"If it works, keep it" and "it's all I've ever known and so I'm terrified" are two very different things. As I reminded Bob Caesar last week, it isn't like his long reign as arbiter of all that's good and decent downtown let to streets paved with gold (those turned out to be the ones leading to his domicile in Silver Hills.
No, it took different people, different money and different ways of thinking about development to so much as take the hesitant baby steps of recent years. When you read the first two comments in the discussion below, you see ideas -- streets comprise a real estate portfolio, and that parks needn't be big and expensive to be desirable -- that fully qualify as the AntiCaesar.
Just get out of the way, Bob. Your time has passed, and we must adapt and experiment now if we're too have any hope of surviving the effects of the bridges and tolling regime that you, yourself, tragically joined in imposing.
Dynamic Duos: Michael Bloomberg And Janette Sadik-Khan On The Future Of Walking, Biking, And Driving
Michael Bloomberg, Mayor
Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner, Department of Transportation
Sadik-Khan: The streets in a city like New York--6,300 miles of streets--it's the largest real estate portfolio the city has. So we have to make it more efficient. That's why designing in bike lanes, bus lanes, new capacity on the seven-line [subway] extension--it's all about using that existing resource, but looking at it differently.
Bloomberg: And it's not just roads. It's parks. With our PlaNYC, a park for everyone within 10 minutes was our [goal]; to get that, you have to take schoolyards and convert them into parks in the off-hours, simply because there's no room to go build new parks in the dense parts of our city. There are a lot of those kinds of things, and they impact the economy, they impact the psyche of the people who live here, they make the city more attractive.
2 comments:
I now truly believe that Bob doesn't like the revival of downtown and especially doesn't want anymore to happen. He may not even completely realize that about himself, yet.
No matter one way or two way, patrons of other businesses are parking in HIS parking spaces.
Funny thing is, it's not even innovative. The only thing two-way and automobile-alternative advocates are asking for is that the city be allowed to function as it was actually designed-- with multiple, simultaneous modes of transport.
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