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The woman responsible for nearly 400 miles of bike lanes in New York City reveals how she did it

new york bike
Enjoying Citibike, New York City's bikeshare. Reuters/Gary Hirshorn

If you are an urban design buff — or even someone who has been just casually paying attention to New York City's transformation into a pedestrian haven in recent years — you probably are familiar with Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's Department of Transportation Commissioner between 2007 and 2013.

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During Sadik-Khan's tenure, the city built 60 pedestrian plazas (including the Times Square plaza that's closed off to cars for five blocks), nearly 400 miles of bike lanes (including the city's first protected lanes), a bus rapid transit system, and the country's largest bike share program. It wasn't easy.

In "Streetfight — Handbook for an Urban Revolution," a new book co-written with Seth Solomonow, Sadik-Khan chronicles how she fought to reshape New York City's streets, and how other cities are now following suit.

"It doesn't take billions of dollars. It can be done in weeks and months and not years," Sadik-Khan, now a principal at Bloomberg Associates, tells Tech Insider. "But every single inch of the 180 acres we reclaimed from cars was a fight."

One of the ways that Sadik-Khan was able to overcome potential bureaucratic gridlock: data. Lots of it. As she writes in the book: "In God we trust. Everyone else bring data."

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"We went a long way in taking our streets from ones that were measured by anecdote...to now measuring by analysis," she says. Here's a look at the kind of data the DOT started measuring during Sadik-Khan's tenure, pulled from a 2012 report on "measuring the street."

New York City transportation data
NYC Department of Transportation

Sadik-Khan also believes in the importance of having an overarching vision — and carrying it out quickly. She credits former mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC, a 2007 plan to accommodate a million more New Yorkers while still improving quality of life by 2030, as a big piece of her vision. 

But vision, of course, is not enough. You need action. And if you wait too long, residents start to lose faith. "Giving New Yorkers an idea of what's possible on their streets is important. For so long they've seen [plans] suspended in animation," she says. "It's about showing changes in real time using temporary materials."

Before permanently creating a pedestrian plaza in Times Square, Sadik-Khan and her team launched a six-month pilot using temporary materials — paint, planters, tables, beach chairs, and so on — to give locals a taste of what it would be like.

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nyc dot commissioner janette sadik-khan
Janette Sadik-Khan. Flickr/NYC DOT

People took to it immediately. There was, in other words, buy-in from people on the ground. That goes a long way in making permanent changes to city streets.

Sadik-Khan is quick to credit other cities that she looked to when coming up with ideas for New York City. She borrowed the idea of creating parking-protected bike lanes from Copenhagen, while the idea to create a bus rapid transit (BRT) line came from Bogota. 

Perhaps the biggest change to the way we think about city streets since Sadik-Khan's tenure is the fact that we're thinking about city streets at all.  "There's a new vocabulary in New York City. People didn't talk about plazas, bikeshares, bike lanes, and rapid bus service before," she says. "It's been exciting to see how just in a few years there's a new vocabulary, a new road order."

Check out "Street Fight" here.

New York City
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