Janette Sadik-Khan’s TED Talk: “You Can Remake Your Streets”
by Angie Schmitt, Streets Blog
In the six years that Janette Sadik-Khan has headed the New York City Department of Transportation, streets have been transformed. Across the five boroughs, 26 acres of asphalt were converted into 50 pedestrian plazas. New bus lanes are speeding transit trips on major thoroughfares in Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, and soon Brooklyn. The city added dozens of miles of protected on-street bike lanes — groundbreaking designs for an American city — and 350 miles of bikeways overall. The biggest bike-share system in the country launched this May, and now regularly sees 40,000 trips per day.
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These changes have improved safety, boosted retail performance, and elicited impressive public approval ratings despite TV and tabloid coverage that tended to be outlandishly negative. Sadik-Khan emphasized that it wouldn’t have been possible to accomplish so much in such a short time frame if it weren’t for the original stroke of genius: the decision to test things out to see what succeeds.
“The temporary materials are important because we were able to show how it worked,” she says...
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<a href="http://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/10/17/janette-sadik-khans-ted-talk-you-can-remake-your-streets/">http://dc.streetsblog.org/2013/10/17/janette-sadik-khans-ted-talk-you-can-remake-your-streets/</a>;
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[B' Spokes: I'll stress with a little paint (a temporary material) we can and should try some innovative designs over a trial period. If they don't perform well then take them away, at least we can learn what does and does not work here. We need more experiments and a lot less of what I perceive as "Because of some mysterious calculations all done in my head we can't accommodate bicyclists here." ]