Michael Bloomberg, Mayor, and Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner, Department of Transportation:
Sadik-Khan: A third of New Yorkers get around by transit. A third get around by walking. A third get around by driving. And yet, the investment strategy has been very much toward the car. And it’s really been a 1950s view of our streets, that they were really to move cars as fast as possible from point A to point B. … if we’re going to grow and thrive, between now and 2030, we really need to take a hard look at our assets, and improve the efficiency of our city, and reduce greenhouse gasses.
Bloomberg: Janette’s put in 500 miles of bicycle lanes. And we have 6,000 miles of roads. You can make the case that that’s not exactly changing the whole world. … Most people can still go exactly where they were going before,
exactly the same way. So I think the only change in a practical sense you’re going to do has to be evolutionary. It can’t be revolutionary.
Sadik-Khan: We changed a parking lot over a weekend, from an underutilized area for parked cars to a plaza. And we literally just painted it, painted it green, painted the curbs. Added tables and chairs and planters. Three years later the sales tax receipts are 172% higher than before in the adjacent areas. It worked.
Bloomberg: When she closed Broadway … it brought down the accident rate dramatically. The sidewalks could not handle the number of pedestrians and they were slowly taking over the roads. Now they’ve taken over the whole road. But they probably transport a lot more people than the cars. Cars when you think about it are very inefficient–typically they have one person or maybe two people in it, they’re big.
Sadik-Khan: Times Square is now one of the top 10 retail locations in the world.
Bloomberg: Building owners tell me they make more from the ground floor than from the rest of the building.
(Business friends) ask, “Aren’t you ruining the city for business with all your nanny-state stuff?” … “Wait a second,” I said. “Let me get this straight. We have record population, record tourists, record number of private jobs in the city, record life expectancy, record retention of employees–what did I miss here?”
I liked this comment in the full article:
The innovators are the ones with their arrows in their backs, as the euphemism goes. If there is an instant referendum in advance on everything, you’re never going to do anything. And one of the dangers is, particularly with elected officials who have no knowledge of technology, they will say, oh my god, we had 10,000 people write me yesterday saying they don’t like that bike lane. Yeah, it’s one kid with a computer, and he bought the friends on Google.