Janette Sadik-Khan

Photo by Jennifer 8. Lee via nytimes.com

We first heard about the Department of Transportation's Urban Art Program last month when we reported on Brooklyn's much-hyped secret dumpster pools.

When we went to check out that installation, we ran into a D.O.T. staffer who chatted with us about how the program reflects the agency's ongoing re-imagination of public space.

Yesterday, the D.O.T. unveiled the first two exhibits to hit city streets in conjunction with the program's new pARTners initiative, in which artists compete for money to do art installations, like murals and sculpture, in public places. One of them, as The New York Post reports, is a plywood sculpture resembling children's blocks in the East Tremont section of the Bronx. The other, which Jennifer 8. Lee profiles on City Room, consists of two miniature green roofs placed atop bird nesting boxes in Red Hook:

montreal.bixi.com

Bike-sharing got a big boost Thursday morning, August 20, when the New York Post reported that Mayor Michael Bloomberg, once skeptical that bike-sharing systems could work in New York City, shifted gears and said that such a system would be “ideal” here.

Cycling advocates had even more cause for optimism later that day when the city’s transportation department set up a bike-sharing demo in Union Square.

It was the latest in a series of such events to teach New Yorkers about a system, prominent in cities like Paris, Barcelona and Montreal, in which bikes are rented out in short intervals at self-pick-up and drop-off points throughout a city.

At Thursday’s demo in Union Square, which was by Bixi, a Montreal-based bike-share company that recently enlisted Boston and Minneapolis as the first U.S. cities to implement its services, Bixi employees and D.O.T. staffers were teaching curious passersby about how bike-sharing works, and there were about 10 docking stations set up with bikes available for people to ride around the square.

Transportation Commissioner (and local cycling hero) Janette Sadik-Khan happened to be checking out the demo when we stopped by around 4 p.m.

Flickr via Ed Yourdon

The Daily News takes a look at the conflicts that are emerging between cyclists, pedestrians and drivers as New York's bike-riding and general populations continue to expand.

According to the paper, the city's population is expected to increase by a million people by 2030, which, as transportation commissioner and cycling advocate Janette Sadik-Kahn points out, would make cycling more necessary to alleviate the strain on roads and subways.

Indeed, the number of bike commuters in New York is expected to triple by 2020, and to meet this demand, city officials are planning to create 50 new miles of bike lanes a year, reaching 1,800 by 2030. The number of city cyclists jumped by 35 percent between 2007 and 2008 alone, according to the News report.

But while "cyclists see themselves as the healthy, green, cheap future of transportation," they're at odds, sometimes at a deadly cost, with some of those with whom they share the roads:

This morning, City Room broke the news that eight city bus shelters on two 34th Street lines are getting real-time bus arrival indicators so riders can know how many minutes of waiting they have left before the next bus shows up.

The installment is part of a pilot program launched by the M.T.A. and the city's transportation department that will be evaluated over the next six months and potentially expanded to include more stops and routes, according to a press release Mayor Bloomberg's office sent out this afternoon.

From the City Room report:

Tracking systems are commonplace in other major cities like London and Washington, where subway straphangers know exactly when the next train will arrive. (The accuracy is high, even if not 100 percent.) In New York, electronic displays are already installed on the L train.

It is not the first time that New York has tried to provide bus customers with a more precise estimate of when their rides will arrive. In fall 2007, the city tested a similar satellite-based system along First and Second Avenues, which also included digital signs that displayed the number of minutes until the next bus.

That system was plagued by technical errors and was abandoned after just four months. Transit officials said the 34th Street pilot program would avoid the same problems.

The announcement of the program comes a week after Mayor Bloomberg announced a wide-ranging campaign platform to improve the city’s mass transit infrastructure.

The mayor pledged to install some form of tracking technology along half of the city’s bus routes by 2013. His plan also noted that buses along 34th Street will use “mesh network technology, similar to that used to track military vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

There's more on 2nd Ave. Sagas and Streetsblog. The full press release is after the jump:

Flickr via Ed Yourdon

It's official. The long-coming bike access bill, which at one point last month sparked some infighting between city councilmen and comptroller candidates David Yassky (the bill's author) and John Liu (who was criticized for stalling the legislation), has cleared the Council's transportation committee and is headed for a vote by the full City Council tomorrow, July 29.

We've been following the bill, which is designed to encourage bike commuting by requiring commercial building owners to provide bicycle access and storage, for the past few months, and you can find our full coverage here.

In anticipation of the bill's passing in committee, Mr. Yassky, Mr. Liu, D.O.T. Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Transportation Alternatives' Paul Steely White and various other officials and bike/sustainability/public health advocates gathered on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge this morning to celebrate.

Read the release Mr. Yassky's office sent out after the jump:

Photo by Antonia Belt

Back in June, Jocko Weyland, one-third of the trio behind Brooklyn’s much-hyped dumpster swimming pools, attended a dinner event at a Lower East Side arts space on the second night of the New York Bicycle Film Festival. There, Mr. Weyland got to meet a real New York City celebrity—Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn, whose pro-cycling, pro-pedestrian, pro-public-space agenda has made her something of an urbanite rock star.

 “I’m not usually one for fanning out at this late age,” said Mr. Weyland, 42, “but after hearing her speak I was like, ‘I’ve gotta meet this woman!'"

When he finally got his turn, (Mr. Weyland offered the rather hip analogy that trying to talk to Ms. Sadik-Kahn at a bike event is like trying to talk to Thurston Moore at a Sonic Youth concert), he took the opportunity to tell her about the dumpster pool project, which has turned a junky lot near the Gowanus Canal into something of an urban oasis, complete with cabanas, bocce ball, grills and, of course, three fully functional, chlorinated, lifeguard protected, 8- by 22-foot dumpsters-turned-pools.

At the time, the site—the location of which Mr. Weyland and his colleagues, David Belt and Alix Feinkind, at the futuristic SoHo-based urban design firm, Macro Sea, are keeping secret for security reasons (or at least trying to!)—was still under construction. They’ve since been hosting private parties and film screenings. It's safe to say the pools have become the latest cool-whacky thing (as in “Look at this cool whacky thing!”) to infiltrate the New York blogosphere.

But before all that, when Mr. Weyland mentioned the project to Ms. Sadik-Kahn, she was enthusiastic, and pointed him toward her director of strategic communications, Dani Simons, to discuss it further, Mr. Weyland recalled.

Flickr via Ed Yourdon

Since last fall, the City Council has been developing legislation that would require office buildings to let tenants bring their bikes into work. This morning, June 15, the Council’s transportation and consumer affairs committees jointly held a hearing on what has come to be known as the Bicycle Access Bill, and on a corresponding piece of legislation that would create tens of thousands of parking spaces for bikes in some city lots and garages.

Since the idea behind the bill is to encourage more people to bike to work, it’s no surprise that Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn, a fervent—and, some might say, autocratic—bike advocate, worked with Council members on drafting the bill, and showed up to testify about it this morning.

“Given the costs associated with traffic congestion, both economic and environmental, and the fact that transit fares and costs are on the rise, cycling is needed now more than ever,” Ms. Sadik-Kahn said. Bike ridership in New York saw a 45 percent increase between 2006 and 2008, she said, citing a 2007 D.O.T. study that found more than half of the city’s non-cycling commuters don’t ride their bikes to work due to a lack of secure bike parking.

“The benefits are crucial to a more sustainable and vibrant city,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

via The Transit Politic

A few weeks ago, a day before speaking about street policy to Toronto planners and politicians at an April 22 meeting of the Canadian Urban Institute, New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told Canada's National Post that she's interested in bringing street cars back to the Big Apple.

"The streetcar program is something that I’m looking at here," she said in an interview.

In Brooklyn for instance, Ms. Sadik-Khan went on to tell the paper, a new streetcar network could bolster the local economy by encouraging people to shop.

"We threw away our streetcars, and you kept them," she said. "I think it’s a great economic development tool ... We need to rebalance the transportation network and make it as efficient and effective as possible.”