Most advocates believe that two-way streets function better for pedestrians, cyclists, commerce, and livable streets. In fact all across the country, hundreds of cities are changing one-way streets back to two-way.
But in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the NYC Department of Transportation - without any community input or stated reason - has developed a plan to turn two-way 6th & 7th Avenues into one-way corridors for traffic like 8th Avenue. In this StreetFilm, advocates from each of the NYC Streets Renaissance partners show just how much 8th Avenue differs in its street geometry and car speeds and how it would impact neighborhood life on 6th and 7th Avenues.
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Aaron Naparstek:</i>
[00:04] Look how fast these guys are going. This is… I mean
it’s unbelievable. This is a residential street. This
is one of the most beautiful residential blocks in all of New York City,
and you’ve basically got, you know, vehicles treating it like a highway.
Look how fast this guy’s going. That’s what people do on this
street and basically DOT wants to turn 6<sup>th</sup> Avenue into a
street just like this. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Aaron Naparstek:</i>
[00:30] The Department of Transportation announced that it has a plan
to transform three Avenues that run through Park Slope, Brooklyn.
The plan involves narrowing 4<sup>th</sup> Avenue, which is a big major
six lane thoroughfare. It involves turning 6<sup>th</sup> and
7<sup>th</sup> Avenues into one-way streets, similar to 8<sup>th</sup>
Avenue here. We actually don’t know many details of the plan
because the plan was essentially developed in secret. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Graham Beck:</i> [01:06]
8<sup>th</sup> Avenue behind me is a one-way street, and as you can
tell, the cars move incredibly fast. We’re going to do some
speed gunning to see just how fast they move. 28. 32.
35. 29. 39. 39 miles an hour. 40 miles an hour.
Oh, 44. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Graham Beck:</i> [01:38]
18. 19. 14. 10. 20. 21. 18.
We got a cyclist. 12. 21. 15. 18. 20.
I mean this batch of cars is moving about half the speed of the cars
on 8<sup>th</sup> Avenue. Well on 8<sup>th</sup> Avenue we were
getting speeds in the mid 20’s, 30’s, even the low 40’s.
That one-way street really encourage vehicles to travel faster and it
was even a little scary standing out there with the speed gun.
On 7<sup>th</sup> Avenue our high speed was 25 miles an hour. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Aaron Naparstek:</i>
[02:16] One-way streets like 8<sup>th</sup> Avenue here, they just aren’t…
they just aren’t as friendly to neighbourhood life, you know they’re
not… they’re not as conducive to neighbourhood life. You’ve
got hundreds of cities and towns all across the US right now that are
taking their old 1950’s era one-way multilane highways and they’re
turning them back into two-way streets, because two-way streets people
generally feel are more conducive to neighbourhood life.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Andy Wiley-Schwartz:</i>
[02:41] When you look at people who are using a street like this, there
are people pushing strollers, there are people walking very slowly,
there are older people and younger people walking down 7<sup>th</sup>
Avenue, a commercial street like this. And they’re very comfortable
walking down the street because the traffic is moving more slowly, because
the traffic is going two-way and sort of inching its way down the street.
They’re behaving all in the same way, they’re here to be here.
They’re not here to move through here. Generally one-way streets
are thought to be less favourable for the merchants and for business
environment because you just have less choice. You have less choice
of direction to go in, it’s harder to circulate around to get to a
place where you want to go, the street is engineered for cars to move
quickly through, so they have less of an ability to kind of scan the
environment to find out what’s open, what’s closed.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Aaron Naparstek:</i>
[03:25] This to me is not a neighbourhood street. It’s loud,
you can hear.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">[pause]</font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Aaron Naparstek:</i>
[03:36] We’re not even exactly sure what problem the traffic engineers
are trying to solve, cos if they had asked the community, the community
would have told them that, you know, one-way 8<sup>th</sup> Avenue here
is actually one of the biggest problems in the neighbourhood.
Parks Slope Civic Council did a big transportation forum last year and
that’s what people told them. They said they didn’t like 8<sup>th</sup>
Avenue, they didn’t like the way that traffic moved so fast here.
One of the things that the DOT is going to point to is that there are
fewer pedestrian injuries and fatalities on 8<sup>th</sup> Avenue than
there are on 7<sup>th</sup>. You know maybe it just means that
this is a less pleasant place to walk, a place where people don’t
want to walk with their kids.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [04:19]
We just had a little boy, a four year old killed on 3<sup>rd</sup> Avenue
and Baltic Street, run over in the crosswalk with the light giving him
the right-of-way, and DOT was supposed to finish doing traffic calming
improvements on 3<sup>rd</sup> Avenue by the end of fiscal year 2006,
Commissioner Iris Weinshall said it herself. Well it’s 2007
and not only is the work not done, but it hasn’t even been started.
There are a lot of other pedestrian safety issues in the neighbourhood
that people really want the city to address. And the city isn’t
doing it and they’re coming in here and they’re saying that this
one-way street thing is all being done for pedestrian safety.
Well, you know, we don’t buy it. It’s not believable.
It’s not credible. </font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">[music]</font> <br></p>
http://transcriptdivas.ca/transcription-canada/
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