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NY City: On the street – clear sailing (slideshow with audio)
Bill Cunningham, New York Times
Enthusiastic photos and commentary about New York City’s opening of its street to bicycles, pedestrians, bicycles, spring stilts, wheelchairs, a 20-feet bicycle, baby carriages (one containing pet rabbits).
This is the third Saturday in August for NYC, though Bogota, Columbia has been doing it for 30 years (see next item).
Quotes from photographer Bill Cunningham who narrates:
“A total New York happening”
“Park Avenue [was] closed from the Brooklyn Bridge all the way up into Central Park.”
“The most extraordinary thing you ever saw. … Everyone was out.”
“It was a triumph for bikes.”
“I can’t begin to tell you what an excitement it was. “All we can hope is that they repeat it next summer.”
“I think the good that it did, the excitment it brought, you can’t imagine what it was like. It was like the day after a blizzard, but a blizzard of bicycles.
“If it happens again, get your roller skates, get your in-line skates, get your bicycles whatever you have on wheels and get it out on Park Avenue.”
Recorded by Susan Guerrero
Produced by Simone S. Bridges
Photos by Bill Cunningham
(30 August 2008)
Traffic stoppers: cities closing streets to cars
Tim Holt, Christian Science Monitor
An increasing number of cities are temporarily closing streets to cars and opening them to pedestrians and cyclists. It fosters a greater sense of community.
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They danced the tango in Portland, Ore., they’re doing the samba in New York, and by the end of this month, they’ll be dancing in the streets of San Francisco. It’s urban planning with a Latin twist, a simple idea imported from South America for transforming the cityscape. Temporary street closures, or ciclovias, are sweeping across the US, as cities take a new look at alternative uses for their streets.
It all started in Bogota, Colombia, about 30 years ago. The ciclovia – which means “cycle way,” or bike path, in Spanish – was designed as a relatively inexpensive way to promote walking and bicycling, and to encourage the mingling of people from all backgrounds in the city’s streets.
It worked. Every Sunday Bogota draws nearly one-fourth of its population of 7 million out to walk and cycle 81 miles of car-free streets.
In the early years of the event, residents from the poorer sections of town, many of them of Indian descent, and those from more affluent neighborhoods, of European descent, would halt at one another’s boundaries. After a while, though, those invisible lines began to melt, and now people from all over the city mingle freely.
… Some US cities are hoping for similar social benefits. When it launches its first ciclovia Aug. 31, San Francisco is hoping to help connect a currently isolated, low-income neighborhood, the Bayview, with other parts of the city on a six-mile route. Portland’s June 22 event linked an African-American neighborhood with newer, gentrified neighborhoods on the city’s north side.
For some public space advocates, this is just the beginning: “London, Paris, and other cities have taken this idea much further, but they started with temporary street closures,” notes Wiley Norvell, whose organization, Transportation Alternatives, is participating in the New York event. “Once you get out of the mind-set of ‘all cars all the time,’ all sorts of possibilities open up.”
… With the encouragement of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s transportation czar, Janette Sadik-Khan, New York is becoming an open-air laboratory for alternative uses of public space. On three Saturdays this month, seven miles of streets in Manhattan, including a long stretch of Park Avenue, will be closed to traffic for six hours each day. Vehicular traffic has been permenantly removed from two lanes of Broadway in midtown Manhattan to make room for pedestrians and cyclists. As part of this transformation, people will soon be sitting at cafe tables on what used to be one of Broadway’s busy southbound lanes.
(18 August 2008)
No Traffic on a Saturday? Well, No Cars, Anyway
Javier C. Hernandez, New York Times
… The ding of bicycle bells and the chatter of people on foot replaced the usual automobile noises along 6.9 miles of Manhattan for six hours on Saturday. It was the first day of Summer Streets, the city’s experiment in car-free recreation modeled on similar efforts in Guadalajara, Mexico; Bogotá, Colombia; Paris; and several American cities.
On a path that extended from the Brooklyn Bridge north to Park Avenue and the Upper East Side, thousands of people filled the streets, taking part in activities like street-side tai chi or salsa dancing. Others simply enjoyed the chance to stroll in normally car-clogged streets. In a city where walkers, cyclists and motorists must share limited space, having a major thoroughfare through Manhattan free of cars created a giddy sort of excitement.
(9 August 2008)
