Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Traffic

Hello MTA Bailout, So Long Truck Tsunami?

By John Kaehny | Mar 3, 2009 | 16 Comments

The New Jersey "trucker’s special." Graphic: Sam Schwartz. Sheldon Silver’s partial endorsement of the Ravitch Commission’s MTA rescue plan [PDF], which includes East and Harlem River bridge tolls, offers the best political hope in years for reducing the daily truck tsunami pulverizing downtown Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. The truck inundation is due to the great […]

Streetfilms: Timing Streets for Cyclists, Pedestrians, and Everyone Else

By Ben Fried | Feb 2, 2009 | 10 Comments

From the new San Francisco branch of Streetfilms, Janel Sterbentz takes a look at one of the city’s main bicycle routes — Valencia Street — and asks how it would function if signals were timed to give cyclists the "Green Wave" instead of cars. Cyclists would get a smoother ride and feel less compelled to […]

What Inauguration Day Means for DC Streets

By Ben Fried | Jan 20, 2009 | 7 Comments

Inauguration parade rehearsal. Photo: Travir/Flickr As many as four million people are expected to descend on the National Mall today for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation’s 44th President. Contending with that mass of humanity has left officials with no choice but to implement temporary policies to get people in and out of […]

New DOT Measuring Stick Highlights Need for Transit and Bike Investment

By Ben Fried | Dec 16, 2008 | 4 Comments

Yesterday NYCDOT released the first Sustainable Streets Index [PDF], a scorecard to measure how well New York is progressing "towards achieving more sustainable mobility." This is the fruit of Local Law 23 (a.k.a. Intro 199), which passed earlier this year after former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall helped scuttle it at the end of her tenure. […]

Kheel Planners: MTA Austerity a Recipe for Gridlock Hell

By Ben Fried | Nov 21, 2008 | 7 Comments

New Yorkers can expect more misery on the streets as well as underground if the MTA has to follow through on the austerity measures it unveiled yesterday. The transportation analysts behind the Kheel Plan — the congestion pricing variant that balances higher driver fees with free transit — calculate that the likely combination of service […]

DOT to Present Ideas for Brooklyn’s Most Notorious Intersection

By Ben Fried | Oct 21, 2008 | 4 Comments

The confluence of Flatbush, Atlantic, and Fourth Avenues is a traffic nightmare of epic proportions right smack next to a huge transit hub and shopping center. (We hear some sort of arena and housing complex might get built there too.) Crossing the street here is an unwelcome adventure for thousands of pedestrians every day, and […]

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