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Janette Sadik-Kahn: Well, on Earth Day 2007, Mayor Bloomberg announced
PlaNYC, which is the city's long-range plan and sustainability initiative for New York.
The idea was, what are we going to be able to do to ensure that we continue to grow and
thrive in the years ahead, and that had some important implications for how we plan and
design our city.
Michael Bloomberg: You know, cities have to lead by example.
We are the problem. We're where the people live. We generate 80 percent of the greenhouse
gases so we can't just sit around and wait for others to do it.
Amanda Burden: We are now at 8,400,000 people and we expect
to grow to 9.1 million people by 2030.
[Kid: Now!}
Janette Sadik-Kahn: I think that New Yorkers are really hungry
for public space and so to be able to provide that, I think, is a huge quality of life improvement
for people who live, work, and play here.
Amanda Burden: So our job is to look comprehensively at land
use in the city, and that means rethinking mobility, providing alternatives to the automobile,
and creating access to everyone for jobs, housing, work through a bike-able, walkable city.
Thomas Farley: The world that we occupy every day is designed,
for the most part -- we're not in the natural world -- but it hasn't always been designed
with human behavior and human health in mind.
David Burney: Actually, designers have some influence on
that, and we'd always been in the business of making things more convenient and less mobile,
you know, and more elevators, and so people had to do less. The health department worked
with us, and said well, you know, we ought to change that thinking. Let's try and get
people moving more.
Thomas Farley: Any change in the design of buildings, or
streets or neighborhoods, which makes it easier for people to simply walk, is going to be
health promoting for the entire population.
Janette Sadik-Kahn: We have actually invested and put down on
the streets of New York in the last three years alone, 250 miles of on-street bike lanes,
and what we've done is taken innovative designs borrowed from other cities and implemented
them on the streets of New York. So, for example, on 8th and 9th Avenue in Manhattan we actually
flipped the traditional bike lane and the parking lane. That investment strategy alone
has paid huge dividends alone just on the safety front. In fact, every single time we
put down a protective bike lane, we see injuries for all users go down some 50 percent.
David Burney: One of the goals of PlaNYC was to provide
recreational open space within 10 minutes of every residence, because it's been pretty
much established that, if people have a small park -- and it doesn't need to be large -- any
open recreational space within 10 minutes, they will use it.
Janette Sadik-Kahn: We have 6,000 miles of streets in New York
City, and I look at our streets as some of the most valuable public space. So Mayor Bloomberg
asked us to see what we could do to improve traffic, and what we did was take a look at
who is using these streets, and how are they using them? And as it turned out, in Times
Square, 90 percent of the pedestrians that were there were only given 10 percent of the
street space, and yet 90 percent of that space was allocated to cars.
Resident: There were a lot of tourists here before too,
but there was a lot more traffic going down, so this is very different feeling. It's very nice.
Janette Sadik-Kahn: So once we flipped that, and actually made
that area safe for pedestrians, we were actually able to improve the flow of traffic. We were
able to create a world-class space for people to enjoy the Great White Way. People don't
go to Times Square to watch the traffic. People go to Times Square to enjoy the incredible
lights, camera, action that's there.
David Burney: Even in the 20 odd years that I've lived here,
it's become a much more walkable city. There are now plazas and street trees, and bike
lanes, and sidewalk cafes that have emerged over the last decades.
Amanda Burden: The five boroughs are very different and we
want to grow in those neighborhoods without changing their character, and the goal of
course is to create complete neighborhoods, neighborhoods of choice where you have jobs,
housing, open space, retail, within a walkable, bike-able distance.
Michael Bloomberg: What works here, in many cases -- not all,
but in many cases -- will work elsewhere. We'd love to have people copy us in the same
ways that we'd love to get their ideas and apply them here if applicable.
Janette Sadik-Kahn: What do we need to do to insure that a 9 million-person
New York City, is better than an 8 million-person New York City is today? It's an iterative
process. We are constantly searching for the great ideas that other cities have, and so
I think it's wonderful that cities are coming together to say, how do we make our cities
as great, and as green, and as sustainable as they can be?
Michael Bloomberg: Sustainability is something that makes fiscal
sense, and it makes sense for our lives going forward, the air we breathe, the water we
drink, the future we leave our kids.
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