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Photo by Christopher Chan.

Yesterday, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver announced that Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing bill would not move through Albany, a huge blow to New York City’s livable streets movement and Bloomberg’s ambitious PLANYC, which had congestion pricing as its centerpiece. The congestion pricing plan, which had the support of New York City’s City Council, called for charging drivers $8 for entering Manhattan below 60th street. Using the funds generated by charging drivers, New York City planned to inject an infusion of cash into the mass transit system which is strapped for cash and experiencing increasing ridership. With congestion pricing killed, it’s unclear where the funding for the city’s mass transit infrastructure will come from.

See our friends at Streetsblog for more coverage.

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NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaking at Regional Planning Association annual meeting. Photo by Ethan Arpi.

In The World In 2008 - a supplement to the Economist - Mayor Bloomberg outlines some of the aims and inspirations for his super-ambitious PLANYC, a city-led initiative to convert New York City into one of the greenest mass human developments on earth. Mayor Bloomberg’s Plan, like New York City itself, is a postmodern mash-up with ideas and inspirations taken from cities around the world. In the Mayor’s own words:

In developing the climate-change strategies that underpin PlanNYC, we drew on the experiences of Berlin for our renewable-energy and green-roof policies; Hong Kong, Shanghai and Delhi for our innovative transit improvements; Copenhagen for our pedestrian and cycling upgrades; Chicagoand Los Angeles for our plan to plant 1m more trees; Amsterdam and Tokyo for our transit-oriented development policies; and Bogotá for our plans for Bus Rapid Transit.

The Mayor also mentions London, Stockholm and Singapore as inspirations for his congestion pricing proposal, one of the more controversial measures of his plan. (See: What Is Congestion Pricing?)

There’s an interesting story behind many of Bloomberg’s proposals; they come from cities in the developing world, places where municipal funds are hard to come by so every project must be constructed carefully for it to succeed. Another interesting point is that city leaders are increasingly communicating with each other, exchanging ideas and success so that they can be replicated throughout the world.

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New York Times Magazine writer Randy Cohen, aka The Ethicist, sits down with Mark Gorton from The Open Planning Project and discusses the ethical implications of driving, congestions pricing, biking and the use of public space by private individuals. Mr. Cohen argues passionately for cities that are clean, livable and pedestrian friendly. Moving to a post-car culture is not about asceticism, he argues, but quite the opposite: “what we’re talking about is how people can be happier…that the automobile undermines…our ordinary daily happiness…”

Special thanks to Rob Katz for finding this outstanding video!

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Photo of Brooklyn-Queens Expressway by See-ming Lee on flickr.

Author Will Self walks. He walks where people are not meant to walk. He walks out of airports into cities and from cities into airports. He has walked from the middle of London to Heathrow, from LAX to Watts, from O’Hare into downtown Chicago. In a humorous piece by radio show Studio 360, Will Self walks a particularly unwalkable piece of terrain, from La Guardia into Manhattan. In the process he climbs fences, walks through cemeteries and somehow must deal with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (a project of Robert Moses, New York City’s “Master Builder”).

In his new book, “Psychogeography”, Self explores how geographical environments shape our psyche. He believes that modern transportation such as highways and airplanes disorients and distances us from the world around us but that walking has the ability to reconnect us to the spaces we inhabit.

In an interview with the Boston Globe, Self claims that,

“I’m interested in orientation. I’ve been traveling around the States on author tours for 15 tours now. A lot of these North American cities I’ve been in and out of numerous times, but I never knew where I was. That’s an abuse of me and an abuse of the city, to reduce it to an assemblage of cab rides, bookstores, encounters with journalists, barrooms, and then back to the airport. These walks allowed me to reclaim these cities.”

In an urban world dominated by cars and freeways, walking around cities “is a form of dissent,” Self tells us, it’s “an insurgency against the contemporary world.”

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According to Leinberger, Washington’s metro has encouraged walkability. Photo by MatthewBradley from Flickr.

According to a study put out by Christopher B. Leinberger of the Brookings Institute, Washington DC has the most “walkable places” - it has 20 - per capita of any city in the United States, when just 20 years ago it had a scant 2. Leinberger attributes Washington’s rise in walkability to two things: (1) the success of the metro system and (2) the use of “overlay zoning districts” that encourage walkability around metro stations.

Other factors that come in to play are the area’s robust economy, the city’s large population of university degree holders (who are more likely to live in walkable areas), and the throngs of 20 to 30 somethings who flock to the city for jobs.

How could New York with its canyons of glass and steel not be ranked first? Here’s the catch: New York has the most “walkable places” of any US city but because it’s population is so high and falls short on the per capita side.

Urban planner Richard Florida also has some thoughts of his own on his blog.

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Jabbour’s New York City subway map alongside the current, more cluttered version.

In 1972, the Vignelli’s, the husband-wife designer-duo, created New York City’s subway map, a splendid synthesis of simplicity and elegance. Their design, with lines running at 90 and 45 degree angles, was an immediate hit, becoming an instant icon of high-modernism. But as New York City grew out of its grit - the Vignelli’s map depicted New York’s rivers a grimy brown - it was soon scrapped and later replaced with the map plastered on the hundreds of subway cars that criss-cross the city. Now Eddie Jabbour, an obsessive designer and founder of Kick Design, has taken a shot at the subway map, creating a bright and bubbly map, inspired by the aesthetic of web 2.0. Sadly for Jabbour, his map has not been embraced by the MTA, who, according to the Gothamist, claim that it is riddled with geographical inaccuracies. (It’s not like this stopped the MTA before; after all the Vignelli’s map displayed Central Park as a square.)

In a future post, I’ll talk a little bit about the design of the Metrobus map for Mexico City, where designers relied heavily on iconography as opposed to text in order to make the map accessible to the illiterate.

Via Built Environment Blog.

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Everyone bikes in Portland. Photo by dontbecreepy from Flickr.

Visiting the New York Times website today, I was struck to find that the most emailed article of the day was about Portland, Oregon’s efforts to promote our two-wheeled friend, the bicycle. For most people in the planning world, and for people like me who float around its fringes, hearing about cycling in Portland isn’t exactly news. After all, it seems that everyone knows that Portland is the Curitiba of the United States: it’s smart, well-planned, pedestrian friendly, and as if that’s not enough, it has an exquisite mass-transit system. The point I want to make is that the real news here is not the story itself, but how the readers responded to it. And that’s with thousands of emails to family and friends. For the first time, I suspect, New Yorkers are looking to this left-coast curiosity for ways to improve their own city.

To learn more about what New Yorker’s are doing to make their city more like Portland, check out our friends at the Streetsblog.

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A shot of East Harlem. By roeyahram from Flickr.

In New York, just under two miles from the glitter and glam of 5th Avenue, is the working-class neighborhood of East Harlem, home to six of Manhattan’s seven bus depots and some of the dirtiest air in the city. I stumbled across an article published in the New York Times just under a year ago about Wendy Agustín, a mother of five who lives directly across from on these bus depots. Ms. Agustin keeps the windows to her apartment closed all day so her children don’t have to breathe the contaminated air that rises up from the depot. “If I don’t keep those windows closed,” she told the New York Times, “that smell rises up and comes in, a smell like diesel, a nasty stench.” Some of Ms. Agustin’s neighbors have voiced similar complaints and have found their possessions caked in a thick layer of soot from the buses after having left their windows open. Asthma is also a big problem in the neighborhood, which has the highest rate of asthma hospitalizations in the country. And many of these hospitalizations are occurring to children who have been poisoned by the air. According to the National Asthma Survey, from 2002-2004 children between the ages of 0-14 living in East Harlem experience 126.1 hospitalizations per 10,000 residents.

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