Friday, December 17, 2010

NYC Dept of Transportation Commissioner Profile from Esquire

Fascinating piece from the Best and Brightest 2010 issue of Esquire Magazine.



Written by Lisa Taddeo, "Janette Sadik-Khan: Urban Reengineer" looks at the NYC Transportation Commissioner and her efforts to reclaim the city for the people (my words, not necessarily hers).

It's terribly interesting reading and reminds me of "Traffic" written by Tom Vanderbilt (and which I reviewed here two years ago). In fact, reference is made in both the Taddeo piece and Vanderbilt book of various cities in Scandinavia as the ideal for traffic planning. Less cars, more bike lanes and pedestrian plazas... all designed to improve the livability of an area while also increasing safety. Very cool stuff.

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In this same issue of Esquire was reference to a website I've heard about a few different times, but have never actually been able to fully use. The Wilderness Downtown was designed around the Arcade Fire song "We Used to Wait" and is supposed to have really cool technology around it... you just apparently need the Google Chrome browser to make it work. Oh well...