Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
As New York City’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed the seemingly impossible and transformed the streets of one of the world’s greatest, toughest cities into dynamic spaces safe for pedestrians and bikers. Her approach was dramatic and effective: Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, but it also lessened congestion and increased foot traffic, which improved the bottom line of businesses. Real-life experience confirmed that if you know how to read the street, you can make it function better by not totally reconstructing it but by reallocating the space that’s already there.
Breaking the street into its component parts, Streetfight demonstrates, with step-by-step visuals, how to rewrite the underlying “source code” of a street, with pointers on how to add protected bike paths, improve crosswalk space, and provide visual cues to reduce speeding. Achieving such a radical overhaul wasn’t easy, and Streetfight pulls back the curtain on the battles Sadik-Khan won to make her approach work. She includes examples of how this new way to read the streets has already made its way around the world, from pocket parks in Mexico City and Los Angeles to more pedestrian-friendly streets in Auckland and Buenos Aires, and innovative bike-lane designs and plazas in Austin, Indianapolis, and San Francisco. Many are inspired by the changes taking place in New York City and are based on the same techniques. Streetfight deconstructs, reassembles, and reinvents the street, inviting readers to see it in ways they never imagined.
Highlights
Creative street design, not stop signs, could change safety on a street.
Highway-size lanes induce highway speeds and lane-changing tendencies that go with them. Wide-open lanes provide more room for the driver of one car to wind up in another's blind spot. The biggest consideration in how fast people drive isn't the posted speed limit or how traffic signals are timed, but the street's design speed—the vehicle speed that the street was designed to accommodate safely.
Have we tried to convince everyone in New York City that the Times Square project would work before we took the first step — answered every cabbie's doubt and refuted every newspaper columnist's armchair analysis — it would have taken five years just to break ground, and even longer for the dozens of other plazas.
Bike share should never be viewed in isolation as an alternative to driving or public transportation. Bike share works well when it serves both those who use it solely to commute as well as those riding to and from transit hubs. The 66,500 bikes in Hangzhou's system in China are specifically geared to solve the “first mile/last mile” problem to get people from their homes to the city's transit system. This is a big gap in many cities with lower but still moderate densities that could serve transit if residents had an effective means to reach bus or rail without driving.
As more people bike, their visibility on the street increases. When drivers see more bike riders, they learn to expect them, to anticipate their movements. They slow down and look around when they have to share the road, which also protects people who walk, completing a virtuous cycle. By the logic of helmet proponents, European nations like Denmark and the Netherlands, with vast numbers of cyclists riding without helmets, should see sky-high rates of head injuries. Yet they are far safer than other countries and are becoming only more so as the number of cyclists increases.