Here’s the one that transformed the streets of New York

Difficult to arrange an interview with Janette Sadik-Khan. Always between two planes, she travels the planet, requested by many cities who wish to transform their streets to make them more convivial.

As Michael Bloomberg’s transport commissioner between 2007 and 2013, she added 640 kilometers of cycle paths in the city, created around sixty public squares, including the most important in Times Square, redeveloped more than a hundred intersections and makes the American metropolis a fascinating laboratory of modern town planning.

1. What guided the changes you made?

People want to be able to get around more efficiently, they want it to be easy and they want to do it cheaply. To do this, one must first understand the value of the urban capital that is already in place. No need to change everything! You have to see the street differently: what are the streets really for? Who do they belong to? Are they only used to allow cars to move?

We plan to welcome 1 million more people to New York over the next 25 years and the goal was to make the different neighborhoods more pleasant. We wanted to transform the essence of what streets are: to make walking and cycling more user-friendly, to make buses faster and, above all, to improve safety on our streets.

2. You started your program by closing one of the world’s largest squares, Times Square. How did you convince people to go in this direction?

We acted very quickly. Instead of endlessly debating different projects, we got them up and running quickly, with the option to cancel them if they didn’t work. We advocated the “pilot project” technique: nothing is broken, nothing is destroyed, we delimit the public places we want to create with a retractable structure. And if that doesn’t work, we go back.

Times Square, we did it overnight. Anyway, like most of our streets, this place had a big problem with congestion and pedestrian safety. We could have been wrong in the way we did it. But we can never say that it is not worth trying to improve the situation. Especially since our streets have not changed for 50 years!

3. One of the arguments put forward to justify the absence of changes is that these projects for public places, cycle paths and reserved lanes are too expensive. How much have all these changes cost you?

Everything we have done in New York, the 640 kilometers of bike paths, the 60 pedestrian public squares, the seven lanes reserved for the rapid bus service, the creation of the largest network of bike sharing in North America, all this cost only 1% of the total budget of the city transport department.

And today we have one of the lowest accident rates between pedestrians and cars in city history! And we accomplished this in just six and a half years. It doesn’t cost millions of dollars, and it doesn’t take decades to complete projects.

What you need are paint on the floor, stones that come from old demolition projects to protect the space you want, chairs and tables bought on sale in a big box, and a few pots for plants.

People can’t wait years to see change in their streets. You have to show them that it is possible to change things quickly. Otherwise, all the energy is wasted by the constant paralysis of the planning and engineering process. We’ve shown New Yorkers that things can be changed quickly, with materials available in any transportation industry.