Stephen Miller

Ask a New Yorker about the city's plazas, and they're likely to first think of Times Square. While the city's marquee pedestrian space gets most of the attention, there are dozens of neighborhood-scale plazas across the city, with dozens more in the works in communities requesting them from DOT. Not all local groups have the financial might of Midtown Manhattan behind them, but there is still a need to maintain and support these spaces. Without city funds or donations, it can be hard to keep a good thing going -- or to get it off the ground in the first place.

Last month, the Upper East Side's 19th Precinct devoted two full pages to traffic safety in its inaugural monthly newsletter. In an echo of Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, who claimed at the initial Vision Zero press conference that 73 percent of crashes injuring pedestrians are the victim's fault, it featured an eyebrow-raising statistic that blames four of the five Upper East Side pedestrian fatalities in 2013 on the dead victims. But that's a misleading way to characterize the cause of most pedestrian deaths, and given NYPD's track record of rushing to blame victims in its crash investigations, it may not even be an accurate depiction of these five Upper East Side deaths.

The 2013 citywide data on traffic fatalities is out, and a pair of number-crunching reports from street safety advocates confirm what New Yorkers know in their gut: Wide, car-centric streets are the most dangerous places to walk in New York City. Now, the question is whether Mayor Bill de Blasio will use the release of his Vision Zero strategy later this month to put the full power of his administration behind fixing the city's most dangerous streets.

More headlines at Streetsblog USA

Bicycling in Manhattan has long been a male-dominated mode of transportation, but a new study says bike-share is helping improve the gender balance in the borough's bike lanes. Another change since the blue bikes hit the streets last summer: Manhattan bike riders are far more likely to follow the rules of the road.

A report laying out Mayor Bill de Blasio's traffic safety strategy, including a section on policing, is due in less than two weeks. In the meantime, precinct commanders have taken wildly different approaches to the issue, some more successfully than others. As a department-wide traffic safety policy comes into focus, TrafficStat, NYPD's traffic analysis initiative, is likely to take center stage. Streetsblog spoke with retired Deputy Chief James McShane, who played a central role in the introduction of TrafficStat in the late 1990s.

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Weeks into his first term on the City Council, Antonio Reynoso is beginning to negotiate the tricky politics of housing and development in the neighborhoods he represents. So far, it's tough to decipher whether his office will support the construction of walkable, transit-accessible housing that New York needs in order to keep the cost of living from spiraling out of control.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Yesterday, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer compiled a list of 57 pedestrian danger hotspots identified by community board district managers and sent it to city agency heads serving on Mayor de Blasio's Vision Zero task force. Many of the locations in Brewer's list have a long track record as dangerous locations, including many where people have died crossing the street.