{"id":54795,"date":"2016-04-26T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T16:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=54795"},"modified":"2016-04-26T16:15:43","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T20:15:43","slug":"street-fighter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2016\/04\/26\/street-fighter\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: What Toronto can learn from street fighter Janette Sadik-Khan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"feature-lorinc\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Toronto has only one short and unflattering walk-on part in Janette Sadik Khan<\/a>\u2019s fascinating account<\/a> of her experiences as the crusading transportation commissioner for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.<\/p>\n

There, in the index under \u201cbike lane antipathy,\u201d we get two measly pages about the 2012 Jarvis Street debacle, plus Shawn Micallef\u2019s iconic picture of the guy lying in the path of the paint removing truck.<\/p>\n

And really, we didn’t, and don\u2019t, deserve any more.<\/p>\n

\"Jarvis\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday, as Sadik-Khan and her co-author Seth Solomonow<\/a> swept into town for a lecture and dinner hosted by Ryerson\u2019s City Building Institute<\/a>, the public works and infrastructure committee proved the point. They couldn\u2019t muster a decision on the Bloor bike lane pilot project, punting the staff report<\/a> to council, where it may well\u00a0die the death of a thousand small studies.<\/p>\n

Some wag once observed that the fights inside academe are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Surely the same could be said of a pilot project like the Bloor bike lane. Even if the test doesn\u2019t work out, I\u2019ll go out on a limb and predict that the city\u2019s economy and transportation network won\u2019t collapse as a result. Indeed, the magnitude of council\u2019s dithering on this exhaustively scrutinized idea is inversely proportional to the risks entailed by such experiments, the success of which have been amply proven in much more challenging urban environments.<\/p>\n

Sadik-Khan, if we care to listen to her, has some trenchant learnings about how the city\u00a0could short-circuit the extreme analysis-paralysis that becomes apparent\u00a0at such moments. As the bureaucrat who re-engineered complicated intersections to create dozens of new pop-up plazas<\/a> across New York City and\u00a0deployed hundreds of kilometres of protected bike lanes, Sadik-Khan well understands the nature of political push back, and has the welts to prove it.<\/p>\n

But she also demonstrated, with the crucial support of a mayor who brought vision and intellectual rigour to the job, that it\u2019s possible to change the status quo using a combination of savvy tactics (e.g., pilot projects), insightful data, and the force of (real, as opposed to manufactured) public opinion.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s true that Sadik-Khan served a singular public figure within a government structured to provide the mayor\u2019s office with sufficient executive authority to carry out a mandate, she insists the public space revolution her team brought to Gotham was anything but a forgone conclusion. \u201cTo plan is human,\u201d she likes to say, \u201cbut to implement is divine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Herewith, some of Sadik-Khan\u2019s key insights about implementation:<\/p>\n

Use traffic safety to drive public space improvements<\/h3>\n

When Bloomberg hired Sadik-Khan, her first move was to take the broad goals set out in PlaNYC<\/a>, his long-range vision, and translate them into a strategic plan<\/a> for the Department of Transporation, something that had never been done before. (The City of Toronto\u2019s Transportation Services has no such mission statement.) The plan laid out key objectives, including a goal<\/a> to reduce traffic fatalities in NYC by 50% by 2030.<\/p>\n

Toronto\u2019s fatality count has nosed up in recent years<\/a> (one death per 45,000 people), while New York\u2019s has dipped to levels not seen in a century<\/a> (one per 64,000). Pedestrian and cyclist safety measures, from protected lanes to traffic calming and speed limit reductions, improve public spaces. And, here\u2019s the\u00a0most important point: when council sets targets for itself, the city has an incentive to move the marker by implementing changes in the configuration of our streets. Garden-variety public safety campaigns, such as this spring\u2019s version<\/a>, won\u2019t do the trick (i.e., people will continue to die).<\/p>\n

Leverage data to show how success can beget more success<\/h3>\n

Before Sadik-Khan began her campaign, New York businesses were just as fearful of changes to the street network as their counterparts are here: What happens if the customers can\u2019t park? What happens to delivery vehicles? Will traffic jams choke off retail streets? New York\u2019s equivalent to local business improvement areas, she explains, were often the most vehement opponents to bike lanes, new plazas and other changes.<\/p>\n

Bloomberg, a man who made billions packaging and selling information, had a mantra, Sadik-Khan recounts: \u201cIn God we trust. Everyone else bring data.\u201d After setting up a pilot project (e.g., new bike or bus lanes), her DOT officials hustled to collect information on traffic flows through re-configured intersections, pedestrian and cyclist counts and other metrics. The figures invariably showed how these changes tended to put more<\/em> potential customers on the street and in front of businesses that had feared the fall-out of lost traffic. Once they saw the data, she says, the BIAs became some of the DOT\u2019s most important allies in subsequent projects. A virtuous circle, in other words.<\/p>\n

This is an approach pioneered by the famous Danish planner Jan Gehl<\/a>, who has used this kind of data gathering in cities like Copenhagen and Melbourne (and whose firm has been retained by the City as part of the CoreTO project<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But we don\u2019t do a very good job of collecting, tracking and publicly reporting this kind of information. The Bloor bike lane staff report promises to ante up before and after cycling and vehicle counts, and survey businesses online. But it\u2019s not clear what the base line data is (the numbers are not in the report), nor, it seems, will the evaluation include anything on pedestrian activity, public realm use, or other indicators on the quality<\/em> of street life along that stretch. Indeed, on the one major Toronto arterial that has seen a significant re-configuration prior to the recently completed Queen’s Quay West reconstruction \u2013 St. Clair from Yonge to Keele, for the right-of-way \u2013 the city has never bothered to compile data showing how the street has changed since dedicated streetcar line went into operation in\u00a02009. No data, ergo no progress to report.<\/p>\n

Listen to the public, not the noisemakers<\/h3>\n

During the most intense period of her reforms, Sadik Khan says DOT officials would hold up to 2,000 public meetings per year<\/em>, a number that confirms\u00a0an extensive attempt to engage the public. But to create better conversations, she asked her officials to change the dynamic of those sessions. Instead of beginning with a presentation of a city plan, and thus creating a target for NIMBYs, Sadik-Khan\u2019s officials would open meetings with a simple question: “What problem are you trying to solve?” It\u2019s a brilliant means of engaging a skeptical public, and turning oppositional meetings into problem-solving exercises.<\/p>\n

As the campaign gained moment, the DOT doubled down its efforts to end-run the naysayers by inviting communities to submit applications for new plazas through the Neighbourhood Plaza Partnership<\/a>. Consider the appealingly subversive nature of such a shift: instead of bureaucrats dictating what goes where, communities could\u00a0identify such spaces and then embark on a process to see them brought to fruition. It\u2019s no surprise, in fact, that Sadik-Khan\u2019s plazas have cropped up across the five boroughs. The earliest ones — in DUMBO, in front of Macy\u2019s and along Broadway in Times Square — showed the rest of the city (and the world) what was possible. (It’s also important to note, for all the suburban fussbudgets\u00a0on Toronto council, that city politicians representing NYC’s\u00a0outer boroughs couldn’t veto\u00a0plans to create\u00a0the now iconic plazas along Broadway in Manhattan.)<\/p>\n

To nail it all down, regular public opinion polling, she points out, has consistently revealed the New Yorkers were “way ahead” of local politicians, string-pullers and the pundits when it came to all the new bike lane and bike sharing infrastructure. Such findings not only provided political cover; they revealed proof of concept, which is that the road network, accounting for as much as a third of all urban space, represents an invaluable asset that can be used much more productively in dense cities looking for smart and inexpensive ways to improve quality of life, boost local\u00a0economies and reduce environmental damage.<\/p>\n

Now a consultant with Bloomberg Associates (which offers free advice on urban regeneration to cities), Sadik-Khan pays homage to Frank Sinatra when she riffs about what New York can teach other cities about the future of their streets:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can remake it here,\u201d she writes, \u201cyou can remake it anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe even in Toronto. Maybe<\/em>\u2026.<\/p>\n

top photo by Teri Tynes<\/a> (cc); protest photo by Shawn Micallef<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toronto has only one short and unflattering walk-on part in Janette Sadik Khan\u2019s fascinating account of her experiences as the crusading transportation commissioner for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. There, in the index under \u201cbike lane antipathy,\u201d we get two measly pages about the 2012 Jarvis Street debacle, plus Shawn Micallef\u2019s iconic pictureContinue reading “LORINC: What Toronto can learn from street fighter Janette Sadik-Khan”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":54806,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32,9,20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-streetscape","category-traffic","category-urban-design","category-walking"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: What Toronto can learn from street fighter Janette Sadik-Khan - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2016\/04\/26\/street-fighter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: What Toronto can learn from street fighter Janette Sadik-Khan - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Toronto has only one short and unflattering walk-on part in Janette Sadik Khan\u2019s fascinating account of her experiences as the crusading transportation commissioner for former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. 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