A Safe Space
Open Streets + Retail Rescue
transportation alternatives | open street campaign
This collective action by New York City’s own, favorite, industry-leading transportation advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives, is the key initiative to make these essential changes in our city within a timeline worthy of a pandemic.
This is up to us, we can’t wait for Washington.
#OpenStreets
SLATE | “Street FooD - Close the roads. Reclaim the parking lots. Put restaurants outside. By HENRY GRABAR
“When the shutdowns end, America will reopen with a set of restrictions that seem designed to leave most cities closed for the foreseeable future. Restaurants and bars, in particular, will have trouble handling the new rules. … Fortunately, almost every restaurant in America has the ability to quadruple its footprint overnight, with one weird trick: putting tables in the parking lot.
American restaurants have space for social distancing: parking space.”
https://slate.com/business/2020/04/restaurants-reopen-outside-coronavirus.html via @slate
They’re doing this in Wuhan. We can do it here soon, too.
Hector Retamal/Getty Images
Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty
transportation alternatives | 14 Cities Getting It Right - What Bill de Blasio Can Learn About Open Streets from Cities Already Doing It — Including NYC
““Whichever underlying conditions the pandemic has exposed in our health-care or political system,” Tom Vanderbilt wrote in The Atlantic this week, “the lockdown has shown us just how much room American cities devote to cars.”
Nowhere is this more true than New York, America’s most populous metropolis and the city most hard-hit by COVID-19, where the majority of sidewalks are too narrow to maintain safe physical distancing practices, and where, for more than 100 years, public space has been sliced and slivered to accommodate car traffic.
In late April, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a solution: 100 miles of streets closed to cars and open to people, coupled with plans to widen narrow sidewalks and install pop-up bike lanes. What all that will look like is still open to debate.
Lucky for New Yorkers, other cities have already responded to the pandemic by closing their streets to cars — and there are some major lessons for Mayor de Blasio in the Open Streets of other cities. Here’s what he has to learn.”
nyc department of transportation | the economic benefits of sustainable streets
“Better streets mean better business. Attractive public space and better designed streets are not simply aesthetic or safety improvements. Better streets attract more people and more activity, thus strengthening both communities, the businesses that serve them and the city’s economy as a whole.”
~ Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC DOT Commissioner 2007–2013
NYCDOT/Bennett Midland
Outdoor cafes in Vilnius in summer. Augustinas Žemaitis.
the guardian | Lithuanian capital to be turned into vast open-air cafe Vilnius gives public space to bars and cafes to allow physical distancing during lockdown
by jon henley
““Plazas, squares, streets – nearby cafes will be allowed to set up outdoor tables free of charge this season and thus conduct their activities during quarantine,” said Remigijus Šimašius. Public safety remained the city’s top priority, the mayor said, but the measure should help cafes to “open up, work, retain jobs and keep Vilnius alive”.
Eighteen of the city’s public spaces, including its central Cathedral Square, have been opened up for outdoor cafes and restaurants, city hall said, and more are expected to be added as the summer progresses. The move has been welcomed by owners, with more than 160 applying to take up the offer.
“It came just in time,” said Evalda Šiškauskienė of the Lithuanian Association of Hotels and Restaurants, adding that the measure would help members “accommodate more visitors and bring life back to the city streets, but without violating security requirements”.
Vilnius authorities have also given the city’s public health workers €400,000-worth (£350,000) of restaurant vouchers intended both as gesture of thanks for their work and a much-needed stimulus to the city’s cafes.”
