I've personally seen how the things that happened in NYC have changed Pittsburgher's minds and gave people outside of the "advocates" a toolkit that they never new they had. Needless to say her work made everyone else's job much easier by mainstreaming the idea that built environments are meant to be altered and change with the times, and that the default car-centric design is not the best use of space or the best we can do. NYC streets, under her reign, changed so dramatically and gave advocates across the country a new way to think and talk about what our cities can be, almost creating a new language.
Spending most of my adult life working on the cultural and infrastructure change of our transportation system in Pittsburgh, this book was validating to say the least. Streetfight deconstructs, reassembles, and reinvents the street, inviting readers to see it in ways they never imagined. Many are inspired by the changes taking place in New York City and are based on the same techniques. She includes examples of how this new way to read the streets has already made its way around the world, from pocket parks in Mexico City and Los Angeles to more pedestrian-friendly streets in Auckland and Buenos Aires, and innovative bike-lane designs and plazas in Austin, Indianapolis, and San Francisco. Achieving such a radical overhaul wasn’t easy, and Streetfight pulls back the curtain on the battles Sadik-Khan won to make her approach work. Real-life experience confirmed that if you know how to read the street, you can make it function better by not totally reconstructing it but by reallocating the space that’s already there.īreaking the street into its component parts, Streetfight demonstrates, with step-by-step visuals, how to rewrite the underlying “source code” of a street, with pointers on how to add protected bike paths, improve crosswalk space, and provide visual cues to reduce speeding. Her approach was dramatic and Simply painting a part of the street to make it into a plaza or bus lane not only made the street safer, but it also lessened congestion and increased foot traffic, which improved the bottom line of businesses. An empowering road map for rethinking, reinvigorating, and redesigning our cities, from a pioneer in the movement for safer, more livable streetsĪs New York City’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan managed the seemingly impossible and transformed the streets of one of the world’s greatest, toughest cities into dynamic spaces safe for pedestrians and bikers.
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