Auld lang syne*
And welcome to this newsletter.
It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & all their discontents: streets, environment, energy, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:
- The progress towards Vision Zero;
- America’s rail renaissance;
- The lasting power of a name;
& much, much more.
Vision test
If patterns hold over the weekend, Hoboken, New Jersey will enter 2023 in its seventh consecutive year without a single traffic fatality. In other words: the last time anyone was killed by, in or from a car there, Barack Obama was still in the White House. Not too far away, Jersey City will be on its second. This is a municipality with a population similar to St. Louis, Missouri, which saw 78 traffic fatalities last year—its second-highest figure on record. (I wrote about the Jersey success story this time last year, and a lot of it has to do with daylighting.)
New York City finds itself somewhere in between. Although we lag our trans-Hudson neighbors, this was one of the safest years for pedestrians in 114 years of record-keeping, making us an outlier within an outlier. Yet the exact opposite is true for those on two wheels: at its close, 2023 was one of the deadliest years for cyclists and other micro-mobility users in recent memory.
How did that happen?
Diving into the data can tell us more about what a city is doing right and wrong. For Gotham, it enters 2024 both closer to and further from Vision Zero, the policy goal of eliminating all traffic-related fatalities, which it announced ten years ago this January. In my last piece of the year, I tried to solve the street safety riddle that’s been stumping me for some time, in New York Magazine’s Curbed.
End of term
I’ve officially exited the fuzzy haze left over from finals, nonstop grading and exorbitant screen time. Amidst a bumpy semester for teaching the news, this fall’s cohort for The Journalistic Inquiry: The Written Word was comprised of a stellar bunch, who arrived each evening chock full of energy and questions—which, as time goes on, I’ve come to greatly appreciate. And in what has now become a Streetbeat tradition, I will again assume the role of ‘class dad’ and brag about them, plucking their final features from our class’s Medium.
One student wrote about the struggles outreach groups face handling the city’s migrant crisis. Another looked at the life of bouncers. They examined consent in modern dance, the dearth of all-age DIY venues, and the rise of Chinese-made content on social media. They explored the evolution of gossip, AI-generated imagery, and urban art in the digital age. They asked what the holiday high season means to native New Yorkers, and whether our gerontocracy is working for the rest of us. Give ‘em a read.
As for me, I’ll return to teach my cities-focused capstone course in late January, but I’ll no longer coordinate events for NYU Journalism. (They will be in good hands, though!) I’ll instead focus my energy on other endeavors, with some very exciting stuff planned in the new year. Stay tuned!
OSA: On the map
It was a rainy conclusion to a rainy season of the 31st Ave Open Street, but we still squeezed out a few holiday festivities before the barricades left for the winter. That included the installation of three tree benches in conjunction with Astoria Woodworkers Collective, a pandemic-age upstart of craftspeople—some trained, others learning—who hone their tactile skills at a community woodshop nearby. A final memento to the block before we hibernate until April.
But for this month’s section, I wanted to talk about how our streets change; or how something can go from pilot to permanent, in our physical landscape but, also, collective consciousness. Even if it doesn’t feel like much has happened on your block in some time, our streets are ultimately works in progress—they’re receptive to new technologies, new configurations, and new users. This is the thought I get every time I look at my own street using an online time portal. (I’ve discussed the invisible design advances on our streets here before.)
Maps are demonstrative of this. We recently passed a part of my dad’s old neighborhood, in southeastern Queens, that is labeled on Google as ‘Little Guyana,’ which didn’t exist when my dad was growing up there. But now, it cuts a slice of the city up for a burgeoning population, quite literally placing their community ‘on the map.’ And that does something to our mind, in terms of how we perceive our surroundings. (It’s the same with any Chinatown, Little Italy, etc.) A demarcation feels tangible; it allows us to more greatly grasp what our streets are for, and who can access them. Our mental map updates accordingly.
Right before the holiday break, the New York City Council approved the official co-naming of the 26-block-long 34th Avenue Open Street in Jackson Heights as ‘Paseo Park,’ which means ‘a leisurely stroll’ in Spanish, often with the connotation of socializing. The ‘super-block’ there, the city’s first, quadrupled the amount of open space in a neighborhood that often found itself at the bottom of the list for places with parks or public spaces to go. (Crashes have plummeted there, too.) Soon, people will see this residential stretch—with its plazas, shared streets, and more—on maps, both online and offline, under a wholly new moniker, an homage to what happened after March 2020. The street is now a park. And that brings a level of lasting impact that even a redesign can’t offer.
Bright Side: Americans on trains
Over the holidays, my partner, my brother-in-law and I took a Megabus from New York City to State College, Pennsylvania, to visit my mother-in-law and their family. We usually take the Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian line, which stops about 30 minutes away in Lewistown. But this year we couldn’t, because that train, which runs just once a day, was sold out.
Now, to be fair: we looked fairly late, and we could’ve been much more savvy in our trip planning. (After the Megabus broke down en route, which actually produced a rare offline conviviality amongst us passengers, you could say we learned our lesson.) But we weren’t alone. Everywhere you look, Amtrak trains are at or nearing capacity, unable to keep up with growing demand. In fact, when Amtrak added just one train to Norfolk and Roanoke in Virginia last year, the number of riders soared. Same in the Northeast and North Carolina.
Amtrak, the country’s national rail company, is one of the few transit agencies that I know of that has surpassed pre-pandemic levels for both ridership and revenue. A packed holiday season comes off the heels of this month’s announcement of the largest investment in American rail in modern history. Amtrak was one of the biggest winners of the Biden administration’s 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law (cue Amtrak Joe gifs), and we’re starting to see that $66 billion investment portfolio take shape in the form of more routes, modern trains, upgraded infrastructure, and the potential for high-speed.
The “new age for rail,” as Amtrak officials are heralding, is just beginning. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise: Americans are traveling to places with great transit, like Europe and Asia, in record numbers, and then returning home with that classic infrastructure hangover (the abroad version of “Why can’t we have nice things?”) A younger generation, who are driving less, traveling more and acutely aware of transportation’s massive carbon toll, are taking to rail. And there is nothing Americans loathe more than sitting in traffic.
Amtrak’s investments will take time. Getting America, a country of cars, onto trains will take time. We probably won’t see infrastructure upgrades for another five years or so, and new routes are a decade away. Yet ridership will continue to percolate. If you build them, they will come. I’m counting down the days to the second daily train in Pennsylvania. But really, I know it’ll sell out in no time.
On the Radar
Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present and Future Through Its Place-Names, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
(This section can be read as a spiritual sequel to this month’s OSA, as a longer examination of how names hold power.)
I recently came across Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s newest book on where the names of New York City get their meaning. Jelly-Schapiro works two floors below me at NYU, and I’ve known his work tangentially for some time; a part of his book with Rebecca Solnit, “Nonstop Metropolis,” briefly captured the Internet’s attention for reimagining the city’s subway map via the women who were born nearby. (We live off the Lucy Liu station.) If you needed to be reminded that the overwhelming majority of names in the public realm—our streets, our parks, our bridges, our tunnels—are dudes, here’s a great way to do it.
Jelly-Schapiro’s whole point is that a society, through what it calls things, shows off not only its value set, but also, its contested history. Of course, we see this in America’s Deep South, with the ongoing fight to remove Confederate names and statues. We see this in the abundance of streets named for Martin Luther King, Jr. after his assassination, which now lie in places that more likely show racial strife than progress. And we see this across the Global South, as names often cite colonial forebears or the people who stood up to them.
The book, which I highly recommend, puts forth the idea that we continue to shape our world, and who deserves recognition in it. That’s the ‘future’ part. It also explores how much of it we’ve systematically erased, too. (Anyone who has read or seen Killers of the Flower Moon knows this concept well.) A name makes space for a culture, but it can just as easily brush over as it can stand up—an argument made on both ends of the Christopher Columbus co-naming rope. It’s amazing how many Indigenous tribal titles I’ve grown accustomed to throughout my life; my homeland is dotted with towns like Ronkonkoma, Massapequa and Montauk. But it’s also unsettling how many I’ll never hear, because they were lost either to British or Dutch settlers, real estate developers, or well-intentioned planners looking to organize a street grid. (All of whom were mostly white.)
Names, in their usage and distinction, are power struggles, defining the worlds we inhabit. The more we know of them, the more we know a place.
Streetbeat Gig Board
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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (my rep on the Hill) is looking for a deputy district director. (New York City, NY)
Global Designing Cities Initiative is hiring a bunch of folks for its work on BICI, the Bloomberg Initiative for Cycling Infrastructure. (Remote)