Want Better Streets? Just Add Paint.
By Andrew Small, CityLab
Originally published on October 29, 2019.
If you’re frustrated with the slow speed of efforts to make streets safer, perhaps you should grab a paint brush.
During New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, the city reclaimed 180 acres of road space, creating 60 park plazas in large part by rerouting traffic and simply painting the surface of the road. The effort transformed many city streets from something other than the “sea of gray” that urban corridors tend to be.
“Reclaiming these streets gave us a huge canvas for vibrant art and safe-street designs,” Janette Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner, said at the CityLab DC conference last week. “But these projects are more than eye candy. They can deliver significant safety benefits for pennies on the dollar.”
Now Sadik-Khan and Bloomberg want to help more cities—especially small and mid-size cities—do the same thing. Bloomberg Associates, in collaboration with Street Plans Collaborative, announced the Asphalt Art Initiative on Monday in an effort to spur more roadway and pedestrian interventions on a blacktop canvas. Along with the new street guide, Bloomberg announced a competition: Ten small and mid-sized American cities can receive up to $25,000 each to implement their own arts-driven transportation projects to be completed by the end of 2020. Cities with anywhere between 30,000 and 500,000 residents are eligible to apply. Applications are due Thursday, December 12, 2019.
See more photos of asphalt art in cities around the country and read the rest of the article on CityLab.
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