Thursday, April 22, 2010

Solving traffic woes in Jackson Heights

From the Queens Courier:

After an 18-month, $1.4 million community-driven study to address traffic congestion, the Department of Transportation (DOT) has recognized the transportation and pedestrian needs of Jackson Heights.

In a community open house on Saturday, April 17, DOT presented the research and data collected that highlighted the area’s most pressing issues and they will present their solutions at two public community workshops on Tuesday, April 27 and Thursday, April 29 at 6:30 p.m. at Public School 60 at 77-02 37th Avenue. The DOT hopes to share a vision of how the streets would look and function, and to create the framework for future transportation improvements.

“The goal is to come up with short-term solutions in a collaborative fashion. We will propose temporary fixes to these problems and monitor how well they work,” said DOT Project Manager Willa Ng. “We can expand sidewalks and close down streets with paint.”

Double parking, traffic and pedestrian congestion, noise and air pollution were among the major issues cited. Also noted was how vendors followed pedestrians and so key streets continued to be overcrowded. In some areas, traffic moved under five miles per hour.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

PK, they are illegal, but will somebody in JH please introduce a program to teach them how to cross the street. Also, no more 2 sizes too small tee's. puhleeaaaaaaazzzz!!

War on the Car said...

Warning folks, this is not to help out Jackson Heights (hell if they wanted to do that all they need to do is crack down on illegal conversions, tweeded clogging up sidewalks with their illegal knockoff merchandise, and downzone to a level the community was built for.)

Naw.

The are going to start to close streets in Queens as they did in Manhattan.

Its part of the mayor's war on the middle class by attacking the automobile. Meter maids, aggressive ticketing, restricting parking spots, letting density get out of hand - the days of the auto (an most importantly the complaing middle class) are numbered.

We all can WALK to work, RIDE BIKES to work and shorehorn yet people without worring about the costs (and carbon footprint) for transporation.

In other words, just as Beijing (and similar places) are strarting to look like 2020, NYC is starting to look like Beijing or Bucharest in the 1950s.

Cool, eh?