Name: 【TED】Janette Sadik-Khan: New York's streets? Not so mean any more (Janette Sadik-Khan: New York's streets? Not so mean any more)
Uploaded: 2013-11-23T16:17:03.000Z
Duration: 14 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The work of a transportation commissioner

Adverbs of degree

isn't just about stop signs and traffic signals.

Streets are some of the most valuable resources

You can remake your streets quickly, inexpensively,

You just need to look at them a little differently.

This is important because we live in an urban age.

and the U.N. estimates that over the next 40 years,

the population is going to double on the planet.

So the design of cities is a key issue for our future.

and that if we're going to continue to grow and thrive

and the efficiency of our infrastructure.

in a kind of suspended animation for generations.

This is a picture of Times Square in the '50s,

and despite all of the technological innovation,

providing more room for buses, more room for bikes,

and to make our streets as safe as they can be

because if you want to change and steer the ship

you need to know where you're going and why.

The design of a street can tell you everything

In this case, it's expected that you shelter in place.

When we started out, we did some early surveys

and we found that New York City was largely

on a fire hydrant, not the mark of a world-class city.

It's not great for seniors. It's not great for retailers.

It's probably not good for the fire hydrants.

Certainly not good for the police department.

So we worked hard to change that balance,

and probably the best example of our new approach

Three hundred and fifty thousand people a day

and people had tried for years to make changes.

They changed signals, they changed lanes,

everything they could do to make Times Square work better.

It was dangerous, hard to cross the street.

so we took a different approach, a bigger approach,

We closed Broadway from 42nd Street to 47th Street

And the temporary materials are an important part

of the program, because we were able to show

And I work for a data-driven mayor, as you probably know.

So if it worked better for traffic, if it was better for mobility,

if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it,

we could put it back the way that it was,

And that was a very big part of the buy-in,

much less anxiety when you think that something