Janette Sadik-Khan

The city and the M.T.A. officially kicked off their "select bus service" on 34th Street today, a higher-speed service that sets bus-only lanes on the street, from First Avenue to 11th Avenue.

The initiative, which ultimately envisions a partition between the bus lanes and car lanes, has been highlighted as a way to increase capacity to the far West Side as the area develops. It is now illegal for most other vehicles to travel in the bus-only lanes, recently painted red.The state Legislature did not act on a bill pushed by the city that would have allowed cameras to ticket drivers who venture into the lanes illegally, so the enforcement is left to the police.  read more »

"'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." ["Bloomberg's Street Fighter"]

In the late winter, Dan Biederman had a meeting with the city’s Department of Transportation in which the agency’s commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, gave him a heads-up on a project in the works. The agency wanted to close down traffic lanes on Broadway, she told the longtime president of the 34th Street Partnership, with the aim of opening up large swaths of the central corridor to pedestrians and bikes.

“It was one meeting at which we were going to discuss several things, and one was to be a surprise,” Mr. Biederman said. “She said, ‘Nobody knows this; please don’t share this with the press.  read more »

DENVER—Discussion of infrastructure in national presidential campaigns is usually extremely limited, as the decidedly un-sexy topics like highway funding and new tunnels tend not to energize the public as does, say, a war or a controversial social issue.

Things haven't been much different this election, at least not yet, but there are at least a few reasons to think under-funded infrastructure might enter the debate in a more pronounced role, at least if one listens to some of the infrastructure geeks we heard at a roundtable on the topic on Monday, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Institute.

The funding needs nationwide for highways, roads, rails, ports, etc.  read more »

DENVER—Jerry Nadler has been critical of the Bloomberg administration (and other administrations) for its lack of attention paid to managing freight transportation, and last year at a luncheon publicly asked Mayor Bloomberg curtly why his PlaNYC intitative didn't devote discussion to the issue.

But today, one of the few Bloomberg administration officials in Denver, Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, gave praise to Nadler at an infrastructure forum here, saying cities need to pay more attention to freight planning, as truck deliveries are "choking our cities and economic growth."

"One of the things, that's also not been mentioned is freight planning," she said.  read more »

At a conference today organized last week the Regional Planning Association, which describes itself as a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in the NY/NJ/CT metropolitan region, one topic dominated the discussion: the failure of congestion pricing.

Albany was the main focus of the conference participants' ire.

An exasperated Edward Skyler, the deputy mayor for operations, said, "The smallest things require approval from the state. For example, if we want to put traffic cameras up, we can't do that unless we get approval from Albany."  read more »

It’s a pretty crowded room upstairs in the City Council chambers, where testimony about congestion pricing is being given by city Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and the Director of Long-term Planning and Sustainability, Rohit Aggarwala.

In one exchange, Aggarwala told City Councilman Robert Jackson, “[Y]ou don’t have to get 20 percent of the people off the road to have 20 percent reduction in traffic.” She continued, “Sometimes, if you take one or two cars off, it takes a crowded, congested condition and it turns it into traffic that can flow.”  read more »

Streetsblog notes that the city's new transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan [far fight] biked to work today. Which, in keeping with her new boss' plan for the city, would seem to be a sign of how the department is changing its focus from moving vehicles to reducing the number of them.