VIDEO: The Makeover Of NYC Streets

Via the Atlantic:

Clarence Eckerson has been documenting conditions on the city’s streets since the 1990s, and he has a huge archive of footage. Here, he juxtaposes images of key New York locations before, during, and after radical redesigns that took place under the jurisdiction of the Bloomberg administration’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. Eckerson shows the transformation of Times Square, Herald Square, the Brooklyn waterfront, the Queensboro Bridge, and several other formerly car-choked areas that are now havens for human beings on foot and on bicycles. If you’ve been walking or riding a bike in these places over the years, you know how profound the changes wrought by Sadik-Khan’s policies have been. But now that New Yorkers have begun to get used to more humane streets in many parts of the city, it’s startling to see just how stark the contrast is. It makes you wonder, how did people accept the previous status quo?

Lets hope that De Blasio’s administration continues one of the few Bloomberg campaigns that everybody loved.