Better roads for bikes and walkers: What cities inspire Janette Sadik-Khan?

Culture TEDTalks The commissioner of New York’s Department of Transportation, Janette Sadik-Khan, shares the story of transforming New York’s streets at TEDCity2.0. Photo: Ryan Lash

“It doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space,” says Janette Sadik-Khan in today’s TED Talk, filmed at TEDCity2.0 earlier this month. Janette Sadik-Khan: New York's streets? Not so mean any moreSadik-Khan tells the story of how she and her team — quickly and cheaply, but not without controversy — changed New York from a city designed for car transit to a city where bikes, pedestrians and drivers all move in sync.

Since 2007, when she was named commissioner of the city’s Department of Transportation, DOT’s urban transport programs have quickly and inexpensively remade the streets around the five boroughs of New York, creating pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes, jump-starting Bus Rapid Transit and midwifing a bike-share program with 6,000 strategically placed bikes.

“You have to design your streets for everyone. The cities that have safe streets, that are easy to get around, are the ones that will grow and thrive in the 21st century,” Sadik-Khan told the TED Blog.

What inspired her bold slate of urban projects? She says: “We took pieces from lots of different cities to have the gorgeous mosaic that we have in New York.” So we asked: Which ones?

Sadik-Khan found inspiration for New York’s integrated bike lanes from Copenhagen’s urban bike paths. The Danish model incorporates bikes directly into the street, but protects bikers by floating parking lanes in the middle of traffic, creating a low-cost buffer zone that made it safer for bikers to move quickly around the city.

Copenhagen also has one of the earliest bike-share programs, which helped inspire the launch of Citi Bikes in New York this past summer. Sadik-Khan also cites Paris and London as powerful sources of inspiration. From Vélib, Paris’s six-year-old bike share program, she realized that New York’s Citi Bike program needed to be interconnected — that all of the stations needed to work in sync. In New York, like in Paris, users can return bikes to any docking station, and if one station is full, users will be directed to the nearest hub with available spaces. From London’s Barclays Cycle Hire, she got the idea for a privately funded project at no cost to taxpayers — and she also learned that flexibility would be key in New York, where the new bike-share stations are solar-powered and wireless and can be moved as demand changes. The idea of bike shares has spread rapidly from city to city — as of this week, you can rent a public bike in 525 cities around the globe.

At the same time, Bogotá’s Bus Rapid Transit system got Sadik-Khan thinking hard about how to best manage New York’s bus fleet, which is both the largest and slowest in the world. Bogotá got its buses moving by getting them out of congested city traffic and into speedier dedicated bus lanes. Inspired by the Colombian program, she introduced the Select Bus Service in 2008, using paint and lane markers to reallocate space on the streets to bus-only lanes. There are six Select Bus Service routes in New York now, with more planned.

In her talk, Sadik-Khan shares a bold idea for how to launch projects quickly and inexpensively — pilot them with temporary materials to test them out. In Times Square in May 2009, for instance, her team blocked off a brand-new pedestrian zone with “paint and orange barrels,” and filled the space with cheap lawn furniture from a local hardware store. “We were able to show how it worked,” she said. “If it worked better for traffic, if it worked better for mobility, if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it. And if it didn’t work, no harm, no foul — we could put it back the way it was, because these were temporary materials. That was a big part of the buy-in. Much less anxiety when you think something can be put back.” (Spoiler: The Times Square pedestrian zone was so beloved that the traffic-free zone was made permanent in February 2010.)

Since 2007, Sadik-Khan and her team have reallocated 26 acres of urban space for pedestrian use, building 50 plazas around New York’s five boroughs. These plazas close off under-used streets and carve out space for people on foot, creating a space for public art installations, live performances and recreation. Public plazas have made the streets safer for pedestrians and have actually sped up traffic.

This transformation has, in turn, inspired other cities — including Boston, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Mexico City — to create their own pedestrian spaces. Los Angeles, a notoriously car-centric city, carved out a corner of its Silver Lake district in 2012 for the public to walk, sit and eat. It even duplicated the green dots that mark New York’s streets. Buenos Aires is expanding its pedestrian zones to create calmer spaces in the bustling city of 12.8 million.

Sadik-Khan says she’s noticed a kind of competition among the world’s global cities, which are measuring themselves against one another. This competitiveness, she notes, urges big cities to think seriously about sustainability and innovate new ways to make their cities greener. Instagram and Tumblr push this forward, by making visual design easier to share. “Ideas are spreading like wildfire,” she says.

It’s igniting a powerful conversation about the environment and space use; together, Sadik-Khan says, these competing, inspiring cities are developing a playbook for 21st-century urban design.

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11 Books to Inspire, Encourage, and Cleanup Your Writing

I’d like to call myself a writer. But I have found that it is hard to do. Mostly because of fear of the craft and how I sometimes don’t think that I can “stack up” to other, better writers.

What I have found is that my notion of me being terrible at writing isn’t anything unique. Not in the slightest. The best writers in the world all struggle with this notion on a daily basis. It’s hard for me to believe that writers like Steven King and Natalie Goldberg don’t believe that they are awesome at writing all the time, but it’s true.

So, instead of being hard on myself I decided to read what other writers had to say as well as learn some writing technique in the process. Below are 11 books that can help you inspire, encourage and clean up your writing.

On Writing Well

This book is a classic and one of the first that I read when I got into writing. Zinsser writes in a very approachable style and reminds you that writing isn’t always fun; that it is a real job and that you have to write through blood, sweat, procrastination, and tears to be considered a writer.

He is the one that helped me understand that writing less is more.

It would be hard to not include a book about writing from one of the best selling authors of all time; Stephen King. This book dives into King as a person and also provides the reader with how he stays motivated and how he goes about the writing process. There is some excellent stuff in this book and definitely worth reading a few times to glean.

Anyone that listens to Metallica while writing horror and mystery is my kind of human.

Ah, what can I say about Natalie Goldberg? That she is one of the greatest writing enthusiasts and teachers I have come across.

In Writing Down the Bones, Goldberg reminds us that we can’t beat ourselves up as writers and no matter what we will. She shows us how to get out of our “monkey mind” and how to write without the inner critic stopping your from putting down your ideas.

If you are a writer or even know a writer, Writing Down the Bones can “inspire” you and move you to keep your ideas and pen moving.

Several months ago I heard about the idea of writing 750 words a day to get out of myself and to keep the flame of writing alive. It helps you by making a guarantee with yourself; no matter what, no matter how tired or apathetic I am, I will write 750 words a day.

That idea came from the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Cameron suggests writing “Morning Pages” every day. The idea is to write 3 pages of long hand writing and no matter what don’t stop while you are writing. It is supposed to liven the writer in you as well as work through some cruft so you can be more creative.

And it works.

Bird by Bird is a book by the infamous Anne Lamot. I have yet to read it but from the endless awesome reviews at Amazon, it seems to be a truly great book about writing.

Lamott is known for speaking her mind and isn’t afraid to tell you the truth about writing. She has written around a dozen books

The Courage to Write is what it says; a short book to help writers not be afraid of the keyboard or pen and help to get them writing more. Raplh Keyes is a well known writing teacher and in this book tries to help us get over the fear of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards).

Keyes writes about the reasons why we become fearful of writing and it’s no surprise that the fear is something in ourselves rather than something external.

This is a fun book and isn’t truly a writing technique book like most of the others. What the Pocket Muse is intended to do is give writers a spark to write and be creative. There are many sayings and prompts throughout the book with different types of visuals to get a writer’s mind going.

It’s a nice little book to have by your side, especially if you want to find something for a little boost to get started writing.

The Daily Writer is another book that isn’t completely about writing technique. What the Daily Writer provides is 366 prompts and writing exercises that you can use everyday. Every good writer that I have encountered over the years has kept a journal or has written every single day without fail. So, something like the daily writer coupled with the above mentioned Morning Pages can kickstart your writing habit and your creative process.

I’ve used the Daily Writer for almost 7 months now and it is definitely worth the time and money to check out.

I tend to not write fiction but have been thinking about trying some more and more. Especially when a friend recommended “Immediate Fiction” to me. Once again, I don’t have first hand knowledge of this book, but according to my friend and reviewers on Amazon, this is one of the best books for help with writing fiction.

Ah, the classic. I remember sitting in my first semester of college writing with this weirdly colored and amazingly short book as our text. I in no way recognized the importance of Mr. Strunk’s book then. It took several years and a revisit to college to understand its impact on my writing.

The 11 rules of Usage and Composition are extremely valuable and something that every potential writer should take note of.

Don Murray is sort of the “black horse of writing”. Not too many people outside of the field know about him as he doesn’t have the grand allure of authors like Steven King. But Don Murray may have been one of the best writers and writing coaches in the West.

The Essential Don Murray is a collection of all of Murray’s scattered works and provides the reader with many strategies and tips for writing. But, what this book truly shows us is how much Murray loved writing and tries to help the reader love it too.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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