A Work in Progress - Latest Comments

Re: Strabismus and Amblyopia

Natasha Wolpe — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 13:51:02 -0000

hey, thanks so much for posting this.... Im kindof like you, had my second strabismus surgery a month ago and things are a lot better. tried the whole eye therapy thing and couldn't rid of double vision. im so much better now after surgery but the one thing that is almost worse is my memory. is debilitating and sooooo embarrassing. If I meet someone new and they tell me their whole life story, what they do for a living, family, even really important stuff I cannot recall. Makes people think I'm an idiot or that I don't give a shit. Did you or do you have this problem? any advice, more eye therapy? etc. hope all is well :) message me on facebook Natasha Wolpe if you have any thoughts cause I know I wont check this.

Re: My Dividend from Leaving Hacker News

Jeff Jenkins — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 13:09:41 -0000

Glad I could help! I'm still very happy a year on

Re: My Dividend from Leaving Hacker News

Dan — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 10:39:31 -0000

Thank you. You have inspired me to do the same.

Re: Mapping the Case for the 5th/6th Ave Bike Lanes

Jeff Jenkins — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 10:02:08 -0000

I basically agree entirely. I know a lot of people are in to two way streets, but I really prefer narrowed one way streets. One of the scariest things as an urban cyclist is an intersection where one or both of the streets are two way. There are so many more possibilities for where traffic can be coming from that I'm worried I'll miss one.

That said, if we had protected bike lanes then I wouldn't care at all since that comes with bike traffic lights and insulation from the car lanes.

Re: Mapping the Case for the 5th/6th Ave Bike Lanes

johnmassengale — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 09:45:54 -0000

Absolutely, Manhattan needs more continuous and therefore better north-south bike lanes. It also needs a variety of bike lanes, and a variety of streets. Fifth and Sixth Avenues should be two-way, slow-speed streets that are more pedestrian friendly than Second Avenue, The bike lanes on Fifth and Sixth Avenues should have less obtrusive, less heavy-duty engineering than the Second Avenue bike lanes, with more emphasis on placemaking, and less emphasis on "throughput." They should be places where people want to get out of their cars and walk, rather than transportation corridors for cars and bikes.

We can do all that easily if we slow them down to 20 miles per hour. Then the heavy engineering and all the highway-scaled striping and signage can go away, and we can have streets that are safe for "jaywalking," which should be a natural right for New Yorkers, who pay extravagant rents for access to a public life outside their apartments. Much of that public life takes place in "the space between the buildings" (in the words of Jan Gehl), and it suffers severely if the traffic engineers take three-quarters of it (the space between the sidewalks) to one-way arterials designed to move cars (and now bikes) *through the city." When you divide the road up like that, you clearly kick the pedestrian to the side of the road and tell him to stay there.

Great cities have a variety of streets. Walkable cities have at least some streets that do not favor the car and throughput over the pedestrian and placemaking. It's the difference between transportation engineering and urban design, which makes places where people want to be.

In those places, cars and bikes both go slowly, like the pedestrians. Depending on the circumstances, the bike lanes might be sharrows, or they might be less heavy-duty lanes, as we see in France, Germany, Holland and Denmark. Those countries all have bike lanes and bike networks where children can ride safely. In the book Street Design, we call them "Penalosa Zones." They're something we don't yet have in New York. Our new bike lanes are great, but we need more variety, with some for Men In Lycra and some for kids.

When Manhattan's avenues were converted from two-way to one-way in the 1950s and 1960s, the central avenues were the last to be converted to one-way. Now, they should be the first to be converted to two-way. This conversion to two-way is a trend going on all over the country, because the streets become more walkable and the retail more profitable. Importantly, this is also the best way to get to Mayor DeBlasio's Vision Zero pledge of no traffic deaths in New York City in 10 years. The one-way arterials built by the Bloomberg administration were great advances, and they are safer. But the only way to get to zero is to eventually go to 20 mlles per hour, and once you do that, you no longer need one-way arterials. It's time to take the advances of the Bloomberg administration and build on them with even safer, more walkable streets.