Neckdowns

Upper West Side joins the push for DOT to just install "neckdowns" wherever the safety improvement is needed.

Some then-and-now photos of New York City show how residents lost precious space to the automobile. What we could do to fix it.

Stella didn’t dump as much snow on NYC as predicted, but there was enough to make for some fine sneckdowns.

The Department of Transportation has completed a multi-year transportation study of the Upper West Side, and Wednesday night the agency walked local residents through the many proposed changes [PDF]. The suggestions for the area between 55th and 86th Streets, west of Central Park, include a number of valuable intersection-level improvements to pedestrian safety, but left some feeling that the recommendations don't go far enough.

Elizabeth Press sends these shots of the northeast corner of Hoyt and Schermerhorn in downtown Brooklyn. In what may be a first for New York City, this nifty little DOT reclamation includes bike racks installed on the roadbed, not the sidewalk. (Update: DOT confirms that yes, this is something new for the city.) More on that later. First, take a minute to appreciate all the ways this project, which cost a mere $5,000, according to Ben Muessig at the Brooklyn Paper, has improved life for New Yorkers. 

These DOT photos [PDF] show off the revamped Bronx Hub -- the shopping district and transit nexus in Melrose that just received a slew of livable streets improvements. Planters, surfacing, and a few strategically placed concrete islands demarcate pretty substantial new swaths of pedestrian space, including a block-long plaza (shown above and in bird's eye view below). There's also a short stretch of exclusive bus territory and some interesting bike lane treatments. Follow the jump for more pics.

Work is underway on a major livable streets makeover [PDF] for the Hub -- a shopping mecca in Melrose that some have called "the Times Square of the Bronx." The DOT plan simplifies a complex traffic pattern where three streets converge. In the process, space is transferred from vehicles to sidewalk extensions, pedestrian refuges, and a new, block-long public plaza.

As a candidate for a livable streets makeover, Columbus Avenue is a no-brainer. A block from Central Park, it is home to the American Museum of Natural History and sports a string of active ground floor businesses, but the street itself is a classically car-oriented corridor: three moving lanes sandwiched between two parking lanes. The Columbus Avenue BID has been working with Project for Public Spaces to make the street itself more of a destination -- to create a walkable, transit-oriented "spine" running from the museum to Lincoln Center on Broadway.

As New Yorkers well know, sidewalks around subway stops and major transit hubs are often intensely crowded. Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC team is aware of this and buried on page 48 of the Technical Report supplementing PlaNYC's transportation recommendations is a new program called "Safe Routes to Transit" (SR2T). While the attention to pedestrian issues is welcome, given the scope of the congestion problem near major transit stops, SR2T is a fairly modest proposal and is best viewed as a good beginning, a point of departure for significantly improving the walking part of transit trips.