After Gutenberg

Speaking of green space in a city that can help protect residents from strokes and heart disease, and can reduce health inequalities related to income and social deprivation, Toronto Treehugger Lloyd Alter relays information about the “Streets are for People” petition.

As this blog previously mentioned, having a goal of more walkable communities is held to be an example of smart growth, which, notes Lloyd Alter, “covers everything from physically separated bike lanes to reclaiming public space for people, through freeing up bus lanes for faster mass transit, and even the psychology of the street – how cues from the environment can help create cultural shift in the city’s drivers.”

Of course, the AG spin cycle was set for an emphasis on electric propulsion for public transit with the intermodal transit setting switched to on. Roger, Rabbit.

The Treehugger post is more in the spirit of take back the street advocacy of the original inspiration: Bogota’s Ciclovia. Similar events in the United States have included Portland’s Sunday Parkways and New York City’s Summer Streets, and San Francisco’s Sunday Streets, a Ciclovia-style event where streets are closed to cars. It’s basically a big outdoor party attended by StreetFilms.

Janette Sadik-Khan is the current Commissioner of the Department of Transportation in New York City. Besides deserving of “a huge amount of credit” for success of the Ciclovia inspired, Summer Streets program, along with Danish Architect/Planner Jan Gehl, she is co-author of “World Class Streets” (PDF ), which suggests that “a vastly disproportionate amount of space is allocated to parking cars than to public seating spaces.”

The following video by StreetFilms is a conversation between The Open Planning Project’s Executive Director, Mark Gorton, and Commissioner Sadik-Khan on the topic of World Class Streets.