Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
		Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

Like a modern-day Jane Jacobs, Janette Sadik-Khan transformed New York City's streets to make room for pedestrians, bikers, buses, and green spaces. Describing the battles she fought to enact change, Streetfight imparts wisdom and practical advice that other cities can follow to make their own streets safer and more vibrant. 

As New York City’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed the seemingly impossible and transformed the streets of one of the world’s greatest, toughest cities into dynamic spaces safe for pedestrians and bikers. Her approach was dramatic and effective: Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, but it also lessened congestion and increased foot traffic, which improved the bottom line of businesses. Real-life experience confirmed that if you know how to read the street, you can make it function better by not totally reconstructing it but by reallocating the space that’s already there.
     Breaking the street into its component parts, Streetfight demonstrates, with step-by-step visuals, how to rewrite the underlying “source code” of a street, with pointers on how to add protected bike paths, improve crosswalk space, and provide visual cues to reduce speeding. Achieving such a radical overhaul wasn’t easy, and Streetfight pulls back the curtain on the battles Sadik-Khan won to make her approach work. She includes examples of how this new way to read the streets has already made its way around the world, from pocket parks in Mexico City and Los Angeles to more pedestrian-friendly streets in Auckland and Buenos Aires, and innovative bike-lane designs and plazas in Austin, Indianapolis, and San Francisco. Many are inspired by the changes taking place in New York City and are based on the same techniques. Streetfight deconstructs, reassembles, and reinvents the street, inviting readers to see it in ways they never imagined.

网友对Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution的评论

The book lives up to its title. This book should be distributed to every civic leader in a community with > 100,000 people to sensitize them to current thinking. Provides many of the counter-arguments used by inertial (politicians/engineers), fearful (politicians/engineers) and angry (drivers) opposition to livable streetscapes. Easily the best book on this subject ever written, familiar and astute as the author is in the ways and interfaces between end-users, planners, designers, funding sources, election cycles and other political shenanigans. What a wonderful team she and Mr. Bloomberg made. I love the quote cited early in the book, "To plan is human, to implement, divine." Advocates of change should closely read this book to learn what hidden obstacles lay in their path and that are often kept concealed by city administrators to keep things in the indefinite "planning" phase so many municipalities find themselves in. One of the most profound insights is that waiting to build deep consensus is almost always going to result in retaining the status quo. Politicians disinclined to action or any thing that costs a dime will, as a result, advocate cost free and wheel-spinning studies. The author was fortunate in having a strong, forward-thinking mayor and deputy mayor. This makes many of the actions described less-applicable to the rest of us facing either lukewarm support or downright opposition from leadership (surely the most common situation in the US). The book gives hope, though, and provides enough nuts-and-bolts information to be applicable to any community..., acceptance of this vision is remote in red-state and purple america, but if it can be done in NYC...,

Janette Sadik Kahn was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Transportation Commissioner between 2006 and the end of Bloomberg's term in 2013. She was best known for throwing out the accepted engineering manuals, the "Manual of Traffic Control Devices" and the "Policy on the Geometric Design of Streets and Highways," (the Greenbook) both developed over the decades for rural highways. She also helped form the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) as an alternative to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). AASHTO is the publisher of the Greenback, and as the name suggests, is comprised of state department of of highway officials. The system was structured that way in 1921: the feds tell the state DOTs what to do, and the states tell the cities what to do. The system was predicated on the assumption that city administrations were (and are) too incompetent and corrupt to run their own affairs. On the other hand, most state DOTs carry an implicit (and often explicit) bias: from a transport point of view, cities are irrational. They should go away. The job of the transportation planner and engineer to assist in that process. Suburbs are okay, but only a half-way measure. Total dispersal is the goal.

The book is mostly a memoir, and a pretty good one. It's also a fairly good introduction to the philosophy behind the two NACTO guides, for bikes and for livable streets. My biggest complaint are the selective omissions. Khan, in the introduction, corrects a Bloomberg aide who describes the position as "traffic commissioner." "I'm the transportation commissioner," she corrects. Well, not so fast. At this time, NYC was embarking on the biggest transit project since BART, 45 years ago: the 2nd Avenue Subway Line. Not a word about it. Why? "Transportation Commissioner" doesn't run transit in NYC. Not surprising: not even Robert Moses was bold enough to take on NY Transit. And that still leaves out PATH, Long Island RR and the suburban bus lines (16?). Not mentioned is the fact that NY Transit is the largest bus system in North America without a single bike-on-bus rack. That's why she only talks about bus rapid transit: her definition of BRT is limited to the modified rights-of-way, not the bus operations. Go talk to transit about that.

Similarly, her much heralded "pocket parks" in odd-shaped intersection triangles were found through an inventory of sites to store snowstorm salt. There were some high profile exceptions (Times Square, the Flatiron Bldg.) but most were in old industrial/warehouse neighborhoods. Her "blitz 'em overnight" tactics worked because the building occupants were tenants, not owners, and didn't really care, except for the lost parking, which was often mitigated. When the condo boys move in, those odd lots will disappear or become walled off plazas.

If you are mostly interested in the bikey stuff, great. But if you want some perspective, I highly recommend a 1965 book by Henry Barnes called "The Man With Red and Greens Eyes." A small-town engineer from the sticks who works his way up to public works director in Denver gets the attention of the New York City Mayor in 1959, and is hired as traffic director to everyone's surprise: "who he?" He discovers a traffic nightmare. Resisting the calls of the daily newspapers to do something drastic, Barnes implements a series of odd-ball, cutting edge improvement, we would today call TSM. He makes every east-west street one way. He allows left turns only on signals. He installs the "Barns Dance," an all-red traffic signal phase just for pedestrians, letting them even cross diagonally. Oh, and the biggest single thing: "The first thing I did is get rid of those Godawful trolley buses and replace them with modern diesel buses." The more things change, the more they stay the same. Sorta.

This book documents the author's efforts to transform New York City's Streets to provide for multimodal designs that accommodate pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders. It is an interesting story that relates to transportation engineering, public outreach, and public policy and is recommended for anyone interested in the planning and design of urban streets. My only negative comment is that the author's individual biases sometimes appear in the narrative and are not supported by facts. I consider some of the negative comments regarding the need for auto travel and the role of traffic engineers in the urban planning process to be misleading.

I just finished this book and recommend it to anyone interested in infrastructure and the way we live in cities. Though there is plenty of nuts and bolts detail that will appeal to urban planners and designers, there is great information for community activists too. The book covers everything from bike lanes and pocket parks to rapid bus systems and bridge maintenance, and it all comes in a highly readable package. I wouldn't call it a "how to" because every city is different and solutions need to be tailored for specific challenges and opportunities. But, it is a great primer for the language of urban transportation and to learn what is possible.

喜欢Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution请与您的朋友分享,由于版权原因，读书人网不提供图书下载服务

查看更多 下一篇