Comments on Janette Sadik-Khan

She is the transportation commissioner in NYC. The New York Observer ran a little story, "Bloomberg’s Street Fighter: The relatively radical Janette Sadik-Khan has championed bike lanes and pedestrian plazas—but does the transportation commish move too fast?," on her.

Here are a couple of nice comments to the story that express very well the sentiments I try to express (not as well sometimes) about the difference between the center city, and Washington specifically, and suburbs.

Hugh Taylor:

"Radical" compared to what? London and Paris, among other great cities, are way in front of New York City when it comes to reclaiming street space for pedestrians, public space, buses and bicyclists. People flock to live here, and raise families here, precisely because they do not have to drive everywhere. Commissioner Sadik-Khan should be applauded for finally letting New York be New York instead of trying to make it a Houston or Atlanta. It's nice to see NYC government aspire to be a world leader instead of laggard.

Jacob:

Perhaps she is radical when compared to previous DOT commissioners, who were about 50 years behind the curve of transportation policy. As a global city, we should compare our policies to those in Paris, London, Tokyo, and Shanghai; not LA, Houston, and Atlanta.

Interestingly, unlike in DC, the NYC Department of Transportation does not have to go through a public participation and approval process to do projects.

And now I think that we need to make public space improvement a very central part of transportation planning, since it really is about the public space parts of the built environment.