Save the Date: January 10, 2017 StreetsPAC Fundraiser for City Council Member Ben Kallos!
Please plan to join us on Tuesday, January 10, 2017, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., for a fundraiser for City Council Member Ben Kallos.
Ben, who was first elected to the Council in 2013, has been a champion of pedestrian safety, and was instrumental in bringing crosstown paired bike lanes to the Upper East Side. He can often be spotted riding his bicycle around his district.
All the details are below. We look forward to seeing you there! RSVP.
StreetsPAC Urges a Total Overhaul of City Parking Policy
Last Monday, the City Council's Committee on Transportation held an oversight hearing on parking policy, and StreetsPAC took the occasion to urge the Council and the Department of Transportation to completely rethink the way we allocate curb space in New York City. Here's a bit of what we had to say:
The dedication of vast portions of our public streets to free private-vehicle storage is a 1950s-era concept that is ripe for change. While we have wisely moved on from many other ideas that seemed sensible in the Fifties, our misguided parking policies have gotten a free pass.
As vehicle ownership patterns evolve, we should concurrently be reinventing our streets. As more and more goods arrive via FedEx and UPS, and Fresh Direct, and as New Yorkers increasingly avail themselves of ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, we should be dedicating space on most city blocks – including residential blocks – for deliveries and pickups and drop-offs.
Homeowners and renters should be able to reserve curbside space for plumbers and electricians and moving vans and other service providers. Shared vehicles – cars and bikes – should be given priority over private ones.
Furthermore, the city should reactivate, and greatly expand, its PARK Smart program, and experiment widely with dynamic pricing of curbside parking spaces. Multiple studies have shown that a large percentage of city driving involves cruising for parking, and the underlying cause is underpriced curb space. Or curb space that isn’t priced at all.
The bottom line is that we aren't going to achieve Vision Zero, or become a truly 21st century city, until we grapple with the thorny issue of streets that have been designed predominantly, and overwhelmingly, for motor vehicles. And as anyone who's ever attended a Community Board meeting knows, it all starts with parking.
You can read our full testimony here.
StreetsPoll: Time for Community Boards to Stop Holding Up Street-Safety Projects
In our last StreetsPoll, following the news that Manhattan Community Board 12 had yet again failed to act on proposed design upgrades to Dyckman Street that it had been considering for eight years, we asked you how long you thought it should take for CBs to endorse safe- and complete-streets projects.
Your answer was unanimous: 100% of you wondered why Community Board approval should be needed at all for life-saving infrastructure projects. Good question! Let's resolve that in 2017, we won't let anything stand in the way of redesigning streets to save lives.
Best wishes for a safe and happy holiday!
