NEW YORK’S BIG WHEEL
New York City created a new public plaza overnight, former NYC official explains
Former New York transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn leads a tour of Edmonton’s infrastructure Friday with city councillors, media and members of the group Paths for People. Sadik-Kahn speaks tonight at the Metro Cinema.
Big moves laid out in paint and planters allowed New York to transform its streets and even Times Square when transportation commissioner Janette SadikKhan was in charge. The same could happen here.
“That’s one of the big lessons from New York. You can move quickly to change your streets and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money,” said Sadik-Khan, responding to a question about four big projects vying for funding in Edmonton’s next four-year capital budget.
The Jasper Avenue overhaul alone could cost $48 million to repave and improve the streetscape. But at least three other areas — the 124 Street commercial district, 101 Avenue in east Edmonton and 109 Street south of the river — are designated for a similar main street treatment.
Residents around 109 Street have been waiting to see something for decades.
Testing plans this summer with temporary measures could be a great idea, she said. “You can move fast . ... We went into communities where we knew there was a hunger for these things. Within the first six months, we turned a parking lot into a plaza overnight just by painting the curbs and painting the green plaza.”
Sadik-Khan spoke to Postmedia on Edmonton Talk Back, an interview show hosted through Facebook Live. Then she took a bike tour Friday with community members, city administration and city councillors Tim Cartmell and Ben Henderson.
On Saturday, she’ll speak at a leaders’ workshop, followed by a free, public keynote address at Metro Cinema at 6:30 p.m. It’s sold out, but organizers say there may still be tickets available at the door.
Organizers with Paths for People hope it will inspire a new wave of changes, similar to how a 2016 workshop with urbanist Gil Penalosa inspired a push for the downtown bike grid.
In Times Square, Sadik-Khan took a complicated road network, with a three-legged intersection, and closed Broadway to traffic. That freed up a hectare of space to create a new public plaza. One day it was filled with cars — the next day it was full of people, with temporary lawn chairs for the experiment.
It was a six-month pilot project where her team measured everything down to the till receipts of street-oriented businesses and air pollution. Even traffic congestion improved. Simplifying the road network by closing a street improved traffic flow by 10 per cent, and converting most of Times Square to a pedestrian plaza helped make it one of the top 10 retail destinations in the world.
The pilot project stayed in place until New York officials were ready to convert it to permanent infrastructure.
“It’s about being a little more imaginative about how you use your streets,” said Sadik-Khan.
Sometimes, that meant narrowing streets, shifting intersections to create a right angle and turning the excess space into a plaza. Other times that meant carving out a bus-only lane to get more people through more easily.
They created programs to allow communities to apply for bike lanes, pedestrian islands and other measures. But key was testing it on the road quickly, and adjusting based on user concerns. “There was not a single project that we did that wasn’t tweaked.”