Urban

Transportation Policies
Urban Design
May 31, 2013
A Streetcorner Serenade for the Public

Plaza
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
In Brooklyn, the No. 3 subway line ends at New Lots Avenue, where passengers descend from
the elevated tracks to what used to be a nasty intersection, trafficked by prostitutes, drug
dealers — “You name it,” as Eddie Di Benedetto, the owner of Caterina’s Pizzeria, put it the
other day. Not long ago, a coalition of local merchants and community leaders turned to the
New York City Department of Transportation, which runs a program to make traffic circles,
triangles and streets into pedestrian plazas.
The department brought in some potted trees and chairs, closed off a short street and voilà,
what had been a problem became a boon. Since the plaza opened last summer, crime has
plummeted, Mr. Di Benedetto told me, crediting the local police precinct. He heads the New
Lots Avenue Triangle Merchants Association.
“People use the place all the time now, meaning the area is watched and safe,” he said. “I’ve
had my pizzeria since 1971, so I can tell you, this is a renaissance.”
Cities need public spaces like plazas. For years they have mostly been planned from the top
down. In New York, zoning laws have carved many of these spaces from commercial
developments, which have been given bonuses to include them. Mayor Bloomberg is pushing a
new proposal to rezone east Midtown, near Grand Central, that is a variation on this same old
trickle-down theme.
But fresh thinking has focused on cheap, quick, temporary and D.I.Y.-style approaches to
creating public space — among these, curbside “parklets” in San Francisco and a communal
farm on what had been a derelict parcel in the middle of Phoenix. “Small steps, big changes,”
as Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York City Department of Transportation commissioner,
described the logic of plazas like that at New Lots.
And guess what? A beer garden made out of freight containers on an empty plot turns out to
be a lot more popular and better for a city than a sad corporate atrium with a few cafe tables
and a long list of don’ts on the wall.
As more and more educated Americans, especially younger ones, are looking to move
downtown, seeking alternatives to suburbs and cars, they’re reframing the demand for public
space. They want elbow room and creative sites, cooked up by the community or, like the plaza
program, developed from a democratic mix of top-down and bottom-up governance.
The other day I visited Michael Bierut, whose design firm, Pentagram, has drawn the maps
that accompany the new bike-share program. Pentagram’s New York office faces Madison
Square Park. Mr. Bierut remembered when the plaza program started to take over the
pedestrian-unfriendly territory where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue, just next to the park.
Traffic patterns improved, but he still thought the city was nuts to create plazas from concrete
islands marooned between busy boulevards when there was already, right there, one of the
most gorgeous parks in the city.
“Was I wrong,” he said, laughing.
The plazas outside his building are mobbed on warm days, with people even toting Shake
Shack burgers out of the park to sit next to all the traffic — partly for the view (the Flatiron
building one way, the Empire State Building the other) but also for the reason people gravitate
to Trafalgar Square in London or the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy.
To be in the middle of things.
“It’s why we congregate near the kitchen at a dinner party instead of in the living room,” said
Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who directs the Department of Transportation’s plaza program. “That’s
where you see people coming and going to the fridge to grab a beer and watch stuff happen.”
Nationwide, people moving downtown want to be in on the mix, too; they want pedestrian-
friendly streets, parks and plazas. And smart cities are responding, like Dallas, whose Klyde
Warren Park opened downtown last year atop the Woodall Rodgers Freeway, where it
burrows for a few merciful blocks below ground. The place was buzzing when I passed by one
recent weekend. In Phoenix, where nearly half of all city lots are vacant, the mayor, Greg
Stanton, lately chose an empty 15-acre parcel — an eyesore in the heart of town — for an urban
park and garden where nearby residents, mostly immigrants, can grow vegetables, for their
own tables or to sell at local farmers’ markets.
And in San Francisco, the city government has been renting out curbside parking spaces, long
term, on the condition they be turned into parklets. Most involve little more than benches and
shrubs. But the best have become elaborate interventions, with landscaping, platforms, even
mini-mini-golf. I spent a morning watching kids play and adults sunbathe in a parklet outside
Fourbarrel Coffee on Valencia Street. Los Angeles and Philadelphia, among others, have
recently started parklet programs. New York is trying it out, too.
In the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, I also came across a project called Proxy,
which recovers the land left behind where a highway had been. After the Central Freeway was
taken down, residents petitioned the mayor to do something with a few of the vacant lots it
left behind. Douglas Burnham, a local architect who runs the firm Envelope A+D, proposed
Proxy: a shifting, temporary campus of modified shipping containers hosting retailers, art
galleries and cafes.
Crowds flock to hang out at the Suppenkuche’s Biergarten, a scene at night. The architecture is
simple. The vibe is friendly. The changing layout conforms to a neighborhood in flux. Local
merchants feared Proxy would steal customers away. Instead, it has brought people to the
neighborhood.
Back east, retailers in Times Square saw a similar influx after the plaza program closed
Broadway to cars. Carmageddon didn’t happen; business boomed. Commercial rents in Times
Square have doubled during the last year alone.
All these New York plaza projects haven’t come up roses. Neighborhoods mostly request
plazas with an agreement to look after them; poorer communities, without Business
Improvement Districts, have sometimes had trouble with the maintenance.
To aid them, Ms. Sadik-Khan said, the Transportation Department is working with the
Horticultural Society of New York and the nonprofit ACE Programs for the Homeless to
develop a jobs initiative in which ex-convicts and homeless people provide horticultural
services and general upkeep. Communities pay on a sliding scale for the help. It remains to be
seen if it delivers.
The process of construction is that the department first lays out the plazas (Pearl Street in the
Dumbo area of Brooklyn, for example) with temporary materials. Then the city’s Department
of Design and Construction takes over, as do outside architects, including well-known and
young firms like Snohetta (Times Square), RBA GROUP and DSGN AGNC (Corona, Queens) to
consult with local representatives on the final results.
Not surprisingly, bottom-up design usually works better than trickle-down. That east
Midtown rezoning plan I mentioned, which the Bloomberg administration is trying to ram
through the City Council before the mayor’s term expires, would be a bonanza for commercial
developers who want to erect giant office towers on Park Avenue and around Grand Central
Station. But even as it portends to radically reshape the neighborhood, it treats the public
realm (mass transit as well) as an afterthought.
There’s a half-baked idea to transform some of Vanderbilt Avenue into a pedestrian street and
a plan for public space being drawn up with consultants. In return for the right to build extra
big buildings, developers would contribute to a city-run fund that, someday, might act on that
plan. It remains a backward approach to addressing public needs.
We’ve seen what happens the old way. During the early 1960s, zoning codes in New York
created privately owned public spaces, or POPS. There are now more than 500 of these plazas,
arcades and atriums — spaces that often nobody wanted, least of all the developers who built
them in exchange for gaining millions of extra square feet and other valuable zoning
concessions.
I spent a day last month touring sites with Jerold Kayden, an urban planner and Harvard
professor. The City Planning Commission has tried in recent years to improve standards and
upgrade certain locations, working with outsiders in some cases. Mr. Kayden took me to what
had been an especially grim atrium near 62nd Street and Broadway that, with Lincoln Center’s
patronage, has been turned into the David Rubenstein Atrium, expertly redesigned by Tod
Williams and Billie Tsien. There are regular concerts and cafe tables next to gadget-charging
outlets. I chatted with four women running a small dance company in Inwood who meet there
every week for the usual reason: to feel in the middle of things, they said.
These public spaces more or less operate on the honor system, so owners take advantage. At
Trump Tower, public benches that the building is obliged to provide have been replaced by a
sales counter hawking Trump merchandise, and there was no furniture, though promised, on
the public terraces. J. P. Morgan Chase, which owns 383 Madison Avenue, has blocked off a
lobby that is a public through-space, claiming security concerns. Guards shooed me out the
door when I asked whether the building’s owners had obtained permission from the city.
Since Occupy Wall Street took over Zuccotti Park, another POPS, owners have drawn up ever
more restrictive lists of rules. At 120 Park Avenue, across from Grand Central (years ago the
Whitney Museum had a branch there; now it’s desolate), a guard stopped me from taking a
photograph; at 590 Madison Avenue, formerly the IBM Building, the nicest of the indoor sites,
you can’t play cards.
New Yorkers deserve better, and have paid for it. As with the rest of the public realm, the
priority ought to be public service. Ms. Sadik-Khan is right: Improving public space doesn’t
always take much. It’s good for business. It’s good for people.
It’s common sense.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 2, 2013

Two captions this weekend with an article about D.I.Y.-style public spaces describe incorrectly the
Pearl Street Triangle shown in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The photograph of a parking lot shows what the
triangle used to look like — not its current state. And a photo illustration shows the triangle’s
renovations;; Pearl Street Triangle is not awaiting renovation.
Amman Journal - Sidewalks, and an Identity, Sprout in Jordan’s Capital - NYTimes.com 2/24/10 8:05 AM
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February 24, 2010
AMMAN JOURNAL
Sidewalks, and an Identity, Sprout in Jordan’s Capital

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
AMMAN, Jordan — It might be too much to call it a miracle, but the government of this ancient
metropolis that rolls out over seven sun-burned hills has managed something that until now
seemed impossible. It built sidewalks that are easy to walk on.
But wait, Amman has achieved something else, too! It has put in park benches. And not just in
parks, but right there, on those new, flat sidewalks that do not end suddenly, for no apparent
reason. Sidewalks and benches are easy to dismiss as discretionary conveniences, unnecessary
urban flourishes. That is especially true considering how people here need so much — better jobs,
better schools and better health care.
But to talk to those behind the sidewalks and the benches is to see these ubiquitous objects as
powerful tools of social planning, tearing down walls between rich and poor, helping a city bereft
of an identity develop a sense of place and ownership.
“I think it made people a little happier,” said Omar al-Deeb, 68, who grew up in the less wealthy
East Amman side of the city.
Mr. Deeb sells shoes and sandals in a tightly packed neighborhood where shops and homes,
mosques and churches all cling to the sides of a hill, linked by narrow, winding streets. His
workplace is a plastic chair on the corner of Al Taj Street and Bader Street, right next to one of
the city’s latest innovations, a pedestrian walkway with trees and benches. A street once clogged
with cars is now a place where families from a side of town that often felt ignored by the
government have benches to sit on.
“Everybody likes it,” said Ahmed Sosa, 38, owner of a nut shop just off the new square that
opened this month.
These are not one-time projects, a few benches here and there, but part of a master plan for
Amman, an attempt to bring order to a city with roots that date from 8500 B.C. and whose
modern incarnation hosts 2.5 million residents, 3 million in the summer. Amman’s master plan
has a slogan — “A livable city is an organized city, with a soul” — a subtle way of describing what
Amman does not want to be, which is Dubai.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/world/middleeast/24amman.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print Page 1 of 3
Amman does not want to be, which is Dubai.
“We were facing Dubaification,” said Gerry Post, a Canadian who is president and founder of the
Amman Institute for Urban Development, a team of mostly Jordanian architects, urban planners,
designers and thinkers created by Mayor Omar Maani to help restore, rather than reinvent,
Amman.
When Mr. Maani was appointed four years ago, there were plans to build 16 glass and steel
towers along a main road of Amman, towers that would block out the vista of white houses
carpeting the hills. The tallest was to be 80 stories. The towers would have strained the
infrastructure, but more troublesome to the urban planners, they would have created islands of
privilege for the very rich.
The projects were relocated to three low points around the city, preserving the skyline and a sense
of community, along with the much needed investment.
“I don’t want two cities in one,” said Rami F. Daher, the architect and urban reinventor behind
some of the city’s most subtle and yet most audacious projects.
In Mr. Daher’s world, benches matter, as do sidewalks.
“Most important of all is social diversity and justice,” Mr. Daher said, sounding more like a
political activist than a planner.
Jordan’s political system makes change difficult. Like many others in the Arab world, it offers a
veneer of democracy that in the end yields to one central power, in this case the monarchy. The
urban planners see a chance to empower citizens by changing the spaces around them, but by
first asking how they want to live. They do surveys, and Mr. Post has trained staff to hold
community meetings.
“What’s lacking in the city is a sense of citizenship,” Mr. Post said. “We have to create a sense of
citizenship as well as stewardship.”
Jordan has grown with each wave of immigrants — Circassians, Armenians, Lebanese and
Palestinians. Later, Jordanians who lived in smaller villages and cities moved to Amman, helping
it develop into an economic, political and cultural center. But no matter how many generations
later, people rarely identify as being from Amman, many people here said. Developing an urban
identity and altering deeply held customs are difficult tasks.
Already, though, there have been some small victories.
“If you’re a girl and you’re just hanging out on a regular street or sitting on a sidewalk, it’s
considered inappropriate,” said Reem al-Hambali, 20, as she sat in the bright winter sun along
considered inappropriate,” said Reem al-Hambali, 20, as she sat in the bright winter sun along
the first pedestrian plaza built here. “Everyone will look at you and ask, ‘Why is this girl sitting
there?’ But here it’s O.K. We can sit here and it’s normal.”
But the experience of Wakalat Street also demonstrates the pitfalls of change. The street had been
the exclusive realm of wealthy shoppers from west Amman, and shopkeepers were not interested
in building a more egalitarian space. They wanted people with credit cards.
Those shop owners did not care to have a lot of young people of modest means hanging around.
It intimidated their customers, they said. So they complained, and the city promptly removed
most of the benches.
Another major project was a nearly mile-long stretch of road on the eastern edge of west Amman
that is now called Rainbow Street. It was quietly on its way to becoming an exclusive, inner-city
community for the rich and privileged.
That did not happen.
The city would not let Mr. Daher close the street to traffic so he had it paved with cobblestones, to
slow the traffic, soften the view and fill the air with the rumble of traffic passing over the bumpy
pavement. But most of all, Mr. Daher said, the sidewalks were flattened for walking.
There were problems. The British Council, which has been on that road for years, refused to lower
a massive wall, to protect its prisonlike security facade. But a local school did lower its walls.
Stores were set back to allow pedestrians to pass, and to make room for benches.
People like Rainbow Street. They mingle with Ammanis from other parts of the city. Some
residents have complained about the foot traffic, and others have complained that prices and
rents have gone up. But Rainbow Street appears reborn.
“It’s a change for us, but it’s a good change,” said Samar al-Sarayreh, 17, as she sat with her sister
on a scenic overlook of the city. “When I come here now, there are fewer cars and there is a place
to sit down and relax outside the house. It’s a public place for everyone.”
Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
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December 22, 2006 / 55(SUP02);34-38
Urban Planning and Public Health at CDC

Chris S. Kochtitzky, MSP,1 H. Frumkin, MD, DrPH,2 R. Rodriguez, MA,2 A. L. Dannenberg, MD,2 J.
Rayman, MPH,2 K. Rose, MPA,2 R. Gillig, MCP,2 T. Kanter, MURP3
1 Office of the Director, Coordinating Center for Environmental Health and Injury Prevention; 2 National
Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry; 3 National Center on
Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities
Corresponding author: Chris S. Kochtitzky, MSP, Office of the Director, Coordinating Center for Environmental Health and
Injury Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, N.E., MS E-28, Atlanta, GA 30333. Telephone: 404-498-0668; Fax: 404-498-0083; E-
mail: csk3@cdc.gov.
Introduction
Urban planning, also called city and regional planning, is a multidisciplinary field in which professionals
work to improve the welfare of persons and communities by creating more convenient, equitable, healthful,
efficient, and attractive places now and for the future. The centerpiece of urban planning activities is a
"master plan," which can take many forms, including comprehensive plans, neighborhood plans,
community action plans, regulatory and incentive strategies, economic development plans, and disaster
preparedness plans (1). Traditionally, these plans include assessing and planning for community needs in
some or all of the following areas: transportation, housing, commercial/office buildings, natural resource
utilization, environmental protection, and health-care infrastructure.
Urban planning and public health share common missions and perspectives. Both aim to improve human
well-being, emphasize needs assessment and service delivery, manage complex social systems, focus at the
population level, and rely on community-based participatory methods. Both fields focus on the needs of
vulnerable populations. Throughout their development, both fields have broadened their perspectives.
Initially, public health most often used a biomedical model (examining normal/abnormal functioning of the
human organism), and urban planning often relied on a geographic model (analysis of human needs or
interactions in a spatial context). However, both fields have expanded their tools and perspectives, in part
because of the influence of the other.
Urban planning and public health have been intertwined for most of their histories. In 1854, British
physician John Snow used geographic mapping of an outbreak of cholera in London to identify a public
water pump as the outbreak's source. Geographic analysis is a key planning tool shared by urban planning
and public health. In the mid-1800s, planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted bridged the gap between the
fields by advancing the concept that community design contributes to physical and mental health; serving
as President Lincoln's U.S. Sanitary Commission Secretary (2); and designing hundreds of places,
including New York's Central Park. By 1872, the disciplines were so aligned that two of the seven
founders of the American Public Health Association were urban designers (an architect and a housing
specialist) (3). In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court, in validating zoning and land-use law as a legal
government authority in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, cited the protection of public health as part of
its justification (4,5). Other connections have included 1) pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs, who during the
1960s, called for community design that offered safe and convenient options for walking, biking, and
impromptu social interaction; and 2) the Healthy Cities movement, which began in Europe and the United
States during the 1980s and now includes projects in approximately 1,000 cities that in various ways
highlight the role of health as much more than the presence of medical care (6).
Contributions of Urban Planning to Public Health

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the synergies between urban planning and public health were
evident in at least three areas: creation of green space to promote physical activity, social integration, and
better mental health; prevention of infectious diseases through community infrastructure, such as drinking
water and sewage systems; and protection of persons from hazardous industrial exposures and injury risks
through land-use and zoning ordinances. During the middle of the 20th century, the disciplines drifted
apart, to a certain extent because of their success in limiting health and safety risks caused by inappropriate
mixing of land uses.
The disciplines recently have begun to reintegrate. During the last 20 years, shared concerns have included
transportation planning to improve air quality, encourage physical activity, prevent injuries, and promote
wellness. In addition, some original crossover ideas, such as the potential for parks and recreational
facilities to contribute to physical activity and mental health, have reemerged. Relatively recently, urban
planning has focused on the effects of community design on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions to
affect the growing public health concern of climate change. Finally, emergency preparedness (e.g.,
community infrastructure assurance, evacuation planning) and access to health care (e.g., assurance of
accessibility and adequacy of facilities) are topics important to both disciplines.
Recent contributions to the public health knowledge-base by urban planners and other community
designers, such as architects and engineers, are important. A recent tabulation of the 50 most-read/most-
cited articles within the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) (as of October 1, 2006) included topics
of interest to both urban planning and public health professionals, such as social capital, neighborhood-
level effects on health, housing and health, and clustering of fast-food establishments around schools (7).
Examples of cross-discipline collaborations (Table 1) from publications such as JAMA and AJPH address
such diverse CDC program areas as aging studies, air pollution and respiratory diseases, disability and
health, unintentional injury, and nutrition and physical activity.
As individual collaborations have increased, calls for broad profession-level integrations also have
increased (Table 2). Thus far, CDC has employed only a few urban planners, either temporarily or
permanently. Urban planners, for instance, have worked within the ATSDR Policy Office, Division of
Health Assessment and Consultation, and Office of Tribal Affairs; within the National Center for
Environmental Health Policy Office and Division of Emergency and Environmental Health Services;
within the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities Division of Human
Development and Disability; and within the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health
Promotion Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity. Although these urban planners have conducted
some research, their primary role has been to bridge the broader urban planning, academic, and practitioner
worlds.
Specific Findings, Activities, and Contributions

The interdependence of urban planning and public health in both research and intervention activities is
evident in many areas. For example, to increase physical activity, persons need safe and accessible areas;
development of these areas can be aided by determining the environmental barriers and facilitators that
affect activity levels; designing, constructing, and maintaining community environments to help ensure
safety and accessibility; and developing programs to encourage people to use improved community
environments to increase their activity levels. Without the contributions of both disciplines, the odds of
substantial increases in community physical activity decrease considerably.
Pedestrian and bicycle safety programs also illustrate the interdependence of public health and urban
planning. Transportation planners are charged with creating streets and intersections on which all modes of
transportation can safely coexist. However, considerable morbidity and mortality occur annually because of
injuries related to interactions between motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians, indicating that many
communities have failed to truly balance choices of transportation modes.
Examples of recent successful cross-discipline activities include chronic disease prevention, injury
prevention, health promotion for older adults and persons with disabilities, and air- and water-quality
assurance. Reviews of research studies conducted by cross-disciplinary teams on behalf of the Guide to
Community Preventive Services have documented that street-scale urban design and land-use policies affect
levels of physical activity and result in recommendations for wider implementation of such policies (8).
Similarly, research has documented the potential for design choices to reduce both unintentional (9,10) and
intentional (11,12) injuries.
Research has described some of the impacts of physical environments on the health and quality of life of
persons with disabilities (13), residents of low-income housing projects (14), and older adults (15). In
environmental health, data analysis of waterborne-disease outbreaks and extreme weather events indicates
potential interaction between land-use patterns and risk for waterborne diseases (16). In an equally
important area of environmental health---air quality and respiratory health---CDC staff used the unique
"natural experiment" of the Atlanta Olympics to document a 42% decrease in acute asthma events among
children that were attributable to reductions in automobile traffic and associated air pollution (17). Other
impacts of the interdependence of urban planning and public health also have been demonstrated (Table 3).
Urban planning in particular and the array of community design professions in general historically have
played major roles in public health, and public health disciplines have played major roles in urban planning.
In recent years, as reintegration between the two professions has accelerated, academia has responded by
offering cross-cutting courses and, in at least five schools, joint graduate degrees in urban planning and
public health. At the federal level, CDC leadership selected seven "place-related" goals reflecting this
reintegration (18), many of which are impacted by urban planning. CDC scientifically and programatically
addresses all factors associated with the interaction between people and their natural and human-made
environments and promotes design and construction of places that improve both physical and social
environments (http://www.cdc.gov/healthyplaces). Providing safe and healthy places in which to live,
work, and play is more likely to succeed if urban planning and public health work together. Future
integration of and collaborations between the disciplines can serve as a cornerstone for the immediate and
long-term success of the Healthy Places goals (19). A long-term blending of the responsibilities, tools, and
eventually perspectives of public health and urban planning can result in many positive outcomes,
including the following:
Public health explicitly recognizing the importance of place-based approaches and the leverage these
provide for addressing public health opportunities and threats.
Public health and urban planning professionals increasingly drawing on tools and processes
developed by the other field. Key examples are geographic information systems (20); health impact
assessment (21); and community assessment tools, such as the Protocol for Assessing Community
Excellence in Environmental Health (22).
Public health professionals increasingly engaging in the urban planning arena, participating in zoning
decisions and serving on urban planning boards, and incorporating health into urban planning
decision-making.
Urban planning professionals increasingly engaging in the public health arena, participating in
campaigns promoting physical activity and pedestrian injury prevention and serving on boards of
health, and incorporating design into public health decision-making.
This renewed integration is essential in restoring and enhancing the health and vitality of the nation's places
and people.
References
1. American Planning Association. Available at http://www.planning.org.
2. Jackson RJ. What Olmsted knew. Western City 2001;(March):12--15.
3. Glasser J. Back to the future [transcript]. Presented at Global public health: issues and strategies for
Hawai'i and the Pacific, June 12--13 2002. Available at
http://www.hawaii.edu/global/projects_activities/Past/GlasserXscript2.pdf.
4. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 US 11 (1905).
5. Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 US 365 (1926).
6. International Healthy Cities Foundation. Available at http://www.healthycities.org/overview.html.
7. American Journal of Public Health. Articles in demand. Available at http://www.ajph.org.
8. CDC. Guide to community preventive services. Physical activity. Available at
http://www.thecommunityguide.org/pa.
9. Retting RA, Ferguson SA, McCartt AT. A review of evidence-based traffic engineering measures
designed to reduce pedestrian--motor vehicle crashes. Am J Public Health 2003;93:1456--63.
10. Elvik R. Area-wide urban traffic calming schemes: a meta-analysis of safety effects. Accid Anal
Prev 2001;33:327--36.
11. Carter SP, Carter SL, Dannenberg AL. Zoning out crime and improving community health in
Sarasota, Florida: "Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design." Am J Public Health
2003;93:1442--5.
12. Casteel C, Peek-Asa C. Effectiveness of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED)
in reducing robberies [review]. Am J Prev Med 2000;18(4 Suppl):99--115.
13. Whiteneck GG, Gerhart KA, Cusick CP. Identifying environmental factors that influence the
outcomes of people with traumatic brain injury. J Head Trauma Rehabil 2004;19:191--204.
14. Kuo FE, Sullivan WC. Aggression and violence in the inner city: effects of environment via mental
fatigue. Environment and Behavior 2001;33:543--71.
15. Koepsell T, McCloskey L, Wolf M, et al. Crosswalk markings and the risk of pedestrian--motor
vehicle collisions in older pedestrians. JAMA 2002;288:2136--43.
16. Curriero FC, Patz JA, Rose JB, Allele S. The association between extreme precipitation and
waterborne disease outbreaks in the United States, 1948--1994. Am J Public Health 2001;91:1194--
9.
17. Friedman MS, Powell KE, Hutwagner L, Graham LM, Teague WG. Impact of changes in
transportation and commuting behaviors during the 1996 Summer Olympic games in Atlanta on air
quality and childhood asthma. JAMA 2001;285:897--905.
18. CDC. Healthy people in healthy places. Available at http:/www.cdc.gov/osi/goals/places.html.
19. CDC. About CDC: health protection goals. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/about/goals/goals.htm.
20. Waller LA, Gotway CA. Applied spatial statistics for public health data. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley
& Sons; 2004.
21. Dannenberg AL, Bhatia R, Cole BL, et al. Growing the field of health impact assessment in the
United States: an agenda for research and practice. Am J Public Health 2006;96:262--70.
22. National Association of County and City Health Officials. Protocol for Assessing Community
Excellence in Environmental Health. Available at http://pace.naccho.org.
Table 1
Return to top.
Table 2
Return to top.
Table 3
Return to top.
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Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Department of Health

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1600 Clifton Rd, MailStop E-90, Atlanta, GA 30333, and Human Services
U.S.A
July 13, 2013
Bloomberg’s Traffic Ideas: First the

World, Then, Maybe, the City
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
The roads may soon teem with miles of new bike lanes, made possible by Michael R.
Bloomberg. In Turkey.
High-capacity buses zip through exclusive traffic corridors, part of Mr. Bloomberg’s bet that
better public transit options will discourage private car use. In Brazil and Mexico.
And in Egypt, between the uprisings in the streets, speed-tracking cameras were hung along
the Ring Road of Cairo. They resemble the ones expected to reach New York City, eventually,
under a bill approved in Albany last month.
Though often hamstrung at home by headstrong state lawmakers, an entrenched taxi industry
and a city in which even a single bike lane can inspire years of litigation, Mr. Bloomberg has
found success overseas in pushing — and financing — a global transportation agenda during his
final years as the mayor of New York City.
Since 2007, Mr. Bloomberg’s charitable foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, has committed
more than $130 million toward traffic policy and road safety worldwide, outstripping
donations for every cause except the reduction of tobacco use.
He has personally presented children with yellow riding helmets in Hanoi, Vietnam, smiling
through a helmeted song-and-dance number from students at the Nam Trung Yen school, and
helped assemble a fleet of auto-rickshaws in Rajkot, India. He has lobbied successfully to drive
down the legal blood-alcohol limit in Guadalajara, Mexico — where “tequila and roads just
don’t mix,” he said in 2011 — and armed police in Cambodia with Breathalyzer equipment.
As a result, traffic policy and public health experts say, Mr. Bloomberg has emerged as perhaps
the world’s leading transportation force, acting as a catalyst abroad for helmets, seat belts and
slower speeds at the same time that bright blue bikes and pedestrian plazas have been affixed
to his local legacy.
MORE IN N.Y. / RE
“We have never seen anything like this,” said Dr. Etienne Krug, the director of the World
Who Is Fnu
Health Organization’s Department of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability. “This is
Read More »
by far the largest international road safety project ever.”
As a global cause, traffic safety is of a piece with Mr. Bloomberg’s past public health pushes —
from a proposed ban on large sodas in New York to his bid to improve maternal welfare in
Tanzania. He hopes to prod as much change as possible as quickly as possible, current and
former advisers say, displaying two of his hallmark qualities: impatience and a thirst for wide-
scale influence.
Without intervention, traffic crashes would become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030,
according to the World Health Organization. Mr. Bloomberg’s charity has focused on many
large cities, and on 10 countries — including China, India and Russia — that account for
roughly half of the world’s road-related deaths.
“We’re not as rich as you guys in New York,” said Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro,
where Mr. Bloomberg is aiding the installation of four new bus rapid transit corridors in
preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.
Mr. Bloomberg’s example is so rousing that Rio de Janeiro has elected to lift other ideas from
New York without a dollar of his help, Mr. Paes said. He noted plans for a large bike lane
expansion and the use of an information hot line, 1746, modeled on Mr. Bloomberg’s 311
system.
In New York, though, Mr. Bloomberg often has been stymied on matters of transportation.
The state controls the subways. His pitch for congestion-based pricing languished. A plan for a
near-uniform fleet of yellow taxis — the first major redesign since the age of the Checker cab
— was invalidated in court, though the city passed a new set of rules last month in the hopes of
reviving it.
At times, his frustration has shown. In May, according to a lawsuit brought against Mr.
Bloomberg by one of the plaintiffs in the taxi case, Mr. Bloomberg threatened, “When I am out
of office, I will destroy your industry,” adding an expletive, during an altercation at a Knicks
game. (Mr. Bloomberg initially said that he did not recall the conversation, but he seemed to
allude to the episode on his radio show days before the suit was filed.)
In March, as it became clear that momentum for speed-tracking cameras had stalled in Albany,
Mr. Bloomberg assailed state lawmakers, blaming them by name for the future deaths of
children killed by speeding cars. In last month’s vote, the three senators he mentioned all
supported the speed camera bill.
In American cities outside of New York, Mr. Bloomberg’s transportation footprint is less
pronounced, for now. But his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, has attracted
a national following amid the expansion of bike lanes and the introduction of the bike-share
program in May, serving as president of the National Association of City Transportation
Officials and speaking often in other cities about the mayor’s local transportation feats.
Mr. Bloomberg has cast his philanthropy as an extension of his local initiatives. He invoked his
foundation’s work last week at a news conference hailing the passage of speed camera
legislation. In a 2011 speech, Mr. Bloomberg cited New York City’s expanded medians,
recalibrated traffic signals and better-regulated pedicab industry as he explained his broader
traffic goals.
“Our record of improving safety in New York encouraged me to try to replicate this same
success around the world,” he said then. “Road safety has not typically been a top priority, yet
the number of lives that could potentially be saved is incredible.”
He has long taken particular pride in the city’s falling traffic fatality numbers during his
tenure, though the 274 traffic-related deaths of 2012 were the most in the city since 2008.
While the mayor’s philanthropy has hit the occasional roadblock abroad, some stumbles have
been understandable. Since installing the speed-cameras, among other efforts, the foundation
has suspended operations in Egypt amid political upheaval, with officers ill-positioned to
enforce speed limits.
“The police were too busy with other things,” Dr. Krug said.
In India, where Mr. Bloomberg’s team has evaluated 2,600 miles of high-risk roads for
potential safety improvements, helmet laws have proved difficult to enforce without setting off
religious tensions, Dr. Krug said. In communities with large Sikh populations, some locals
have interpreted the laws as discriminatory against those who wear turbans.
But across many regions, Mr. Bloomberg has made strides quickly. In Suzhou, China — where
more than half of road-traffic hospitalizations were attributable to electric bike crashes,
according to the foundation — program officials helped draft new electric bike regulations. In
Vietnam, motorcycle helmet use has more than doubled, to 90 percent, since Mr. Bloomberg
and the foundation’s partners helped pass a national helmet law.
The foundation estimates that its efforts will save at least 13,000 lives over a five-year period.
For Mr. Bloomberg, the work has supplied a useful credential to cite during local disputes, like
the tussle over helmet use for the new bike-share program in New York. The administration
once supported a mandatory helmet law for cyclists, but has since resisted calls to require
helmets. (Officials have said that mandating helmets depresses ridership.)
Questioned last year about the stance, the mayor produced his trump card: “Well, look,” he
said, “keep in mind my foundation works on traffic safety.”
Personal Health: Giving City Streets Built-In Safety Features - NYTimes.com 2/7/12 10:49 AM
FEBRUARY 6, 2012, 3:59 PM
Personal Health: Giving City Streets Built-In Safety Features

By JANE E. BRODY
Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesRE-ENGINEERING New York has done much to improve safety, with projects
like this bike lane near Columbus Circle.
When it comes to moving people around in healthy ways, New York City already has a leg up on
most cities and towns around the country.
The city has sidewalks in all five boroughs; food stores and other shops are within walking
distance of where most people live. It is served nearly everywhere by extensive, inexpensive and
largely dependable public transportation. City children have long been able to walk, skate or
scoot to school, though these days fewer attend schools in the neighborhood.
Because so many New Yorkers use their feet to get them from place to place, they weigh on
average six or seven pounds less than those who live in suburban America, said Dr. Richard J.
Jackson, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles,
and moderator of a public television series called “Designing Healthy Communities.”
Despite a rising tide of pedestrians and cyclists, the number of traffic-related deaths on city
streets fell last year to the lowest level in a century, declining 40 percent since 2001. Although
cyclist deaths did rise in 2011 for the second year in a row, the per capita death rate for cyclists
has dropped.
Developing a Master Plan
Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, attributes these improvements to

an ambitious plan-in-progress to re-engineer city streets. Recent years have seen a plethora of
projects to improve pedestrian and cycling safety, including pedestrian plazas, well-marked
crosswalks, bike lanes (both segregated and shared with vehicles) and timed traffic signals that
enable pedestrians to better judge their ability to cross streets safely.
The timed signals were late in coming to New York, which now has 1,100 so-called countdown
signals at pedestrian crossings. I first encountered these signals two decades ago in Seattle. I
was delighted to find one the other day when I crossed Park Avenue at East 64th Street with a
friend in her 80s who recently had back surgery and walked slowly with a cane.
The city is also enhancing enforcement of traffic laws, with more summonses for drivers who
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/giving-city-streets-built-in-safety-features/?pagemode=print Page 1 of 3
ignore stop signs, sail through red lights, and talk or text on a handheld device while driving.
But as Ms. Sadik-Khan acknowledges, this is only the beginning; a lot more must be done to
make the city streets safer for people who wish to navigate them under their own steam.
As James F. Sallis of San Diego State University and co-authors wrote in “Making Healthy
Places,” a compilation of academic reports on urban design published last year by Island Press,
“People are more likely to choose to walk for transportation and for recreation when there is
good pedestrian infrastructure.”
Just 1 percent of federal transportation funds are spent on pedestrian and bicycle facilities,
David A. Sleet and co-authors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted in the
book.
Not coincidentally, pedestrian deaths in the United States are three times as high per capita as
in Germany and five times as high as in the Netherlands. Safer road designs in these countries
slow motor vehicles and separate them from pedestrians and cyclists.
Enacting similar changes to encourage physical activity in suburban America is no small task. In
The Natomas Buzz, a Web site about a neighborhood in Sacramento, Brandy Tuzon Boyd, a
reporter, recently described the promising plans and frustrations of trying to improve walking
and biking access and safety in Natomas, a bedroom community that now covers 22 square
miles.
Yes, there is a new and well-used bike and pedestrian bridge that connects community trails on
one side of a freeway to trails on the other side. There is a program to teach students how to
travel safely to school on foot and by bicycle. Crossing guards have been posted. Helmets were
provided for cycling students who couldn’t afford them.
Awareness among students and parents of the value of physical activity is decidedly up. But that
is not enough: Cars still often fail to heed stop signs and red lights, and one of the region’s most
popular cycling routes is still too narrow and dangerous.
In the past decade, there were more accidents reported between cars and cyclists in Natomas
than between cars and pedestrians.
Still, a master plan to improve walking conditions and calm traffic is in place, with speed
humps, marked crosswalks, pedestrian islands and other measures intended to enhance the
physical activity and health of residents, young and old.
Physical Benefits
As more people like those in Natomas rely on themselves instead of fuel-driven vehicles to get
from place to place, experts expect a decline in health problems known to be aggravated by air
pollution, stress and inactivity: asthma and other respiratory diseases, heart disease, high blood
pressure, Type 2 diabetes, depression and even some cancers.
But as Margaret Schneider, an associate researcher at the University of California, Irvine, wrote
in “Making Healthy Places,” “As important as the built environment is, it is far from being the
only determinant of health. Even well-lit, cheerful staircases; broad, attractive sidewalks; and
safe, well-constructed bicycle paths may not seduce people into forgoing the elevator, walking to
work, and cycling on errands.”
She added: “Even when walkable neighborhoods are available, people may still choose to live in
far-flung suburbs, reducing their opportunities for routine physical activity.” Accompanying her
report is a picture of a dog walking in a park on a leash held by a woman in a car.
Still, there is evidence that if you build it, they will come. Twenty-three percent of the users of
two new community trails established in Morgantown, W.Va., were “new exercisers” who were
more dependent on the trails for physical activity than people using them who were already
habitually active, according to a report by Paul M. Gordon and colleagues at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Such trails are also likely to be cost-effective. Of four trails established in Lincoln, Neb., the
average cost for a person who became physically active as a result was $98, certainly much less
than what even a minor health problem related to a sedentary lifestyle would cost.
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Bike safety
Calm down
With a very few exceptions, America is no place for cyclists
Sep 3rd 2011 | SEATTLE | from the print edition Like 3K 2
DYING while cycling is three to five times more likely in America than in Denmark, Germany or
the Netherlands. To understand why, consider the death of Michael Wang. He was pedalling
home from work in Seattle on a sunny weekday afternoon in late July when, witnesses say, a
brown SUV made a left turn, crunched into Wang and sped away.
The road where the 44-year-old father of two was hit is the busiest cycling corridor in Seattle,
and it has clearly marked bicycle lanes. But the lanes are protected from motor vehicles by a
line of white paint—a largely metaphorical barrier that many drivers ignore and police do not
vigorously enforce. A few feet from the cycling lane traffic moves at speeds of between 30
miles per hour, the speed limit for arterials in Seattle, and 40 miles per hour, the speed at
which many cars actually travel. This kind of speed kills. A pedestrian hit by a car moving at
30mph has a 45% chance of dying; at 40mph, the chance of death is 85%, according to
Britain’s Department of Transport.
Had Mr Wang been commuting on a busy bike route in Amsterdam, Copenhagen or Berlin, his
unprotected exposure to instruments of death—namely, any vehicle moving at 20mph or more
—would be nearly nil. These cities have knitted together networks for everyday travel by bike.
To start with, motor vehicles allowed near cyclists are subject to “traffic calming”. They must
slow down to about 19mph, a speed that, in case of collision, kills less than 5%. Police strictly
enforce these speed limits with hefty fines. Repeat offenders lose their licences.
Calmer traffic is just the beginning. In much of northern Europe, cyclists commute on lanes
that are protected from cars by concrete buffers, rows of trees or parked cars. At busy
crossroads, bicycle-activated traffic lights let cyclists cross first. Traffic laws discriminate in
favour of people on bikes. A few American cities have taken European-style steps to make
streets safer for cycling, most notably Portland, Oregon, which has used most of the above
ideas. The result: more bikes and fewer deaths. Nearly 6% of commuters bike to work in
Portland, the highest proportion in America. But in five out of the past ten years there have
been no cycling deaths there. In the nearby Seattle area, where cycling is popular but traffic
calming is not, three cyclists, have been killed in the past few weeks.
from the print edition | United States
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June 26, 2011
Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban

Policy
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
ZURICH — While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and
offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite:
creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to
make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more
environmentally friendly modes of transportation.
Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car
traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs.
Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of
the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network
of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.
Likeminded cities welcome new shopping malls and apartment buildings but severely restrict
the allowable number of parking spaces. On-street parking is vanishing. In recent years, even
former car capitals like Munich have evolved into “walkers’ paradises,” said Lee Schipper, a
senior research engineer at Stanford University who specializes in sustainable transportation.
“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate
driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European
Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for
people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”
To that end, the municipal Traffic Planning Department here in Zurich has been working
overtime in recent years to torment drivers. Closely spaced red lights have been added on
roads into town, causing delays and angst for commuters. Pedestrian underpasses that once
allowed traffic to flow freely across major intersections have been removed. Operators in the
city’s ever expanding tram system can turn traffic lights in their favor as they approach, forcing
cars to halt.
Around Löwenplatz, one of Zurich’s busiest squares, cars are now banned on many blocks.
Where permitted, their speed is limited to a snail’s pace so that crosswalks and crossing signs
can be removed entirely, giving people on foot the right to cross anywhere they like at any
time.
As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, the city’s
chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. “Driving is a stop-and-go experience,” he said.
“That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy
for drivers.”
While some American cities — notably San Francisco, which has “pedestrianized” parts of
Market Street — have made similar efforts, they are still the exception in the United States,
where it has been difficult to get people to imagine a life where cars are not entrenched, Dr.
Schipper said.
Europe’s cities generally have stronger incentives to act. Built for the most part before the
advent of cars, their narrow roads are poor at handling heavy traffic. Public transportation is
generally better in Europe than in the United States, and gas often costs over $8 a gallon,
contributing to driving costs that are two to three times greater per mile than in the United
States, Dr. Schipper said.
What is more, European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the
Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United
States never ratified that pact.
Globally, emissions from transportation continue a relentless rise, with half of them coming
from personal cars. Yet an important impulse behind Europe’s traffic reforms will be familiar
to mayors in Los Angeles and Vienna alike: to make cities more inviting, with cleaner air and
less traffic.
Michael Kodransky, global research manager at the Institute for Transportation and
Development Policy in New York, which works with cities to reduce transport emissions, said
that Europe was previously “on the same trajectory as the United States, with more people
wanting to own more cars.” But in the past decade, there had been “a conscious shift in
thinking, and firm policy,” he said. And it is having an effect.
After two decades of car ownership, Hans Von Matt, 52, who works in the insurance industry,
sold his vehicle and now gets around Zurich by tram or bicycle, using a car-sharing service for
trips out of the city. Carless households have increased from 40 to 45 percent in the last
decade, and car owners use their vehicles less, city statistics show.
“There were big fights over whether to close this road or not — but now it is closed, and
people got used to it,” he said, alighting from his bicycle on Limmatquai, a riverside
pedestrian zone lined with cafes that used to be two lanes of gridlock. Each major road closing
has to be approved in a referendum.
Today 91 percent of the delegates to the Swiss Parliament take the tram to work.
Still, there is grumbling. “There are all these zones where you can only drive 20 or 30
kilometers per hour [about 12 to 18 miles an hour], which is rather stressful,” Thomas Rickli,
a consultant, said as he parked his Jaguar in a lot at the edge of town. “It’s useless.”
Urban planners generally agree that a rise in car commuting is not desirable for cities
anywhere.
Mr. Fellmann calculated that a person using a car took up 115 cubic meters (roughly 4,000
cubic feet) of urban space in Zurich while a pedestrian took three. “So it’s not really fair to
everyone else if you take the car,” he said.
European cities also realized they could not meet increasingly strict World Health
Organization guidelines for fine-particulate air pollution if cars continued to reign. Many
American cities are likewise in “nonattainment” of their Clean Air Act requirements, but that
fact “is just accepted here,” said Mr. Kodransky of the New York-based transportation
institute.
It often takes extreme measures to get people out of their cars, and providing good public
transportation is a crucial first step. One novel strategy in Europe is intentionally making it
harder and more costly to park. “Parking is everywhere in the United States, but it’s
disappearing from the urban space in Europe,” said Mr. Kodransky, whose recent report
“Europe’s Parking U-Turn” surveys the shift.
Sihl City, a new Zurich mall, is three times the size of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Mall but has only
half the number of parking spaces, and as a result, 70 percent of visitors get there by public
transport, Mr. Kodransky said.
In Copenhagen, Mr. Jensen, at the European Environment Agency, said that his office building
had more than 150 spaces for bicycles and only one for a car, to accommodate a disabled
person.
While many building codes in Europe cap the number of parking spaces in new buildings to
discourage car ownership, American codes conversely tend to stipulate a minimum number.
New apartment complexes built along the light rail line in Denver devote their bottom eight
floors to parking, making it “too easy” to get in the car rather than take advantage of rail
transit, Mr. Kodransky said.
While Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has generated controversy in New York by

“pedestrianizing” a few areas like Times Square, many European cities have already closed
vast areas to car traffic. Store owners in Zurich had worried that the closings would mean a
drop in business, but that fear has proved unfounded, Mr. Fellmann said, because pedestrian
traffic increased 30 to 40 percent where cars were banned.
With politicians and most citizens still largely behind them, Zurich’s planners continue their
traffic-taming quest, shortening the green-light periods and lengthening the red with the goal
that pedestrians wait no more than 20 seconds to cross.
“We would never synchronize green lights for cars with our philosophy,” said Pio Marzolini, a
city official. “When I’m in other cities, I feel like I’m always waiting to cross a street. I can’t get
used to the idea that I am worth less than a car.”
Thinking Outside the Bus - NYTimes.com 11/23/11 8:37 AM
NOVEMBER 17, 2011, 9:30 PM
Thinking Outside the Bus

By LISA MARGONELLI
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
Tags:
Buses, Elderly, Medicine and Health, Rural Areas, Transit Systems, Veterans
Until September of 2010, Pam Boucher’s life was small. Living in Brunswick, Me., a rural town
of 21,000, she was dependent upon others to move. At the time, she used crutches or a walker to
get around and seizures prevented her from driving. She’d get rides to medical appointments
from a social service agency. Trips to buy groceries, or visit her husband in a nursing home,
required the help of her adult sons or scheduling a social service staff member. A trip to the local
Wal-Mart would cost $28 in taxi fees. Socializing outside her apartment was pretty much
impossible. “I was very limited,” she says.
But when Brunswick started running two small 14-seat hybrid

buses around town, Boucher, who is 59, immediately hopped on. Lack of transport
in rural areas is
The Brunswick Explorer travels a 7-mile route every hour in both not just
directions. Now in a wheelchair, Boucher calls me from a bus stop, inconvenient, it
harms public
where she’s waiting with a friend. The bus has changed her life, she health.
says, giving her independence, control over her time and the ability
to socialize. “I take it at least once a day. Sometimes three times.”
She meets friends on the bus, takes herself to her medical appointments, and goes shopping for
groceries afterwards. A few months ago the bus extended its hours into the evening to
accommodate more commuters; she can now shop for groceries in the evening if her day has
been spent at medical appointments.
As we’re talking the airy green bus pulls up and extends the ramp so she can wheel her chair
onto it. She yells jokingly at her friend, “Are you going to leave me here? Hah. Doug won’t leave
me here.” She turns back to the phone to explain. “Doug’s the driver. He’s really good to me.
He’s knows my condition and that I sometimes forget where I am.”
America’s famously car-dependent culture strands the Pam Bouchers among us: those too old,
too young, or too sick to drive cars. Overall, only 5 percent of Americans use public transit to get
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/thinking-outside-the-bus/?pagemode=print Page 1 of 6
to work and that number is somewhat distorted by the huge numbers of people in cities who
commute by subway, train or bus. Outside of metropolitan areas, the number of Americans
taking public transit falls to just 1.2 percent. With so few people on the bus, schedules become
infrequent and inconvenient, and ridership drops further. As local governments have cut back in
the recession, some buses have gone away. Options for rural commuters have been falling even
as gas prices have been rising: Between 2005 and 2009 the number of America’s rural residents
who had the option of taking any bus at all fell to 78 percent from 89 percent.
Lack of transit literally hurts many Americans. The 40 percent of American military veterans
who live in rural areas report much lower health quality of life scores than urban veterans. The
Veterans Administration attributes this in part to poor transit to medical facilities. Lack of
transit to after-school sports means that rural kids are 25 percent more likely to be obese. And
the future will be grimmer: by 2015, 15 million elderly people will be without access to
transportation. In Atlanta, 90 percent of seniors will be without access to transit. Studies have
shown that when seniors can no longer drive their cars, they cease participating in society: Visits
to friends and family fall by 65 percent; shopping and eating trips fall by 59 percent. Boucher’s
experience in Brunswick is the exception rather than the rule.
Conventional wisdom says that the way to create or improve public transit is to invest billions to
engineer rails, trains and buses. But the Brunswick Explorer is one of many innovators that are
seeing transit as more than an engineering problem and trying to build transit that meets the
needs of its residents.
Roger Duncan for The New York TimesPam Boucher was wheeled off the Brunswick Explorer bus by the driver,
Gregory Guckenburg. Boucher said the bus service made it possible for her to get out of the house to visit doctors, shop
for food and socialize.
This week Fixes looks at this and two other small but intriguing transit initiatives. They operate
on wildly different models: The Brunswick Explorer is public; it is paid for by riders, who pay a
nominal fare, and a combination of federal and local sources, including the town of Brunswick.
Another involves private entrepreneurs providing van service; and the third is a non-profit that
has radically re-thought the terms of mobility. Together these three programs suggest that we
could get a lot more out of our transit dollars — and more important, get a lot more people from
place to place — if we approached potential transit riders as customers, and gave them exactly
what they need.
In the world of public transit, the Brunswick Explorer is a radical idea. Its genesis came from a
coalition of local social service agencies — organizations that work with the elderly, mentally ill,
disabled, homeless, as well as with college students and local hospitals. They approached
Coastal Transit, a nonprofit regional transit provider to be a part of their coalition. Coastal
Transit’s executive director, Lee Karker, had worked on two other rural bus systems that fell
apart. Both were designed to fill objectives other than helping riders; one was supposed to clear
congestion out of a tourist town, and the other just drove from one end of town to the other
without much regard for where riders wanted to go. Karker describes the process of setting up
the Explorer as “more organic.” “Before when we looked at bus routes we got input on traffic
patterns, not input from the users,” he said. “Now we’re trying to be more entrepreneurial.”
Working as part of the coalition, rather than as transit engineers, changed their worldview. “We
have a tendency to make a transit system look the way we think it should look rather than what
the community needs and what they want,” Karker said.
What the community wanted was a system that ran every hour, that was easy for people like
Boucher with mobility issues to use, was green, and that went everywhere they’d like to go —
from housing projects to doctors’ appointments to the town’s grocery stores, malls and Wal-
Marts. Brunswick’s buses are small and have green hybrid drivetrains. While bus stops in other
towns are often placed on access roads to malls, leaving riders to traverse acres of icy parking
lots, the Explorer pulls right up under the canopy of the Shaw’s supermarket so that a
wheelchair user can easily roll off the bus and into the store without braving snow, rain or
uneven pavement. And while the bus travels a set route, it will detour to make pickups if called
in advance.
So far, Brunswick’s ridership has increased by 50 percent in the past year, to an average of 91
people a day in October of 2011. Stops were added to the route as calls from passengers
increased. The hours have been extended — they now run from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. — so that more
commuters can ride.
John Secone, the bus’s supervisor, who sometimes works as a driver, tells me about his
customers as I sit in the town’s neat bus station in early November. One of the first riders of the
day, he says, is a man who takes the bus to his job at Wendy’s. Students from Bowdoin College
have started taking the bus to school. For a few riders it’s been a revelation: a man in his early
20’s who’d only been able to take paratransit to medical appointments visited Wal-Mart on the
Explorer for the first time. Secone describes the bus as a community, where people meet friends,
and where people have expectations of the bus and its drivers that go well beyond boundaries of
a typical bureaucracy.
The lesson of the Explorer is that when transportation finds the people who need to use it, and
then gets them where they want to go, it can grow organically. In the next two years, the
Explorer will have to stretch as a green industrial park opens at the site of an old naval base and
the train line from Boston links to Brunswick. Anticipating this change, some nearby towns
have begun to design connecting Explorer links of their own. The challenge will be to expand the
route according to the desires of its passengers, rather than to accomplish abstract goals of local
governments. Here Karker suggests that empowered riders may just hijack the system for their
own uses. The bureaucracy of one nearby town has been dithering for months about the pros
and cons of linking their transit system to the Explorer. Riders have been much quicker to
improvise. One resident in a nearby town cobbles together rides to link up with the Explorer;
she’s taking charge of her own mobility. “More power to ‘em,” laughs Karker, at her ingenuity.
It’s emblematic, he says, of a larger question of how many people would really like to use the
bus: “We really don’t have a sense of how big the potential could be here.”
But transportation does not have to be a public enterprise, as an example on the extreme urban
side of the spectrum has shown: The hundreds of private “dollar vans” that zip around the
streets of Brooklyn and Queens looking for passengers offer an intriguing model of transit that
meets customers’ needs because drivers are the owners and operators of the vans. While many
of these vans are legal and insured to carry passengers, some are not, and all of them suffer from
archaic laws that prohibit them from picking up passengers at curbs. Trundling down Brooklyn’s
Flatbush Avenue, Winston Williams’s Ford 350 van is worlds away from rural Maine. Like
Williams, most of his passengers this weekday morning are former residents of Caribbean
islands where jitney-style vans provide cheap transit, and they’re familiar with the ritual of
flagging down vans and paying two dollars to ride. Williams’s company, Blackstreet Van Lines,
runs eight vans, collecting hundreds of people a day. One morning as I ride with Williams, he
talks about business ideas — expanding routes to carry hipsters places where subways are
inconvenient, branding vans to build a presence, putting advertising on the vans to increase
profits. The biggest hurdle to increasing ridership, he says, is resolving the legality of the whole
fleet — both legalizing pickups and eliminating the unpermitted vans.
Legal issues aside, private vans provide services no public system could support, says David
King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University. The concentration of
vans along Flatbush means that sometimes there’s a van every minute, so riders don’t have to
wait. Sometimes they’ll take a mother and child to daycare and then wait at the curb while the
mother walks the child up to the door of the facility — something a city bus would never do.
Always on the lookout for customers, the drivers make routes where customers don’t have other
options. A van between Chinatowns in Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, for
instance, can take as little as 20 minutes when the subway would take over an hour. King says
that he sees potential to enhance transit options for everyone by incorporating dollar van type
services.
For one thing, dollar vans quickly learn passengers’ desired routes, like traveling between
Chinatowns. This sort of knowledge could help public transit planners design systems that keep
up with riders’ real needs. Dollar vans’ ability to scale up dramatically intrigues King.
“According to our estimates, the dollar vans are carrying 120,000 riders a day in New York,
which makes them the country’s 20th largest bus system.”
Still, many people do not want to ride the bus, and that’s where a
Related More From Fixes
third model comes in — this one a nonprofit that re-envisions the Read previous contributions to this
accepted ideas of transit for the elderly and disabled. ITNAmerica series.
(Independent Transportation Network) is a 15-year-old nonprofit that has grown from a single
program in Portland, Me., to a travel network of 18 cities providing 4,000 rides a month. ITN,
which was founded by Katherine Freund after her 3-year-old son was hit by an 84-year-old
driver (he was injured, but recovered), offers a radical rethinking of mobility. “The spark was
that I tried to approach the problem (of senior mobility) in a businesslike way,” Freund says.
Freund decided to make ITN sustainable for the long term, by trying to avoid surviving on
public money. “You can’t solve a problem without sufficient resources.” She decided to link
needy riders with the “excess capacity” of other drivers willing to take them out and walk them
arm in arm to their destination. To pay for the service, ITN created “transit savings accounts”
which essentially standardize and financialize rides, making them transferable without
currency. So I could give elders rides in California and transfer the credits I’ve “banked” to my
mother in New England. Elders can also donate their cars to ITN and receive credits to their
accounts. And recently retired drivers can “bank” rides for themselves later by driving others
now. This fall, the program logged 330,000 rides, and Freund is working on a bold national plan
to create dynamic ride-sharing for people of all ages.
Freund thinks most transit planners, focused on schedules and infrastructure investments, don’t
really get what moves people. “Mobility is not a car or a train, but really a primitive feeling — a
value — of knowing you can move where and when you want. The ability to move is a basic as
the difference between being a plant and being an animal. It’s these basic feelings — like love —
that really motivate people,” she says.
With a baby boomer retiring every eight seconds, and gas prices and carbon emissions rising,
the challenge of moving Americans around requires huge real investments of public and private
money. In 2008 the National Surface Transportation Commission found that we need to double
or triple spending on transit to keep up with the growth in population over the next 50 years.
But the potential for re-thinking what we think we know about transit, for concentrating on the
mechanics of the human brain and our culture as much as the mechanics of bus lines, seems
limitless. What innovations do you see? And how do you see transit changing or failing to
change to meet your needs?
David Bornstein is off this week.
Reports cited in this column:

Commuting statistics from the 2010 U.S. Census.
Statistics on rural commuters from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Report on rural veterans’ health from the Veterans Administration.
Study on activity and health of rural children from the University of Maine.
Report on lack of transit for seniors from Transportation for America.
Transit statistics on spending and population from Transportation for Tomorrow.
Lisa Margonelli is the author of “Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your
Tank.” As director of the New America Foundation’s Energy Policy Initiative, she publishes
The Energy Trap.
Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018
Can Better Urban Planning Combat Obesity? – Upvoted 4/10/16, 8:26 PM
5150
iStockPhoto.com/joyt
LIFESTYLE
Can Better Urban Planning Combat Obesity?

A new global report links health to the way we design cities.
Michelle Woo • April 7, 2016
The catalyst for change in Oklahoma City was the moment when Mayor Mick
Cornett realized he was getting fat.
It was all those damn business lunches. “Everyone wants to feed the Mayor,” he
lamented. But then he looked around him, and noticed he wasn’t alone. Oklahoma
City was one of the 10 most obese cities in America, with the highest density of fast
food outlets. Not quite the stats you want to list on the marketing brochures.
So he came up with a plan. A challenge. In 2007, he launched This City is Going On A

Diet, an initiative aimed at motivating residents to lose a collective one million
https://upvoted.com/2016/04/07/can-better-urban-planning-combat-…&ref_campaign=issue51_20160410&ref=tier4_science&ref_type=copy1 Page 1 of 5
pounds. This wasn’t just about helping people fit into their swimsuits for the
summer—Cornett wanted to systematically break down a “culture of obesity.” So he
called for fundamental changes. A 2009 referendum approved a one-cent sales tax to
fund a 70-acre urban park, hundreds of miles of sidewalks and trails, a streetcar
system, and health and wellness centers. Private businesses provided loans to create
more walkable downtown streets and add bike lanes and recreation facilities. City
officials spent $100 million to create Every school is getting a gym. With the new
emphasis on exercise, city officials spent $100 million creating a world-class rowing
and kayak center.
The challenge turned into a $777 million, 10-year effort to redesign the city’s
infrastructure with physical activity in mind. And it’s working. By 2012, the city met
its goal of losing a million pounds, and the changes will help future generations live
healthier, too.
It is not a new idea that cities can make it easier—or exceedingly difficult—for people
to be physically active. But a new report from the International Physical Activity and
Environment Network (IPEN) revealed just how much urban planning can impact how
much our bodies move. Published in the medical journal Lancet and shared in Reddit’s
Science community, the global study of 6,822 adults showed that those who live in
the most activity-friendly neighborhoods get up to 89 minutes more exercise per
week than those in the least activity-friendly areas. The message in the findings: To
combat obesity, start at the macro level.
Neighborhoods varied in socio-economic status, and the study used geographic

information systems (GIS) to measure residential density, number of street
intersections, public transport stops, number of parks, mixed land use, and nearest
public transport points. Physical activity was measured with devices called
accelerometers that participants wore around the waists for a week.
IPEN
We’ve all heard how we’re becoming a slothful society. One in four adults are
classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as “insufficiently physically
active.” Elementary schools are reducing or eliminating recess to maximize class time.
Diabetes cases have quadrupled over the past three decades. But beyond health and
wellness, the report cites other benefits to designing “active cities”—less crime,
more productivity, better school performance, increased civic engagement, and
reduced pollution and traffic.
“Cities that make physical activity a priority, converting existing spaces into active
spaces, and design environments for people to be active will create a legacy of
physical activity,” the report states. “These active cities will be better off by almost
every possible measure.”
There’s no magic formula to creating an active city, and a plan for Cincinnati would
look different than one for New Delhi, but the report has some standard recommend
for all communities: more parks and trails, walkable community designs,
more sidewalks and bike paths, better public transit, and schools and workplaces
within walking and biking distance of students. Other innovative solutions include
creating “pocket parks” (transforming small, unused pieces of land in urban areas into
recreational spaces), installing dividers between cycle and automobile lanes to
increase bike safety, keeping parks and athletic spaces open and well-lit at night,
introducing car-free weekends and creating workspaces that enable physical activity
(treadmill desks and walking meetings!).
It all starts with an understanding that for better health, we need better design.
When you live in an active city, you can feel it. Redditors commented on the new study
with their own experiences.
Comment from discussion Szos's comment from discussion "Study of 6,822 adults in 14 global
cities finds that those who live in the most activity-friendly neighborhoods get up to 89 minutes
more exercise per week than adults in the least activity-friendly areas. The Lancet study
demonstrates that urban planning may be used to combat obesity.".
Comment from discussion solena's comment from discussion "Study of 6,822 adults in 14 global
cities finds that those who live in the most activity-friendly neighborhoods get up to 89 minutes
more exercise per week than adults in the least activity-friendly areas. The Lancet study
demonstrates that urban planning may be used to combat obesity.".
See the full discussion in the original Reddit post.
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Germany’s energy mix: Getting out of gas | The Economist 9/26/14, 9:11 AM
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GERMANY'S Energiewende, or energy transition, is an ambitious policy aiming to move

the country's electricity generation away from both nuclear and fossil-fuel sources. More a
slogan than a coherent plan, the term represents the German government's desire to cut
carbon emissions by 70% from 1990 levels by 2040, while switching off all the country's
nuclear-power plants by 2022. In the long term that means generating more energy from
renewable sources. But more energy from dirty fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas,
will be needed in the meantime. Yet so far this year, it seems that one of the policy's
unintended consequences has been to put cleaner gas-powered plants out of business.
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sooty fuel increased by 11%; in total, more than 45% of Germany's electricity supplies are
now produced by burning coal.
In contrast, the amount of energy generated from gas has Related topics
fallen sharply. It dropped by a third between 2011 and 2013,
Russia
and so far this year by a further 24%. That seems strange
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given its relatively green credentials. Coal-fired power
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producing fly ash that releases 100 times as much radiation Electricity generation
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emit. The worrisome result of this has been to raise greenhouse-gas emissions, but
without any corresponding reduction in electricity generation from nuclear sources.
That outcome is the exact opposite of the intentions of the original policy. The main
reason for this appears to be that the sharp fall in the price of solar energy in recent years
has undermined the economics of gas more than it has coal. In Germany, as in America
and Britain, there is a sustained peak in electricity demand in the middle of the day, with
consumption falling overnight. Solar power neatly meets the noontime peak, often
producing too much at that point in the day, while at the same time making no
contribution to power demand at all overnight. Since gas-fired plants are easier to switch
on and off quickly than coal and nuclear ones, the gas plants used to be used to fill any
gaps at peak times. But with the larger peak now satisfied by the growth of solar and
other renewable-energy sources, gas plants are now underemployed. In the past seven
months, they have rarely passed 50% of their capacity; many are now losing money for
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Cultural revolution
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With the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continuing to threaten the supply of gas to
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there are questions over the green credentials of biofuels produced by intensive
agriculture.
A better way to improve Germany's energy security would be to connect the country's grid
to more geopolitically reliable sources. Building better power links to hydropower-rich
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and with the price of wholesale electricity so low in Germany at the moment, it is
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How Do We Protect New York City’s Pedestrians? - NYTimes.com 4/28/15, 8:17 PM
http://nyti.ms/1byyoN0
Magazine | WALKING NEW YORK
How Do We Protect New York City’s Pedestrians?

By SUSAN DOMINUS APRIL 23, 2015
When a car hit John Longo as he crossed Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in December
2013, he was tossed skyward, high and far enough that he had time to contemplate
his flight. “I remember thinking, I’ve been in the air too long,” says Longo, whose
230-pound, 47-year-old body landed 20 feet from where it started. He does not
remember hitting the asphalt (he landed on his head), but he recalls stumbling to a
slender median dividing Atlantic and saying out loud, to no one in particular,
“Please let me live, please let me live.” He was bleeding from the back of his head,
but he felt little pain, only a numbness in his arm, which was the first clue,
paramedics eventually told him, that he probably had spinal damage.
For years, Longo had crossed Atlantic at that spot as many as six times a day —
it was the fastest way to get from Clinton Hill, where he lives, to Prospect Heights,
where he owns a restaurant called Dean Street. A former high-school linebacker
and an entrepreneur, Longo was not a timid man. But he had always been
apprehensive about the intersection, a sprawling space where three avenues meet
at awkward angles: Atlantic, Washington and Underhill, which he was walking
along the evening he was hit. A walk signal gave Longo 32 seconds to cross six
lanes of traffic on Atlantic (three running east, three running west), which never
felt to him, or just about anyone else who walks there, like enough time. Even still,
when he tells the story of the accident, which happened on a rainy night, he partly
blames himself for a lapse in his usual vigilance. He says he had reached the
median, which is halfway across, “but I wasn’t looking over my right shoulder, and
I stepped off.” Longo had the walk signal and the legal right of way, but that was no
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/magazine/how-do-we-protect-new-york-citys-pedestrians.html?_r=1 Page 1 of 9
consolation when, a moment after he stepped into the street, a Lexus making a
quick left from Washington Avenue slammed into him. At the hospital, he learned
that he had broken three vertebrae in his neck. Nearly a year and a half later, he is
almost fully recovered, with the exception of his left arm, which remains numb.
Walking in New York is one of the great empowering privileges of living here
— without money, gear or skill, a New Yorker can still get somewhere, autonomous
and unencumbered. But along with that freedom comes inevitable risk. Longo was
one of around 12,000 New York City pedestrians who were injured in traffic
accidents in 2013, a statistic that has stayed fairly constant over the last five years.
In 2014, the first year in which Mayor Bill de Blasio implemented Vision Zero, a
plan to reduce pedestrian deaths to zero, 138 pedestrians died in traffic accidents.
That was down from a five-year high of 182 deaths in 2013.
In pursuing Vision Zero, New York is embracing a relatively new approach to
cities, one with a focus on walkers over drivers. Most city planners now see the era
of the car’s urban supremacy as a brief, misguided phase in city culture. Rather
than competing with suburbs, cities are capitalizing on their own traditional
strengths, recognizing pedestrians as arguably their most economically
invigorating (not to mention energy-efficient) form of traffic. In New York, the
city’s Department of Transportation has been re-examining and redesigning
hundreds of intersections like the one where Longo was struck, trying to find the
best answers to questions that went unasked for decades: What do pedestrians
want? What’s the best way to protect them? And where do they want to go?
For much of the 20th century, when the engineers running urban transit
authorities thought about traffic, they thought less about the pedestrian experience
and more about saving money, by saving time, by speeding movement, by enabling
cars. They analyzed traffic flow, the backup of cars, stoplight times and right- and
left-hand turns, all in an effort to keep vehicles moving freely and quickly through
the city. They ran the data through a program that would spit out a rating (A to F)
for the “level of service.” An A meant that a street was congestion-free, which gave
cars the potential to speed; an F meant that it was too congested to be functional.
The grade considered ideal for most streets in New York was a C.
The value of speed, for car commuters, was an easy equation for engineers.
“The assumption is that all travel time is a waste of time,” says Zhan Guo, a
professor of urban planning and transportation at New York University’s Wagner
School of Public Service. “But that rationale doesn’t apply to pedestrians.” The
worth of the pedestrian experience, so pokey, so subjective, was scarcely
considered, partly because it was hard to quantify.
Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an
advocacy organization, recalls that as recently as the administration of Mayor
Rudolph W. Giuliani, he and his colleagues regularly heard top Transportation
Department officials make references to “pedestrian interference.” “They saw
pedestrians as a nuisance,” he says, “something that had to be dealt with.” No
policy better reflected the administration’s regard for pedestrians than the barriers
that Giuliani’s police force erected throughout Midtown in 1998 to rein in
jaywalkers. The blockades were cumbersome, ugly and pre-emptively punitive. As
irritating as they were, or perhaps because they were irritating, pedestrians
frequently made a point of finding their way around them.
Under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who appointed the innovative Janette
Sadik-Khan as his transportation commissioner in 2007, the city’s attitude toward
pedestrians changed significantly. Instead of reining in walkers, the city started
catering to their needs.
Progressive urban planners — the kind Sadik-Khan sought out — look across
cities and try to predict pedestrian desire. Desire manifests itself as a straight,
logical path, what is known as the “desire line.” Those lines dash all over the city,
creating an imaginary map laid over the real one. Usually, they represent the
quickest, easiest connection from one point to another, the path that pedestrians —
perhaps especially New York pedestrians — will follow, regardless of markings or
traffic lights.
This past winter was ideal for studying pedestrian intent. The places where
snow was trampled to slush reflected the will of those who walk. At the south side
of Atlantic and Washington Avenues, for example, employees of the Transportation
Department noticed the utter absence of snow at the edge of a small triangular
patch of grass that divides the right-turn lane of Washington Avenue from its other
lanes. One afternoon in March, as Ryan Russo, a deputy commissioner at the
agency, stood at that triangle explaining the intersection’s problems to me, he

paused to point out a man who stepped into the street and cut across Washington
Avenue’s right-turn lane to reach the triangle, rather than veering right along the
sidewalk and then veering left to reach a crosswalk that would take him across
Atlantic.
“Technically, he should stay on the sidewalk,” Russo said. Not that Russo
judged the man; he understood. The triangle was goofy. Walking all the way
around it was inefficient. That tiny patch of grass was too small for a pedestrian
who wanted to continue heading in a straight line up Washington. Having crossed
onto the triangle, the man was now quickly walking north in the street that ran
alongside it, millimeters from the cars whizzing past.
Russo has respect for walkers and their desire lines. He wishes that the path
they wanted was always the safest one, but what can you do? You cannot fight
desire. Standing by that grassy triangle, we turned to look at the corner of
Washington and Underhill and watched as three elderly people, leaning on one
another, one of them limping, defied two crisp white crosswalks forming a right
angle, instead making a more direct, but more dangerous, diagonal line across all
six lanes of Atlantic Avenue to reach a small park.
“The old design paradigm was, ‘Let’s just make the pedestrians do it — just
have them walk on the sidewalk, because it’s safer,’"” Russo said. “But then they
don’t do it.” New thinking about the placement of crosswalks in New York reflects a
kind of détente between city planners and city walkers: Better to mark clearly some
new crosswalks than fight a losing battle to change New Yorkers’ view of their
relationship to the streets — territorial, headstrong, entitled, efficient. (The
approach is increasingly in favor outside New York as well.)
Russo, who started at the department in the first Bloomberg administration,
has been there long enough to know how much of an internal cultural shift was
required before the various units grew comfortable with the idea of deferring to
pedestrian desire lines. “It’s not an easy thing to do, because once we’re saying you
can cross here, we own it,” Russo said. “And if someone gets hit, it’s our
responsibility, it’s our liability. It’s easier not to do it.”
But a crosswalk in a less safe location is probably more protective than one
that walkers ignore altogether in favor of their own unmarked path. “The crosswalk
makes it clear that the pedestrian has the right of way,” Russo said. “And a turning
vehicle encountering a pedestrian not only has to exhibit due care to avoid injuring
the pedestrian, they have to stop and let the pedestrian complete the crossing.” The
car, not the pedestrian, is interfering in the space.
When we walk on the sidewalk, we follow a fluid, mutually understood
choreography, unknowingly angling a shoulder here, dipping a foot off the curb
there, avoiding eye contact as we maneuver through the hordes between us and our
next destination. In the street, by contrast, there is a surprising amount of eye
contact between pedestrians and drivers. Sometimes the driver gives that
benevolent, royal flutter of the hand — Go ahead, pedestrian, I grant you the
right. But as often as not, that gaze is more complicated, imbued with subtle
indications of territorialism or outright hostility.
That day at the Brooklyn intersection with Russo, I walked several times
through a long crosswalk stretching from Underhill to Washington. On one trip, I
was about halfway to my destination when a white van tried to make a right-hand
turn onto Washington, stopping only inches from me. I could feel the driver’s
impatience in the proximity of the van; I could see it in the face of the man on the
passenger side. He was staring me down, irritated. I stared back, not changing my
gait, glaring, as if I, with my bristling body language, could take on his 5,000--
pound metal exoskeleton. There is something distinctly New York about the
combination of bravado and wariness that the city’s pedestrians carry with them —
it is as if the way New Yorkers walk has influenced who we are, rather than the
other way around.
“In a lot of other cities, pedestrians are people who think of themselves as
drivers who happen to be walking,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University
of Virginia who studies the rise of the car in urban areas. “And therefore, they’re
considerate of the concerns of the driver. But most people in New York think of
themselves as pedestrians and are not so sympathetic to the driver’s perspective.”
Studies bear out the distinctiveness of the New York pedestrian. Last year,
research conducted by Diniece Peters, a project manager at the Transportation
Department, analyzed what is known as pedestrian reaction time, the amount of
time it takes for a pedestrian to step off the curb and start moving once a walk
signal has flashed. When cities determine crosswalk times, national guidelines
recommend that they build in three seconds for people to leave the curb. But
Peters, who studied crosswalks in only New York, found that that was six seconds
too many — she found reaction times of negative three seconds. New Yorkers,
whether they waited patiently on the sidewalk or had already maneuvered their
way into the crosswalk, were moving before the walk signal even flashed; they
looked instead at the traffic light and charged out as soon as it turned in their favor
(which is usually moments before the walk signal flashes).
Peters, who presented her findings this year at a national conference, had a
hard time persuading the audience, composed of transportation professionals from
cities around the country, about the validity of her findings. “They were
incredulous,” Russo said. “They were like, ‘There’s no such thing as a negative
reaction time!’"” Another study, conducted by Sam Schwartz Engineering, looked at
a sample of 52,000 street crossings by pedestrians in Times Square. It found that
42 percent of the people there disregarded the “don’t walk” sign altogether.
If walking New Yorkers often ignore traffic laws, that may be because they
sometimes know better than to follow them. Sightlines can be clearer in the middle
of the street. And at intersections with traffic lights, according to the
Transportation Department, a majority of the pedestrians who were killed or
severely injured were crossing with the signal. “Every New Yorker has the
experience of being in a crosswalk and being bullied,” says Paul Steely White, the
pedestrian advocate. “And if the crosswalk is meaningless, then you’re going to
take your space where you can grab it. You’re going to cross where it’s convenient,
and not where it’s necessarily lawful.”
White, like many pedestrian-safety advocates, has been calling for the
enforcement of stiff penalties for drivers who hit pedestrians (and cyclists) while
running a red light or when the person in the crosswalk has the walk signal. “With
more meaningful enforcement,” he says, “you’ll have greater pedestrian
compliance.” White — and the Transportation Department — believe that
pedestrian education is crucial and that people walking in the streets do bear
responsibility. But accommodating the pedestrian’s fallibility, he says, is as
important as trying to prevent it.

Last summer, six months after Longo’s accident, Roy Germano, a
documentary filmmaker who lives in Clinton Hill, started calling the
Transportation Department regularly, asking when it would make changes at the
intersection that it had been promising the local community board since 2011. He
eventually put up fliers in the neighborhood. “Do you fear for your safety when
crossing Washington and Atlantic?” they asked, and included tabs people could
tear off with the phone numbers of agency officials. In November, a young woman
crossing the intersection was hit by a car and hospitalized. Soon after that, having
called the department for weeks, Germano found himself connected directly to
Polly Trottenberg, de Blasio’s commissioner of transportation. A few weeks later,
the city finally started moving forward on its plans.
The city has deemed about 450 intersections and corridors high-priority
zones, where the largest numbers of pedestrian fatalities and injuries have taken
place. Atlantic Avenue is one of those corridors. And the department recognizes its
intersection with Washington as treacherous enough to create a psychological
barrier dividing Prospect Heights and Clinton Hill, when the city is trying to
encourage connectivity. Statistically, it is not one of the city’s most dangerous
intersections. But perhaps the crash data is skewed “because no one crosses there,
because it is so dangerous,” said Terra Ishee, a co-director of the pedestrian project
group for the agency, who accompanied Russo and me that day in March.
With help from a lobbying campaign by families who lost loved ones struck by
vehicles, de Blasio succeeded in reducing the speed limit to 25 miles an hour
throughout the city, a limit that had already been imposed on Atlantic Avenue. But
drivers still barrel down both directions of the thoroughfare, one of many in New
York, White says, that are typical of those designed in the mid-20th century, “the
heyday of the highway Interstate era — it was a design no different from what you’d
find in Houston.”
To determine what routes at the intersection had the least traffic and could
therefore be altered, surveyors spent two days there. They placed tiny pneumatic
tubes on each street of the intersection. Each time the wheels of a car rolled over a
tube, it sent puffs of air to a clicker keeping count. The surveyors held clickers that
counted which of those cars were turning and which were going straight.
Pedestrians walking through the designated crosswalks and along their own
desired paths were also noted. The goal was to determine how to make the
intersection safer for pedestrians without significantly reducing the almighty “level
of service.”
The engineers found that they could, in fact, prohibit cars going south on
Washington from entering Underhill without backing up traffic substantially, and
they will impose a left-hand turn signal at the very place where the Lexus driver —
eager to take advantage of a rare gap in traffic — had moved too quickly onto
Atlantic, slamming into John Longo. The duration of the walk signal that so
worried Longo will be extended. (The length will vary depending on the time of
day.) New crosswalks will make law-abiding citizens out of those pedestrians who
wish to walk to that tiny grassy triangle or cut from Washington across Atlantic at
an angle to reach the small park.
A few weeks later, I returned to the intersection, which looked more chaotic
than ever. Construction on the department’s safety measures had started, so the
area was further cluttered, with gravel and orange cones and line markings
denoting future shifts. I could see where the median on Atlantic would be
lengthened and widened; the van driver who had made that sweeping right turn
would not have nearly as much time to pick up speed, and the angle of the turn
would be less open. The design alone would have slowed him down. Longo was
thrilled that adjustments were already being made to the traffic lights. Roy
Germano says he is happy with the changes, but he wants more: more enforcement
of the speed limit on Atlantic, more certainty that a new ban on a left-hand turn
onto Atlantic from a car heading south on Washington would be heeded.
A traffic guard working there that late afternoon was screaming, full throttle,
at a truck halted at a light. But there was so much competing noise from other
trucks and cars that I could not make out which of the many possible traffic sins
the driver had committed. I watched as a father pushing a stroller south toward
Prospect Heights crossed Atlantic, heading toward Underhill. His head swiveled to
the left, to the right, to the left, to the right. Something in his focus made me think
that he was not even aware he was doing it; it was a primal alertness, in response to
loud noise and large objects that dart with surprising speed in unpredictable ways.
A girl going the other direction jogged up to the same crossing, her pink backpack
swinging, and decided to make a break for it, although by then the signal told her
not to. Traffic was picking up, though it was not quite rush hour. I was cold in my
coat, but a man wearing shorts, holding a basketball, started to cross Atlantic.
Instead of making it to the other side, he pivoted quickly to the left and started
walking west alongside the median. Cars were speeding by in both directions, but
he was practically dancing in the street, dribbling his ball, showily bouncing it
between his legs as he made his way. The street was his path, his stage, his court.
Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to
your inbox every week.
A version of this article appears in print on April 26, 2015, on page MM28 of the Sunday Magazine with the
headline: Stride Rights.
© 2015 The New York Times Company
Insect-inspired virtual traffic lights could replace – or augment – the real things 12/17/15, 8:40 AM
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http://www.gizmag.com/virtual-traffic-lights/24917/ Page 1 of 8
instinctively takes the right-of-way, followed by the smaller group – the same
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making gear, environmentally-friendly technologies and anything
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So it would be impossible to get onto a busy street. revolutionize memory
storage is magnetic, but
Your Email not as we know it
Slowburn 8th November, 2012 @ 10:19 a.m. (California Time)
Looks good. It'll need a maximum 'wait time' to prevent solo or low volume traf‐
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fic being held motionless all day.
Robt 8th November, 2012 @ 10:34 a.m. (California Time)

Gizmag
The system ofcourse should not weigh groupsizes byLikenumber of vehicles
Page 100k likes but Cancer-fighting
rather the amount of persons in them. This, i suppose, would improve peoples nanoparticles carry
medicine to tumors in the
willingness to carpool and travel by bus. To promote cycling maybe the ratio lungs
between persons and vehicle weight also could be a factor in the algorithm.
Solo drivers in SUVs soon would be a rare sight in crowded city streets. :-)
Conny Söre 9th November, 2012 @ 7:24 a.m. (California Time)
Have you seen traffic on a city road in India? On many roads traffic moves
along all day without signal lights and lane discipline. The basic principle is that
one moves into the next available gap - be it to the front left, front right or TroyTec modular
recumbent packs multiple
straight in front of you. In principle you drive there on the left side of the road bikes into one package
except when the left side is full of traffic in which case you just shift on to the
right side of the road or completely off the road if necessary. It seems people
can easily sort this kind of situation intuitively. Seems to work well.
Lloyd D'Rose 11th November, 2012 @ 7:56 a.m. (California Time)
I agree with Lloyd - the same principle has been applied in European countries
Warp drive looks more
as well. Look for shared space concept. promising than ever in
recent NASA studies
Renārs Grebežs 13th November, 2012 @ 7:18 a.m. (California Time)
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Quick Study: Ricky Burdett on changing cities: Man v City | The Economist 9/30/14, 7:15 PM
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RICKY BURDETT is professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics
(LSE) and the director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age program. Professor Burdett was
the architectural adviser to the mayor of London from 2001 to 2006 and is a member of
the Hurricane Sandy Regional Planning and Design Competition. He is also co-editor of
"The Endless City" (2007), "Living in the Endless City" (2011) and "Transforming Urban
Economies" (2013).
Are cities getting bigger?
At the moment 54% of the world’s population live in cities. By 2050 it could be 75%. Only
three generations ago, in 1900, that figure was 10%. Not only have cities become bigger,
the speed at which cities are growing is something we’ve never experienced before. In
Lagos, Mumbai and Dhaka, for example, there are roughly 35-45 people per hour being
born or moving into those cities. That's over 300,000 a year. The impact of that is
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/09/quick-study-ricky-burdett-changing-cities Page 1 of 5
enormous—sewers, lighting, electricity provision, housing, hospitals. These urgent issues

are not necessarily addressed by the cities that are growing the most.
Addressing that kind of growth sounds impossible.
There are very positive examples of how growth can be managed well in both the global
North and South though the growth is unequal—it is concentrated now in Asia, Africa and
parts of Latin America and has stabilised in Europe and North America. In some cases
it’s actually reversed. Detroit and some Eastern European cities have had population
decreases in recent years.
What slows growth?
It’s to do with migration reaching a saturation point. Eventually, people have found jobs
and begun to do what they need to do. Let’s take Brazil—the economy has now stabilised
so people are not as dramatically drawn to cities in order to get jobs. Work has been the
Recent Activity
reason why people move to cities for five thousand years and it will remain the reason.
One person recommends this.
But if people do keep coming then what happens?

Why does liberal Iceland want to ban online
There are many cities like Jakarta, Bangkok and Lagos, which are not managing growth pornography?
well. They are expanding at an enormous rate with very little control on the infrastructure.
An Indian summary
Most of the growth is informal, unregulated and results in slums. This presents enormous
problems for quality of life.
Who really runs Wikipedia?
So the infrastructure just collapses?
The price is wrong
The resilience of people and cities is extraordinary. Mexico City grew to 22m people in a 17,005 people recommend this.
very short time and the city hasn’t collapsed. However, it has run out of water. The city
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has sucked dry the water base—you can see cracks in the pavements and buildings. Sao
Paulo is about to do the same. Most of the informal residents are on the outskirts where
the water reservoirs are and all the settlements lack toilets and sewers.
Where do they get water from?
You need to reduce the amount of consumption and provide clean water to these very
underprovided areas. What is happening in Latin America now is that a lot of mayors and
city leaders are getting to grips with this. In Rio de Janeiro many of the favelas have been Follow The Economist
retro-fitted—water, electricity, gas and postal services now exist in places that still look
pretty ropey. Not unlike, perhaps, an Italian medieval town 400 years ago. Narrow streets,
not great quality of air and light but totally functioning environment and economy because
this is where people live and work.
In walled cities like Siena and Lucca I imagine growth would have been physically
Latest updates »
contained and they must have felt reasonably stable?
This is the big debate in urban planning. Do you contain growth or do you let it grow Boris Johnson: Alas, poor brick
Blighty | 1 hour 52 mins ago
forever? One of the ways you might manage growth is to contain it. In the late 1930s
London began to develop the green belt. This is exactly the same as a wall, like that
around Lucca. This means the city can only grow so far. Then you have a 20 mile green
Detroit's recovery: Motoring forward
zone and you promote new towns or the organic development of older towns. Milton Democracy in America | 3 hours 11 mins ago
Keynes was designed at the same time as the green belt—people then commute from
there into London. That model is a very sustainable model of an environmentally efficient
city that tries to reduce the amount of commuting. Most of the big cities I’ve described, Babbage: September 30th 2014: Hello, ello
like Rio and Lagos have average commuting times of four hours a day. That’s average! Newsbook | Sep 30th, 16:59
Is that inevitable?
No! If you take a city like Hong Kong, which has a population of seven or eight million, the Historical health: Meadicine
Prospero | Sep 30th, 15:56
average commuting time is 11 minutes. In Tokyo, the largest city in the world at 36m, the
average commuting time is less than an hour. That’s because they have such
extraordinary investment in public transport and it is all very integrated.
The Russian budget: Economic pain,
The key point here is that each city develops its special and political mechanism that is caused by Ukraine
Free exchange | Sep 30th, 14:53
coherent with the point of development at which it sits. There is no perfect city but there
are cities that are fit for purpose for their time and place.
Daily chart: Where street meets tweet
Graphic detail | Sep 30th, 14:47
But there are cities that work and cities that don’t.
Yes. I would say London with the green belt works, Hong Kong with its public transport
infrastructure works, obviously the Scandinavian cities of Stockholm, Oslo and British wages: Are more jobs low-paying?
Free exchange | Sep 30th, 13:53
Copenhagen are extremely efficient, but places like Medellin or Bogota also show
extraordinary low cost, simple innovation and intervention. In Bogota they’ve invested in
more than 100km of cycle routes and it’s as successful as cycling in Copenhagen.
More latest updates »
They’ve also added the Bus Rapid Transit system—dedicated bus lanes. This is
absolutely radical for a city like this and the effect is dramatic.
But a lot of people are still living in slums? Most popular

The UN projects that one in three new urban dwellers will soon be living in a slum. That Commented
creates a social time bomb in the cities currently growing at this incredible rate. London
1
went through this problem 150 years ago. London was then hyper-congested, India, America and
political theatre
enormously polluted, with appalling living conditions, and average life expectancy for men
I give you Narendra
was 24. In the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, London invested massively in sewers under the Modi
Thames embankment, to avoid cholera epidemics, and in the social housing movement.
There was an awareness that unless good quality housing is provided for the most 2 Hong Kong's protests: A tough test for China's
deprived we aren’t going to solve the poverty problem. Institutions and interventions into leaders
the fabric of the city go hand in hand to improve the conditions of people who moving in. 3 America and Islamic State: Mission relaunched
4 Hong Kong students on strike: Class struggle
What about pollution in these overcrowded places? 5 Ukraine and Russia: Win some, lose more
The defining statistic of the environmental issue is the fact that cities consume an Advertisement
enormous amount of energy and contribute 70% of the world’s CO2 emissions. If you can
reduce their footprint by 10% you can do enormous benefit to the world. If Mexico City
followed the Bogota model instead of the Los Angeles model it’s clear what the
improvement would be. Even in America there are cities apart from New York that stand
out. Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Washington have brought in the Urban Growth Taking
studying the GMAT
Boundary, like the green belt. It limits sprawl. If you do this you are automatically making
a city more compact and you can then disincentivise the car. As a city mayor you can
improve things. soon?
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Options for Simplifying the Commute - NYTimes.com 6/13/15, 2:27 PM
SPECIAL SECTION: TRANSPORTATION
Options for Simplifying the Commute

By John Markoff and Conor Dougherty
June 10, 2015 6:32 pm
In November 1974, the newly born Silicon Valley began an ill-fated “dial-a-
ride” experiment. A phone call to a team of operators would send a bus to pick up
and drop off a rider along a computer-customized route. After the 1973 oil crisis,
however, the service quickly became a “success disaster.” The dial-a-ride, created
by the Santa Clara County public transit system, groaned under a crush of 80,000
calls a day for weeks and led to busy signals, missed rides and low efficiency. Less
than six months later, the service was essentially canceled.
Four decades later, the advent of consumer GPS, the wireless Internet and
ubiquitous smartphones has brought the principle of dial-a-ride back, this time as
part of a chaotic wave of public and private efforts that combine the idea of
“mobility as a service.”

A look at how technology is changing how we get around
The Internet, which has already transformed a wide range of industries

including music and publishing, is becoming a disruptive force among all sectors of
the transportation industry. The modern car has rapidly become a mobile
computer and sensor, and the flows of traffic have become rivers of sensors, giving
rise to a vast range of new transportation-related services.
In Silicon Valley this change can be seen in the convergence of new Internet-
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/options-for-simplifying-the-commute/ Page 1 of 6
based technology and organizational innovation from start-ups, larger technology

firms faced with the challenge of moving thousands of employees between home
and work, as well as local governments and schools faced with similar challenges.
“We are in the midst of a fundamental transformation that will rearrange the
way we own cars,” said Balaji Prabhakar, a Stanford University electrical
engineering professor who is a founder of Urban Engines, a Silicon Valley start-up
intent on improving mobility by using data science. “We won’t have to worry about
how we get to work or how we get home.”
Ride-hailing and alternative taxi services like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar have been
joined by a raft of newcomers. Split, a ride-booking service, and Bridj, a “pop-up”
microbus system, both started recently in the District of Columbia. And
smartphone apps like RideScout, Urban Engines and Citymapper try to make it
possible to blend disparate transportation systems.
“The ubiquity of smartphones is creating new transportation ecosystems that

can scale,” said Steve Raney, a transportation planner at Cities21, a consultancy
based here. “When it arrives, a two-car suburban family can sell one of them and
rely on a smartphone for travel, and an urban millennial will never have to buy a
car.”
One question posed by such services is whether they are merely skimming
riders from already underfunded public transit systems. Santa Clara County Valley
Transportation Authority executives note that 20 percent of the workers who ride
the private tech fleets between San Francisco and Silicon Valley would have
otherwise used public transit. The dark outlook presented by the explosion of
private transit systems is that an elite class of tech workers will be moved in style,
while the overall quality of transit will decline.
“In Silicon Valley only one out of every thousand travelers is moved by Uber or
Lyft,” Mr. Raney said. “They have huge market caps, but they don’t move the
needle” in the overall transportation crisis.
The future of transportation with fewer private cars can be seen in many parts
of the world. Helsinki, Finland, for example, has adopted the ambitious goal of a
car-free city and intends to create a point-to-point “mobility on demand” system by
2025. The vision is to use smartphones to weave together on-demand minibuses,
driverless cars, bikes and conventional buses to make it possible to make any trip
without a private car.
In Mountain View, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, the North Bayshore
neighborhood is a suburban technology center that includes NASA’s Ames
Research Center and well-known tech companies like Google and LinkedIn. The
region is characterized by endless avenues of low-slung office buildings that are
surrounded by acres of free parking and miles from the nearest rail station.
Yet despite its suburban sprawl, a little more than half of North Bayshore’s
21,400 daily commuters drive to work alone — a remarkable figure, given that
nationally about three out of four commuters drive to work alone, according to
census data. The difference here is a mix of public and private transportation
services — from private technology buses and public rail lines to Uber and Lyft
cabs — that employees stitch together to make trips that often stretch dozens of
miles in a day.
Google, the city’s largest employer and North Bayshore’s largest tenant,
transports about 35 percent of its local work force on private shuttle buses that run
across the San Francisco Bay Area. It is an expensive perk that not every company
can offer. About 10 percent of Google employees ride bikes, and the rest either car
pool or combine the CalTrain commuter rail with a local shuttle from the Mountain
View station.
“Google’s drive-alone rate now matches that of San Francisco, in a place where
there is effectively zero public transportation and nothing but office parks,” said
Jeffrey Tumlin, a principal in the San Francisco office of Nelson/Nygaard, a
transportation consulting firm. “The case study is so compelling that it is changing
the way the industry works.”
Certainly, the buses have proved to be a political flash point in San Francisco
where fears of tech-oriented gentrification have become a deeply dividing political

struggle. And some urban planners worry that new mobility services may
ultimately encourage suburban sprawl. Silicon Valley technology workers who once
might have chosen to live close to their employers now have the choice of living in
Santa Cruz, San Francisco or even Marin County. From a congestion perspective,
however, the tech workers have a far smaller impact in buses than they would if
they commuted in cars.
In addition to providing free bus service, Google and office neighbors like
LinkedIn and Intuit try to eliminate every reason to drive to work alone. For bikers
who want to freshen up after the ride in, there are showers and towel service. All
three companies also offer an emergency ride program so that employees can get a
lift home in the middle of the day when the shuttles are not running.
For doing errands during the day, LinkedIn has nearby ZipCars, and Google
has a fleet of about 80 electric loaner cars that charge under solar-powered
canopies. “We don’t want your needing a car during the day to be the reason why
you drove in the first place,” said Brendon Harrington, Google’s transportation
manager.
Google is also building a public, pedestrian-only “Green Loop” so that its

employees can get between its miles of buildings without having to drive. The
company owns or leases the equivalent of three Empire State Buildings worth of
office space in Mountain View.
This year, Google will begin an even more ambitious experiment, a street test
of a small fleet of self-driving cars that will be limited to 25 miles per hour and
make short trips around its campus and Mountain View.
While such vehicles will be prohibited from traveling routes with higher speed
limits, they are likely to be well matched for dense urban areas and campus
settings. For example, in cities like San Francisco and New York, average traffic
speeds are below 20 m.p.h. In 2013, a study done by the Earth Institute at
Columbia University showed that robotic taxis would cost considerably less to
operate than human-driven vehicles.
At the same time, entrepreneurs here in Silicon Valley and elsewhere around
the country have begun experimenting with new business models and different
scale — buses instead of cars.
In addition to the private bus fleets ferrying tech workers throughout the
region, some new private transit services are open to anyone. And RidePal, a
company that runs plush, Wi-Fi-equipped buses for several employers including
LinkedIn, also sells its extra seats to anyone who needs a ride. One-way tickets are
$12 —comparable to commuter rail lines in the area — while monthly passes are
$200.
“Tech workers are not too hot on driving out to suburbia anymore,” said
Martin Alkire, a principal planner for the City of Mountain View. “A lot of cities are
really struggling with how do you attract a talented work force into a suburban
environment.”
Start-ups like Leaf and Chariot, both in San Francisco, and Bridj, in Boston
and Washington, have begun bus service on both fixed routes and more flexible
routing, which echoes the Santa Clara County dial-a-ride venture. In this case,
however, they offer perks like comfortable seats, Wi-Fi and juice bars.
Also in Washington, the company Split has recently begun operating. Split is
based on technology pioneered in Helsinki by a private-public partnership that
created that city’s Kutsuplus (“call plus”) ride-hailing service, a modernized version
of the dial-a-ride idea.
Mountain View is trying to push North Bayshore’s share of drive-alone

commuters even lower, to 45 percent, in hopes of adding more jobs but fewer cars.
As part of a redevelopment plan, Mountain View now requires that future North
Bayshore developments come with a plan for how the tenant will meet the 45
percent target, and the city can take steps to fine companies whose plans do not
measure up.
The precise outlines of the Internet-driven change are still uncertain, but it is
clear that technology will transform the way people move from place to place as
deeply as cars changed transportation when they went into mass production.
“The private car may have only 10 or 20 years left in its life,” said Gil P. Friend,
chief sustainability officer for the City of Palo Alto.
A version of this article appears in print on 06/11/2015, on page F2 of the NewYork edition
with the headline: Options for Simplifying the Commute.
Road kill | The Economist 7/8/15, 10:07 AM
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Road kill E-mail Reprints & permissions
Print
Despite improvements, driving in America remains extraordinarily dangerous

Jul 4th 2015 | HOUSTON, TEXAS AND WASHINGTON, DC | From the print edition Advertisement
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THE Cedar Creek Saloon, a bar an hour or so outside Houston, sits just off the freeway
next to a clutch of motels, a barbecue restaurant and a petrol station. From anywhere
nearby the only way to reach it, realistically, is by car. And yet on a Friday night it is
packed with people happily smoking as they work their way through buckets of Bud Light.
Not everyone is driving; but one patron, a little worse for wear, admits that not everyone
drinking has a lift home. “People out here drink when they want to drink,” he says. And
drunk-driving laws? “They don’t pay attention at all.”
Drunk-driving is just one of the perils of American roads. In 2014 some 32,675 people
were killed in traffic accidents. In 2013, the latest year for which detailed data are
available, some 2.3m were injured—or one in 100 licensed drivers. These numbers are
better than a few decades ago, but still far worse than in any other developed country.
For every billion miles Americans drive, roughly 11 people are killed. If American roads
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were as safe per-mile-driven as Ireland’s, the number of lives saved each year would be
equivalent to preventing all the murders in the country.
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In most of the rich world, far fewer people die in road

In this section
accidents these days; cars are much safer than they were,
with crumple zones, airbags, anti-locking brakes and Change is gonna come
adaptive cruise control. Use of seatbelts is widespread. But Road kill

compared with other countries, America has not improved One for the people Latest updates »
much. And in some ways things have been getting worse. Our man in Havana
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Other risky behaviour is equally tolerated. As if roadside bars are not dangerous enough,
in Louisiana drivers can stop at drive-through daiquiri joints to top up for the road. Across Advertisement
America, almost a third of traffic deaths involve alcohol. The number of motorcyclists
killed each year has more than doubled since the late 1990s—mostly because there are
more on the roads but also because, in 31 states, most adult bikers do not have to wear
helmets.
Speed limits on highways in America can often seem low—a product of a law, now
abolished, which imposed a national limit of 55mph. But faster roads are proliferating—in
Texas, one stretch of toll road between San Antonio and Austin now has an 85mph limit.
No clear link exists between speed limits and accidents, perhaps because speed limits
are so widely flouted anyway. But the higher the speed, the more likely it is that an
accident will be fatal.
A newer problem is mobile phones. A study in 2011 by the Centres for Disease Control
found that 69% of American drivers had used their mobile phone at the wheel in the
previous 30 days, and 31% had read or sent texts or e-mails. Among European countries,
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Sidewalk Labs, a Start-Up Created by Google, Has Bold Aims to Improve City Living - NYTimes.com 6/13/15, 1:02 AM
http://nyti.ms/1KXexCv
TECHNOLOGY
Sidewalk Labs, a Start-Up Created by

Google, Has Bold Aims to Improve City
Living
By STEVE LOHR JUNE 10, 2015
Google’s ambitions and investments have increasingly broadened beyond its digital
origins in Internet search and online advertising into the arena of physical objects:
self-driving cars, Internet-connected eyeglasses, smart thermostats and a biotech
venture to develop life-extending treatments.
Now Google is getting into the ultimate manifestation of the messy real world:
cities.
The Silicon Valley giant is starting and funding an independent company
dedicated to coming up with new technologies to improve urban life. The start-up,
Sidewalk Labs, will be headed by Daniel L. Doctoroff, former deputy mayor of New
York City for economic development and former chief executive of Bloomberg L.P.
Mr. Doctoroff jointly conceived the idea for the company, which will be based in
New York, with a team at Google, led by its chief executive, Larry Page.
The founders describe Sidewalk Labs as an “urban innovation company” that
will pursue technologies to cut pollution, curb energy use, streamline
transportation and reduce the cost of city living. To achieve that goal, Mr.
Doctoroff said Sidewalk Labs planned to build technology itself, buy it and invest
in partnerships.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/technology/sidewalk-labs-a-start-…gle-has-bold-aims-to-improve-city-living.html?rref=technology&_r=0 Page 1 of 3
“It’s going to evolve and we’re just starting up,” he said in an interview.
Neither Mr. Doctoroff nor Google would say how much Google intended to
invest in Sidewalk Labs, but it could be sizable eventually. A model for Sidewalk
Labs, they said, is Calico, a company backed by Google, established in 2013 and
run by Arthur D. Levinson, a former Genentech chief executive. Last September,
Calico and AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company, announced that they would build a
research center in the San Francisco Bay Area for diseases that affect the elderly,
like dementia, with an initial investment, split evenly, of $500 million.
In a post on Google Plus, the company’s social network, Mr. Page termed
Sidewalk Labs “a relatively modest investment” and one “very different from
Google’s core business.” It is a business but a decidedly long-term bet, Mr. Page
wrote, and he compared it with Calico and Google X, the lab that incubated
Google’s autonomous vehicles.
Mr. Doctoroff said he had known Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman,
for years, and only began meeting with Mr. Page in recent months. Over the last
year, Adrian Aoun, an engineering manager, had been traveling, studying and
scouting the opportunity in urban technology for Google, and also met with Mr.
Doctoroff repeatedly. In his post, Mr. Page thanked Mr. Aoun for helping “bring
Dan on board.”
Mr. Doctoroff brings an understanding of urban challenges to the venture,
from his six years as deputy mayor, while Google brings money and technical
expertise. Mr. Doctoroff left Bloomberg, a technology-driven information
company, last year after the founder, Michael R. Bloomberg, decided he wanted to
again take control of the enterprise.
The timing for Sidewalk Labs is right, Mr. Doctoroff said, because “we’re on
the verge of a historic moment for cities,” when technologies are rapidly maturing
to help address needs like the environment, health and affordable housing. The
arsenal of fast-developing technologies, he said, includes sensors, smartphones,
and the resulting explosion of digital data combined with clever software to help
residents and municipal governments made better decisions.
The technology, he said, can open a door to “extraordinary business
opportunities and opportunities for improving quality of life.”
Major technology companies, like IBM and Cisco, already have large
businesses that apply information technology to improving the efficiency of cities.
IBM has used its researchers and technical prowess in projects like traffic
management in Stockholm and microlevel weather forecasting to predict the
location of life-threatening mudslides in Rio de Janeiro.
Sidewalk Labs, Mr. Doctoroff said, planned to work in “the huge space
between civic hackers and traditional big technology companies.”
While big technology companies take a “top-down approach and seek to
embed themselves in a city’s infrastructure,” he said Sidewalk Labs would instead
seek to develop “technology platforms that people can plug into” for things like
managing energy use or altering commuting habits. He pointed to New York’s
bike-sharing program as an early example of a technology-assisted innovation in
transportation.
There is already an emerging academic focus on applying modern digital
technology to cities’ physical systems. Leading examples include New York
University’s Center for the Urban Science and Progress, and the University of
Chicago’s Urban Center for Computation and Data.
“It’s great to see an ambitious private sector initiative like this recognize that
cities are important,” said Steven E. Koonin, director of the N.Y.U. urban science
center. “And there are technology opportunities, but they are complicated.”
Personally, Mr. Doctoroff said, the new venture promised to tap the experience
of his entire career. “I do think this job is a convergence of my skills at a time of
historic convergence for cities,” he said.
Correction: June 10, 2015

An earlier version of this article misquoted a post by Larry Page on Google Plus. He
called Google’s investment in Sidewalk Labs “relatively modest,” not “relatively small.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 11, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Google Sets Its Sights on Urban Life.
RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
The Cost-Effectiveness of New York City’s Safe Routes to

School Program
Peter A. Muennig, MD, MPH, Michael Epstein, MPH, Guohua Li, MD, DrPH, and Charles DiMaggio, PhD
In the United States, motor vehicle crashes are

Objective. We evaluated the cost-effectiveness of a package of roadway modifi-
the leading cause of death for children aged
cations in New York City funded under the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program.
8 to 19 years, and the second leading cause
Methods. We used a Markov model to estimate long-term impacts of SRTS on
of death for children aged 4 to 7 years.1---3 injury reduction and the associated savings in medical costs, lifelong disability,
Virtually all motor vehicle-related pedestrian and death. Model inputs included societal costs (in 2013 US dollars) and observed
injuries are preventable. One way of reducing spatiotemporal changes in injury rates associated with New York City’s implemen-
childhood motor vehicle injury is to improve tation of SRTS relative to control intersections. Structural changes to roadways
roadway safety.4---7 However, roadway im- were assumed to last 50 years before further investment is required. Therefore,
provements require a large up-front invest- costs were discounted over 50 consecutive cohorts of modified roadway users
ment, and the chance of a child being severely under SRTS.
injured in any given intersection is relatively Results. SRTS was associated with an overall net societal benefit of $230
million and 2055 quality-adjusted life years gained in New York City.
small. Nevertheless, such improvements re-
Conclusions. SRTS reduces injuries and saves money over the long run. (Am J
main in place for decades, producing long-term
Public Health. Published online ahead of print May 15, 2014: e1–e6. doi:10.2105/
benefits on a single investment. Given the high
AJPH.2014.301868)
cost but the long-term benefits, there is un-
certainty surrounding the cost-effectiveness of
roadway improvements. evaluated using a variety of techniques, in- the actual societal cost of the program. In
One roadway improvement program is Safe cluding a difference in difference design and New York City, SRTS was targeted toward
Routes to School (SRTS).8---10 SRTS was enacted a Bayesian changepoint analysis.5 SRTS has the highest-risk intersections, so our research
under the federal Safe, Accountable, Flexible been found to produce an 11% increase in question focused specifically on intersections
and Efficient Transportation Equity (SAFETEA) active transport to school (walking or biking) with a history of a high rate of injury. Our
Act in 2005 (Pub L No. 109-59). SRTS was while simultaneously leading to a 33% to 44% models estimated fluctuation in costs associated
a $612 million dollar program that funded state reduction in school-age injury rates in high- with childhood pedestrian injury and changes
departments of transportation to build new risk intersections within New York City.5,12,13 in quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) that
sidewalks and bicycle lanes, improve safety Among all users of these intersections, injury occurs when high-risk intersections are modi-
at crossings (e.g., via traffic calming measures), reduction rates were more modest, with about fied. These models, built using TreeAge Pro
upgrade signage, and enhance pedestrian a 14% decline.5 2013 (TreeAge software, Williamstown, MA),
education.8,12 The intent of SRTS was to This analysis assesses the cost-effectiveness are designed to estimate outcomes for the
encourage children to walk and bike to school of SRTS in preventing pedestrian injuries among average school-aged pedestrian over his or
by making school travel safer, thereby reducing school-aged children traveling to and from her lifetime or the average incidental adult
an important barrier to commuting outside school (the intent of the program) relative to the SRTS user over his or her lifetime. Thus,
of a vehicle. Capital improvement projects status quo. We examined this subpopulation these models present the net present value
were funded at 10 400 schools in the United because it is the target of the SRTS legislation. of a single year of SRTS intersection use. To
States. In 2012, Congress enacted Moving We also examined the cost-effectiveness of estimate total annual costs, we multiplied these
Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century SRTS for all users at all times. This latter analysis values by the estimated number of users.
(MAP-21; Pub L No. 112-141) to replace the provides the overall societal benefits of the We only included those medical costs asso-
SAFETEA. As a result, dedicated funding for program, whether intended or not. ciated with the initial injury, changes in QALE,
SRTS ended, though the program may con- changes in bussing costs, and changes in burial
tinue under discretionary funding at the state METHODS costs. All outcomes were adjusted to 2013
and local level. constant dollars and discounted at a rate of 3%
Approximately $10 million in the initial We set out to determine the cost-effectiveness per year.
wave of funding went to the New York City of the SRTS program in New York City for both The models are designed such that, in the
Department of Transportation, which intro- school-aged children (the target of the legislation) first year, the intersection user has a very
duced safety improvements at 124 schools and adult users of the improved intersections. small risk of injury and a significant chance of
with the highest injury rates.11 SRTS has been When both estimates are summed, we obtain remaining healthy. If the user remains healthy,
Published online ahead of print May 15, 2014 | American Journal of Public Health Muennig et al. | Peer Reviewed | Research and Practice | e1
then we assign no costs other than SRTS capital

costs and, in the child model, changes in TABLE 1—Values Used in the Markov Model Evaluating Safe Routes to School (SRTS)
bussing use. If the user is injured, we assign the in New York City vs the Status Quo
user the initial medical costs associated with Variable Base High Low
an injury and a very small risk of death. If the
user survives, we assume that all future soci- Injury risks
etal costs will be subsumed by the change in Increase in active transport, SRTS, % 10 12 8
health-related quality of life (HRQL) score.14 Total pedestrians at risk, no.
Both the SRTS arm and the arm modeling the School-aged children (5-19 y) 40 525 ... ...
unmodified intersections are identical except Adults using intersection 181 148 ... ...
that the SRTS arm contains a reduced risk of Annual probability of pedestrian injury, SRTS intersection
injury, reduced costs associated with active School-aged children (5-19 y) 0.0008 0.023 0.0004
transport, and upfront costs associated with Adults using intersection 0.002 0.014 0.0003
SRTS. To estimate the total societal costs, these Risk ratio, injury, SRTS intersection
lifelong costs (for a given annual cohort of School-aged children (5-19 y) 0.67 0.83 0.35
users) are then multiplied over the projected Adults using intersection 0.86 0.88 0.84
useful 50-year time horizon of an intersection Probability of hospitalization 0.12 0.16 0.08
modification and discounted at 3% in a sepa- Case fatality ratio 0.001 0.006 0.0007
rate model. Both models were validated using Health-related quality of life,a injured 0.95 1 0.9
a spreadsheet, but we used TreeAge to allow Cost inputs
for sophisticated sensitivity analyses. Total program cost (NYC), $ 10 298 000 ... ...
Per capita program cost (NYC), $
Costs School-aged children (5-19 y) 254 ... ...
Monetary costs were adjusted to constant Adults using intersection 57 ... ...
2012 US dollars and are listed in Table 1.15,16 Injury cost, $
Costs associated with pedestrian injuries were Hospitalized 50 832 60 998 40 666
obtained using the Center for Disease Control Not hospitalized 1170 1404 936
and Prevention’s Web-based Injury Statistics Totalb 7129 11 139 4114
Query And Reporting System (CDC WISQARS) Death cost, $
and a comprehensive analysis of multiple sour- Project year 1 6351 7621 5081
ces of 2000 data.17 At end of life/school-aged children 930 1116 744
The average annual cost of transporting a 3 y of bus transit cost, $ 2016 ... ...
child to school, $692, was obtained from the Mean user age
US Department of Education.18 Since the vast School-aged children, y 10 ... ...
majority of children under SRTS commute on Adults using intersection, y 35 ... ...
foot rather than bike,12 we assumed that active Note. NYC = New York City.
transport carried no costs. Costs associated a
The health-related quality of life score is scaled 0 to 1, with 1 representing perfect health.
b
with death and memorial preferences were Does not include lost productivity and leisure time, which is assumed to be captured in the health-related quality of life
score.
derived from the 2009 National Funeral Di-
rector’s survey, then inflated using the general
CPI.16 Our estimated cost of death considered surgeons at Columbia University Medical (a value of 0 is equated with death, and a value of
the average cost of burial versus cremation Center in New York City; they have extensive 1 indicates a year lived in perfect health). Based
and their associated frequencies. The total cost experience working with adults who were upon this score for hospitalized school-aged pe-
of the SRTS program in New York City was struck by motor vehicles as children. These destrians and a value of 1.0 for nonhospitalized
$10 298 000. senior physicians were asked to provide sub- victims, we computed a weighted average HRQL
jective assessments of the impact of the “aver- score of 0.95 for all individuals injured in crashes.
Health-Related Quality of Life age” child hospitalized for vehicular injury with
QALE is the product of the cohort’s mean respect to that individual’s lifelong mobility, Probabilities
health-related quality of life (HRQL) and its life self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort, and Additional inputs into the first model in-
expectancy. The impact of childhood pedes- anxiety/depression. cluded pedestrian-injury incidence rates and
trian injury and death on victim’s HRQL was The 2 EQ5D-5L instruments yielded scores pedestrian injury case fatality rates for both
assessed using the EQ5D-5L,19 which was of 0.64 and 0.47, for an average value of 0.55 SRTS and no SRTS arms. Model inputs are
distributed to 2 senior pediatric orthopedic for injury victims who required hospitalization listed in Table 1.4,5,12,17 We did not include
e2 | Research and Practice | Peer Reviewed | Muennig et al. American Journal of Public Health | Published online ahead of print May 15, 2014
TABLE 2—Assumptions Used in the Markov Model Evaluating Safe Routes to School (SRTS) in New York City vs the Status Quo
Assumption Rationale (Impact on Estimates)
Future lost productivity and leisure time costs of injury are included within the EQ5D scores may implicitly include lost productivity and leisure time, however this has been
health-related quality of life score. debated.14 (Favors status quo.)
SRTS benefits were limited to roadway changes. Conventional wisdom holds that safety education programs are less important than roadway
modifications. (Favors SRTS.)
We assumed that exercise, reduced pollution, and reduced noise associated with If active transport does produce lifelong health benefits, this assumption favors status quo.
active transport to school would have no impact on future costs.
Mortality risk occurs only at the time of injury. Injury victims may be at higher risk of future death both from physical limitations and the
economic impact of the injury on the victim’s life. (Favors status quo.)
estimates of those injured who did not seek error associated with an estimate. For example, threshold of $100 000 per life year gained
medical care. It was conservatively estimated that injury risk reductions were varied by the (a predetermined threshold for the purposes of
any given school-aged child (aged 5---19 years) standard errors. The amount of time a child our sensitivity analyses only). An influence anal-
would only use an SRTS intersection for 3 years spends at a school, on the other hand, must be ysis (“tornado” diagram) suggests that the most
before moving to another school or graduating. bounded by guesswork because we do not important variables in the analysis were the
have adequate data on this for our SRTS probability of injury, transportation costs, the risk
Sensitivity Analyses neighborhoods. reduction associated with SRTS, and the discount
Before running sensitivity analyses, we found rate. The impact on the incremental costs and
that SRTS was cost saving even in the annual RESULTS effectiveness of the model of variations in these
cohort model. This model is relevant in the variables can be found in Table 4. These figures
event that all of the observed benefits of SRTS The model inputs are listed in Table 1, and reflect the returns that might be expected over
are transient (e.g., if they all occurred through the underlying assumptions of the modeling a single cohort of intersection users.
the education component). Clearly, multiplying approach are listed in Table 2. For the first These single cohort costs, however, do not
these benefits by many years will only amplify cohort of intersection users, school-aged SRTS reflect the likely true cost-effectiveness of SRTS
savings. Therefore, we only conducted sensi- users produce a net societal savings of $224 because intersection modifications tend to last
tivity analyses on the annual model. We con- and an incremental gain of 0.0004 QALYs for decades, and most benefits are probably
duced a series of one-way sensitivity analyses over their lifetimes (Table 3). For all pedestrians realized through such modifications. When dis-
along with a Monte Carlo simulation. In the (societal costs), the figures are similar, with counted over the assumed 50-year useful life of
Monte Carlo simulation, we either included $226 in savings and 0.0008 QALYs gained. an intersection at a 3% rate, SRTS saves $5500
what we recognized as plausible boundaries for This single cohort analysis was robust to all per user and results in a net effectiveness gain
the values or we included the known random sensitivity analyses using a willingness-to-pay of nearly 0.02 QALYs per user. In the parlance of
TABLE 3—Costs and Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy (QALE) of Safe Routes to School (SRTS) in New York City vs the Status Quo
School-Aged Pedestrians All Pedestrians

Variable Cost, $ Incremental Cost, $ QALE Incremental QALY Cost, $ Incremental Cost, $ QALE Incremental QALY
Per user per y

SRTS 4 –224 28.3009 0.0004 16 –226 51.7602 0.0008
Status quo 227 28.3005 242 51.7595
Per user older than 50 y
SRTS 352 –5449 721.7209 0.0103 664 –5500 1319.9715 0.0193
Status quo 5801 721.7106 6164 1319.9522
Total, NYCa
SRTS 14 246 784 –220 826 117 29 247 740 417 70 891 435 –230 047 354 137 619 641 2055
Status quo 235 072 901 29 247 323 300 938 789 137 617 585
Note. NYC = New York City; QALY = quality-adjuste life years.

a
Totals tend to be much higher for all users only because many more adults tend to use these intersections than do school-aged pedestrians.
34% to 43% in New York City school-aged

TABLE 4—One-Way Sensitivity Analyses of Variables Included in the Annual Model children.23---25 The annual medical cost of child-
Incremental Cost Incremental Effectivenessa hood obesity is $220 per case among school-aged
children.26 However, about one third of obese
Variable High Low High Low
children become obese adults, and obese adults
Probability of injury –222 –223 0.0003 0.00005 accrue many additional costs, such as lost
Bussing costs –1366 –2651 . . .b . . .b productivity costs, and obesity accounts for
Risk reduction –223 –227 0.0008 0.00002 upwards of 10% of all medical costs.27,28 More-
HRQL . . .b . . .b 0.0008 0 over, the rise in obesity expenditures outstrips
Discount rate –223 –224 0.001 0.0003 the medical portion of the consumer price index
in part because obesity rates are increasing
Note. HRQL = health-related quality of life. Variables are based on those used in the Markov model evaluating safe routes to
school. and in part because, as the population ages,
a
b
Incremental effectiveness was determined by quality-adjusted life years gained. the obese incur disproportionate costs.29
Changes in the variable had no impact on this outcome measure.
Were SRTS to prevent a small number of
cases of obesity in each cohort, this benefit
cost-effectiveness analysis, SRTS is said to “dom- overall injury rates in New York City. Taken alone would likely pay for the entire program
inate” a no investment strategy (the status quo), together, these 2 methodological approaches over time.
indicating that every dollar spent in SRTS saves produce reasonable confidence that the observed This study was prone to a number of impor-
both money and lives. This dominance is not effects are not confounded by exogenous vari- tant limitations. First, although upwards of
impacted by variance in the plausible ranges of ables. To the extent that these results are valid, 90% of SRTS funds were used for engineering
the variables represented in Table 1, including SRTS appears to not only improve health and and infrastructure projects (e.g., sidewalk con-
the overall Monte Carlo simulation, which pre- save lives, but to also save money. Government struction),11 SRTS funded some education pro-
dicts that SRTS would save money and lives in agencies that chose to invest in SRTS may grams as well as roadway improvements. We
virtually 100% of the simulations. The figures therefore receive returns on their investment assumed that the effects of SRTS would be
represent savings per user. When all users of not only with respect to money but also with limited primarily to roadway improvements
SRTS intersections over 50 years are considered, respect to the health of their constituents. SRTS and therefore modeled these benefits over
the overall discounted cost and effectiveness of is, by its nature, a program targeted toward 50 years. Education benefits, however, tend
the policy is more apparent, reaching $230 school-aged pedestrians rather than all inter- to be more transient. If the benefits of SRTS
million saved and 2055 QALYs gained. section users. But even when the analysis is were limited to education campaigns rather
When restricted to school-aged pedestrians, limited to the benefits realized by children than roadway improvements, then the ex-
the overall program cost remains the same (the policy target), the program remains pected benefits we observed would therefore
($10 million), but the number of users drops cost saving. When all users are considered be greatly reduced. On the other hand, the
substantially (from 181 000 to 41 000). How- (the societal benefits), the cost-effectiveness cost estimate that we used included both
ever, these drops are offset by a much longer improves further. infrastructure programs and roadway im-
time horizon for which QALYs are gained (from It should be noted, though, that school zones provements. Therefore, if roadway improve-
age 10 years rather than from age 35 years), by are likely already safer than other areas of ments are much more effective than education
reductions in bussing costs (which are a major most cities. For example, speed limits are much campaigns, we would have underestimated
component of the model) and by a much larger lower in school zones, and crossing guards the cost-effectiveness of SRTS. Even when
protection associated with SRTS (a risk reduction are often present during school hours. Much analyzed over just 1 cohort, however, SRTS
of 33% rather than just a 14% average risk greater benefits may be realized by improve- produces a reasonable cost-effectiveness
reduction). The net result of targeting children ments to high-risk intersections outside of estimate.
produces cost reductions of $221 million. school zones, including larger reductions in Another limitation is that our estimates ex-
However, because adult users are much more childhood fatalities. clude any social or health benefits associated
likely to be injured on average (possibly because With respect to other benefits, SRTS appears with increased exercise, reduced neighborhood
drivers are more careful during school hours and to increase the number of children who bike traffic congestion, reduced pollution, and
crossing guards are present), most QALYs are or walk (relative to driving) to school.9,10,12,20 perhaps increased neighborhood cohesion,
gained among adult users of SRTS intersections. Obesity rates in New York City are dropping all of which may reduce excess morbidity and
simultaneously as street modifications are im- mortality and improve quality of life in New
DISCUSSION plemented. However, although strongly sug- York City.30 These data are difficult to ascer-
gestive, there is no conclusive evidence that tain, however. Inclusion of such costs could
Whether evaluated using difference in dif- active transport reduces the incidence of child- further increase the value of SRTS. A final
ference or Bayesian changepoint analysis, SRTS hood overweight or obesity.21,22 The incidence important limitation is that our data were
has been shown to reduce both childhood and of childhood overweight and obesity is about not derived from multicenter randomized
controlled trials. The estimates upon which we Correspondence should be sent to Peter A. Muennig, Safety Administration. 2002. Available at: http://www.
Associate Professor, Mailman School of Public Health, fhwa.dot.gov/environment/safe_routes_to_school.
base the effectiveness of SRTS are therefore
Columbia University, MSPH Box 14, 600 West 168th Accessed April 9, 14.
susceptible to unforeseen threats to internal Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10032 (e-mail: Pm124@ 10. Hubsmith DA. Safe routes to school in the United
validity. columbia.edu). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph. States. Child Youth Environ. 2006;16(1):168---190.
org by clicking the “Reprints” link.
Finally, given its overall benefits, it would 11. New York City Department of Transportation.
This article was accepted December 29, 2013.
be logical to expand the program to high-risk Safety Programs: Safe Routes to Schools. Available at:
intersections that fall outside of school zones. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/safety/saferoutes.
Contributors shtml. Accessed December 15, 2012.
However, doing so assumes that the results C. DiMaggio conceptualized the study and contributed
to the development of the article. P. A. Muennig wrote 12. Boarnet MG, Anderson CL, Day K, McMillan T,
of the present study are generalizable to high- the article and built and ran the final Markov models. Alfonzo M. Evaluation of the California Safe Routes to
risk census tracts outside of those studied M. Epstein collected the data in consultation with School legislation: urban form changes and children’s
here. Given that some questions remain sur- C. DiMaggio and G. Li, wrote the methods section, and active transportation to school. Am J Prev Med. 2005;28
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ability of SRTS, randomized implementation safe walking and biking to school: the Marin County success
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States would simultaneously allow for invest- This research was supported by the National Center 14. Gold M, Siegel J, Russell L, Weinstein M. Cost-
ments in a program with social benefits and for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. New York, NY:
Control and Prevention (grants 1 R21 CE001816 and Oxford University Press; 1996.
conclusively demonstrate whether these benefits 1 R49 CE002096); the National Institute on Drug 15. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Medical Portion of the
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Public health practitioners have moved be- and the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention cpi/home.htm. Accessed August 17, 2006.
at Columbia University.
yond initiatives that require actions on the part 16. Consumer Price Index, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
of the public, such as health education cam- Available at: http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm.
Human Participant Protection Accessed September 1, 2006.
paigns, and on to innovative approaches to The study protocol was approved as exempt by the
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Tipping Point in Transit - NYTimes.com 6/13/15, 1:31 PM
Tipping Point in Transit

By Farhad Manjoo
June 10, 2015 6:32 pm
One sunny morning a few weeks ago, I slipped into the inviting cockpit of a
Mercedes-Benz S550 sedan, a ride equipped with massaging front seats, reclining
back seats, a heads-up display worthy of a fighter jet and more speakers than a
political convention. At $136,000, this was a car fit for a rap star or a European
Union functionary, of which I am neither (yet).
Instead, I write about the future, and embedded in the S550 are a host of
technologies that roughly approximate the future of automobile transportation —
already available, for a high price, on the road today.

A look at how technology is changing how we get around
For decades, pundits and theorists have been expecting a future in which cars
drive themselves, and companies like Google have been testing advanced versions
of these systems for several years.
But the S550 — some of whose self-driving features can be found in other
luxury automobiles, including Cadillacs, Volvos and soon the Tesla Model S —
shows that in many ways, the future of transportation is already here, and it is
evolving at a pace that would surprise even the most optimistic enthusiasts.
And today’s semiautonomous road car isn’t the only sign that transportation is
changing quickly. Because of on-demand services like Uber, the very idea of
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/tipping-point-in-transit/ Page 1 of 7
owning a car is being undermined.
Observers say that advances in transportation may be especially apparent in

cities, where technology is creating an emerging multitude of options, from app-
powered car sharing and car-pooling to new modes of driving and parking to novel
forms of short-distance travel and private jitney buses with seats allocated by
phone.
Communication systems and sensors installed in streets and cars are creating
the possibility of intelligent roads, while newer energy systems like solar power are
altering the environmental costs of getting around. Technology is also creating new
transportation options for short distances, like energy-efficient electric-powered
bikes and scooters, or motorcycles that can’t tip over.
“Cars and transportation will change more in the next 20 years than they’ve
changed in the last 75 years,” said M. Bart Herring, the head of product
management at Mercedes-Benz USA. “What we were doing 10 years ago wasn’t
that much different from what we were doing 50 years ago. The cars got more
comfortable, but for the most part we were putting gas in the cars and going where
we wanted to go. What’s going to happen in the next 20 years is the equivalent of
the moon landing.”
Mr. Herring is one of many in the industry who say that we are on the verge of
a tipping point in transportation. Soon, getting around may be cheaper and more
convenient than it is today, and possibly safer and more environmentally friendly,
too.
But the transportation system of the near future may also be more legally
complex and, given the increasing use of private systems to get around, more
socially unequal. And, as in much of the rest of the tech industry, the moves toward
tomorrow’s transportation system may be occurring more rapidly than regulators
and social norms can adjust to them.
“All the things that we think will happen tomorrow, like fully autonomous
cars, may take a very long time,” said Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor
at the University of South Carolina School of Law who studies emerging

transportation systems. “But it’s the things we don’t even expect that will happen
really fast.”
A step toward that future is something that Mercedes calls, clunkily, Distronic
Plus with Steering Assist, a kind of advanced cruise control that lets a vehicle
basically drive itself on freeways. Using radar and cameras, the S550 can center
itself within a lane, remain a safe distance from the vehicle ahead and
automatically brake and steer to keep pace with traffic.
But that didn’t mean that I could exactly doze off on the road. The self-driving
system, for example, can’t handle sharp turns. Both the car and the company
warned me not to see the car’s abilities as permission to distract myself, which is a
bit like warning the fox to exercise some self-control around that newfangled self-
guarding henhouse. The Mercedes issues an alarm when you’ve taken your hands
off the wheel for more than 10 seconds.
Still, the car lulled me: With the S550 making most major decisions, I could
safely look at incoming Twitter messages while jammed in bumper-to-bumper
traffic. The car even promises to respond to emergency situations, like if it senses
that you’re veering off the road into the median, or if the vehicle ahead of you
suddenly jams on the brakes.
Thankfully, I didn’t get a chance to test those features.
High I.Q. Commuting

The technologies pushing rapid changes in transportation are similar to those
altering much of the rest of the world: sensors, smartphones and software.
The sensors help cars, roads and other elements of modern infrastructure
become aware, letting vehicles keep track of other vehicles and the roads around
them. And smartphones keep track of people. They help companies like Uber take
payments and route drivers and riders efficiently.
And they enable companies like Leap Transit, one of several app-powered
luxury private bus services operating in San Francisco, to measure demand on its
routes. Finally, the software ties the sensors and the smartphones together.
When the entire transportation system has been wired, powerful software
operating within cars, on phones and in the computing cloud will analyze all the
incoming data to constantly reallocate resources, watch for any emergencies and
prompt action as soon as they happen.
“You’re adding intelligence to every step of the system,” said Stefan Heck, a
research fellow at Stanford University who explored the benefits of smart
transportation last year in “Resource Revolution,” a book he wrote with Matt
Rogers, a management consultant at McKinsey.
Like many who’ve studied the issue, the pair argue that autonomous driving,
intelligent roads and other advances would make transportation far safer and more
efficient than it is now.
Every year, more than 30,000 Americans are killed in cars, and traffic crashes
cost society at least $300 billion a year, according to a study by AAA. Most
accidents are caused by human error that could, in theory, be mitigated or avoided
by artificial intelligence.
Reducing fatalities on American roads by the tens of thousands is within the

realm of the plausible, according to experts and automakers. In 2008, Volvo even
set a goal for itself: By 2020, the Swedish carmaker hopes that “nobody shall be
seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo.” It is a vision that rests in large part, it
says, on increasing automation.
Efficiency gains are also likely. Today, most cars spend most of their time idle,
and even when they’re moving, they frequently carry a single person, a
tremendously inefficient allocation of resources. That could change not just
through smartphone-enabled car-pooling and reduced vehicle ownership, but also
because automation would change driving itself.
Cars that couldn’t crash could be made lighter, and they could pack closer
together on freeways and travel in platoons, reducing congestion and, eventually,

the amount of space cities devote to roads. Intelligent roads, Mr. Heck and Mr.
Rogers argue, could save untold numbers of lives and hundreds of billions of
dollars.
That’s the dream. But the path to full automation isn’t likely to be smooth or
quick. Although Google recently announced that it would soon begin test-driving
self-driving cars, many experts said they believed that fully autonomous cars for
the public were at least a decade away.
More than technical limitations, price hampers vehicles with this capability.
Prototype self-driving cars of the sort that Google uses are usually equipped with a
high-end laser sensor known as Lidar, a comical device that sits on the car’s roof
and spins like a windmill, detecting obstacles in all directions. Google has said that
the Lidar units on its prototypes cost as much as $85,000 each. Though costs are
expected to come down, the devices are too expensive for today’s production cars.
Many carmakers plan to start testing their autonomous vehicles over the next
five years, but none have offered any date for selling them to the wider public.
But if full automation is still years away, what car companies call
“semiautonomous” features are already here — and they’re getting better, cheaper
and more widely available every year. The semiautonomous features found in
luxury cars use ordinary sensors that are largely invisible to the outside world.
Among these are radar, often powered by units mounted in the grille or the top of
the windshield. There are also cameras and ultrasonic systems positioned around
the car that allow it to detect objects and pedestrians at close range.
Together, these sensors let the car see pretty much everything a human driver
can see, and a whole lot that a driver would most likely miss, like a sudden
slowdown by the vehicle two cars ahead.
Some cars now or may soon take advantage of so-called telemetry data, like
mapping information that describes the bend of a curve or an emerging traffic jam.
Manufacturers say it wouldn’t take too much work for such data to be integrated
into the semiautonomous systems in today’s cars.
In practice, these could lead to a driving experience that very closely mimics
self-driving in certain conditions. Tesla, which plans to introduce a self-driving
feature called Autopilot as a software update to its Model S sedan this year, has
said that on highways, its cars will be able to steer into turns steeper than mere
gentle bends.
“We can basically go between San Francisco and Seattle without the driver
doing anything,” Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, told reporters in March.
There are early signs that certain semiautonomous features will improve
safety. The Highway Loss Data Institute, which tracks insurance loss statistics on
vehicles, has found that Volvo’s forward-collision avoidance system, which slows or
stops the car if it senses an imminent crash, has reduced claims of bodily injury by
at least 18 percent.
Radar and cameras are such old tech, and are produced at such large scale,
that they don’t add much cost to vehicles. Many manufacturers sell their
semiautonomous systems as an upgrade for about $3,000 or less, and several
carmakers said they could envision autonomous features becoming standard
features across a wide range of vehicles. If they continue to show safety and
efficiency gains, they may one day even be mandated by the government.
“There is not a fundamentally expensive technology involved in any part of

this,” Erik Coelingh, who runs Volvo’s safety technology program, said of the
semiautonomous features coming to cars.
Unequal and the Unknown

Not all coming advances may be democratically allocated. Though the prices
charged by car-hailing apps like Uber have fallen sharply because of huge scale,
they are not as cheap as many public transportation options.
And other privatized transportation technologies like the Leap bus service or
Shuddle, a car-sharing app for driving children to school, are starting with high
prices that may fall as the services grow larger, though it’s far from clear that will
happen. Even optimists concede these difficulties of access. “Not all of this will
make everyone better off,” said Mr. Heck of Stanford.
The bigger problem may be the way the culture, laws and our brains respond
to improvements in transportation. One worry about technology that makes
commuting less of a headache is that it will lead people to move farther away from
their jobs, which will in turn increase sprawl and drive up demand for cars,
eliminating any overall benefit from the advances.
Another is a well-known paradox of safety called the “offset hypothesis.” If we

make cars safer, won’t people then just act more dangerously, offsetting any
benefit?
I noticed this effect during my days with the Mercedes. With the car steering
for me, and promising to take care of emergencies, I felt much safer fiddling with
the stereo, the GPS navigator and even my phone while driving 75 miles an hour
down the highway.
“Here is a technology that will significantly reduce the kinds of crashes that we
know about. But at the same time, it will lead to different behaviors, and it could
lead to new crashes,” said Mr. Smith, the University of South Carolina law
professor. He added that automakers would have to spend years fine-tuning the
design of their autonomous and semiautonomous systems so it became clear to
drivers what the capabilities and shortcomings of the technologies were and to
push drivers away from risky behavior.
“The solution is saying, we have to accept that humans are imperfect, and
design accordingly,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on 06/11/2015, on page F1 of the NewYork edition
with the headline: Tipping Point in.

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Transportation Policies

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