Quality of Life

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and 9th St. resident Konrad Kaletsch at Dizzy's Diner, Eighth Ave. and 9th St., August 2, 2005. That's DOT Borough Commissioner Lori Ardito in the background wearing shades and looking none too happy to be harangued by Park Slopers demanding safer streets.

From a press release that just came across the Streetsblog transom:

Those of you who are sick of reading about DOT's plan for Park Slope's 9th Street and the small but well-organized group of car-owning residents who are opposed to it, will be pleased to know that whole affair may soon be resolved.

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.

Given that it was only a few months ago that Mayor Michael Bloomberg could be heard saying, "We like traffic, it means economic activity, it means people coming here," his pitch for a whole new set of progressive transportation policies at last week's meeting of the Regional Plan Association was all the more remarkable:

 Beer good, ethanol bad 

On Saturday, over 100 cyclists turned out for Brooklyn Greenway Initiative's annual ride. For nearly a decade, they have been working with numerous community & government groups to bring a Hudson River-style recreation path from Greenpoint to Sunset Park. In the next few years, much of the 15-mile route will finally become reality.