New York magazine last week ran a long profile of Janette Sadik-Kahn, NYC's transportation commissioner and the lead agent in trying to tame the city's streets.
Between her plans for Broadway and her smaller interventions scattered across the city, Sadik-Khan has unwittingly touched off New York's latest culture war, a street fight of sorts. To her supporters, she is a heroic figure of vision and inspiration--the woman who tamed the automobile and made the city safe for bicyclists. To her opponents, she's the latest in an extensive line of effete, out-of-touch liberals: the hipster bureaucrat. All parties would agree she's an unusual Transportation commissioner, a title that may call to mind a paunchy, mustachioed male with a penchant for dirty jokes. Sadik-Khan is a stylish, young-looking 49-year-old whose skirts don't always pass her knees. ("I am a gay man, but I appreciate a sexy-looking woman!" says her friend the former restaurateur Florent Morellet.)
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Sadik-Khan's approach to traffic management is not as extreme as it may first appear. Many transportation experts now recognize that adding more lanes to a traffic-clogged road is a poor long-term solution for gridlock, because over time more lanes just attract more cars. (This, in a nutshell, is why cities with the most highways tend to have the most traffic.) Sadik-Khan's Broadway plan, which reduces lanes and improves streetlight timing, reflects this new evolution of traffic theory. Eliminating the three-way intersection at 34th Street, for example, means that cars on that street and on Sixth Avenue will no longer have to sit through green lights on Broadway; the DOT predicts that this will shorten wait times by nearly a third. Southbound drivers on Seventh Avenue should expect a 17 percent improvement in travel time between 59th Street and 23rd Street. Northbound motorists driving up Sixth Avenue can supposedly look forward to a 37 percent improvement.
But even though the Broadway plan has been pitched as a way to ameliorate traffic, it's apparent when touring Times Square with Sadik-Khan that the planning problem that most animates her is not car congestion but people congestion. "This is a plan to pedestrianize a street, not to mitigate traffic," says someone who has discussed it with DOT officials. "This was a plan about greening New York, outdoor space, and seating. It was almost a happy accident that they found that traffic could be mitigated."
Update: Chris Swope's take on the "The Great White Right of Way"
