Streetfight Quotes

“If building roads actually resulted in less traffic, then surely after sixty years of interstate highway construction we would all be cruising at highway speed.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“An advanced city is not one where poor people drive cars,” Peñalosa says, “but where rich people take public transportation.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Another protester said that more cyclists on New York City’s streets looked “ridiculous.” She gave the reporter the tired refrain “This is not Amsterdam.” DOT has no Amsterdam-ometer in its traffic analysis toolbox to measure changes in the street on a scale of one to ten windmills. Analyzing”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“If governments sincerely believe that their streets are so dangerous they must compel people who ride bikes to wear armor, they should instead immediately redesign their streets to make them safer so people don’t need that protection in the first place. Failing”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Never underestimate the anger directed at bicyclists. They ride too fast, terrorizing pedestrians. They ride too slow, dangerously obstructing drivers. They don’t wear helmets or reflective bike gear, jeopardizing themselves. They look ridiculous riding around in those helmets and reflective bike gear, more like Mad Max marauders than human beings. They shouldn’t ride in streets, which are hostile, car-only zones. They shouldn’t have their own lanes because there aren’t enough of them to take away space from cars. Yet there are so many of them that they’re running down pedestrians and therefore shouldn’t ride on sidewalks.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Reversing the atrophy afflicting our city streets requires a change-based urbanism that creates short-term results—results that can create new expectations and demand for more projects.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“If shared rides and driverless vehicles give suburban residents all the benefits of private vehicle ownership with fewer of the costs or disadvantages, it could encourage further sprawl. Meanwhile, within cities, shared rides run the risk of shifting millions of commuters not only from private to shared cars, but also from public transportation into the backseat of one of the growing menu of TNC options. Critically, these technologies depend on smooth and free-flowing roads the same way that private cars today do. We need to think comprehensively to expand access to shared rides while similarly increasing transit and reducing the footprint of those shared vehicles on the street. New technologies must be integrated into an urban plan that seeks to increase the use of transit, riding bikes, and walking while reducing the number and danger of vehicles on the road.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“The added parking within the city center assures commuters a parking space, inducing more people to drive to work instead of taking public transit.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Free or cheap parking is an embossed invitation to drive into dense urban areas instead of taking transit. Futz with the parking rate and city officials risk being accused of fleecing taxpayers. Free parking is viewed as a right, a privilege bought and paid for by tax dollars. Yet pedestrians and transit riders who pay the same taxes would be arrested for “parking” their nonautomotive personal property along the curb. If, instead of parking a car, I erected a Bedouin tent at the curb, fed the meter, and arranged inside the tent a living-room furniture suite, I’d be hauled off before my sweet tea had time to cool. That space is clearly valuable, or at least too valuable to share with anything but cars.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Small businesses in New York are increasingly taking advantage of our bike rack program, which gives them the ability to request bike racks (what we call “corrals”) that replace curbside parking spaces outside their establishments. Instead of one car monopolizing a parking space all day, a corral can house a dozen or more bikes at any moment, with turnover throughout the day. Many shops have stopped using van and car services to shuttle goods through the streets, investing in cargo bikes that can more quickly haul loads across town without being stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“DOT has no Amsterdam-ometer in its traffic analysis toolbox to measure changes in the street on a scale of one to ten windmills.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“We lined the SBS routes with enforcement cameras that issue tickets to cars that drive, stop, or dawdle in the dedicated bus lanes.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“TransMilenio operates like a train, with buses moving in dedicated lanes separated by barriers that keep out general traffic. Passengers pay their fare before they get on the bus, avoiding delays. They get on the bus via any of its three doors, reducing the time spent at stops. They board at stations where buses don’t have to pull over and then wait for a break to remerge into traffic.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“If governments sincerely believe that their streets are so dangerous they must compel people who ride bikes to wear armor, they should instead immediately redesign their streets to make them safer so people don’t need that protection in the first place. Failing that, municipalities concerned about their citizens’ heads should enact and aggressively enforce laws that require pedestrians to wear helmets too. Some 270,000 pedestrians die globally every year after being hit by cars, 4,735 of them in the United States. As far as I know, none was wearing a helmet.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“As more people bike, their visibility on the street increases. When drivers see more bike riders, they learn to expect them, to anticipate their movements. They slow down and look around when they have to share the road, which also protects people who walk, completing a virtuous cycle.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“As cities around the world launch bike-share systems and bike lane networks, safety objections are often used against bike lanes and cyclists in the form of mandatory helmet laws and proposals to register bikes and insure riders. These are all solutions in search of problems and attempts to legislate against perceived annoyances, not according to actual safety data.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“with speed warnings stenciled directly on the pavement”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“The safety data are even more definitive on streets with bike lanes, where serious crashes are 40 percent less deadly for pedestrians. In separate studies of streets with protected bike paths, injury rates plunged as much as 43 percent for cyclists, pedestrians, and people in cars.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Instead of assuming that traffic signals and signs will keep the peace, traffic engineers must instead place safety at the center of street designs and change the geometry of urban streets to slow drivers to the speed of life. Knowing how and where to do that takes the right kind of data to prioritize safety improvements according to the danger and not the annoyance.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Both ideas of safety—traffic and crime—are served by the same quality: people, and their eyes on the street. Sidewalks busy with pedestrians are a crime deterrent. More people on the street—including on bikes—creates safety in numbers, a human system of indicators, signs, and signals.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Yet traffic deaths are one of the few categories of death for which there are rarely criminal consequences.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Yet there is no corresponding revulsion or even sustained outrage at the persistence of needless and preventable deaths. It’s unimaginable that such a toll would go almost unnoticed in any other field, industry, profession, or practice.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Nearly 17,000 American servicemen were killed in 1968, the single bloodiest year of the Vietnam War. In the United States in 2014, an estimated 32,675 American lives were snuffed out—not by war but in ordinary car crashes. Numerically, this death toll is the equivalent of a jetliner packed with 300 passengers falling out of the sky every three days for an entire year. It’s more than three times as many people killed in one year as died on 9/11, plus the American service people killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined in the decade and a half since, and nearly three times the number of Americans killed annually in homicides by guns.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“What was unusual in Amar’s case was that the New York Police Department issued two citations to the truck driver, one for failure to exercise due care for his vehicle and the second for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, both punished with fines comparable to parking tickets. A driver’s claim that he “never saw” the person he hit and killed with his vehicle is often all that’s necessary to be excused from criminal prosecution in New York and many American cities.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“More riders create demand for more biking infrastructure and invite more people to ride and to walk on increasingly safer streets in an increasingly virtuous cycle.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“You can fight it, you can lie about it, you can say the sky is falling, but you can't keep a good bike lane down.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Whatever annoyance or unpredictability pedestrians and cyclists pose on the street, drivers are the ones in each other’s way. They are never stuck in traffic. They are the traffic they are stuck in.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“The fact that beach chairs made headlines and not traffic marked a victory in the global movement for public space. Once completed, there was no longer much argument about whether it was a good idea. The chairs lasted barely a month before they were replaced with more durable bistro chairs and tables. Those that survived the sit-fest were sold on eBay, but I keep one of the original beach chairs by my desk in my office. It’s a simple affirmation, not just in New York but anywhere: in a city without seats, a beach chair can be king.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“By designing infrastructure and developing real estate to support people who walk, ride bikes, or take public transit, cities aren’t merely meeting existing demand, they are creating demand for the kind of growth the city wants to see and needs to survive. If planning past is prelude, cities that invest in sustainable streets will get what they build for.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution

“Vancouver voters defeated the plan in 2015 after a withering, five-month campaign. Opponents effectively portrayed Vancouver’s transportation network and the people who ran it as inefficient and incompetent, and, in so doing, cut off new sources of funding to guarantee that the agency couldn’t do its job efficiently or competently.”
― Janette Sadik-Khan, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution