Streetfight: Rewriting the Operating Code for City StreetsDRAFT April 1, 2015By Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow

Introduction: Hidden in Plain Sight

The opportunities hidden in plain sight in every city; How NYC changed; door opened with background Bloomberg and PlaNYCwithout this impetus, nothing would have happened.

Chapter 1: Urban Legends

The mythology and legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses; Their competing philosophies in the continuum of other schools of thought for streets and a personal view from the street; How New York Citys streets came to be what they are today and how this reveals how most cities tend to operate by inertia, tradition, and, occasionally, out-of-date planning; Streets didnt just happen, they happened by design.

Chapter 2: Density is Density

Cities are on the rise and where a majority of the earths population live; The problems facing cities must be addressed systematically. Leveraging density both for efficiency and sustainability is more important than ever and cities need new strategies; PlaNYC was the first attempt to unify the citys departments under a comprehensive operating principle, drawing on some of the best ideas from around the world (Will include examples of global C40 cities implementing best practices); Outdated design standards and emerging strategies to improve them.

Chapter 3: How to Read the Street

The anatomy of the street and the operating principles that led to streets being built like highways; Learning to reading between the lanes planners can find entire cities hidden on their streets.; How commonly held theories about how streets work cause millions of people to misunderstand and oppose efforts to improve them; The promise and difficulties of pricing roads around the world; Lessons learned from the battles over congestion pricing in NYC and around the world.

Chapter 4: Follow the Footsteps

You can design a street to make it livable by watching how its used; New York City examples illustrate how that use of a street can be changed simply by applying paint and readily available materials; Rewriting the code underlying streets and showing city residents the power of the possible; Applying this approach and using these tools in the transformation of Times Square; The importance of data collection, the economic impact of these kinds of projects and scalability for other cities. (Will include discussion of sidewalks/wayfinding/view sheds)

Chapter 5: Bike Lanes and Their Discontents

What you see depends on how you get around; The story of the Prospect Park West bike lane in New York City and its bikelash; Howand whybike riding has sparked political and cultural controversies around the world.

Chapter 6: Bike share: Leveraging the Power of the Street

Bike share systems are the binding receptor in transportation networks, setting a new standard for convenience; By integrating the transportation ecosystem, bike share explodes the demand for transit and walking and provides the low-cost missing link for city development; The experience of launching Citi Bike, the nations largest bike share program, and bike share programs in other cities (Portland, Los Angeles, NACTO cities).

Chapter 7: Transformative TransitThe future of transit is already embedded in the streets of every city; How cities like Medellin, Bogota ,Mexico City and New York, molded by geometric, community and political realities.

Chapter 8: Blood on the Streets

Traffic deaths are the greatest unacknowledged public health crisis in the world; Discussion of approach to traffic and what has worked in other cities; Prescriptions for the future not just for NYC but for other congested cities;Vision Zero and global safety actions and ad campaigns.

Chapter 9: Measuring the Street

Measuring the impact of projects requires a forensic approach beyond traffic volumes and travel times; Data solves the problem not just of determining a projects impact but also how to communicate that impact and winning support for similar programs elsewhere. Discussion of similar results in other cities, including Transport For London study on pedestrianization. REPURPOSE FOLLOW THE LEADER;

Chapter 10: Signs and Dotted Lines

Parking signs, street signs, pedestrian signals and countdown clocks. Streets are filled with a bewildering forest of components that we barely notice and are at best misunderstood and ignored at worst. This chapter looks at the irrational and contradictory policies governing parking, the futility and confusion of signs and signals, and how cities might be better off without any of them.

Chapter 11: What We Talk About When We Talk About Streets/Communicating Change

How planners and leaders frame changes to the street and win public support can be is as important as the project itself, yet planning schools arent good at teaching how to communicate change. A look at the cardinal myths and fears that accompany any project that improves streets and strategies for how to surmount them. A closer discussion at how to negotiate the long game of public opinion with the short game of media headlines. Chapter 12: Conclude.

Final thoughts; Streets as small communities; A look at whats next and examples from around the world; New innovations that will lead to the next wave of change.

Introduction: A New Street Code

Every city has an underlying operating system, and no matter how exotic the city, streets from Melbourne to Mumbai to Manhattan are all similar and failing in the same way. Streets have been designed to keep traffic moving but not to support the life alongside it. Streets force city dwellers to make bad choices about how to get around and discourage them from walking, stifling the kind of varied and spontaneous street life that energizes the worlds greatest cities and dragging down the local economies that would otherwise thrive. Too many streets are inefficient and dangerous, reflected in chronic congestion, chaotic streets and in 1.24 annual million traffic deaths along 40 million miles of road worldwide. Until relatively recently, there hasnt even been a commonly shared vocabulary to name or describe these failures, leaving streets in a kind of suspended animation for more than a half century despite innovations that have revolutionized almost every other field. Streets in cities around the world look virtually the same in their utilitarian blandness and the underlying operation, danger and economy of city streets remain as opaque and featureless as the asphalt roadbed. People have forgotten what streets are for and have little idea how they can be used or how powerful a force in urban life they can be.

This book reveals the underlying source code for streets that helped unlock New York Citys roads, sidewalks and the collective space between buildings that is the filament of all cities. It also demonstrates how to rewrite that code and alter your own citys streetsan approach that is now spreading rapidly to city streets around the world. After six years of the most radical restructuring of a citys streets this side of master New York City planner Robert Moses and his nemesis, Jane Jacobs, the patron saint for streets, nearly a half-million pedestrians in New York City daily walk across Times Square plazas atop former vehicle traffic lanes that were changed overnight. Bicyclists ride safely in green lanes painted along the curb where cars once parked on streets where people feared to tread. Pedestrian-filled plazas bloom where scraps of asphalt had lain dormant for decades. And, most importantly, hundreds fewer New Yorkers die annually in traffic crashes.

But unlike the means used by Robert Moses, this revival of the citys transportation network was accomplished without bulldozing a single neighborhood or razing a single building. It was cheapabsurdly cheapcompared with the billions of dollars spent annually building new streetcar and light rail lines and rehabilitating or replacing aging roads and bridges in American cities. And it was fast, installed in days and weeks using do-it-yourself and guerilla tactics: paint, planters, lights, signs, signals and surplus stone. Overnight, centuries-old roads turned into pedestrian oases atop space that had been there all along.

The strategies, tactics and the fight were so extensive and so effective in New York City they have implications for cities globally. For the first time in history, as of 2010, the majority of the worlds population lives in urban areas. By 2050, that number is expected to grow to seven in 10. Citizens of the world have become citizens of cities. But cities themselves are not prepared for this urban reality. When it comes to streetcraftthe design, diversification and balance of city streets, sidewalks and public spacegovernments, developers, engineers, architects and the people who live in cities have not caught up with the new road order.

Despite this historic demographic realignment, todays city streets were built in different ages and barely serve the long-outdated purposes they were originally designed for. Car-based urban planning has built atop, around, over and through these streets, adjusting for increases in population only by increasing the scale of the already obsolete infrastructure. These effortsbuilding new highways, widening streets and endlessly sprawling the citys limitshave only multiplied the damage wrought on city cores and smothered the very things that make them places where people want to live: accessibility, convenience, diversity, culture and immediacy. In turning streets into places to move cars instead of people, theyve become places people dont want to go unless they are in one.

From Ancient Rome to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the New World, cities have always been the global cradles of culture, technology and commerce, where historys most luminous minds and civilizations converged and altered the course of history. But little of this richness and creativity is reflected in the streets of the worlds growing megalopolises, which are expanding faster than its people are capable of consciously influencing. Elected leaders, city planners and citizens have few expectations for how city streets should perform, and without a clear understanding of the scope of the problem, few cities have explicit goals to reduce and eliminate serious traffic crashes, reduce congestion and implement policies that make cities more walkable, more diverse and discourage sprawl.

Streets are also cities social, political and commercial arteries, and they can ascribe social status with famous addressesPark Avenue, Champs-lyses, Lombard Street or Rodeo Driveor mark political and identity boundaries like Falls Road in Belfast and the segregated roads of the West Bank. Regardless of the wealth or status of their inhabitants, city streets are inherently democratizing public places. They continue to play critical roles in democracies and the public life and transformative moments in the history of people. Whether its Tiananmen Square, Mexico Citys Zcalo the Bastille, Trafalgar Square, or Tahrir, Wenceslas or Taksim squares, these spaces are where the life and history happen.

No city so embodies the strengths and contradictions of urban streets as New York City. A 19th-century street grid cut imposed over pre-Colonial footpaths, Manhattans streets were maximized for car space under a 20th-century city planning dogma. This change grafted the motor vehicle and an idea of independent, suburban, internal-combustion progress onto a city where millions of people walk and ride subways and buses. Postwar New York was built for a future that forgot its dense and efficient urban origins, and its new, car-focused infrastructure became an obstacle for the future that eventually arrived. Yet the most visible outcropping of this problemtraffic, its danger, inefficiency and its uninviting, overrun driving surfacehas become an invisible part of the streetscape.

Invisible in this new road order are the people of New York and every city. Every city resident is a pedestrian at some point in the day. Any city whose streets invite people to walk, bike and sit along them also inspires people to innovate, invest, spend money and to move, love and remain in these cities. And regardless of where you live or how you get around or how much you may detest bike lanes, streets matter. They are the mortar that now holds most of the worlds population together and they must be designed to encourage walking and the street life, economy and culture that they support. Global city dwellers are beginning to recognize the potential of their city streets and, after seeing whats possible, urgently want to reclaim them. They are slowly recognizing an unmet hunger for livable, inviting public space. Parks, plazas, benches, any place to sit down. Room to bike, walk and get around without having to get somewhere. Many cities have embarked on significant and headline-grabbing efforts to reclaim roads, bridges, tunnels and rail rights-of-way and turning legacy hardware into the stuff of urban dreamsparks and greenways, city idylls that provide room to walk, bike and play in the middle of a city where a highway once stood. Some cities have embarked on plans to build bikes into the transportation network with bike lanes and bike share programs. Tactical urbanists reclaim parking spaces for a day and calm traffic through asphalt murals. They call them livable streets, complete streets, sustainable streets, and they may be able to rescue cities from the urban disaster that awaits if they do not change course. Yet few of these strategies have been incorporated into the way that cities operate from the street up. Traffic planners and engineers still resort to outdated planning and engineering manuals that prescribe wide lanes but narrow imagination for creating quality streets and walkable urban places. Even where the imagination exists and the political will is aligned, the effort to make these overdue transformations can quickly become a streetfight against the status quo. Its a daily battle for the city planners of today to keep the next generation from reverting back to claiming more road space for cars merely by force of habit.

During an intense, six-year period under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City proved to itself, the nation and the world that almost everything assumed how urban streets operate was wrong. New approaches to public projects and to the data that documented them turned global debates over public planning on their heads. Real-world experience showed that reducing the number of lanes on a street or closing them entirely didnt merely provide pedestrian space and breathe new life into neighborhoods, it actually improved traffic. And simply painting part of a street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, it also improved traffic and increased both pedestrian foot traffic and the bottom lines of local businesses.

Its no coincidence that the American city with the tallest buildings, the most people, the most iconic landmarks and larger-than-life public figures would embrace such an intense and a high-profile reshuffling of its streets. But while this counterintuitive approach enjoyed widespread support and improbably high poll numbers, it also enraged a small but vocal army of opponents. They were a mix of people who detested Mayor Bloomberg and those skeptical of anything environmental, healthy or vaguely French. They denounced the changes and politicized the very data that should have transcended the passions surrounding these changes.

Street life got better by virtually every measure, but it was the pushback to this approach that got the biggest headlines. When you push the status quo, pushes back, hard. Everyone likes to watch a good fight. And this was a streetfight: a politically bloody and ripped-from-the-tabloids streetfight. I was deeply embedded in that streetfightright in the middle of it, in fact. Call me biased, call me crazymany people havebut I am convinced that the fight to wrest back New York Citys streets holds lessons for every urban areas, and that the future of cities depends on it.

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My six-year, seven-month, 18-day tenure as New York City transportation commissioner started with a meeting at New York Citys at City Hall, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, in early spring 2007.

Why do you want to be traffic commissioner? the 108th Mayor of New York City asked me.

It was his first question and my first time even in a room with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire entrepreneur-turned-mayor, sitting with six of his deputies arrayed Knights-of-Camelot-style across the expanse of an immense, round table. Six years into his administration and two years into his second and term, I realized that it wasnt clear to me that daynor to many outside that roomwho or what he was looking for in a top transportation official during his remaining 31 months in office.

Despite Bloombergs phrasing, the question he asked wasnt a test. Its a common misconception that the commissioners job is limited to managing traffic congestion.

I dont want to be the traffic commissioner, I said. I want to be transportation commissioner.

Bloomberg said nothing. No one jumped in to break the tension. Well, at least I got to meet the mayor, I consoled myself, confident that I had just blown the interview.

The administration of Michael Bloomberg had a global reputation for innovation and a by-the-numbers-please approach to governance. This was the Mayor who had created the 311 system allowing residents to dial one number to obtain virtually any city service. He had banned smoking in bars and trans fats from restaurantstrifles compared to his overseeing dramatic reductions in crime and wresting of control over city schools from a notoriously ineffective Board of Education. But at the time there was no transportation leg to his legacys table, no initiative, goal or accomplishment on a scale even approaching his other achievements.Fresh from my traffic gaffe, I pushed ahead with my priorities, unsure how theyd be received as I heaved them upon the table like a gauntlet: I wanted to make New York Citys punch-line buses work better. To make bike riding a real, safe transportation option on New Yorks mean streets. To charge a toll for all people who drive into Manhattan during rush hour.

These were far from mainstream transportation ideas but I assumed that Team Camelot must have wanted to hear my pitch or they wouldnt have asked me to the table in the first place. So I made it plain: I wanted to change the transportation status quo in New York City. Fifteen years earlier I was transportation advisor to Mayor David Dinkins and since had worked under President Bill Clinton at the Federal Transit Administration before leading the transit practice of a major international transportation engineering firm. My audience with Bloomberg told me that they werent just looking for someone to ride out the rest of the term with little change or controversy. They wanted someone who understood the basic architecture of government and had transportation credentials, but with a private-sector metabolism that thrived on ideas and innovative approaches to problems.

Having already worked within the New York City Transportation Department, I understood that it was in charge of so much more than traffic. New York City has 6,300 miles of streets, 12,000 miles of sidewalks, 1.3 million street signs, 12,000 intersections with traffic signals, 300,000 streetlights, 788 bridges and the Staten Island Ferry, moving 22 million people annually, and facilities to make the signs and do the ironwork to hold together these streets, sidewalks and bridges. The chief mission was managing the hardware and responding to the daily emergencies that wreak havoc on them. New York Citys DOT, with a headcount hovering around 4,500 employees, was larger than many transportation departments for entire American states. Instead of rural roads and highways, New Yorks portfolio contains some of the most valuable, dense and contested real estate in the nation. Viewed through another lens, DOT had control over more than just concrete, asphalt, steel and striping lanes. These were the fundamental levers that govern a public realm which, if applied slightly differently, could have radically different impacts.

But judging by what the DOT had accomplished in the first six years of Bloombergs administration, it wasnt clear what was expected from that agency in the final two years. I didnt share that sentiment with the committee. Looking at the dour faces around the table, I was certain that I had already bombed and even more certain that the appointment would never happen. People dont usually succeed by implying that prospective employers should have done things differently or should go out in a blaze of glory.I misjudged.

I would later discover that the reason there wasnt more palpable enthusiasm that day was because my agenda was already settled law with the committee. The crux of this city-altering approach was being codified as we spoke into PlaNYCthe visionary, long-range sustainability plan guided by Dan Doctoroff, then-deputy mayor for economic development. PlaNYC was a detailed, 127-initiative blueprint for urban sustainability unlike anything New York or any big city had ever seen. It stated a goal of reducing carbon emissions by 30% while improving the efficiency and quality of life in New York City neighborhoods and business districts. It also took the unusual step of laying the groundwork needed to accommodate the one million more New Yorkers expected to live there by 2030, which would have a profound impact on the operation and allocation of resources of every city agencyand in particular how we designed and used city streets. Strategies like buses, bike lanes, open space in every neighborhood and using less energy and more sustainable materials to achieve it. This new vision changed everything about how New York would function. Other cities had started drafting plans centered on a handful of long-range goals. But no other citys vision embedded that approach into a code for all city agencies to follow and support each other mutually, from transportation and parks to housing and energy consumption and waste management. It was also unprecedented in expecting all city agencies to work together and not as independent fiefdoms run by strong-willed personalities. All agencies were expected to pull in the same direction that the mayor set, or there would be consequences. PlaNYC was a new manual that we could use to rewrite the streets and overcome the status quo myth that New York was ungovernable.

This plan coincided closely with the priorities I had laid out gleaned from 20 years in transportation at city, federal and private levels. For Bloomberg, this made me the right person for the right job at the right time. I would soon discover that reanimating dormant streets and implementing the goals of PlaNYC required an entirely new and relatively radical approach. Its not enough to have a vision and specific goals for a city. The way to achieve them is where the heart of change resides, and that change is excruciatingly difficult.

City leaders, urban planners and engineers and the people that they serve have been as hobbled as their streets by two opposite, increasingly unproductive tendencies: Megaproject monomania, which is still embraced by mayors and leaders who want to leave a mark and do something during their tenures, versus a strategy of neighborhood-based preservation and resistance not just to neighborhood-destroying projects but to even necessary and modest changes that would improve their streets. The future of our cities has fallen between these cracks, remaining stagnant as governments plan bigsometimes too bigand communities routinely oppose changes in the status quo by thinking smallmaybe too small. What both parties lack is the vocabulary to think beyond their dysfunctional streets and identify the shared interest that would let them work around their mutual distrust. I discovered that it was more effective to work with local communities to put rapid-fire projects in the ground in real time using materials on hand and then using those projects as instruments to win support to expand this approach than the traditional, municipal alternative: An exhaustive attempt to achieve consensus on a strategy even when theres consensus that the status quo isnt working. This approach can risk years of indecision, inaction and paralysis by analysis to placate the opposition of minorities that accompany any change to streets.

This book pulls back the curtain on the battles fought to make this approach succeed in one of the worlds greatest and toughest cities. It shows where I succeeded and failed and how other cities and communities and their leaders can learn from what we were able to accomplish against almost total oddsand how. Overcoming even obsolete thinking requires an entirely new vocabulary for streets and it also requires new, counterintuitive strategies to win over a skeptical city residents. For leaders, it demands the resolve, courage and grit to withstand the slings and arrows required to do things differently for the first time. Every community believes it has every reason why changing the way that they use their streets is impossible, impractical or just insane. I witnessed that firsthand and determined that there is no end to the excuses for inaction. But inaction is itself inexcusable and as our cities grow, and leaders and the people they serve cannot accept streets in their dysfunction without even attempting to change it.

More than policy or ideas, it is the practical experience and execution of projects that provide the most valuable lessons for any city. As Jerold Kayden at Harvards Graduate School of Design observed, To plan is human, to implement, divine. Based on this real-world practice and not ivory-tower or third-party idealism, this book deconstructs, reassembles and reinvents the street, inviting readers to view something that they experience every day in ways they never imagined. We lay out a new road map to inspire and empower city officials, planners and everyday city residents to create these changes in cities around the world.

This new operating code for streets is already being translated into projects in global cities, from pocket parks and plazas in Mexico City and San Francisco to pedestrian-friendly road diets in Los Angeles and Auckland to pocket parks in Buenos Aires and street closures around the Coliseum in Rome. If it can happen in New York City, according to the Sinatra model of transportation theory, it can happen anywhere.

Ch. 1: Urban LegendsIn July, 2014, seven months after I stepped down as transportation commissioner, a work team from the New York Citys Department of Transportation added a footnote to Manhattans urban history: Working with thermoplastic paint and concrete, the crew striped and heat-stenciled a parking-protected bike path directly in front of 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, the former home of Jane Jacobs, the late urbanist and the patron saint of city streets.

The design of the new bike path, running alongside the curb and protected by the line of parked cars on the other side, wasnt new to Manhattans streets. The new lane connected Hudson Street with an existing bike path built six years earlier just north of Janes three-story, red-brick home. When it first appeared in 2007, a protected bike path was a foreign concept on American streets, one that seemed to upset the balance of the street and viewed as an enemy to traffic. By 2014, it was just another part of the streetscape.

Janes Lane, in front of her former home at 555 Hudson Street, Manhattan, arrived 53 years after the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (Credit: Seth Solomonow)

Meanwhile, across town at 378 Broome Street in the SoHo neighborhood, a tree planted by Jane Jacobs in 1962 in front of the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix provides a reminder today of the neighborhoods saved from master builder Robert Mosess wrecking ball and the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Moses hoped the planned expressway would whisk traffic from the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges to the Holland Tunnel along an elevated highway instead of churning along local streets. Jane and her allies fought and successfully defeated that plan, which would have dramatically altered the Lower Manhattan streetscape and destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses in the process. The tree endures today as a monument to the power of neighborhood preservation and of local resistance to bureaucratic overreach.

These stories and the battles between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses are part of a creation myth about modern New York and all cities. In this almost Shakespearean epic, Moses is remembered as a public works dictator answered to no authority but his own as he force-engineered a Utopian, car-based future onto New York. Jane offered an alternative vision of a future built to a human scale instead of designed to move as many cars as possible. Neither version of these caricatures captures the full extent of their impact on cities and how they should be designed and whom they should serve. And as the myth has evolved it hasnt always taught the right lessons of how to make our streets safer and our cities better.

A native of Scranton, Penn., Jane moved to Depression-era New York City and emerged as the unlikely voice of mid-century urbanism. Her path there was not the result of traditional education but was sparked by her radicalization amid local development politics in her adopted West Village neighborhood on Hudson Street, where she and her husband moved during the 1940s. Her signal work, 1961s The Death and Life of Great American Cities Streets, was an urban revelation. Jane declared in accessible language how a citys design can nourish or destroy the quality of human life in cities. She blasted the planners of the first half of the 20th century for being too quick to destroy old buildingsand the neighborhoods with themin the name of progress and high-rise buildings set back on superblocks in an attempt to evoke the suburbs. Jane said that this approach grossly misunderstands how city neighborhoods function and ignores the small things that animate lifemost of which emanate from the street and buildings, not from the grand designs of developers or urban planners.

Death and Life helped make armchair urbanists out of millions of city dwellers, inspiring them to look at cities not as bleak, scary and chaotic places, but as fascinating, complex networks of neighborhoods sparked into life formed by their density and diversity. As she wrote the manuscript for the book, Jane took her primary inspiration not from engineering manuals and textbooks, but by following the people she saw on the street beyond her second-story window: The Ballet of Hudson Street. Along the neighborhoods sidewalks and in the children, shopkeepers, bohemians, meatpackers and longshoremen and filing through the streets stores, pizza parlors and local watering holes, Jane saw the story of the street. Cities are, by definition, full of strangers, she said, and within a single block, one can encounter a lifetime of characters and customs, giving citizens something they otherwise would be able to get only by traveling.

Jane delighted in this spontaneity of her neighborhoods streets and the details that comprised the life force of the neighborhood. A well-functioning neighborhood city street, street has a little of everything; shops, cafes, schools, libraries, recreation and destinations that encourage walking day and night. Buildings hold apartments but also neighborhoods shops, doctors offices and office space. Having well-balanced street-level design activate the sidewalks, inviting residents outside with their all-important eyes on the street. When people occupy their streets and sidewalks, they see each other and are seen. Even strangers look out for each other, keeping the street safe and neighborhoods engaged and connected.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they appear, Jane said, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a citys wealth of public life may grow. (p. 71) I can think of no better summation of street life, literally or metaphorically. While active street life generates neighborliness, which is a critical form of social wealth, its also good for business. Where communities are walkable and where people are on the street, there is also public ordera prerequisite for a safe and vibrant citiesand there is also foot traffic that drives local merchants and that is sought after by new residentsand is sought and supported by developers. Its as much about urban economics as it is about quality of life.

Janes ideal human-scale neighborhood would have shorter city blocks with varied building architecture and entrances close to the sidewalk. The size of buildings is kept small to prioritize the street-level experience, lest the dwellers in tower apartments set hundreds of feet back from sidewalks lose their connection with the energetic sidewalks and the ground-floor retail. From architecture styles and building stock to sidewalk, block and building size and the zoning allowing mixed uses, Jane showed how density was a citys competitive advantage over suburbs, and that its design shouldnt be left just to modern planners who were less interested in creating street life than about designing something that looks impressive when viewed from above.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city, Jane wrote, people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans. Instead of designing streets from afar and focusing on cars, planners need only look to the street and follow its use to find the solutions for its problems. To me, this way of looking at streets provides the most relevant examples for modern cities. What makes cities great is how their streets organize and concentrate people to catalyze the magic in the city street. Streets are the essential spaces where city dwellers combine, and when people are closer together, it sparks and amplifies humanitys greatest qualities. People interact and inspire each other, generating the kinds of stories that dont happen in quite the same way in suburban strip malls.

By closely observing how people are already using the streetwhere they are crossing, where they gather and what places they ignore and why, how fast the cars are walking, why or locals gather in front of a corner storeone can interpret how the street wants to be used. And just as any ecosystem thrives on biodiversity, where one seemingly small element can have dramatic, interconnected effect on everything else, so too do streets depend on hidden-in-plain-sight components which, when out of balance, can cause the entire system to fail. Street design is no idle or aesthetic pursuit. Entire communities can be impacted by something as simple as how many trees there are on the street and if theres a place to grab some dinner.

Unfortunately, while Janes human-scale vision has rightly analyzed urban ills and inspired generations of city lovers, many of Janes own Village streets today are little changed and remain stunted examples of what a human-scale street could be. As inevitable as the new bike lane outside Janes former home may have seemed to New Yorks increasing number of bike riders in 2013, new and safe infrastructure for bikes and pedestrians was already decades overdue in Greenwich Village by the time it arrived. Neither Jane nor subsequent generations of like-minded allies and progressive city planners succeeded in reversing or significantly altering the existing footprint and impact of a century of car-based planning, or found a way to embed this changed-based urbanism into official city standards for street design so that it doesnt continue. Jane herself observed that the protests and community involvement that she was famous for, including banning cars from Washington Square Park and defeating a Moses plan to bisect the park with a road to connect Fifth Avenue and new homes near LaGuardia Place, do not represent any reversal of the erosion process of space already ceded to cars (p. 359). At most, she said, they represent a stalemate.

New Yorks Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side and SoHo neighborhoods are known for their packed and vibrant (narrow) sidewalks and they are also some of New Yorks most desirable and expensive neighborhoods. But the streets that run between the sidewalksCanal Street, Sixth and Seventh avenues, Houston Street, Broome and Varick streetshave remained sewers of traffic, as broken and blighting in 2006 as they were when Jane left New York for a new life in Toronto in 1968. Every day, endless streams of cars, SUVs, service vans and box trucks lumber along these streets, often as slow as a pedestrian and rarely ever as fast as a cyclist. Meanwhile, the sidewalks along Prince and Spring streets are so crowded that people jostle each other into the street. Jane imagined a future of reclaiming streets and widening sidewalks that had been sawed off to give more room to cars. Yet local community gadflies in her own neighborhood, invoking preservationist language, led fierce attacks on proposals in the 2000s for weekend car-free street events weekends or to install bike lanes and bike share.

Instead of launching an urban renaissance, Death and Life was immediately followed by decades of the urban blight and depopulation. Millions of mostly white city dwellers sought relief from the costs, danger, poverty, stresses and the racial tensions from cities to increasing distant suburbs. Combined with the loss of industry and manufacturing within cities, this rapid de-urbanization brought disinvestment as the municipal tax base fled, starving transportation infrastructure and stranding development. New Yorks West Side Highway, literally and figuratively collapsing under its own obsolescence, was demolished during the 1980s after a decade of plans to replace it foundered. As of this writing, no new subway lines have opened in New York City since World War II, a streak that the MTA is threatening to end in 20TK with the opening of the first five stations of the Second Avenue Subway. Big cities across the nation similarly found themselves saddled with the legacy of massive road and bridge networks that divided neighborhoods and streets more car-dependent, drive-by corridors, unable to support the mix of uses that made the streets rich and inviting places to begin with.

More than a half-century since Janes Death and Life, we still recall the general lesson that cities are for people, but many city residents have long since lost the plot. Jane led one of the earliest in a series of nationwide highway revolts that erupted during the 1960s and 1970s in dozens of cities in North America and around the world. Local residents, empowered by social movements they saw in their own cities, rejected plans for new urban highways and their devastating impact on neighborhoods, the environment and traffic, dozens of projects were scrapped, delayed or abandoned. Despite Janes framing of the greater problems afflicting cities, her greatest impact stopped at the highway off-ramp. Generations of communities have remained focused exclusively on NIMBY fights over what they dont want city streets to behighways, construction sites, residential or retail complexeswhile forgetting what our streets could be: dense, vibrant, inviting and changeable public spaces.

The failure to change the way cities think about and design their streets wasnt because Jane or any of the millions she inspired were wrong about the economics of cities, real estate, or werent thinking big enough about their streets. For decades, our strategies to achieve them werent small enough. Urban dwellers may have the vision but they still lack the specific conceptual vocabulary and strategies to think small about their streets. More and better space for pedestrians to walk or to stop. Sidewalks that include benches and landscaped bioswales that capture rain runoff to nourish sidewalk trees. Intersections that make it easier for old and young people on foot to cross the street safely instead of maximizing traffic volumes. An approach to street and sidewalk design that treats the public realm as important spaces and sees as an investment in them as investments in its economic wellbeing, not merely in its quality-of-life. Instead, if a project isnt a highway, a retail complex or a megaproject, planners and ordinary citizens have no starting points to understand the world of the possible for streets, reducing these would-be developments to to-build-or-not-to-build proposals. Whats desperately needed today is an expansive articulation of a small-scale, change-based vision for cities combined with specific, street-level details that planners can use to retrofit, redesign and rebalance streets and sidewalks to support those who make the city vibrant: its people. ###

Like many New Yorkers Im passionate about New York City streets but I didnt grow up wanting to be a transportation commissioner. Still, my urban education started early, exploring the streets of the city with my mom. She has always been a passionate New Yorker with strong opinions about development, preservation and the nuanced interplay between people on neighborhood streets. Wed be caught up in a conversation about politics or current events and shed constantly tell me to Look up, look up! at the buildings and people who were the backdrop for our ramblings. Theres an old saying that New Yorkers never look up, but they also never really look down, at their streets. How many lanes are there? Why are odd-numbered streets westbound and even numbered streets eastbound? It was a great education and left a profound impact on how I viewed the citys operating system of streets and bridges and their importance for people. My Moms and my backyard was Washington Square Park, just a few blocks from her house, and our conversations often turned to Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, two names forever entwined by the park:.

But I wanted be a lawyer and work on social justice issuesmore Clarence Darrow than Jane Jacobs. I had been encouraged to go to law school by Marion Wright Edelman, the visionary leader of the Childrens Defense Fund, my first job out of college. After finishing law school I worked at a law firm but it didnt take long to realize that wasnt where my passion lay. As soon as I was financially able, I left and was naturally drawn back to the political work that I was involved in before law school.

I worked for the mayoral campaign of Dinkins campaign in 1989, at a time when no one thought he could win. Ed Koch was seeking a fourth term as mayor, and after 12 years most New Yorkers had forgotten what life was like without him. The Dinkins campaign headquarters was located in Times Square at Broadway and 43rd Street, above a peep-show theater. Wed see women dressed in feathers and boas, sequins and crowns riding up in the elevators we shared with them. They definitely got off on a different floor. Around campaign headquarters I saw political luminaries like Harold Ickes, Ken Sunshine, Bill Lynch and Don Hazen. Future mayor Bill de Blasio helped coordinate the volunteer division. It was a strong team of people working on a shoestring budget.

Times Square circa 1989 was still in its raunchy era, with derelicts and hustlers hanging along sidewalks lined with tchotchke stores and adult theaters. Parents forced to walk through the square with their families on the way to a Broadway show would put a protective hand over their childs eyes. It wasnt a place youd choose to go if you could avoid it, and it was certainly not the cleaned-up Giuliani version that would come later, much less the pedestrianized Times Square we have today. For lunch wed grab deli sandwiches and bring them back to the office. There was nowhere and no reason to sit outside. You would be careful walking on the side streets after dark.

After Dinkins won but before he was sworn in as mayor, I remember calling my Mom to talk about what city agency would be good to work for under the new administration. I told her that I wanted to do something that would have an impact and make a difference in peoples lives every day. She waited a beat and said, If you want to touch peoples lives every day, you have two choices: sanitation or transportation. Maybe it was her background as a City Hall reporter for the New York Post covering Mayor Koch that gave her that insight, but she was right.

My career at DOT started work for Lou Riccio the transportation commissioner Mayor Dinkins appointed, working as special council for state and federal affairs. That was just when a new transportation funding bill known as ISTEAwas being drafted, a bill that would fundamentally change how transportation projects were planned and funded. It reflected the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihans view that transportation decisions are best made at the local level, rather than through federal dictates about how and when funding from Washington could be used for road, bridge and transit projects. It was a powerful new direction at the time. I read the entire bill and became a kind of expert on how the rules applied in the city. Shortly after, I was named director of the mayors office of transportation, overseeing everything from strategies to improve the already-doomed replacement Pennsylvania Station, as well as improved access routes to the regions difficult-to-reach airports.

Underground, the transit system had improved from the fiscal meltdown of the 1970s and Gerald Ford famously telling New York to Drop Dead, at least in Daily Newss translation of his refusal to bail out the city. But even 15 years later, the system was still starved for funding. Above ground, the citys bridge and road infrastructure was in no better shape. A previous deputy commissioner during Mayor Ed Koch administration, Gridlock Sam Schwartz, sounded the alarm about the dire disrepair of the four East River bridges, the backbone of New Yorks road system. Sam helped generate awareness of just how badly the bridges had deteriorated, to the point where disrepair had forced the city to shut down the Williamsburg Bridge to replace corroded cables and weathered steel and road components. The bill had come due after years of neglect, requiring billions of dollars and years of recovery projects just to bring them into a state of good repair.

New Yorks streets were similarly decrepit, but that wasnt enough to stop me from commuting to work downtown on the back of my husband Marks bike. He clerked for a federal judge near City Hall. We rode down Greenwich Street to my Worth Street office. I would sit on the seat as he pedaled, standing and steering around pothole minefields and an obstacle course of yellow taxis. The bike was a one-speed silver cruiser we dubbed The Tank. You didnt see a lot of bikes on the city streets at that time. There were no bike lanes to speak of. Even ordinary street markings were hard to come by. It was always a joyful ride, coasting down the street, holding onto Marks waist. But it was dangerous. Seven hundred and one people died in traffic crashes in New York City in 1990. Twenty of them were cyclists.

Downtown Manhattan street life around this time amounted to hotdog vendors and lunches eaten standing up. What public space there was could be found in front of courthouses and official buildings, grim and uninviting spaces likely to be occupied by homeless people and the citys less-savory elements. Safety wasnt on the agenda. The quality of street life wasnt on the agenda. Plazas definitely werent on the agenda. The agenda was basic maintenance and repair. The waterfront road along the Hudson River, the site of the former West Side Highway near where I lived, was a jumble of dilapidated piers and parking lots, and the way there was littered with broken glass and crack bottles. There was no attention to the way the streets looked or felt. New Yorkers were just desperately hanging on, trying to survive, not thinking about how these streetsthe greatest asset in one of the worlds most walkable citiescould be used. Even then I was thinking how wasteful this was and that New Yorks streets had more to offer.

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When Robert Moses looked at New York Citys streets, sidewalks and neighborhoods in the 1930s, he also saw a city struggling to modernize but weighed down by the past. And more than anyone, Moses had the means, the power and the motivation to do something about it. Three decades after his death in 1981, Moses and his legacy remain as complex as the city of New York itself. As Jane has evolved into an almost saintly image of the local preservationist, Moses remains the archetypal destroyer of neighborhoods and caricature of institutional arrogance, as portrayed in Robert Caros 1972 Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. The devastating appraisal documented how Moses relentlessly amassed political power and consolidated regional agencies to become the citys areas master builder, shaping New York Citys physical environment more than anyone since the creation of the grid.

Enabled by successions of mayors and governors and fueled by billions of federal dollars in Works Progress Administration and Interstate Highway funds, Moses amassed as many as 12 directorships and leadership positions over vital public works agencies, including the New York City Parkway Authority to the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to the state parks. The federal government created massive public works programs to build new urban roads and housing to replace the slum infrastructure of the 19th century. Moses was first in line to provide these urban renewal projects. With this seemingly limitless funding and control over public planning, Moses from the 1930s through the 1960s completed one of the most urban massive works agenda in urban history. The almost incomprehensible list of projects that he moved from planning to implementation included 17 parkways and 14 expressways that ringed and connected the city in ways that were thought impossible. It doubled the acreage of city parks, built Lincoln Center and brought innumerable playgrounds and public pools and public beaches where millions of New Yorkers who couldnt afford summer homes or sleep-away camps could play or cool off during hot summer days. Slum clearance was followed by the construction of superblocks of vast symmetrical apartment towers surrounded by tree-lined paths. They housed hundreds of thousands of middle-class New Yorkers at Penn Station South, Washington Square Village and Lenox Terrace and on the Lower East Side.

In his relentless push, Mosess projects also divided the city. Armies of workers bulldozed swaths of entire neighborhoods of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, displacing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Caro and others would note that these projects, notably the Cross-Bronx Expressway, disproportionately impacted African-American and immigrant communities with little political or cultural capital. Thousands of families were dispossessed in this way, often with the promise that they would be housed when reconstruction of new apartments was complete. Meanwhile, the highways separated previously contiguous communities and isolated others that were just hanging on.

Contrast these neighborhood-slicing projects with the aesthetic and engineering marvels like the Verrazano-Narrows and Whitestone bridges overseen by Moses, or contrast the grass-lined parkways with the utilitarian, water-hugging multilane highways like the FDR Drive, Shore Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a section of which is a four-tiered structure carved into the schist layers of Brooklyn Heights. But in the end, this power proved to be far from absolute. Moses proposed a road slicing through Washington Square Park in the 1950s to grant motor vehicles easy access to new residential developments south of the park. Jane and her allies succeeded in halting the plan while also shutting the park to all traffic.

The Power Broker remains required reading in schools, but despite its damning critique, it would be simplistic to dismiss Moses merely as a public works dictator. Like generations of planners before him and since, Moses was shaped by the assumptions of his era. He believed that nothing but bold action could help New York City escape 19th century obsolescence and build atop it a new and more prosperous city that could withstand the future. From where Moses sat in the 1930s, that future was being driven by the motor vehicle. Streets in Mosess era teemed with people, cars and double-decker buses darting in every direction as streetcars rolled along the avenues and elevated subways clanged overhead. Moses saw New York City as a traffic management challenge that could be solvedengineered, built and erected into order. And just as Baron Haussman built a new Paris atop the ashes of the old, so Moses believed that he wanted to achieve was more than just building roads. Through a comprehensive urban renewal program supported by local politicians and backed by billions in federal funds, Moses was building a new city, an Empire of Progress for the common man reaching from Staten Island across Long Island and through the Bronx.

While Mosess successes as a builder are widely debated today, he also prompted fierce opposition at the time to many road projects from Long Island to Lower Manhattan. In this, he wasnt the first city planner to prompt such an intense, polarizing response. New Yorks earliest Transportation commissioners in 1808 started to survey Manhattans patchwork of roads, farmland and waterways, drafting right-angled streets to replace irregular foot- and cow-paths. In this pre-grid status quo, property owners feared that roads might be built through their land, and they strafed the surveying commissioners with vegetables and menaced them with dogs and threats of lawsuits.

Despite its opposition, the 19th-century grid plan instantly rationalized the growing city. New crosstown streets measured 60 feet from building to building with 34 feet of roadbed bisecting them while most north-south avenues were allotted 100 feet. New York City grew rapidly through the 19th century, with the streets growing choked with hawkers and vendors. Transportation planners tried to build their way out of street chaos by building up. The first elevated railway in New York City opened on Ninth Avenue in 1868, to be followed by many elevated structures that would join the citys tall buildings to shroud streets in midday shadows and noise. As buildings grew ever higher and streets teemed with more people, carriages and streetcars in the late 19th century, planners then tried to build their way out of congestion by building downbelow ground. The first subway stations opened in 1904 as rail companies started dismantling the remaining elevated rail structures as noisy and blighting anachronisms.

The 20th century transportation innovations of subways and cars helped accelerate population growth, and the citys population doubled from 3.4 million in 1900 to 6.9 million in 1930. In 1910, the subway moved 810 million passengers. By 1930, that number was 2 billion passengers. The streets of New York, already built for omnibuses, horse-drawn carriages and streetcars, were more than wide enough to accommodate the first motor cars, so long as people got out of the way. Children playing in the street wen the way of the horse carriage

The relatively high speeds and loud engines of automobiles and the lack of a comprehensive traffic signs and signals only amplified the streets bedlam. There were few rules and even less experience in the new right-of-way and little margin of error. At first, cars were seen as the invader on city streets and pedestrians the innocents who started being run down in increasing rapidity. In 1910, the first year that records were kept in New York City, 332 people were killed in vehicle crashes. By 1929, that number more than quadrupled to 1,360. But instead of four times the outrage, city planners and engineers took a different tack, building the city from the point of view of the motorist. Streets were built wider, obstacles were removed and traffic signals became the arbiter of when cars could stop or go. Pedestrians and playing children, who barely a generation earlier mingled with horse carts and vendors in the street, were confined once and for all to the sidewalk and assigned the responsibility for their safety and to stay clear of cars.

The Swiss-French modernist architect Le Corbusier in the early 20th century envisioned cities of wide streets arrayed in geometric patterns and with populations concentrated in soaring towers and pedestrians and cars segregated into tiers. This symmetrical and distinctly futuristic design inspired planners looking to engineer a rational course further away from the mixed-use chaos of the 19th century street, believing that man and machine were species best kept separated. But gone with these new street designs werent just traffic conflicts but all of the complexities of the streetthe messiness that Jane Jacobs saw as vital to the streets viability. No street-level stores, no strolling-friendly sidewalks where people could see others and be seen.

This futurist world was translated to New York City streets by architect Harvey Wiley Corbett, who helped design Rockefeller Center and many other Manhattan skyscrapers. Corbett yearned for a Manhattan taller, more futuristic and crowded than others had dared at the timea gothic, three-dimensional city that continues to inspire film versions of what the future will look like. Corbetts definition of the modern street was as foreboding and intimidating as his renderings. Pedestrians are removed, from street level in the first step to convert a street to modern times, allowing cars [to] invade their former domain, he wrote. This wasnt seen as just pro-car. It was assumed that by separating people from traffic, the relative quiet and dedicated space would improve their lives.

Moses embraced this, thrilling in the engineering challenge and in planning comprehensively at a citywide scale. He conceived of interconnected tunnels, elevated highways and cloverleaf projects, whose radii expanded as years passed. New Yorkers were equally caught up in the excitement of remaking of the city by 1939, when then-Parks Commissioner Moses helped bring the Worlds Fair to Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. Thousands of visitors lined up to view General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit, designed by Norman Bel Geddes, the centerpiece of which was football-field-sized model of the city of the future. Moses saw in the interconnected, almost elegant metropolis as exactly the kind of urban utopia that New York could be, with cars gliding effortlessly on wide roads around and past tall buildings. Impressed by the Futurama display and seeing how it amazed visitors, Moses would build models to awe his political patrons, reporters and the public into supporting his own projects.

Yet conspicuously missing from Moses models or architectural renderings were any representations of people and the life that the street was presumably being designed to encourage and support. Like so much other planning, people were meant to make use of whatever was left over on the street after space had been created for cars. The City of the Futuredesigned to be viewed from above, built for cars, a place where pedestrians were afterthoughtwasnt created by accident. It was by design.

Forty years after the publication of The Power Broker, and 30 years after Mosess death, New York City historian Kenneth Jackson and other historians have reevaluated the Mosess long-term impact. While scorn is still heaped upon Moses, Jackson notes that his was far from an original urban planning sin. Other cities couldnt build enough roadsLos Angeles built 900 miles of highways and 21,000 miles of paved streets in the 20th Century, dwarfing New York City. And despite the limitations of the road network and little new transit added, public transportation reached the highest transit ridership in 60 years and New York City thrived as never before.

Whatever the cause of the New York turnaround, historian Kenneth Jackson wrote, it would not have been possible without Robert Moses. Moses left New York City far better equipped to grow and thrive than the Depression-era husk that he had inherited, and without his brazen and single-minded ability to complete projects, Jackson said, Gotham would have lacked the wherewithal to adjust to the demands of the modern world. (Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson, eds.)

Moses, believing he was helping the city he loved, was apoplectic at the publication of the Power Broker, responding to his biographer in a 1972 letter:

The current fiction is that any overnight ersatz bagel and lox and boardwalk merchant, any down-to-earth commentator or barfly, any busy housewife who gets her expertise from newspaper, television radio, and telephone is ipso facto endowed to plan in detail a huge metropolitan arterial complex good for a century. Anyone in public works is bound to be a target for charges of arbitrary administration and power broking leveled by critics who never had responsibility for building anything I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs. Quoted in Flint, Anthony (2009-07-23). Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Kindle Locations 3420-3424). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Though Moses did not mention Jane by name (nor was she mentioned in The Power Broker), she seemed to fit the profile of the kind of critics that Moses denounced. To Jane, Mosess highways didnt just mean destruction of housing or some minor, local dislocation. He proposed to demolish 416 buildings for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Those buildings were the homes for 2,200 families and the 365 retail stores where they shopped and the 480 other commercial establishments where locals worked or that otherwise contributed to and defined the area. Flint, Anthony (2009-07-23). Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Kindle Locations 2693-2694). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. This wasnt breaking eggs, this was the destruction of a neighborhood and the annulment of the very kind public life that Moses sought. Where Moses saw slums that could only be replaced, not repaired, Jane saw neighborhoods that already contained all the seeds and social networks necessary for their own renewal. Uprooting thousands of residents and small business tenants from Chinatown, SoHo and West Village properties and raising a highway to move people more efficiently from New Jersey to Brooklyn missed the people for the streets.

Jane and the Village dedicated activists she organized with ultimately succeeded in turning the politics against Moses and his plan, bringing it to defeat in the late 1960s, followed by the erosion of Mosess authority. Ultimately, what she stopped wasnt just a highway through Lower Manhattan or Moses himself. She stopped future generations of city residents from being powerless at the hands of the leaders working on their behalf. Jane showed that you didnt have to be a public engineer to know when a proposed development endangers a community. Less clear today is if communities have the tools to conceive of new ideas or to recognize when a proposed change is good for a community. Judging by New York Citys streets, we may not have figured out that one. Transportation technologies have undergone multiple revolutions in innovation and design. The modern automobile changed from a 1961 Chrysler Imperial with its tail fins and curb-feelers to the 2016 Toyota Prius hybrid, with nearly silent engines, air bags, anti-lock brakes and GPS. Coins and tokens disappeared from buses and subways, countdown clocks display how long the wait is for the next train. On Janes streets, however, little has changed aside from the color of the street signs. Between the many newly constructed buildings, the spaces in-between, streets have fallen between the cracks. Until very recently, theyve shown none of the inventive, bold spirit that New Yorkers show in everything else they did.

As the Moses/Jacobs story has been told and retold over the last four decades, Janes strategy of grassroots resistance has been invoked in resistance to official ideasand celebrating them as a victory, even if that victory is the status quo. Pedestrian-, transit- and bike-friendly projects in dozens of cities from Adelaide and Sydney to London, Toronto and New Orleans in recent years have been regarded by residents with the same kind of fear and suspicion usually reserved for proposals for multilane highways. Speaking at public hearings, local residents and business owners invoke Jane Jacobs-like language to fight Jane Jacobs-like projects. They oppose plans for walkable neighborhoods and bike lanes because of phantom fears that they might make streets more dangerous, congest traffic, put local shops out of business or erode a neighborhoods characteror property values. Even as cities belatedly draft sustainability plans to address urban growth and proposing more compact and efficient development, its extraordinarily difficult politically and publically to make the changes that these plans call for in the face of NIMBY opposition, even when majorities of the general population support them.

I saw this firsthand in the backlash to a bike lane we installed alongside a park in Brooklyn in 2009. A small number of residents claimed that the lane made the street dangerous and eroded the neighborhoods character. Pulling grassroots strategies from Jane Jacobs, they collected their own data from video surveillance shot from one residents penthouse apartment, the findings of which, they claimed, showed that far fewer bike riders used the lane than official counts. A lawsuit by the group alleged that the lane violated rules that protect historical landmark districts and that the project didnt conform to environmental regulations. Ill go into more detail on that in Ch. TK.

In San Francisco, a single gadfly halted the citys entire bike-lane-building program for four years, from 2006 to 2010, citing bike lanes potential for unhealthy environmental impacts. Invoking the California Environmental Quality Act, the litigant, a dishwasher from county outside the Bay Area, waged a lengthy and tenacious battle, forcing the city to declare in a 1,353-page environmental review documentconducted over two and a half years at a cost of $1 millionthat removing parking and driving lanes to accommodate bikes wouldnt cause congestion and harmful health effects of more pollution.

For me, the Moses/Jacobs lesson is the transformative impact that transportation infrastructure has on city life. Retrofitting our cities for the new urban age today will requires a Moses-like reverse-engineering, with the next generation of city roads built to accommodate pedestrians, bikes and buses safely and not just single-occupancy vehicles and their diminishing returns on our streets. Jane taught us the need for a more inclusive and humane approach to development projects, and to build them to to human scale and driven by a robust community process. Reversing atrophy requires a change-based urbanism that shows short-term results that can then be leveraged into creating new expectations and demand for the kind of projects people are afraid to dream if.

Globally there is a rethinking of the city and its relationship with its cars and its infrastructure, embraced by new generations of transportation leaders and visionary mayors. On the largest scale, highways in Madrid, Seoul and Rio are being torn down and redesigned for pedestrian and recreational use. Pariss Plages and the Promenade Plante and New York Citys High Line attract millions of visitors to former rail rights-of way turned into parks. Cities are remaking their cities with bus rapid transit networks instead of massive rail projects. On the micro scale, cities like San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Mexico City are creating pocket parks atop former triangles of asphalt or reclaiming and activating forlorn spaces beneath highways. These concepts have even been extended to car-choked Atlantas BeltLine rail trail, and tactical urban interventions in cities big and small to turn parking spaces into cafes or into a mini park for a day. They are examples of urban alchemy and a self-evident how-to converting outmoded infrastructure into modern, public space that makes people want to move to and stay in cities.

What is needed is to codify this approach so that it can be adapted in cities around the world not just to repurpose highway rights-of-way, but to reclaim and give new life to every street. Its one thing to turn back a proposed developmenta new highway, a convention center, a too-tall building or out-of-scale, traffic-generating shopping mall. Its another thing to rewrite the operating code of a street in favor of the people, places and public transportation and replace the vestiges of last centurys planning dogma that ignored the human experience on that street.

Viewing Moses abundant roadbed through Janes idea of a diversified street, you find limitless opportunities for an aggressive, change-based urbanism. There are livable streets hidden in plain sight on every street. Just because a street today has five lanes of traffic doesnt mean that tomorrow it cant be reprogrammed for another use that transforms that street. In fact, it is because so much of our public space is paved that today we have so much raw material to work with. In more and more cities around the world, we must demand and embrace smaller-scale interventions that can quickly and inexpensively reallocate space, reinforcing denser neighborhoods with the power latent in our streets. As cities grow, the next generation of eyes on the street in front of Janes old home may be those of a bike rider in the new bike lane.

Ch. 2: Density is Destiny

From fifteen hundred feet above, Mexico Citys traffic problems seem to disappear. The view rom a helicopter in the hazy sky at rush hour is of a city in slow motion. Pedestrians, buses, taxis and cars inch along, barely perceptible along wide, endless avenues. The only thing that seems to be moving are elevated metro trains and rapid bus routes built along road medians, flanked on both sides by columns of stopped cars.

From above, visible traces remain of the citys natural origins and the 14th-century Aztecs who constructed settlements on an island within Lake Texcoco. That lake was progressively drained and paved over the centuries into what today we call Mexico City. In the city center, Hernan Cortes and the Spaniards conquistadores built Mexico Citys Cathedral at the Zocalo in the sixteenth century using the stones from the Aztec temples they destroyed. Ever since, the citys cathedrals and other ancient structures have slowly retreated back into the clay earth, sinking and leaning, jostled by frequent earthquakes. The network of canals and farming communities at Xochimilco in the citys south provide a glimpse of what the lush, ancient lake city might have looked like. The canal area is protected by law from development but immediately beyond it roads and seas of housing and roads immediately resume. At Tlalpan, one of the citys major green spacesmore forest than parktwo gaps are carved into the parks otherwise green oval like missing teeth. Once forest itself, the gap in the northwest today is a Six Flags amusement park. In the northeast, a gated residential development, El Bosque, cuts into the northeast on a single road lined with upscale condominiums whose entrance is guarded by security.

Along the citys periphery, poor, informal settlements containing many migrants from other parts of the country have grown rapidly for decades within environmentally preserved greenbelt areas that over time prove no more resilient against development than Tlalpan. One by one, these technically illegal communities have reached a critical mass that force officials to recognize them as legitimate municipal communities to be incorporated into the city and provide the necessary infrastructureroads, power, street lights, water mains and sewers. It is the antithesis of urban planning yet these informal communities are one of the fastest growing parts of the megalopolis that today encompasses more than 21 million people spread over 573 square miles. Surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico forms a massive geologic bowl that holds the city and the haze of the citys millions motor vehicle emissions breathed in by 42 million lungs. But the greenbelt cant hold back the sprawl of the city and once these green tracts are absorbed, there is no bringing them back. After the helicopter lands, it also becomes painfully obvious that the view of a city moving in slow motion is no optical illusion. Traffic on the streets of Mexico City barely moves.

The problem in Mexico City isnt that there are too many people in too little space, says Dhyana Quintanar Solares, director of the citys public space department. The problem is too many people in too much space. We have all the advantages that high population can offer but few of the advantages that can only come with density.

Every day from her office near the main road Avenida de la Reforma, along Avenida de las Insurgentes, Dhyana has a front-row seat to the futility of Mexico City traffic. My meetings with her at her third-floor office over the last two years were accompanied by the soundtrack of transportation failure: the blare of car horns. At any hour, hundreds of cars, buses, mini buses, motorcycles, scooters, vendor carts and taxis are crushed together in Mexico Citys asphalt arteries, waiting at traffic signals or blocked into a standstill. The result is a multipart car-horn symphony every time a light turns green. And at the intersection of Insurgentes and Reforma, the light is always green for somebody.

In an effort to reduce pollution and congestion, Mexico City officials in 1989 announced Hoy No Circula (Today you dont circulate), instituting driving bans on about one-fifth of vehicles from driving their cars on any given day, depending on their license plate numbers. These no-drive days have been expanded over the years but there are still so many vehicles on the road that it can sometimes be impossible for drivers to see road markings or even the lights they are stopped for and what lane theyre supposed to be in. Vendor stands and other hawkers selling mango, trinkets or washing windows often encroach on the street and block sidewalks, forcing pedestrians into the road. In those stretches of road that congestion hasnt paralyzed, cars attempt to make up for lost time with speed. Many roads no longer allow curbside parking and have been converted to one-way operation to eliminate as many barriers to cars getting through as possible. Some 1,100 people in Mexico City die in traffic crashes annually.

The city government isnt a hapless victim watching cars take over the streets. The citys own planning rules require that new buildings provide new spaces to park, a rule taken so seriously that new high-rise towers require the construction of a 10-story mascot structure to house all the cars presumed with new office or residential buildings. A 2014 study by the Institute of Transportation Development Policy (ITDP) analyzed 251 new real estate developments built in Mexico City between 2009 and 2013. It found that of the 172 million square feet of new floor area developed, 42% of that space was just what was needed to store cars driven by people using the other 58% of the space. Thats 250,000 spaces, a virtual off-street city built just for carsand this on top of the street space already built to keep cars moving. This robs Mexico City of the opportunity to build more residential properties and greater residential density where its most needednear the citys metro stations and bus, bike and walking network. The added parking within the city center assures commuters a parking space, inducing more people to drive to work instead of taking public transit. In a sense, city regulations require private builders to promote more traffic.

Not surprisingly, Mexico Citys roads have gotten wider and its primary, limited-access highways, such as the Circuito Interior, busier and bleeding congestion into its service roads, then into surrounding neighborhoods, a daily tsunami of steel and carbon monoxide. Any visitor whos tried to cross a Mexico City Street on foot has probably had that life-altering sense of fear, of aging 15 years in 15 seconds, and of not being entirely certain at the first step into the street that youll still be alive by the last step. The simple act of crossing the street can be impossible along roads where officials have erected fences and other barriers, except via a quarter-mile odyssey of pedestrian bridges or underpasses.

But something else is starting to grow through the cracks in the pavement. At the initiative of Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, elected in 2013, Dhyana and her public space department is trying to create invigorate neighborhoods with new community plazas (parques de bolsillo, or pocket parks), which also serve as bulwarks against invasion by parked cars.

A pocket park in Coyoacan, Mexico City, one of dozens that repurpose unused street space to extend sidewalks for seating, gathering, eating and people-watching (Credit: Seth Solomonow)

Bike share stations and protected bike paths have emerged along busy Avenida de la Reforma and in the areas around the historic city center. Six TK bus rapid transit routes today operate along 65 miles of dedicated bus lanes where cars to sit idle, becoming part of the citys transportation network, moving 855,000 daily passengers at full speed past lanes of stopped cars. Avenida 20 de Noviembre used to be high-volume traffic corridor delivering endless columns of cars north to the Zocalo, the nations cultural and political epicenter, even though virtually all of them were bound for destinations far away. Working with Dhyana, we came up with a plan to calm traffic and limit the number of vehicles able to enter the area, creating cast stretches of pedestrian space and extending the Zocalos grandeur further south.

Avenida 20 de Noviembre, Mexico City. Courtesy of Bloomberg Associates, City of Mexico

Beneath the citys highways in Coyoacan, Dhyanas department emptied bleak lots of their fences, parking and garbage and turned these spaces into food courts, bakeries and fitness areas. Little by little, these changes are creating spaces on the street that invite people and create opportunities and not just cars. These strategies are more than just novelties. They may ultimately be part of Mexico Citys long-term salvation.

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I often tell people that if they want to save the planet, they should move to a New York City. But it could be any big city. And its not just a matter of bright lights, great restaurants and world-class cultural institutions. Because of their geographic compactness, population density and orientation toward walking and public transportation, cities are the most efficient places on earth to live, and large cities like New York or Mexico City by far offer the best odds for sustainable growth as global populations increase rapidly. Having millions of people condensed into buildings high rise buildings instead of spread out over hundreds of rural and suburban miles is itself a reason why so many people are attractedculturally, professionally, politically and practicallyto cities like New York. But there is also a functional and economic sustainability-in-numbers case for dense city living. New Yorkers have a carbon footprint about one third of the average American, a function of driving less, living vertically and the environmental economies of scale that come with centrally located goods and services. For all their smog, graffiti, blacktop and seeming anarchy, cities are the greenest places on earth.

Two-thirds of the American population now live in the nations 100 largest metro areas, which in turn generate three-quarters of the nations economy. Urban streets today are the front yards for 80 percent of the American population, and they occupy just three percent of the nations land area. Urban population is expected to growby one million people in New York City alone by 2030, and by 100 million more people nationwide by 2050, a 33% jolt. Concentrating as much of that nationwide growth in cities will be the single most important strategy that nations can embark on in this century. In order to attract, retain and accommodate rising populations, cities must implement rapid strategies to make them more attractive places to live and tp make what infrastructure they do have function more efficiently.

The very idea that living in city can be healthy mystifies many Americans who, channeling their inner Henry David Thoreau, reject cities as dens of pestilence, crowds, noise and crime. The countryside, the Walden Pond theory goes, provides open space and quiet where people can contemplate their higher purposes and live simpler closer to and off of the land. In fact, as we have learned over the last 50 years, the environmental cost of living in suburbs makes New York City look like a coiffed Swiss hamlet. Life in the suburbs leads to two even greater related problems: A hidden but far greater environmental price tag that is borne by society through the driving, emissions, and maintaining and building new roads, while draining cities of the density that makes them efficient and thrive. Suburbs and exurbs force not just mega megacommuting in cars, but require cars to be used for every trip, no matter how banal. Zoning requirements in many suburbs restrict commercial development and office parks to segregated areas, guaranteeing that residential communities will be far out of walking distance for any activity. Unlike Jane Jacobs compact neighborhood, a trip to the suburban store for a half-gallon of milk may be a five-mile drive. Visiting the doctor, going out to dinner, getting the kids to and from school requires thousands of car trips annually, all trips that could be done on foot and by transit en route to and from work in a city.

David Owens, in his influential work on the benefits of compact urban living, Green Metropolis, observed that 82% of working Manhattan residents get to work by public transportation, walking or on a bike, 10 times the national rate. The city has lower per capita energy use than the entire nation, in large part due to people living more compactly in smaller, more efficient homes that are easier to heat, cool and connect to common water and sewer networks. New Yorkers as a state generate fewer greenhouse gases7.1 metric tons annually, a lower rate than that of residents of any other American city, and less than 30 percent less than the national average of 24.5 metric tons. Owen, David (2009-08-29). Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (pp. 2-3). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

Owens and others have also observed that that after years of rhapsodizing about the virtues of pristine forests, modern environmentalists have changed their tune on the city. Instead of fighting to preserve the spotted owl in the forest, they are taking the fight to cities and taking on the NIMBYs who stand in the way of new, denser residential developments. Mainstream environmentalist organizations have reoriented their strategies and started advocating smart or compact urban growth as part of an anti-sprawl strategy, reaching beyond the false pro- and anti-growth dichotomy. More people are realizing that the surest way to protect the nations wonderful open spaces for future generations and for the creatures that inhabit them is to build within cities so that subdivisions wont be built where the deer and the antelope play. Its better for the planet to build one 50-story residential tower in the heart of Manhattan than to force developers to build hundreds of residential units across former greenbelt farmlands. Denser, better-functioning cities mean fewer people fleeing to country and bringing their cars and the roads, parking lots, and strip malls and low-efficiency HVAC and sewer systems needed to support them.

Despite the natural advantages of cities, political leaders havent fully capitalized on them. Its not because theyre not smart, but typically because of the politics and urban planning inertia that has brought them to this point. Jane Jacobs writings notwithstanding, cities dont come with owners manuals. Planners, engineers and the municipal foot soldiers who design, build and run cities tend to learn their lessons on the job and then take any collected wisdom with them when they leave at the end of an administrationoften on the way to more lucrative careers in the private sector. Within city government, street design practices were standardized long before the current generation of planners arrived, usually during a period with no tradition of innovation or experimentation. In this way, cities have tended to operate in much the same way that their cities have sprawled: by doing things the way that theyve always been done, by relying on out-of-date planning manuals and deviating only when forced to. Transportation-as-usual in much of the world means building, expanding, repairing or replacing as many roads as possible and brushing aside anything not tested or explicitly authorized. The most dangerous phrase in the English language is Weve always done it this way, a quip attributed to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a trailblazing US Navy computer scientist. The inertia of outdated street design isnt merely dangerous, it reflects outmoded assumptions about how people want to use their streets. Americans are driving fewer miles on average than a decade earlier, the first sustained drop since the oil crisis of the 1970s. [Citation Dshort] Fewer young Americans are even bothering to get drivers licenses: In 1983, 87% of 19-year-olds had drivers licenses; by 2010, that number was below 70%. And more are opting for rented or shared cars and riding bikes over private car ownership as car sales to Americans under 35 dropped 30% from 2007 to 2012. [Citation: NY Times] On the transit side of the ledger, ridership in 2013 reached its highest level since the start of the car boom in 1956. The federal government has missed these dramatic shifts, forecasting consistent, high growth in driving over much of the last 15 years even as miles traveled has flattened out or decreased.

The misreading of what is occurring in America isnt just confined to driving. Just as parking requirements stifle density within cities, federal policy incentivizes people to live in sprawling suburbs. The tax code allows homeowners to deduct the interest on mortgages in their annual filings, encouraging home ownership, but in the wrong placeoutside of the city, where it favors homeowners with better means. The federal gas tax, designed as a mechanism for drivers to pay for the upkeep of the roads that they use, hasnt been adjusted in two decades, asphyxiating the Highway Trust Fund and the transportation infrastructure reinvestment with it. This is no small sum: Its been stuck at 18.4 cents since 1993. Simply not adjusting the tax for inflation for two decades is a difference in billions of dollars with two decades of diminishing returns. Despite the decreasing returns, most of those revenues go back into roads and only a small fraction is invested in transit. Even Republican lawmakers, usually opposed to any increase in taxes, have come out in support of increases in the taxonly so long as the funds are committed to roads. Having eluded popular attention for so many years, a comprehensive strategy to reimagine and innovate Americas urban streets somehow remained too small for a national policy. Federal government officials want to cut ribbons on new highways or streetcar projects, not bike lanes or street-based neighborhood redesigns. If a transportation project isnt an interstate highway, a high-speed rail or light rail, or a multi-interchange bridge or road, its hard to get their attenti