Tomorrow, “Big Streets: Using and Reusing City Thoroughfares” will take place at the New York Institute of Technology at 6:30pm. Click here to register.

Last week’s event featured talks from the New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner (DOT) Janette Sadik-Khan and Gil Peñalosa, former Commissioner for Parks, Recreation and Sport for the city of Bogotá, Colombia and the executive director of 8-80 Cities. These presentations were followed by a panel discussion featuring Peñalosa, Sam Schwartz of Sam Schwartz Engineering, and Kate Slevin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, moderated by Andrea Bernstein of WNYC’s Transportation Nation project.

As Streetsblog reports, “Shared Streets” did not exactly chart new terrain in what has become a familiar topic of conversation. That said, given how the press has characterized the passions in meetings of this sort, I was pleased to see an entirely civil evening unfold. In the formal, calm confines of the Scholastic Auditorium, the speakers underscored not only the multitude of ways the DOT has encouraged a more diverse usage of the city’s streets, but also the difficulty implementing these changes in this sometimes stubborn city. Perhaps more importantly, the event helped to reframe the debate as to why the issue remains critical to the future of New York.

Sadik-Khan’s stump speech offered an appropriate overview of the many initiatives the DOT has implemented since 2007 to foster a broader spectrum of transport modes and to fortify the streets’ multiple roles as places of mobility, commerce and recreation. This primer was helpful. The recent bike lane debates have had the capacity to obscure some of Sadik-Khan and the DOT’s other successes. Under her tenure, the agency has implemented the Select Bus Service, which has reduced transit times and increased ridership on the the routes, deployed 18 new public plazas, and launched programs like the Summer Streets program, giving Park Avenue over to cyclists and pedestrians on August Saturdays. Under the department’s more conventional remit, the DOT is working to make the streets safer, as well as providing maintenance to service the city’s transit infrastructure.

None of this is news, but it was an excellent reminder that the DOT has done an exemplary job of improving the streets for everyone; from the city’s 3 million daily bus riders, to pedestrians, motor vehicles, and of course, cyclists. In this light, it’s interesting how the bike lane issue has come to define the department and Sadik-Khan herself. Yet despite the conflict that has risen in response to the installation of bike lanes, the DOT has done a remarkable job in getting things done. Change is never easy, particularly in New York; it’s a “high profile and sometimes controversial” job, as Sadik-Khan noted, a fitting segue to Mr. Peñalosa’s presentation.

In a breakneck tour across the globe of cities implementing what could be regarded as best practices, Peñalosa echoed Sadik-Khan’s sentiment in timely soundbites. Change is hard. Looking at examples of what have become paragons of successful urban interventions — Copenhagen’s pedestrian streets and cycling culture, Paris’ Velib bike hire, Bogotá’s car-free Sundays — Peñalosa described the need to rebalance our investment in the street to correct the decades-long emphasis on the automobile, and the challenge in doing so.

Mr. Peñalosa helped to refocus the nature of the debate by reminding us of the larger issues at hand. Bike lanes aren’t only for providing cyclists with safe and efficient routes. More importantly, they’re providing New Yorkers with an alternative. Improving the entire DOT transit portfolio — providing an infrastructure of choice — is critical to keeping the city fluid, and allows it to remain competitive with other large metropolitan areas.

The final panel was a slightly less focused discussion, largely surrounding the various cycling controversies that permeated the evening: the role of cyclists on our shared streets, the rules they should obey (or ignore), and the politicization of the lanes. But what became clear from the panel was the need not only to provide the physical infrastructure for cycling but the cultural support for it as well: both the hardware and the software to foster a widespread culture of cycling in New York.

The emphasis on the lanes, a widely reported hot-button issue that has created some rather unlikely foes, is to be expected. And while the provision of bike lanes are one of the more visible of recent DOT initiatives, cyclists are by no means the only actors on a shared street, and it’s perhaps unfortunate that this issue continues to hijack much of the discussion. Sadik-Khan only touched on the success of the Select Bus Service, and their role in the DOT portfolio was largely absent from the panel discussion. While it is heartening to see such an active debate evolve — as one audience member pointed out, more people than ever are now conscious of the new bike lanes throughout the city — the discourse may distract from equally pressing issues facing the DOT.

As New Yorkers, we’re blessed with an innovative and courageous transit authority that has the foresight to provide transit alternatives that will continue to make moving through the city both easier and more enjoyable. With budget shortfalls looming, providing multiple ways to keep the city mobile is critical to ensuring New York can remain competitive globally – the actual mode is far less important than the continued ingenuity and willingness to break beyond conventional planning practices.

For now, bike lanes and cyclists will continue to dominate the Shared Street discussion in New York. But assuming continued support from the city, perhaps the strident resistance will ebb as it has in Copenhagen, Paris and Bogotá, and naysayers will slowly gain an appreciation for these contentious paths.

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Mat Triebner is a freelance urban strategist, designer, and co-founder of Scout Ltd., a UK-based spatial consultancy promoting creative reuse of vacant lots. He lives in Brooklyn.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

RENEWABLE ENERGY: Railways and Rooftops
Technology never ceases to amaze. Inhabitat reports on Israeli company Innowattech’s new project to harvest energy from train traffic on the country’s rail lines. Innowattech will line tracks with piezoelectric pads that convert stress and pressure into usable energy, and then hook it in to the power grid. A prototype of the system installed last year was able to generate enough electricity to power railroad signs and lights, with energy to spare. The potential of piezoelectricity is something Urban Omnibus devotees will remember from Fluxxlab’s Revolution Door, a prototype that turned the human pressure of pushing a revolving door into enough power to light up an office building’s lobby.

Proposed solar array on the rood of the Brooklyn Army Terminal | Image: NYCEDC

On the local scene – the City plans to deck out the Brooklyn Army Terminal with photovoltaic solar panels. Dubbed the “Smart Grid Demonstration Project,” the panel array will be the largest solar collector in the city and generate at least 600,000 kilowatts of energy annually – enough to power 120 homes (or 2% of the terminal’s energy consumption). The plan is a collaboration between the New York City Economic Development Corporation and Con Edison, who are using $4.5 million of their American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. Once up and running, the BAT will be used to collect data on storage capacity and management of solar panels, and the EDC says its predicted success will lead to the installation of solar arrays in more locations, and perhaps the continued alliance of public and private money in the Bloomberg administration’s Green Economy Plan.
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PUBLIC SPACE: What’s It Good For, Again?
Have an opinion about public space? Weigh in on the latest installment of the Glass House conversations. Deborah Marton of the Design Trust for Public Space asks, “How can public spaces be designed to help individuals become more active participants – socially, economically, intellectually, physically – in the life of their communities?” As New York’s public spaces become increasingly designed, densified and arguably fetishized, a frank conversation about why public space matters is valuable. The Glass House conversations take a weekly design topic and invite commentary before closing the discussion and choosing a “final word,” so go put in your two cents before this questions closes, tonight at 8pm.
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Outside the City Council Transportation Committee Hearing | via streetsblog.org

BIKE POLICY HEARING
It seems not a week can pass without mention of Janette Sadik-Khan. Yesterday, the City Council Transportation Committee drew quite a crowd at a hearing on New York City bike policy. According to Streetsblog, the line to testify was out the door, reflecting the vested public interest in bicycling politics. The committee, like the public, seemed divided, debating the balance of new bike lanes with vehicle traffic. Committee Chair James Vacca said, “Too many people are starting to get the impression that bike policy is about getting them to give up their cars,” and questioned commuters’ use of bike lanes, while other members requested more lanes for their districts. City Council member and cyclist Daniel Garodnick advocated safety and education like the “Don’t be a Jerk” campaign covered in our Roundup two weeks ago. For more on the meeting, see Streetsblog’s summary of the key points.
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CRIMINAL CHARGES: Raw Sewage and Restaurant Grease
The City is trying to put its foot down to reverse the dire situation of Brooklyn waterways. The Department of Environmental Protection has charged four individuals and four business for polluting Sheepshead Bay with raw sewage and restaurant grease. The New York Times‘ “Green” blog quotes DEP commissioner Cas Holloway’s statement, “Today’s arrests send a strong message to property owners who would turn a blind eye to water pollution, or delay fixing a problem: Take responsibility and act now.”
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URBAN PLANNING SONGS: Top Ten
As cultural commentators prepare their end of the year lists (best movies, books, songs, etc), Planetizen has complied its top ten urban planning songs. This may not be the soundtrack to a holiday dance party, but it does sample the eclectic mix of artists inspired by city spaces. Our additions, “Cities” by the Talking Heads (the list quotes David Byrne saying, “if somebody could write a song about [city planning] I’d have to stand up and cheer for them,”) and this years New York anthem, “Empire State of Mind.” After all, isn’t every urbanist’s dream to wander “streets that make you feel brand new?”

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