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On Monday afternoon, the City of Toronto's Public Works and Infrastructure Committee issued no recommendation on the Bloor bike lane pilot project. To the frustration of many, an uncharacteristically bold, progressive initiative is left on precarious footing ahead of next week's Council vote. By 6:00 PM, when Janette Sadik-Khan took the stage at Ryerson's City Building Institute, the audience seemed spoiling for a fight. And a fight is what she brought.
Promoting the recently published Streetlfght: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, New York City's former transportation commissioner shared the experience of building a more pedestrian and bike-friendly New York. Over the course of her tenure (2007-2013), Sadik-Khan saw the city's network of bike lanes and sharrows expand from 29 to over 300 miles, while spearheading the successful—and quickly growing—Citi Bike program. Famously converting a segment of Broadway into a pedestrian plaza, Sadik-Khan oversaw a city-wide reclamation of public space, including the pedestrianization of Times Square.
Working under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Sadik-Khan explained that a data-driven approach formed the bedrock of the administration. Bloomberg's ethos, she joked, could be summed up with the phrase "In God we trust, everyone else bring data." During her time as DOT commissioner, Sadik-Khan stressed that "collecting the right data" was a major step in initiating a new urban paradigm. "We had a huge amount of data on cars," she told us, "but very little on pedestrians."
Leading up to the re-configuration of Times Square as a pedestrian plaza, for example, the DOT found that pedestrians accounted for 90% of traffic, but were only given 10% of the space. The reverse was true for cars. Across New York, meanwhile, many "business owners were convinced that reducing car traffic would hurt their customer base," though the DOT's analysis found that pedestrians account for far more of Manhattan's retail revenue. "Cars don't shop, people do."
Collecting the data helped change those perceptions. In Times Square alone, the pedestrian plaza saw pedestrian injuries reduced by 35%, and motorist injuries reduced by 63%. By tracking 13,000 yellow taxi cabs, the DOT also found that travel times improved up to 17%. New stores opened, and retailers thrived as a new urban "living room" was created. Since the initiative started as a pilot project of "paint cans and lawn chairs," Sadik-Khan added the the reversibility of the changes "reduced the anxiety." Now, "six years later, people like it."
Ultimately, building a pedestrian-friendly city—even investing in new types of data—rests on a paradigm shift; a "new road order." The "streets used to be living rooms, front yards," Sadik-Khan told the audience, lamenting the "dashboard view of the world" that came with the age of the automobile. Many of Sadik-Khan's projects—perhaps most notably Times Square—"didn't take a lot of time, and didn't take a lot of money." What they took was a willingness to "reclaim, re-imagine [and] redesign" the city.
Following the speech, Sadik-Khan's experiences were translated into the Toronto context during a Q & A with recently retired Toronto Star architecture critic Christopher Hume. "It wasn't easy," Sadik-Khan reminded the audience, with "thousands of consultations" and controversies marking her tenure. (Sadia-Khan quoted a newspaper's quip that Brooklyn's Prospect Park West bike lane was "the most contested piece of concrete outside the Gaza Strip"). Eventually, though, combining the right data with a willingness to experiment ("paint is cheap") brought widespread support for the DOT's work.
For Toronto, the fight for the Bloor Street bike lane project provides a backdrop of telling parallels. Here, where many local business owners have supported the initiative, councillors have complained that the data isn't there. Incidentally, the same councillors who—as Torontoist's David Hains points out—"ignored almost all metrics in East Gardiner debate want more rigorous numbers for Bloor bike lanes."
Nonetheless, the roots of change can be simple, Sadik-Khan told the audience. "Paint the city you want to see." It was an emboldening pitch, but one that—for the time being—reverberated only through the echo chamber of the room. For Bloor Street, the fight continues at City Hall. For Toronto, the fight must now take to the streets.
