Streetfilms are short videos that show living examples of streets and public spaces designed for people, where walking, biking, public transit, and fostering community are the priorities. Locations range from Copenhagen, Paris, Curitiba and Bogota to our own New York City. Discussion and party to follow, bring your friends!

Hosted by Vox Pop, cafe/bookstore/community space on Cortelyou Road in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Admission is free, food and drink will be available for purchase.

WHAT
An Evening of Streetfilms

WHEN
Wednesday June 10th at 8pm

WHERE
Vox Pop Cafe and Bookstore
1022 Cortelyou Road (corner of Stratford)
Flatbush, Brooklyn

Park(ing) Day is an event in which organizations from around the globe take over parking spots and transform them into mini-parks, open to all, to serve as a reminder of how public space could be better allocated to accommodate people instead of cars. Our spot was one of 50 throughout NYC.

Park(ing) Day is one of my favorite events of the year (since I discovered it through Sustainable Flatbush last year), and this year’s Park(ing) Day was as wonderful as ever! There is nothing more special than seeing people of all ages and backgrounds, who might not have otherwise ever mingled, meet each other, relax, talk, smile, play, draw, and paint together, all in one tiny green space. Park(ing) Day allowed us to reclaim our precious public space and make magic happen for a day, at Cortelyou Rd. Park!

While last year’s Cortelyou Rd. Park was organized by only two of us, this year’s park benefited from a slew of volunteers and organizations who donated their time and goods to make this event a huge success. This year, in addition to art supplies for the kids, we had a beautiful exhibit of F.A.S.T artists organized by Susan Siegel, organic snacks galore and a huge gift basket (that we raffled) donated by the Flatbush Food Coop, fair-trade coffee donated by Vox Pop, and plenty of hard-working volunteers who helped us organize, document, set up and break down our park.

Thank you to all who made this project a success by showing up and taking their shoes off to enjoy our patch of green!

A huge thank you to Anne for bringing Park(ing) Day to Flatbush (and to all of us!); to all our organizers: Xris, Mela, Rosa, Kelli, and me (yay!); and the volunteers who helped us set up and break down: David, Lashonda, and John. A special thanks to Xris, Flatbush Gardener, for loaning his backyard furniture for the day to dress up our spot!

Park(ing) Day NYC is organized by the New York City Streets Renaissance (a city-wide campaign for livable, people-friendly streets that includes The Open Planning Project, Transportation Alternatives, and Project for Public Spaces), The Trust for Public Land, and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.

Check out highlights from our park throughout the day, from set up to clean up:

To see more photos of Cortelyou Rd. Park 2008, please visit our Flickr Photo Set.

Photos by Keka Marzagao

Union Square, car-free!

Words cannot describe the excitement of seeing Park Avenue populated with pedestrians and bikes on a beautiful summer day. It may not look like much here (this was literally five minutes before the event’s end), but I’m sure Streetfilms will have plenty of front-line footage up tomorrow! For now, check out coverage from:

- WCBS
- Gothamist
- NY1

Livable Streets advocates in New York City have dreamed of this for years, and now it’s all happening very fast…

Here are the details, courtesy of the Green Drinks website:

Join us for BKLYN Green Drinks @ The (Brooklyn) Center for the Urban Environment located on 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. Celebrate their exciting and innovative new headquarters as they become LEED-Certified Gold for Commercial Interiors by the US Green Building Council, the first of its kind in Brooklyn!

Founded in 1978, Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment is dedicated to educating individuals about the built and natural environments of New York City. Creators of the Green Brooklyn conference and the Sustainable Business Network, the Center is a local leader in the field whose commitment to strengthening public education and developing more sustainable communities is rooted in the belief that creating a healthy and livable environment requires instilling an appreciation for and an understanding of the built and natural environments. Their wide range of programs address the needs of the city’s underserved communities with a diverse menu of hands-on educational offerings that develop an understanding of the interdependency of urban life with the local ecosystem, improving academic performance and instruction, and fostering environmental stewardship.

The folks at BCUE want to announce that they are also accepting
recycling on the premises that night:

• Alkaline batteries
• Inkjet/laser cartridges
• Compact Florescent Lightbulbs (CFLs)
• Technotrash, meaning: All forms of electronic media and their cases: diskettes, zip disks, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs et al, video
tape (i.e. VHS), audio tape, game cartridges, DAT, DLT, Beta or Digibeta, and virtually all other type of computer tapes.
• Hard drives, Zip and Jazz drives, jump drives, etc.
• All forms of printer cartridges including both inkjet and toner.
• All types of pagers, PDAs and their chargers, cables, and headset accessories
• All types of rechargeable batteries and their chargers
• All of the cords, cables, boards, chips, etc. attached to or removed from a computer.

WHERE:
Center for the Urban Environment, 168 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215 (btw 2nd and 3rd Aves)
F train to 4th Ave or R train to 9th Street. Walk over 2 blocks north to 7th Street and 1 avenue west to 3rd Avenue

WHEN:
Wed 5/21, 7 pm – 9 pm

Cash bar (proceeds to benefit CUE)

Still thirsty? Bar Tano located at 457 3rd Ave and 9th Street will be open until 12 am.

(… Now, if we could only find a permanent place to recycle our CFLs…)

Some help may be on the way for the Ocean & Parkside intersection at Prospect Park: park reps have informed us that the entrance will be redesigned as part of a massive Park development project due to begin next year.

Of course, how it will be redesigned remains to be seen. We’d urge anyone and everyone concerned about the Park entrance to attend the upcoming public meeting: Monday, May 19, 6:30 p.m. at Wollman Rink.

The current situation is a nightmare for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike, and Transportation Alternatives has lobbied for improvements here in the past. But new opportunity for change exists due to an upcoming project called Lakeside Center, which will be replacing Wollman Rink. While the green design principles described on their website sound nice and all (LEED Gold buildings, rainwater retention basin to irrigate landscaping, passive ventilation, recycled and local materials, native trees and shrubs), for starters I’d be happy just to be able to get across the street and into the Park without risking my life! Once again, the public meeting is on May 19th at 6:30, Wollman Rink.

When I attended last year’s Brooklyn Blogfest at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Sustainable Flatbush had been online for only a few weeks. Most of the names and people and language of the blogging world were very new to me, everyone at the event seemed to be from Fort Greene or Prospect Heights, and covering Atlantic Yards was the primary reason for many of the blogs’ existence.

This year’s Blogfest (held at the Brooklyn Lyceum) was much larger and more diverse, and the one topic we could all agree on was that the word “blog” has become inadequate to describe the many different forms an online journal can take. Brooklyn blogs range from highly trafficked sites that specialize in real estate trends to painfully personal virtual diaries, and everything in between. Text, drawings, photos, and video are all part of the expressive palette, and Brooklyn bloggers wield these tools with great expertise, creativity, and humor. It’s a pretty impressive bunch. Did I mention that I had a great time?

Like a true sustainability geek, I was thrilled to meet the Chair of Brooklyn’s Solid Waste Advisory Board and chat briefly about anaerobic digestion. But mostly it was great to get introduced to new people/blogs such as Brooklyn Ron, CyclechicNY, and Gardenfork; to see the faces behind recent favorites like Clinton Hill Chill Blog, BedStuy Banana, and Flatbush Pigeon; and to hang out with the folks from Reclaimed Home, Fading Ad Blog, and those perky youngsters from Supervegan. A lovely evening, and an inspiration to continue with this adventure of blogging.

Full disclosure: I am a huge fan of separated bike lanes. I was signature #21.

If you think this is something we need here in Brooklyn, you can add your name to the petition here. And do it quick — rumor has it that if there are enough signatures by Monday this plan will get extra support from one of the elected officials below.

Physically Separated Bike Lanes, courtesy of Streetfilms

[Full text of petition]
To: Councilmember Letitia James, Assemblymember Hakeem Jeffries, State Senator Eric Adams, Community Board 8 Chairperson Robert Matthew, Councilmember David Yassky, Councilmember Bill deBlasio, Councilmember John Liu, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz & Rohit Aggarwala:

The Undersigned

———————————————

Sign the petition here!

Yesterday Sadik-Khan gave a talk at the Municipal Arts Society to unveil a new strategic plan for 2008 and beyond called “Sustainable Streets”. Many people were unable to attend because the reservations were at capacity a week before the event (it’s that rock star thing). Fortunately Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms was able to wangle entrance for himself and his camera to record the event for posterity:

Streets

Thanks Clarence! You rock too!

• “While some Queens politicians are claiming that the plan is elitist, the reality of it is that the elites killed this plan. With money going toward transit and a better environment for our city as part of the payoff, congestion pricing was and always will be a populist plan.”
(Second Avenue Sagas)

• “The ball is in your court Mr. Silver. The city needs tens of billions of dollars in new transit infrastructure investment. This plan has died on your doorstep. Now it’s up to you to FIND THE MONEY.”
(Brooklyn Streets, Carroll Gardens)

(And how about Silver’s statement: “Let me be clear: If I were making the decision alone, I might have made a different decision,” Mr. Silver said. Actually, he’s being as UNclear as possible, so that when budget deficits and fare hikes rear their ugly heads he can always say he MIGHT have made a different decision! What a coward…)

• “The fundamental facts remain the same. The traffic problem and air pollution problems are real. The need for better transit is real. Two-thirds of New Yorkers support congestion pricing if the funds are used for transit. The success of congestion pricing in other cities is real. The reality is that we have to come up with a plan to solve our traffic and transit crisis, if not today then tomorrow.”
(Michael O’Loughlin, Campaign for New York’s Future)

• “It will be interesting to see how the country’s most worthless and corrupt state legislative body will justify raising transit fares (a “TAX” on the working class if ever there was one). They seem perfectly comfortable voting for a 22% pay raise for themselves- for a part time job. How can they justify turning down 350 million in federal money for the rest of us??”
(Streetsblog comment)

• “More important than the cost to a small percentage of commuters is the cost of maintaining the status quo and not implementing a congestion pricing plan. Millions more people will clog our roads over the next few decades without viable alternative mass transportation options, making daily commutes far more unbearable.”
(Nassau County Assembly Democrat Michelle Schimel, via Streetsblog)

Congestion Pricing Ad, originally uploaded by wka.

As a supporter of Congestion Pricing, I felt that this week was the time to do whatever I can to help get this legislation passed. So last Saturday I spent some time in Crown Heights (Brooklyn) asking people to take the time to compose a personal letter in their own handwriting to their local representatives (in that case State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and State Senator Eric Adams). I was quite amazed at how many people were willing to do this (it’s not an easy thing to ask for!). On Monday morning I went to City Hall for the Council hearings (wearing the green t-shirt pictured below) and heard testimonies from Speaker Quinn and DOT Commissioner Sadik Khan. Yesterday morning I was part of a small group that met with an aide to City Council member Kendall Stewart, who represents the 45th District (Flatbush, East Flatbush, Flatlands), and I also spoke briefly with Stewart himself afterwards.

What I can attest to from talking to ordinary citizens (meaning, NOT politicians) is that even those who weren’t sure where they stood on Congestion Pricing (or knew nothing at all about it) were in favor when told that the revenue would be dedicated to improving subway and bus service. A few expressed understandable skepticism that the money would actually be used for transit improvements, but were somewhat reassured when told that it would go to a dedicated lockbox.

As for our elected officials, many of them seem to be earnestly asking for the data and information that will enable them to answer their constituents’ doubts. Questions about neighborhood parking permits and whether New Jersey and Long Island commuters should pay more than those from the five boroughs seem to be sticking points for some people. But for those of us who don’t drive – a solid majority in all five boroughs – the need for better bus and subway service is not in question.

More posts on Congestion Pricing and Transit Equity in New York City:

• Obama Supports Congestion Pricing!
• Enrique Peñalosa on Transit Equity for NYC
• A Brooklyn Youth’s View on Congestion Pricing
• More Supporters for Congestion Pricing
• Brooklyn and Congestion Pricing: The Numbers