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- On May 17th, 2021,
I walked my son Kai to school and Matt Jensen greeted us.
He cracked a joke, he smiled,
said Good morning, and Kai went to school.
- To our top story, this half hour
- A hit and run killed a man in Brooklyn.
It happened overnight & police say the victim was crossing
the street when he was hit.
The driver just kept going.
- The next day, rumors were flying
that Mr. Jensen had been killed.
Kids were arguing, saying - that's not possible.
He was teaching me in my classroom yesterday.
And I had the wretched job
of telling my two children that a man
who taught them yesterday had been killed
by a speeding car, one block from their bedroom.
- When I was informed that Mr. Jensen was struck
and killed in a hit and run accident,
I didn't even need to ask where, I knew.
Greenpoint has grown, more people,
more cars, more cyclists,
and yet the streets haven't changed.
- There was another hit and run that just happened on Norman
and McGuinness Boulevard about 20 minutes ago.
- I saw a cyclist get clipped and knocked off their bike.
In the very place where there's a ghost bike already.
You feel powerless. It's a design issue.
It's entirely flawed.
- We have the numbers.
It's really quite striking. Since 2014,
1,443 reported crashes injuring 331 people
and 230
of those injured people happened in the last five years,
suggesting that safety has deteriorated.
- For years there is a crash
on McGuinness Boulevard every single week.
It is wrong. It is shameful.
The status quo is literally killing us.
- Enough is enough.
We're gathered here
to insist on a comprehensive infrastructural
redesign of McGuinness Boulevard
in honor of our dearly beloved Matthew Jensen.
- Friends ask me, oh, isn't it dangerous riding
around New York?
I've been doing that for about 40 years now.
Something like that. Kinda lost count.
Biking in the city has changed a lot
since I started doing it.
In the beginning, of course there were,
I don't think there were any bike lanes.
I used to live on the lower East side.
There weren't very many cabs that would come around there.
Then I lived in Soho.
Similar, not too many cabs in Soho in those days.
So a bike would get me where I wanted to go. If I wanted
to go hear some music, meet some friends, whatever it was,
you could just zoom from one to another very quickly.
There was not that much traffic downtown in those
days, especially at night.
I find it incredibly empowering and liberating.
You feel connected, but watch out.
I see this one kind of edging over.
They're going to turn out.
I find at the present moment there's an awful lot
of vehicles sharing the roads.
You have people going the wrong way.
You have really fast electric vehicles.
There's an incredible number of cars that run red lights,
trucks that run red lights.
Even people riding gas powered motorcycles in the bike lanes
and there's almost no enforcement.
- To everyone from PS 110, I'm so sorry
that you're gathered here in pain and mourning.
For years, we have been trying to undo the car culture,
laws which favored cars and motorists
regardless of what happened to people.
Human life matters a lot more than cars
and trucks in this city, so it's time for a change.
We are putting money in the budget immediately to redesign
and fix McGuinness Boulevard once and for all.
We're going to just plain do it. We have to do it now.
We have to do it now to save lives.
- Let's hear it again for this redesign
of McGuinness Boulevard
and show the Mayor
that he's doing absolutely the right thing.
In that moment,
I was overwhelmed
because I had been involved in too many
advocacy campaigns already to know that things weren't easy
and they weren't, even when they seemed easy,
something was going to go wrong.
So I said to DOT when we first started working on this,
I said, I want this to become like the vanguard
of public input.
I want there to not just be one meeting
and I don't want just one community board,
I want you to do this over and over and over again.
And then I had a talk with the advocates
who were celebrating and I said, look,
you've gotta make sure you just shore it up
because something could go wrong.
- In New York City, more than half of the pedestrians killed
and injured on our roads are killed on just 7%
of roads. Wide arterials with lots of lanes that are moving
through pedestrian dense areas,
through shopping centers,
through areas where there's schools
and hospitals, where people live and interact
and need to cross the street.
- The idea that these are accidents
allows people to think,
oh, well, you know, it couldn't be helped.
Somebody slipped in the bathtub.
And they're not, you know. We know exactly, you know
what we can do that would eliminate most of these,
and to me it's criminal that we don't.
- It's almost like people literally have to die for us
to be able to see changes happen,
and that's not the way you want to do things.
- I always tell people, don't say accident,
but also when you hear the word accident,
let it be an alarm bell.
Let it raise your antenna.
Let it be something that makes you ask,
has this happened before?
Could it happen again?
Will it definitely happen again if we do nothing?
- When we go back a hundred years, we see streets
that were pretty much the bailiwick of the pedestrian.
The pedestrian walked every which way.
If we were in middle of Park Avenue in Midtown,
we would see a park with benches.
We would see the Brooklyn Bridge had four tracks going
across, and a little carriageway & a pedestrian way,
and was handling 400,000 people a day.
Kids ran the street. There were no adults.
It was our meeting place, our playground,
our football field.
We had races between sewers. The curb was our dugout.
You might see 15 kids waiting for their turn to bat.
- Up until the 1920s,
the streets were also places for commerce.
They were places where goods were sold.
They were places where waste was disposed of.
They were places where materials were stored.
That all kind of gets pushed aside as the automobile begins
to take over in the early part of the 20th century.
- As more and more people were driving,
more and more people were dying, particularly in the teens
and in the twenties in city after city.
We saw a death rate in the 1920s that was horrible.
- With cars going by at 30, 40 miles an hour,
the street was no longer a place
where people could gather selling apples
or sharpening knives.
So that compelled the reorganization of streets
to make official the priority
of the automobile in the public right of way.
In fact, the streets are in some cases redesigned
to get rid of a lot of that flexible space
that had once served other uses.
The stoops get cut off the buildings so
that the lanes can be wider.
The park disappears from Park Avenue so
that the street can carry more traffic.
- Prior to 1910,
every single major bridge had a bikeway and a pedestrian way
and had transit.
Since 1910, none had transit going across
and some didn't even have pedestrian or bikeways.
As a teenager growing up in Bensonhurst,
we watched the Verrazano Narrows Bridge
go up in construction.
And when that bridge finally was completed,
I couldn't get more excited.
We immediately on day one went to ride across the bridge
and lo and behold,
a construction worker stopped us from going
across the bridge.
Bikes were considered kids things
and not taken seriously as a form of transportation.
- Look at this street, it's all cars.
Look at this beautiful street
with the London plane trees behind me.
This was probably the most gorgeous street in all
of America in 1850 when it was laid out
and in 1880 when these trees got to full height,
and now all I see are cars and all I hear are cars,
- What happened?
Just a man crossing against the light.
Here's somebody else.
He's in a hurry.
- This could happen to you.
The automotive industry was brilliant in creating this idea
that the pedestrian was the violator.
The pedestrian was there first,
and the pedestrian had claimed all of that space
for hundreds, thousands of years,
since they were walking upright.
Don't cross against a red light.
Don't cross between parked cars. Don't jaywalk.
They came up with this brilliant pejorative jaywalking
and criminalized the behavior that people did for centuries,
walking in a straight line.
- Show consideration for the drivers. Don't be a jaywalker,
be an A walker.
- We ride and walk with love in our hearts with sadness for
what has been lost,
with rage that these crashes did not have to happen
and with hope that we never have to do this again.
We do not know the name of this victim.
He was in his thirties, he was male
and he died on October 17th, 2002.
He was a pedestrian right here at the traffic signal.
We can see exactly why this would be such a dangerous place.
When I moved to the district in 2010,
I witnessed some fairly catastrophic car accidents.
I just couldn't understand why this kept happening
and there was seemingly like almost no, no reaction.
There was no infrastructure change.
This just remained like a real thorn in my side
and I was trying to figure out what was going on politically
that was disrupting
what I felt was a common sense kind of thing.
I decided to run for office in part
because another person was killed on this road in 2019.
I remember when I was first running, I was thinking of it,
I was like, this is like an experiment
and I'm probably going to lose.
But I didn't lose. I won by a lot.
So, because in my last election I won
by 80%,
I have to really consider that people want
what I'm offering them.
- Even as car ownership remained the province
of a relative few in the early half of the 20th century,
it was of course the aspiration of everyone.
A woman in Muncie, Indiana said she bought a car
before she installed indoor plumbing at her house,
because you can't go to town in a bathtub.
In those early days, I do think that it was kind
of a miracle to be able to just go wherever you wanted
whenever you wanted and have that total freedom.
And especially as the highways begin
to open up the natural resources around the city, to be able
to get to the beach or up into the mountains on the weekend.
I mean, that is the dream of
so many working class families in New York at that time.
So I think there is a broad feeling
that things are moving in the direction of
progress.
There was a saying when I was a child,
"What's good for GM is good for the country."
- The car industry
and the corporate sort of influence on
how this country was shaped was was massive.
It was shaped around cars entirely. Driving cars
and owning cars and selling cars
and having ample places to stick
the cars when you weren't driving them.
In the 1940s and fifties, wealthy
and even middle class families are leaving for the suburbs.
It's hard to ignore the role of racism, both in perpetuating
that movement out of cities
and perpetuating the system
of automobile that accompanies it.
And that's all made possible
by this web of federal subsidies,
both for interstate highways,
for mortgages and everything else.
- There was an attitude that the city is like a machine.
It's a matter of zooming from A to B or whatever,
and not really about the quality of life
or enjoying a place.
I think that kind of overlooks what it means
to be a human being,
what it means to be a social animal.
This is the American dream,
- Traveling on time, saving super highways,
free flowing channels of concrete and steel.
- Robert Moses is a world famous highway planner,
a man who knows his business.
- Robert Moses was a pioneer in ramming
highways through cities.
You know, the United States embarked on a full scale
campaign of building in post World War II
with the interstate highways,
but Moses was doing that here in New York
before that, during the New Deal - the parkway system,
the expressways, the Gowanus.
We really chopped up a lot of the city, especially in Queens
and the Bronx during that period.
- In this jet age, events move fast
and our progress is certain to be steady
as we clear away the structures that block progress.
- One of Moses' projects
after World War II was McGuinness Boulevard,
which had been Oakland Street,
a two lane cobblestone residential corridor,
and that was widened dramatically with many more car lanes,
really as part of a connecting road
between the Long Island Expressway
and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
To really increase that footprint
and create all the new lanes meant taking out a lot
of homes and other buildings.
So cars came in
and it's a high volume of cars at higher speeds,
with gas stations and retail with big parking lots
and the kind of things you tend to see
in you know a totally car dependent suburban area,
but there is still a residential neighborhood there.
- I grew up right down the block from here.
My great-grandmother's house was knocked down in the
first place to build McGuinness Boulevard.
And my dad when I was growing up here in Greenpoint,
this is the story of so many parents
that raised children in this neighborhood,
my dad used to wake up in the middle
of the night in a cold sweat having had the same nightmare
over and over again, which was that I ran out of the house
and I was hit and killed on the boulevard.
This story has repeated itself over
and over again here in Greenpoint.
- Years ago when I was on music tours,
I started bringing a folding bicycle.
We'd put them in the tour bus
and pull them out in the morning
and explore where we were before
we had to do soundcheck and do a show.
I really enjoyed that
it allowed me to explore all these cities.
I remember riding around Istanbul,
which has terrible traffic, but I could explore the
whole city, Reykjavic, Rome.
A lot of people are familiar with Amsterdam
and Copenhagen where everybody gets around on bicycles.
Oddly enough, some of those places, I think Copenhagen,
was not always a bike city.
It was given over to cars like a lot of American cities.
And then little by little it was taken back.
They took some parking spots
and turned them into public spaces, which then filled up
with outdoor restaurants.
They put in bike lanes.
And it made it a much more pleasant place to live and work.
As happens in many other places, it ends up being good
for business and good for people's quality of life,
and brings in tourists and all the rest too.
- I'm seeing a gentleman right now with two kids on the back
of his bike and here he comes.
It's beautiful, they're happy, they're smiling,
they're together, going to camp, school, whatever it is,
and that was my husband and our kids.
We rode them to school on their bikes almost every day
unless it was pouring or freezing.
And we continued like that
until the summer of 2006.
My husband, Dr. Carl Henry Nacht,
who was a physician on the upper west side of Manhattan,
serving by this time, thousands of people,
and we decided to try out the fairly new greenway.
We had a green bicycle light,
it was probably the first bicycle light in NYC, to go.
And we were riding next to each other
and all of the sudden these headlights are coming at me
and this truck is swerving around into the intersection,
missed me by inches, but hit my husband.
And he died three days later from his injuries.
These are deaths that create a huge hole in a
community and the ripples out from it go on and on and on.
And these are violent deaths.
I was there. I know what it looks like,
I know what it sounds like,
and I know the desperation of sitting in that place
with my husband, still alive,
and hearing the sirens from
Saint Vincent's Hospital coming north
and not able to get to me
because the West Side Highway is chock-a-block with traffic.
- Oops.
- Hi.
- No motor vehicles.
- On the bike path.
- I know - they should have done this a while ago.
- Well, we're doing their job for them. Thank you.
I'm glad you appreciate.
- I'm a bicycle rider.
- There you go. It's not hard.
- A lot of tickets. Yeah, that's not even readable.
I don't even know what he's thinking.
Hey, it's Gersh Kuntzman,
Still on the criminal mischief beat. Still got my pen.
Listen, it's not that often I come along a car
that's so egregiously defaced.
You could ask yourself, is that just normal wear and tear?
I don't think so, the rest of the car looks pretty pristine.
So it's time for this guy to get the special.
I call this the special.
Just a simple free paint job.
I'm not going to say it's Picasso, but it's not bad.
And now this guy will only get the tickets he deserves,
and it's a lot.
- In New York City,
bicycles somehow managed to survive all these decades,
with the automobile coming in.
But it did that the way cockroaches survive,
it was in the cracks where nobody could notice it.
- In 1966,
New York City mayor John Lindsay made Central Park car free
on Sundays.
And that kind of pried open the door to important
changes, at least changes in thinking about the place
of the car in the city.
In 1973, there was the deus ex machina
of the Arab oil embargo and the OPEC price increase
and suddenly overnight gasoline doubled in price,
when you could buy it.
And that ushered in an overnight boom
in the amount of cycling, not so much
because car drivers switched to bikes, but
because people who had a bike in the basement
or in the living room felt emboldened to go on the streets
because they weren't going to get run over by cars.
It's five o'clock in the afternoon, there are no other cars
and there may be a million people on bikes.
In 1980 Ed Koch went to Beijing and saw so many bikes.
I say, isn't this marvelous?
All these people on bikes -
I gotta do something about that in New York City.
Then in 1980 we also had a transit strike
and thousands upon thousands biked to the city.
After those two events, the Mayor called me into his office
and said, let's build some bike lanes.
So we installed continuous,
physically separated bike lanes from Washington Square Park
to Central Park on Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue
and Broadway, Seventh Avenue.
We had about an eight foot bike lane
and we thought that was terrific.
I remembered thinking, yeah, we're not going to get a lot
of bike riders now,
but by the year 2000 they'll say we were geniuses.
Well, after about six weeks when the bike lanes were in,
I got another call to the Mayor's office
and he said to me, Sam, rip up those bike lanes.
I can't go anywhere without people telling me
how pissed they are with those bike lanes.
And we had to call in our bulldozers.
There were some people that just laid down in the middle
of the road, but it was really just a handful
of bike riders.
There wasn't much a bike constituency at the time.
And the bike lanes disappeared
- In 1987,
Ed Koch decreed that cyclists wouldn't be permitted
to ride in Midtown on weekdays,
and that became the galvanizing event
that propelled bike activism from a very moribund
quiescent, nothing into a vibrant movement.
Bike messengers spearheaded the resistance,
and, more importantly, established cycling
and cyclists as an environmental and city friendly vanguard.
- Toward the end of the Dinkins administration,
things started to happen.
We got the city to close some of the entrances
to Central Park, to get cars out
and the DOT was starting
to use phrases like traffic calming, which were, you know,
direct imports from Western Europe at the time.
And then nothing much happened under
eight years of Mayor Giuliani.
They were putting bike lanes in places
where you didn't really need them and
where they wouldn't get in anyone's way,
so not that useful.
- One thing that happens in the 1990s and 2000s is
that almost every center city in the country begins
to recover some of the residents
that it lost in the fifties,
sixties, seventies and eighties.
But this trend is particularly prominent in New York City,
and one of the reasons for that is that New York maintained
so much of its urban fabric
and so much of its charm and vitality.
And so New York becomes the epicenter of this phenomenon
of lots of people moving back into cities.
And certainly this puts stresses on the usage
of the street. For example,
while most of Fifth Avenue is in fact made up
of the roadway, the vast majority
of people are using its sidewalks.
And that imbalance is what attracts reformers to thinking,
what if we could reallocate this?
Does the traffic really need all this space
or is the traffic just using all this space
because that's the space we've given over to traffic.
And what would it look like if we were to give over some of
that space to other uses?
- Critical Mass took root in New York City very successfully
in the 1990s following San Francisco.
Critical Mass is this flood tide of cyclists
who take over the streets,
not in a possessive way, but just we are here,
we are traffic.
- It's amazing -
As far as I can see in either direction is bicycles.
- For the first 10 or 12 years,
Critical Mass was growing all the time.
By 2004 there might have been five
or six thousand people in the monthly rides.
- Who's streets? Our streets! Who's streets? Our streets!
- The crackdown
during the Republican National Convention in
2004 put an end to that.
The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg,
had a phobia about public disorder, so his police went in
and broke it up.
- Do you know why you're being arrested? I don't know.
- The NYPD arrested hundreds of people
and they continued to arrest
and confiscate bikes at most
of the subsequent Critical Mass rides,
so that by '05 and '06 it was a game of cat
and mouse against the police and it was no longer fun.
It was scary.
Ironically, just two or three years later,
Mayor Bloomberg appointed Janette Sadik-Khan
to engineer a transportation and streets revolution.
- My interview with Mike Bloomberg started with a question -
Why do you want to be Traffic Commissioner?
And I said, I don't want to be Traffic Commissioner.
I want to be Transportation Commissioner.
And I talked about building bike lanes
and making them a real option for how people got around.
Building bus lanes, rapid bus lanes.
We talked about congestion pricing, you know,
talked about making our streets safer,
making it easier to walk.
Mike Bloomberg had a big vision for what the future
of this city could be with a million more people by 2030.
- The Bloomberg administration was different than the usual
political class in that they watched
what was happening around the world.
- It was the first stirrings of the climate crisis.
He was feeling winds of change from Europe.
- He was very susceptible to the idea
that other places were doing it better than us.
You could go in and say, London just did congestion pricing
and they revamped their bus system and it's working great.
And Paris is closing waterfront highways
and doing public bikes
and they're using them to fill up the new bike
lanes they just created.
Or South American cities with a fraction
of our wealth are kickimg our ass on bus transportation.
They're making buses work in a way we're not
even trying to do here.
And he would turn around and ask the people who worked
for him, why aren't we doing that?
And that mattered to them.
I don't think we'd be anywhere if
Bloomberg hadn't been the mayor.
- Early on in my DOT tenure, I went to Copenhagen
and they had these parking protected lanes,
where they took the parking lane
and moved it away from the curb.
And then those parked cars served
as this strong barrier for the cyclists.
It also shortened the crossing distance to make it easier
for people to cross the street,
older people, younger people.
It really improved the safety of the street.
And so we brought that back to New York City,
and tried our first protected bike lane on ninth Avenue.
People said, oh, it's going to be dangerous.
The cars are going to speed. Nobody's going to use the bike
lanes, it's not going to work.
And we said we would try it out with just paint,
and if it worked we would keep it.
And if it didn't work, okay, we'll put it back.
And, you know, we saw injuries go down 58%.
We saw retail sales, the local businesses, go up almost 50%.
We saw dramatic increases in cycling.
This was a win-win-win.
- We are a city of pedestrians, cyclists, skaters, drivers
and mass transit.
Under the Bloomberg administration, it really took off.
We need to continue what was put in place under
the de Blasio administration.
When you go to other cities
and countries across the globe, they're so far ahead of us.
We don't follow in New York.
We lead in New York.
And so we're going to regain our leadership
under the next a few years to make sure
that this is the place where people will come and study
and analyze how we got it right.
- McGuinness Boulevard will get a different look
in the coming weeks.
It'll have a different flow.
The NYC Department of Transportation is
moving ahead with changes.
- A new plan aims to redesign the mile long four lane
street, which runs between the Brooklyn Queens Expressway
and the Pulaski Bridge.
The plan would remove one lane
of traffic in either direction
and install parking protected bike lanes,
a project that the DOT says has worked on other
major streets.
- The DOT says it will also include delivery zones
along the corridor.
And they will continue to work with stakeholders
and monitor developments.
- Supporters of the plan
say this road diet is necessary to protect pedestrians
and cyclists from speeding drivers and large trucks.
Let's give it a chance. Let's give it a shot.
It's going to work. We know that it's going to work.
Makes McGuinness safe! Make McGuinness safe!
Make McGuinness safe!
No more deaths! No more deaths!
No more deaths!
- We don't want to hear you!
We're Greenpointers! We're Greenpointers!
- Yeah - get off your phone when you cross the street!
- We're Greenpoint people!
Make McGuinness safe! Make McGuinness safe!
- Now the city's proposed a road diet for McGuinness Blvd.,
to take that nearly highway back to more
of a neighborhood street, which makes complete sense
because the neighborhood is growing.
If we didn't do the road diet,
the safety problem is only going to get worse.
The city's been doing road diets for about 15 years,
starting in 2007 with ninth Avenue in Chelsea.
And we've done that on a bunch
of overbuilt streets since then -
Broadway, Prospect Park West in Brooklyn
and both of the big avenues on the east side of Manhattan,
First and Second. And you know,
they've all worked really well.
Traffic calming allows other things
to start happening on the street.
You will get more pedestrians.
You'll get more people hanging out on the street,
because they can have a conversation
with the people next to them.
Pretty much every great city in the world
except New York has a lot of pedestrian streets,
and those are great for businesses.
The stuff that people buy still gets
to those places overnight,
and then people flockt there during the day.
- Hey there, have you signed
the Make McGuinness Safe petition?
Thank you. Appreciate it. Excuse me my friend.
Have you signed the Make McGuinness Safe petition?
We are going to need to keep the pressure on
to show the Mayor's office that there's public support.
- That's what I thought too.
But you know, what I learned is that most
of the traffic on McGuinness is not local.
They're like just using it as a shortcut.
So if they took away a lane, less cars would come through.
So it would work. Yeah, I know it's counterintuitive.
- I oppose this plan.
- Tell me why.
- I know it comes from a good...
- I want to hear why.
- I've been here for 15 years,
If you're going to shut down one lane on the McGuinness,
this whole neighborhood is going to suffer.
- This plan was such a good compromise for the neighborhood.
You keep parking, you keep the travel lanes,
you eliminate a lot of cut through traffic
and you get protected bike lanes.
What's your hesitation? You're sighing!
- It's just opposite to my, to my experience, to my logic
or experience or anything.
You know, traffic flows.
If you compare it to water, to oil,
to any, to anything other.
If you clog one way and don't provide an alternative,
so the other ways are going get more congested.
- But the difference is choice.
If you cut off one path of water or oil,
that oil or water is not saying,
oh well perhaps I'll ride my bike today.
Or perhaps I'll take the train today.
- This is literally paint at least for the next like decade.
- If it doesn't work, if it is a disaster,
if it all falls apart, which no one...
- It's reversible.
- I'd like to hear that.
- That's it.
- Yeah, you should try everything to make things right,
but also have the option
to reverse if your calculation were misleading,
- If our calculation
and the Department of Transportation's calculation
and the elected officials' calculation is wrong,
which I don't believe that it is,
but if it is, then you know,
- We really hope that you know everybody's going to be safe
and we'll have less traffic.
This is the goal of everyone.
- That's the hope.
- Thanks again.
- You know when it comes to changes on the street,
sometimes they are seen as counterintuitive.
For a hundred years we've looked at the way
to improve the streets, to improve transportation is
to build more lanes. More lanes, more ramps,
more signals, that'll get us there, right?
And actually we've got almost a hundred years of data
to show no, that actually isn't right.
- People often think of traffic flowing like water,
so they have this sort of hydraulic model of it.
But it's not, it's a set of human choices.
- I think the best example
of this was in Los Angeles when they were adding another
lane on Interstate 405. They spent $1.6 billion
and, at the end of the project,
traffic didn't move any better.
In fact, in part of the rush hour, it was actually worse.
So it is kind of counterintuitive. Actually,
the way to improve traffic is to give people options
for getting around that don't involve driving.
Making it easier to bike, making it easier to walk,
making it easier to take the bus.
People aren't just going to take the bus
because they think it's, you know, the right thing to do.
People are going to take the bus
because it's the faster thing to do,
it's the easier thing to do.
There is no question that you get what you build for.
- When I came to New York in the seventies,
we had people selling heroin on the street, publicly,
graffiti everywhere.
And to my surprise, Bloomberg with Janette Sadik-Khan,
they really did tame the beast to some degree,
with the bike lanes and the pedestrian areas.
But we have a snake!
I have never seen this level of civil
misbehavior as much as the mopeds in the bike path.
It's the speed that is the danger here and their
unpredictability. It's just right in your face.
It's physically scary and it's an affront to our dignity.
I believe strongly
that what's happening here is an injustice against
bicyclists, pedestrians, wheelchair users, old ladies,
old men, babies, people walking dogs,
everybody who has to put up with this now.
Help protect our sidewalks,
help protect our streets! Make them safer!
- Once COVID hit, people in large numbers were switching
to e-bikes, scooters
and other forms of private transportation
that they didn't have to share with anyone else.
- The food delivery
that the pandemic required ensured that electric assist
and motor assisted bicycles,
and now of course mopeds as well,
were not going to be barred from the streets of the city
because they were providing this essential service.
And now that they've gotten their foothold, they're here
and they're here to stay.
- If you look at the actual device, the moped
or the electric bike is one of the great inventions
because it's very low impact on the environment.
It allows you to cover really long distance,
relatively safely.
And also they're relatively inexpensive.
The problem with the electric bike
and the moped is we haven't created safe
infrastructure around them.
- So in New York fashion, they kind
of like just opened the floodgates
and now you are relying on cops
who really don't do this anyway,
to think about like is it a moped?
Is it an e-bike, is it a, like what is it?
Is it legal, is it not?
And they don't know! And they don't get trained
really to to know.
- When it happens in America,
it seems like it always happens bigger
than you expected and then it's sort of out of control.
Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for coming.
We are the Deliveristas Unidos.
And we are fighting to improve the conditions of this job.
Because delivery work is recognized
as an essential job in New York City,
but the apps don't treat us that way.
Working on the streets everyday
exposes you to accidents,
exposes you to being robbed,
and it is very dangerous.
And it's a job that deserves to be dignified.
But we must also insist on and ask for our rights.
We are also an organization
to help you do things the right way.
There are a lot of people that aren't very happy with
delivery workers because many don't respect traffic laws.
They ride on sidewalks.
They do whatever they want on the street.
So we have to spread the word:
Let's respect traffic laws.
Let's respect bike lanes.
If you have a motorcycle,
you can't be in the bike lane.
You have to be in the street.
There are things that can be improved
and we need to keep fighting.
- It is something really sad for me
because a lot of people, they say, no,
I hate delivery workers, I hate bikes, I hate e-bikes,
but they need us.
So that's something crazy about people.
This is the world that we live in.
When you see someone riding a bike, sometimes it looks easy,
but you never know what's going to happen to them.
Because during the pandemic in the 2020s,
we lost like 22 or 24 workers,
and in those coming years,
the number is almost the same.
And last year we lost 18 workers.
So 18 workers was like hit by a car
and then they never came back home.
(Names and ages of cyclists killed in traffic.)
- In Europe and Japan,
the rate of traffic fatalities is far lower
than it is in the U.S.
Are Europeans better drivers?
Are people in Japan better at walking? Of course not.
They face less dangerous conditions.
Their policies and infrastructure
allows them to make mistakes and not die.
By contrast, in the U.S.,
our mistakes are death sentences.
Our systems are built so that unless we are perfect drivers
and perfect cyclists and perfect pedestrians,
we risk being killed or killing someone.
If we build our roads so that they're safe
for a drunk person, then they're safe for everyone.
- Can you paint your way to street safety
in a 9 million person city?
No, you can't. You gotta build stuff.
Well over in Europe, there's very little of this paint
that's forced to sit here for 15 years.
In London they don't paint it, they just build it,
but they build it faster and they build it for real.
- You know, cities around the country have been
building out protected bike lanes and that is so important.
But we have this dynamic that's emerged
where being on a bike in New York City
and in cities across the country is largely a
solitary experience.
You get a flat tire, you're on your own,
your gear start messing up, you're on your own.
You're looking for bike parking, you're on your own.
You need a place to charge your E-bike,
you are on your own.
We have to divorce ourselves from this road warrior
mentality. Oh, you're going to ride this beater bike around.
And yeah, if it gets stolen, you know...
We've got to get ourselves away from that
if we want to see average people adopt micro mobility.
Infrastructure is legitimizing.
It's about elevating expectations.
We should expect world-class infrastructure,
world-class design, world class technology,
when we think about micro mobility.
- Next is McGuinness Boulevard design review and discussion
I would like everyone to be respectful of everyone else.
We're just going to keep it civil.
- Hello everyone. I'm with the Department of Transportation.
Over the past year we did a bunch
of outreach, three workshops with one
of them being in Polish.
We also sent the street ambassadors out.
We were able to survey pretty much every business owner
that was capable of talking to us.
We also had this online feedback map. We got 744 comments.
- We've been hearing loud and clear from community members
and elected officials that we need to move forward.
We need to make the changes on
McGuinness that will improve safety.
- Leave Greenpoint alone already!
- You're going to get kicked out if you interrupt again,
just fair warning.
- I'm just against this bike idea.
I don't think we should mix bikes with cars
and trucks and buses.
- This dieting of McGuinness Boulevard,
it's just going to create a traffic havoc.
- This is a crazy idea.
- Where does all the traffic go?
- So where are the people supposed to park their cars?
- As a single mom, I can't make it
to Key Food on a bike with a baby.
- It just makes sense to not have bike lanes.
I would also recommend getting rid of some
of the greenery, cutting it down.
- Yeah, thanks for your comment, Shannon.
We did a lot of outreach related to this project
and overwhelmingly, you know, the bike lane
and safety for cyclists has been something
that the community's been asking for.
- Tony Argento, thank you for giving me time.
I'm a business owner and a resident of Greenpoint
and a taxpayer.
My company and my clients are heavy truck users,
and if we can't get our trucks to our location,
what good is being here anymore?
- We Need Trucks will surely go out
of business with this proposal.
- You guys gotta get the input of the longtime residents.
- For the people in opposition to any of the plans
this evening, safety has gotten lost in this conversation.
- The leading cause of death in New York City
for children under 14 is being hit by a car.
The leading cause of death for seniors over 65,
number one is falls, number two is being hit by a car.
If the first thing out of someone's mouth in this discussion
is about parking and not human lives,
then I think DOT should take
that into consideration.
- That's going to end the public session.
I want to thank DOT...
- You barely public speak.
- Exactly.
- You serve the public, not yourself.
(Many agitated voices talking over each other.)
- ...stopping the traffic on McGuinness!
- That is not true...
(Many agitated voices talking at once.)
- I want to thank DOT for coming...
- Have the meetings in person, COVID is over!
- Tney don't want democracy!
- This is a done deal folks, remember that.
- This is favoritism!
- Reach out to your elected officials -
- How did the StreetsBlog know about this?!
- Okay, meeting adjourned! Thank you.
- You know, the status quo is a very powerful thing.
And, you know, we've had our streets be designed
the same way for over a hundred years.
And if you change it, you know, people get upset.
- So all of a sudden a new group comes out.
Now this group had been around for a while,
and they had been making themselves known.
But it was clear in these meetings
that they were in the minority
and that the questions
that they had actually had scientific answers.
But with the right kind of backing
and money involved in their campaign, it really took off.
- There are 8.4 million New Yorkers
and there are 8.4 million traffic engineers.
You know, when we started putting these bike lanes down,
people thought, what are you doing?!
There was a very powerful backlash
and bikelash. Our streets are for cars,
you're from the government, you know, I'm not sure
that this is going to go well.
So, you know, it got intense.
There were several lawsuits about it.
Prospect Park West was kind of ground zero
in the bike lane battles.
You know, don't be conned by Sadik-Khan,
which I thought was so clever.
- You know, fairly wealthy people on Prospect Park West
with access to the Mayor were criticizing him directly
at parties and stuff.
We went in one day to talk about something else,
he's like, I need to ask you about Prospect Park West.
And he said, are more people riding bikes there?
And is it safer? That's all I care about.
And Janette was able to say yes and yes,
I'll get you the numbers when I get back to work,
to the office.
But that was the extent of the conversation.
- Bloomberg was imperious, he could be tone deaf,
but at the same time he wasn't afraid to try new things.
- He took a lot of shit for it at the time
and said, look, the stuff she's doing is succeeding.
I don't care what the tabloids say, I'm looking at the data.
I'm looking at how these projects work,
and they are working,
so we're going to keep doing them.
- We really looked at the safety of the street
very much like a scientist looks at a stream.
What happened to safety before and after?
What happened to local businesses before and after?
What happened to the number of cyclists before and after?
You know, after all of the fighting,
after all of the backlash,
after all of the lawsuits,
the bottom line was that it worked.
You know, we saw a tripling
of people in the bike lanes.
We saw the safest streets
that New York City had seen in a hundred years.
You saw people of all backgrounds, ages, sizes,
biking in bike lanes.
It really was a matter of affording them the opportunity.
- You don't think a change is possible in your own behavior
until you see somebody else doing it,
or somebody that you didn't expect doing it,
like you see a business person going to work on a bike.
That kind of plants a little seed in people's heads,
and they realize, oh, this is a possibility.
- People became very comfortable with the new status quo
and it was a very different city six and a half years later.
- Every place in New York where you create room for people
and activities that aren't driving
and parking cars are the most popular places in the city.
Central Park.
The West Side Greenway, the protected bike lane behind us,
which gets 500 bikes an hour.
We may not be Amsterdam,
but we're in Williamsburg and it works.
The same rules of humanity apply.
No one's talking about putting traffic lanes back on
First Avenue in Manhattan.
No one wants to bring cars back to 14th Street.
No one wants to reintroduce two-way traffic on
Kent Avenue in Brooklyn.
And in fact, the arguments are largely forgotten within
a very short time,
as people take up the new space, the buses start to move,
the bikes lanes attract cyclists,
& you don't have a high profile death on that street again.
- It's astonishing to think that all
of the sustainable investments
that we made were less than 2% of the entire DOT budget.
You can do so much for pennies on the dollar
to truly transform your city.
- A battle in Brooklyn over a busy roadway
reaches a boiling point.
Supporters of the DOT plan are pointing fingers at the
Argento family,
which owns the Greenpoint based company Broadway Stages.
Some have accused the family of using their influence
to drum up opposition to the road diet.
A spokesperson for Broadway Stages said the proposed plan
was based on flawed data
and poses a catastrophic threat to the future of Greenpoint.
- I'm sorry, Kevin, you guys have?
- Is it a public forum or private forum?
- I just don't think right now...
- Is it public or private?
- It's a public meeting. Public or private?
- This is a public meeting. For DOT, the city right?
- Is DOT public or or private?
- This is a public meeting Monica.
- Monica, I'm registered.
- Are we closing or opening?
- I think we're shutting the door.
- Public meeting! Public meeting!
- I just want to thank everyone for coming here today.
I've been here since 1996.
It was dirt streets full of garbage.
I've helped clean this neighborhood up block by block.
We're a community of studios where thousands
of jobs have been created,
and you know, I think we should reanalyze the plan,
and you know, try to get more business
input and more community input.
North Brooklyn is the third largest industrial hub in NYC.
We're talking thousands of businesses and thousands of jobs.
We did some research ourselves
and I think personally, this will further bolster
gentrification in this neighborhood.
- You have to get this right!
So I ask that you stop moving forward.
We're adults, let's act like adults!
Let's get together and freaking figure out this thing!
- I'm so disappointed!
There was never a time when we couldn't find solutions!
We are here this morning
because we do understand your
concerns and we're here to listen to them.
We'll listen to them more.
This is a road diet again that was proposed,
that has been done in many corridors citywide,
and it has worked and has made things safer.
But again, we can absolutely, again,
have a continued discussion.
- You show up the CB meeting...
all of you, and you never gave us a chance!
- The Commissioner wants to say a word!
- Thank you. I know how important it is
to make our streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
The Mayor and I, we are very clear.
Traffic violence is equal to gun violence.
We know how important it is in this area.
We know the numbers of crashes,
we know the numbers of victims.
We know that we have to really look at this
as an important project for our city.
- I know there are a lot of strong feelings in this room.
There's a lot of disappointment, a lot
of frustration, a lot of concern.
And frankly, we often see familiar dividing lines
between longtime residents, lifelong residents,
and some of the newer folks.
We've been engaging with the community for close
to two years around how to make McGuinness safer,
and today is yet another opportunity
to give actionable specific feedback
for modifications you'd like to see
to the plan to make it better.
But what I will tell you is this, safety has
to be prioritized.
(Yelling and screaming.)
- I'd be happy to chat with you further...
(More yelling and screaming)
- Wait stop, I want this to be beneficial!
(Chaos!)
Stop being angry, stop being violent!
- It's against the law, keep it moving if you're protesting!
- Broadway Stages bought up a lot
of Greenpoint's property in the nineties, so they own
quite a lot of this district.
And in the past, that meant
that they had a seat at every decision.
And they weren't really invited to the table this time
as anything more than a community member.
And I think that's insulting to them.
And maybe this is getting in the way of a business plan?
Sometimes I feel like it gets into this like
feudal lord territory.
We're working the land and living on it,
but we owe deference.
- Why are you touching my car? Just don't touch my car.
But you want us to be like Amsterdam.
Well, no, I just, I want us to be like nicer.
I want people to be nicer.
And I think a lot of the reasons why people are
so un-nice is because the car turns them into assholes.
I mean, look, it's well documented in academia
that cars, you know, make you more hostile.
And when you're in a car, you care about
your community less.
They call it moto-normativity.
It's like that once you're in a car,
your behavior is normalized,
well by the fact that we have roads where you can drive fast
and highways and the way in which every supermarket has a
big parking lot.
The car companies want you to feel safe
and they want you to feel powerful,
I mean, that's what they market.
And there's no check on that.
- Look at advertising on TV now - bigger, faster.
I mean the size of the vehicles
that are now coming into the city,
the size of the trucks that are coming into the city.
- The sheer physical power
and the inertia, the political inertia
of car ownership and car use
and car entitlement is incredibly powerful.
- Everything becomes a culture war -
those cyclists want to take all our space.
Well, in fairness to the drivers,
they have had a hundred years to believe
that it is their space.
- This plan is so flawed.
It's really just sort of one big bike lane experiment,
when we're talking about...
- You keep coming back to the bike lanes,
but it is so much more than that, right?
The changes that are proposed now are really standard
traffic calming measures.
If everybody wants there to be fewer cars
and fewer accidents and fewer injuries
and death, what's the division?
Hpw are there two sides to this?
- They are going to push 12,000 vehicles off
of McGuinness Boulevard daily.
We do agree though that we don't necessarily want
12,000 vehicles on the road.
These vehicles are going to go onto,
some of them are going to go onto local streets,
some of them are going to go onto the BQE.
- And some of them are going to just figure out a
different way to get where they're going...
- But either way you slice it, it's going to be thousands
of vehicles pushed onto these quiet residential side streets
- Or people will just make different choices.
I know I certainly would.
- Politics are about feelings and not facts,
and that's, that's really a problem.
And it's one of the reasons why
things have been going the way they have been.
- You know, resistance to change is baked into,
it's always been baked into politics.
It's baked in even more now.
- We also have this, this exceptionalism issue.
Folks that like to fight against change always
say, this is New York.
It isn't Bogota, it isn't Spain, it isn't Barcelona.
You can't...
Don't compare those cities to New York.
We can't do what they do.
But then when it comes to something else, they'll be like,
oh, we're the best city in the world.
We're exceptional. It's just like they choose when
New York City is great and can do amazing things.
And then other times...
We can't do what other cities do because we're different.
- I think New York City is exceptionally provincial.
I really do. It's, it's really incredible.
Because we are a place where
people come from all over the world
and yet we can't seem to see past our little area.
- In America right now, we have a big problem.
We've let decadence and we've let greed, you know,
corruption eat away at our civic soul.
No country, no society has ever been wealthier,
than America is right now.
And what do we do with it?
We can't build subways, we can't build bus lanes.
We can't build bike parking. It's incredible to believe!
- Hey it's Gersh Kuntzman -
I'm in, as you can see behind me,
the police parking zone in front of the 78 Precinct.
And we got a cop, who's got an illegal cover.
I'm just going to let the Mayor know that one
of his employees is running around with an illegal cover.
- The defacement of license plates
by NYPD on their private cars,
it's become a thing, so that maybe, you know,
one in 50 license plates
that you see are defaced in some way
that they will evade automated enforcement,
as well as tolls, you know, on the bridges and tunnels,
- If you've covered or, or defaced
or foliated your plate, you're saying to me and my kids,
I'm claiming the right
to drive at whatever speed I want to through a school zone.
And that's wrong.
- Most of our cops or a lot of our cops live in Long Island,
they live in New Jersey, they live in Staten Island,
or they live in the outer parts of the outer boroughs.
And when you have cops that are car-centric,
you end up getting folks that don't want to
enforce things that they are against.
- They will not get rid of cars
that are parked in the bike paths,
often it's their own cars!
- If you had a mayor who said, cut the shit,
we're going to do this for real, people will get the message
You know, Mayor Adams says that once in a while,
but it, you know, you don't, you know,
from the city's actions
and the fact that he lets the cops
A. not enforce any traffic laws
and B. Park wherever they feel like it, you know,
suggests it's not real.
- This never used to be such a crazy committee, right?
McGuinness has become bigger than this committee,
bigger than this community.
It's become a flashpoint from a lot of the crazy stuff
that happened like leading up to the pandemic
and the, you know, people having death threats...
Like all this crazy shit about like fucking roads!
- I make a motion for moratorium.
Until we can get some kind of compromise
because the two sides are too far apart
and nobody's going to be happy.
We've spent two years
of community outreach on this exact proposal.
To think that at the 11th hour, after DOT has been studying
transportation study, multiple transportation studies
specific to this redesign of McGuinness Boulevard,
and that we're going to ask them to stop?
after we've been talking about...
- We talked about this in August, in May of 23.
In June of 22.
In June of 22 in Polish,
- Where?!
- It's all on the DOT website...
Okay, roll call vote.
Roll call vote, roll call vote!
- Four for, seven against, one abstention, the motion fails.
- People need to recuse themselves from voting.
- Why? Did they work for DOT?
Are they contractors on the project? No, no.
Keep organizing, for and against...
- Keep McGuinness moving! Keep McGuinness moving!
Keep McGuinness moving!
- You will not silence us!
You will not silence us! Damn straight!
Anyone who is really from Green Point knows just
how much the Argentos
and Broadway Stages have given back to this community!
To the tune of millions of dollars!
- Broadway stages
were here taking a chance on this community at a time
no one wanted to be here!
- We are mot the leftovers! We the belong here!
- We built this neighborhood!
- Shame on the DOT! Shame on the DOT! Shame on the DOT!
Shame on the DOT! Shame on the DOT! Shame on the DOT!
Shame on the DOT!
- I think we have to be careful,
because the loudest voices in communities don't want change.
And we are being educated
about the extent to which baby boomers, you know, people
of my generation, most of whom are retired now
and who are people of means
and whose affluence is very much bound up with the property
that they own in the city,
or, you know, the below market rate
apartment that they're able to rent.
And they are the ones who come out
to community board meetings and yell
and scream against change.
- Especially in neighborhoods like this one,
there's always been a narrative
that if you are a renter here, you're not part
of the real community.
But this district is 80% renter
and only one out of five people uses a car in this district.
- On Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams ordered the Department
of Transportation to pump the brakes on a contentious plan
to redesign McGuinness Boulevard.
Some have accused Broadway Stages
of using their influence to drum up opposition
and ultimately get the Mayor on their side.
- Listen, I'm a biker, everyone knows that.
My desire, we will have protected bike lanes everywhere,
but I'm going to respect the voices of the people
who live in these communities and we can find a win.
You know, it's unfortunate that we're in a position now
that everyone feels as though you must lose
so I can win. And I just don't believe that.
We will find a way, we will find, don't cut me off!
We will find a way to get what we're looking for,
a safe place.
And if I decide within my role as the mayor
that I want to reexamine and look at other ways of doing it,
I'm going to do that.
- All of the sudden the brakes were pulled on the plan
and it was heartbreaking.
Because honestly for the first time, this is one
of the first times that I think we really saw
the community participating in a way that was reflective of
who lives in the community.
- I can't imagine who would want this to stay
as it is, seriously,
as somebody who drives through there a lot.
- Yeah. What we're really looking at is a few people
really getting into the Mayor's ear
and manipulating the situation,
because the reality is we did two years of work with many,
many community engagements.
- So when you say two years, it
predates this administration?
- Yes.
- So previous administration,
DOT, community engagement, the Mayor liked it
and then the Mayor changed his mind.
- And in fact, every single elected official
that represents my district, supports this plan.
I saw somebody write on Twitter -
What's the point of voting if the person that I voted for
can't actually fix the material realities of my life.
It's really, really disempowering.
And it's actually really dangerous for democracy.
- The mayor didn't believe
that our community supports this plan!
So we are delivering 7,000 signatures with names and
addresses to prove it to him!
- I'm disappointed in the recent
and confusing decision by the mayor.
So I'm inviting him to come spend some time in Greenpoint,
walk the streets with us, with our children in tow,
let him see what we are dealing with,
how unsafe it is at every intersection,
especially McGuinness.
- For a long time we've been fighting to use data
and information and experts to help us build safe streets.
Bloomberg started the process of using it...
(Yelling, booing)
Leave him there.
We're going to do the best we can. He can stay here.
He can stay here.
(Yelling)
Leave him. Leave him.
- You complain about the mayor but you're in bed with him!
- The thing here... This is a perfect example!
- You're a clown and we told you before!
- This is a perfect example!
- You were a clown as a council member & you're a clown now!
- We have individuals, individuals...
- Clowns like you, puppets like you, destroying our city!
I'm a native New Yorker! You guys are outta line!
- Don't match that energy!
We're from Brooklyn - we show love!
- McGuinness safe now! McGuinness safe now!
- Shame on you! You're a clown!
- This is a perfect example of what we're talking about -
He is literally a one man show.
He has no supporters behind him.
What we're doing is standing up for 7,000 people!
7,000 people saying they want something!
The Department of Transportation puts forward a plan
under the administration of Adams
and people like that get the mic!
- Mic check. Mic check!
There were two years...
where research...
was done....
to try to solve...
a problem...
with safety!
If there was opposition...
they should have participated...
in that process!
I understand...
that change is hard!
That change is difficult!
But we have to move forward!
If we don't move forward...
people will lose their lives!
And that's what what we have to focus on!
Let's go to City Hall folks, let's do it!
McGuinness safe now! McGuinness safe now!
- Traffic safety advocates are fuming
after they say this city changed plans to redesign a roadway
that many people say is dangerous.
- This plan is not what we fought for.
And it's confusing because people see a bike lane,
but it's really not at all what we had advocated for,
because there's still two lanes
of traffic in both directions.
So we continue to have this highway-like culture,
with cars speeding through, cut-through traffic.
It's actually a less safe street.
- You're creating points of conflict, whether it's
between a pedestrian waiting in the bike lane
to cross the street, whether it is for a business, trying
to get their delivery and then doing
that delivery in the bike lane.
Whether it is for a cyclist that's just trying to get
safely from the Pulaski Bridge back home on McGuinness.
- The neighborhood's pretty disappointed in it, honestly.
- You know, there's a really tragic element to all this.
This entire process sort of defies belief.
I don't want to say that it's incompetence, right?
- It's not.
- It's weaponized incompetence.
I hope with every part of my being,
that I'm not watching thisfootage a year from now,
or two years from now, right?
And there has been a death in the interim.
God forbid, there's another death on my McGuinness Blvd.
- Why does change happen? I think about that all the time.
- We have a natural tendency to assume that
the way things are is inevitable.
They had to be this way. And that's just not true.
They can change. And in some places they do.
Here's the problem with change in America.
Change in America is incredibly slow. It is so slow.
It's so frustratingly slow.
And I'll give you the best example is global warming.
Everybody in this country is desperate,
desperate about climate change.
But what we're really desperate
of is we don't want to change.
We, we literally do not want to change our behavior
or our lifestyles in any way.
- We are not in a good situation right now, right?
The earth is like literally dying.
Or at least humankind is, we're running our course.
So if we don't start like really fighting for the facts
and fighting for them viscerally,
we're not going to get anywhere.
- This idea of waiting, you know, overthinking...
Every other city has done these types of things.
They have been proven to work.
There's data and science behind it all.
Why not just move with the things that we know work?
And it all comes out to leadership.
- You know, you've seen it in London and Paris,
in Barcelona and Milan.
Those mayors that made those most, you know,
dramatic changes to their streets
were reelected overwhelmingly.
Anne Hidalgo in Paris, reelected.
Sadik-Khan in London, reelected.
Sala in Milan, reelected.
Reelected, reelected, reelected.
So, you know, it's not only good policy, it's good politics.
- I would say most change that I've seen in my career
occurs through happenstance.
- I'm kind of heavy on the deus ex machina,
the bolt out of the blue,
the thing that comes out of nowhere.
Nobody can predict where the next wave
of change will actually come from.
All we can do is to be ready
and to pounce when the opportunity arises.
- We have some breaking news this evening -
NYC Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted on federal charges.
- I don't want to connect dots
that don't need to be connected.
But did somebody's mind change at City Hall?
- You know, the world moves in mysterious ways...
- In the words of Jane Jacobs, cities have the capability
of providing something for everybody,
only when they are created by everybody.