Each panelist gave a short presentation before they sat down together to discuss some broader topics. The moderator for this was Matt Seaton, who is the editor of "comment is free America" at The Guardian and an author of several books on the experience and public image of bicycling, including his latest "Two Wheels: Thoughts from the Bike Lane." The first panelist to speak was Andrew Mondschein, an adjunct assistant professor of urban planning at NYU Wagner, who spoke about some of his research with the Rudin Center.
His presentation, called "Why We Walk: Social, Economic, and Cognitive Benefits," discussed the differences between cognitively "active" travelers, like drivers and walkers, and "passive" travelers, who are passengers in vehicles and on public transportation. It may come as no surprise that the active travelers, when queried, know significantly more about their environment and surroundings. But the part of his brief lecture which I found most fascinating was this graph, which charts the percentage of trips taken by mode and income-education level for both lower- and higher-density areas:
On the right is the graph for high-density cities, like NYC, and it shows that at the opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum both the poorest ("0" on the left) and the wealthiest ("8" on the right) walk (in pink) about the same amounts. The poor walk because they have to, while the wealthy walk because they can -- but what about those in the middle? That's where Mondschein will be focusing future research.
Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, professor and research psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center, spoke about "Main Streets and Mental Health" including her research on main streets in New Jersey, where she hopes to visit 100 main streets in NJ and elsewhere to document the connection between healthy street life and positive mental health. She spoke about how main streets serve as "crossroads," and how crossroads "allow people to develop casual connections and permit people to consult on problems and solutions." She detailed the destruction of one main street in Asheville, NC and the negative consequences it had on the mostly African-American population living there.
Claire Fellman, a landscape architect at Snohetta in NYC, talked about the master plan for a permanent pedestrian plaza in Times Square which will replace the temporary plaza there now with the movable tables and chairs and remnants of curbs from former streets. She said some interesting things, like how they decided to look at this space -- which stretches from 42nd to 47th Streets along Broadway and sees over 500,000 people pass through each day -- "as a sort of room," though she didn't explain this further other than to suggest that they were carefully looking at circulation patterns and zones of activity.
She also noted how "small elevations serve as stages," and that Snohetta will most likely incorporate some sort of structure of levels into the design in order to foster public spectacle. Another thing she noted is that, unlike in the past, signage significantly affects where people gather -- probably because of its electronic and interactive nature. They also thought about collective memory, according to Fellman: "What is Times Square?" is a question they kept coming back to, in order to get to the essence of what the space should be. (Unfortunately, the slides she showed of the renderings were not made available, and I can only assume that they won't be.)
In the end, more questions were probably raised than answers given, though I guess this is to be somewhat expected. It almost devolved into an argument about cyclists vs. pedestrians during the Q&A, but in her closing remarks Jennifer So Godenzo, the pedestrian advocacy manager for TA, reminded everyone that what's important is that we continue to reclaim roads for all alternative modes of transportation and that it comes from those spaces formerly reserved for only vehicular traffic. Rates of bicycling are doubling each year in NYC, and the infrastructure will need to support this growth.
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