Streetfight

A former New York City transportation commissioner maps out her adroit street design blueprint for alleviating traffic congestion and improving urban aesthetics. With the assistance of her former chief media strategist Solomonow, Sadik-Khan chronicles her role in the urban transformation of Manhattan streets and how the architectural improvements she drafted eased gridlock and boosted urban sociability. After years with the NYC Department of Transportation, her creative work as commissioner began in 2007 with the appropriation of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's green, congestion-busting, sustainability-driven urban plan PlaNYC, which, under Sadik-Khan's leadership, became a citywide rebalancing effort transforming clogged streetscapes from "a place where people wanted to park into a place where people wanted to be." She writes passionately about these projects, including the massive reinvention of Times Square, which was so successful it became a design model for other cities. The author includes pages of photographs effectively illustrating traffic-calming intersection designs and pocket plazas, which transformed "a car-clogged street into inviting shared space" and was just one part of the new street improvement plan for New York.