Iris Weinshall

This highly entertaining and informative anecdote is the first contribution from Streetsblog's new transit tipster, Mr. Inside Track:

The Gansevoort Project Aims to Turn a Chaotic Intersection into a Grand Piazza

DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall's speech was, for many long-time Livable Streets advocates, the single most remarkable aspect of yesterday's Manhattan Transportation Policy Conference. As Jon Orcutt at TSTC noted, Weinshall's speech "laid out an array of measures to improve New York's pedestrian and bicycling environments, soften the quality of life impacts of heavy traffic, and begin to reclaim the sheer urban acreage given over to automobiles." Added up, these measures appear to represent the beginnings of an altogether new set of transportation, land use, and public space policies for New York City and, as Orcutt writes, "a significant departure" from past priorities.

I'm up at Columbia University covering Borough President Stringer's Transportation Policy Conference, live:

In the aftermath of September 11th, concrete and steel barriers sprouted like  mushrooms around big buildings in New York City. It almost seemed to me to be a kind of status symbol. You knew you worked in an important building if your landlord had hardened it against truck bombs.

For most New Yorkers the official end of summer is Labor Day which, this year, fell on Monday, September 4, 2006. For astronomers, pagans and Daniel Libeskind's "Wedge of Light," the end of summer is the Autumnal Equinox, the moment when the sun crosses the celestial equator from north to south. By that measure, Fall begins on Saturday, September 23 at 12:03 am this year. But for those who commute by bike along the northern end of Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the end of summer will be the day that New York City's Department of Transportation creates bike safety improvements along this stretch of avenue recently identified as one of the city's top three bicyclist fatality areas. At the moment, there is no end in sight.

Did people have a chance to listen to Brian Lehrer's interview with DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall and Transportation Alternatives' Noah Budnick yesterday morning? If so, what did you think?

Trouble on Two Wheels

In 2001, shortly after being elected the Mayor of Paris on a platform promising to "fight, with all the means at my disposal, against the harmful, ever-increasing and unacceptable hegemony of the automobile," Bertrand Delanoë began implementing a series of far-reaching transportation reforms throughout the City of Light.