Sadik-Khan’s account of her six-year DOT ride might win over readers who live in Vancouver, Copenhagen and Medellin - cities whose traffic-taming experiments provided her inspiration. So is ham-handed traffic rerouting, which was implemented, notwithstanding her innumerable additional justifications, for one main purpose: to realize avid, lifelong bicycle enthusiast Sadik-Khan’s dream to turn New York into “one of the world’s great biking cities.” Everyone else be damned. Plazas for idle lounging thrust into the teeming urban fabric are suburban.
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Left-turn lanes are so confusing that no one - walkers, cyclists or drivers - knows what to do!Īs a lifelong New Yorker who walks more in a week than self-described “pedestrian advocates” likely do in a year, may I offer a gentle observation: strolling in any part of town cluttered by Sadik-Khan’s plazas and bike lanes is less fun than it was. “Plazas” are occupied mainly by tourists and bums.
“Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution” by Janette Sadik-Khan (Viking)įor the rest of us, it’s a streetscape that is more disorderly looking than it was in the crime-wracked decades from the 1970s-’90s. New York City’s 8.3 million are a happier citizenry, blessed with fewer traffic fatalities and a more humane environment for everyone moving from here to there.
If you believe Sadik-Khan’s new book, “Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution” (Viking), something wonderful. Three years since Janette Sadik-Khan left her post as the city’s commissioner of Transportation, what has her ruinous tampering with historic traffic patterns wrought?