Ungridlocked

By Nicole Gelinas, City Journal
Mayor Bloomberg’s transportation reforms have unclogged New York’s streets and made them safer.
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Though drivers in New York City are a minority, outdated traffic engineering long allowed them to reign unchallenged, with clogged streets and too many accidents the results. Over the past five years, however, the city, led by transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, has devised ways to reduce that dominance. Through several new initiatives, mostly outside Times Square, New York has been rationally using its limited physical space to get more people moving more quickly—and that means not in automobiles. New York has achieved its improvements on the cheap. Better still, the changes have saved lives.
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Another way that New York has tried to relieve subway pressure over the last four years is installing more bike lanes. Today, the city has 270 miles of bike lanes, including 20 miles of lanes in which a physical barrier—a curb or a parking lane—protects bikers from drivers. Commuting by bike has risen dramatically, with 24,000 people pedaling into the core of Manhattan in 2010, compared with 15,000 in 2007. This makes good fiscal sense. It has cost New York City about $15 million, including federal funds, to create the new bike lanes. To give subway riders more room by building more subways, the city would have to spend billions.
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New York’s transportation policy isn’t just about getting people from Point A to Point B; it’s about keeping them safe from transportation-related injuries. The city is already doing a good job of this, with vehicle-caused deaths in the city plummeting over the last two decades. “The numbers speak for themselves,” says Sam Schwartz, the Koch-era traffic commissioner known to tabloid readers as “Gridlock Sam.” In 1990, accidents on New York City’s streets claimed the lives of 701 people, including 366 pedestrians—more than one per day. Over the next decade, though, the number of people killed in accidents fell 46 percent, and it fell another 38 percent between 2000 and 2011. Last year was the safest ever for New York drivers, passengers, and walkers, with vehicles causing just 2.8 fatalities per 100,000 residents. You’re more than twice as likely to be killed by a vehicle in Los Angeles as in New York; Atlanta is deadlier still.
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New York’s new bike lanes also enhance safety—not just for bikers but for pedestrians and auto occupants, too. Crashes on city streets that have bike lanes are 40 percent less likely to result in a death or serious injury, in part because the lanes force drivers to go more slowly. Bike lanes also lead drivers to pay more attention to the road. On Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, crashes have fallen 56 percent since the city installed bike lanes.
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https://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_nyc-transportation.html
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B’ Spokes: A very well written article, with lots of positive (and a few not as good as hoped) aspects. But what I get from this article is how traffic engineers once thought they had to set the "dial" to maximum driver accommodation on every single street, NYC is finding a lot of benefits on setting the "dial" to maximum for pedestrian accommodation or bicycling accommodation, even if it means taking away space from cars.