PPR+01: Guide to the DOT’s Economic Benefit of Sustainable Street

Want to know more about the efforts of the Department of Transportation (DOT) of New York city?
“PPR Plus 01: Guide to the DOT’s Economic Benefit of Sustainable Street”

 NSRI has been interested in the street improvement and place-making efforts of the DOT of the City of New York, which was accelerated during the Bloomberg administration and spearheaded by Ms. Janette Sadik-Khan, DOT’s commissioner under him. 

While several Japanese scholars and urban planning practitioners have been researching the place-making aspects of DOT’s programs, we have focused on the DOT’ innovative method to measure the economic benefit of their street improvement program, which is quite important but was not quite introduced to the Japanese planning and urban design field. Therefore, we have reviewed their report titled “Economic Benefit of Sustainable Street”, which is a summary report of the DOT’s research project, to figure out their background and methods. To do this, we have not only read and translated the document, but also identified and reached out to those who have been actually involved in this research project to make sure our understanding was correct and to see what the real challenges were to do such surveys. We also visited all the sites covered in the report, from Brooklyn to the Bronx to understand the context.

 During the course of our research, we have also found out that DOT has been integrating the measures to improve the safety of the streets on top of the place-making, which is simple but is sometimes overlooked, when planning the place-making type events. Although there are some differences between the Japanese regulatory systems and the ones in the U.S. or New York City, we still believe that there are many implications for us to change the cities.

Unfortunately, our report is only provided in Japanese, but should you have any questions, please contact us.
Nishio and Morokuma of NSRI

See PDF:PPR Plus 01