New York – A comprehensive urban redevelopment and alternative transportation strategy focused in equal parts on pedestrians, cyclists and buses
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
On Earth Day 2007 Mayor Bloomberg announced his comprehensive sustainability plan or PLANYC “… the most sweeping plan to enhance New York’s urban environment in the city’s modern history. The combined impact of this plan will not only help ensure a higher quality of life for generations of New Yorkers to come; it will also contribute to a 30% reduction in global warming emissions.” As part of PLANYC, in 2008 New York City’s “Sustainable Streets” was announced by NY Transportation Commission “….an outline for bringing ‘a green approach’ to transportation in the city by implementing safer, more equitable “world class streets policies.”
Sounds like the usual sort of political rhetoric you expect to hear form our political leaders? Not so in New York whose administration under Mayor Bloomberg has proven that there is such as thing as political will, clear vision and strong leadership and that they can coexist. The sage and visionary thinking that has gone into New York’s Sustainable Streets strategy has culminated in what is probably the most comprehensive set of guiding standard for New York’s future. The NYC Street Design Manual “builds on the experience of innovation in street design, materials and lighting that has developed around the world, emphasizing a balanced approach that gives equal weight to transportation, community and environmental goals. It is designed to be a flexible document that will change and grow, incorporating new treatments as appropriate after testing. The use and continued development of the Street Design Manual will assure that New York City remains a leading innovator in the public realm as it becomes a greater, greener city”.
The transformation was done quickly with no major capital construction
Last May a work crew from the New York City Department of Transportation arrived in Times Square and closed off Broadway at 47th Street, directing southbound cars east to 7th Avenue, and turned one of the world’s most congested stretches of asphalt into a 58,000-foot pedestrian plaza. The transformation was done quickly with no major capital construction by simply treating the existing asphalt road surface with IPC’s Ride-A-Way asphalt coating system. Ride-A-Way is specifically designed to topically color asphalt. It is extremely durable, slip resistance ,will not peel, crack or delaminate and is available in an almost unlimited range of colors. In a matter of a few days with little fuss, Times Square was transformed. The New York Magazine discusses the story well. A wide stretch of Ride-A-Way was also applied in green with decorative dots, creating a pedestrian boulevard from 59th to 47th (Columbus Circle to Times Square).
“Biking is the new golf,” Sadik-Khan tells Wall Street crowds.
Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s Transportation commissioner is spearheading these changes.
“From a transportation perspective, Broadway has been a problem for 200 years,” Sadik-Khan says. Fifty-thousand cars pass through this point every day, but the knot formed by the intersection of three streets limits traffic speed to roughly four miles per hour. And then there are the people—about 356,000 of them marching through Times Square daily, from aggravated office workers to bewildered midwestern tourist families with roller suitcases. Prior to the changes, this stretch of Broadway was 140 percent more dangerous than comparable stretches of a midtown avenue.
Various colors were tested prior to determining a standard.
It is the most visible component yet of Mayor Bloomberg’s citywide attempt to make New York’s streets calmer, greener, and safer. And it attempts to establish the front lines of a growing movement to tilt the balance of asphalt power away from the automobile and toward cyclists and pedestrians. This high profile reinvention of the center of Manhattan was not the first New York City urban redevelopment project IPC has been involved in. New York’s use of Ride-A-Way began when the city first started experimenting with the use of color to dilineate bike lanes 6 years ago. Numerous colored bike lanes have been added throughout the city since then. The most prominent is within the redeveloped Broadway corridor in Manhattan. The NYC Transportation Commission narrowed Broadway in 2008 to two lanes between 42nd and Herald Square. Ride-A-Way has been used to enhance the newly dedicated bike lanes within this corridor.
Ride-A-Way also proved ideal for bus priority lane colorization on 57th Street and 34th Street through mid-town. It has had meaningful impact by substantially reducing vehicle ingress which improves system efficiency. The enhanced visibility has also helped build positive public perception of the service.
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