She begins by discussing what hasn’t worked and the impediments to better urban street design. I found the book to be at its best when Sadik-Khan’s gets into the details of her own experiences implementing bikeways and pedestrian plazas in New York. Many of these are well known to transportation activists and are even being used in the Twin Cities, but some are new and interesting. She also discusses innovative, non-automotive approaches to urban transportation that have been implemented in various cities around the world. For those familiar with this history (as I am), this part of the book was less interesting. Sadik-Khan begins the book with a discussion of Jane Jacobs versus Robert Moses and the history of New York. I’ll provide a brief summary of the book and a few ways in which Saint Paul could use some of its ideas. It has important lessons for any city but particularly for Saint Paul, which faces numerous budgetary and political obstacles to implementing its bikeways plan. Her book Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution details how she did it. What’s more, relative to the city’s road, bridge and ferry investments, Sadik-Khan did all these bicycle and pedestrian improvements for (as she says) “the budgetary equivalent of change found between the sofa cushions.” They also added the largest bikeshare system in the United States and around sixty new pedestrian plazas, including a huge one in Times Square, the heart of New York City. In six and a half years, she and the city added nearly four hundred miles of bike lanes and protected bikeways. They also did a 175 Million-dollar rehabilitation of the Staten Island Ferry, initiated an asphalt recycling program that saved the city sixty million dollars, began converting the city’s streetlights to LEDs, and managed to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed or flooded significant portions of the city’s infrastructure.īut Sadik-Khan’s main achievement during her tenure was vastly expanding New York City’s bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.
During her tenure, her agency brought all 788 of the city-owned bridges to a state of good repair or initiated multi-year rehabilitation programs on them.
states.īy all accounts, she did an excellent job.
As such, she was responsible for the maintenance and programming of more infrastructure than transportation commissioners in many U.S. She was in charge of most of the streets, roads, bridges, tunnels, and ferries responsible for moving a population of over eight million people. Janette Sadik-Khan served as transportation commissioner for the city of New York during Michael Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor.
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