New Yorkers joined city and regional transportation, environmental, and planning organizations this morning to thank the city for over three years of transportation improvements. On the steps of City Hall, advocates and city residents displayed a giant card saying “Thanks for a Greener NYC!” addressed to Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and her bosses, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, and signed by 1,700 New York City residents and workers.

“New York is a safer and greener city thanks to Commissioner Sadik-Khan and Mayor Bloomberg,” said Kate Slevin, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign. Slevin referenced several stories sent to the Tri-State Campaign from New Yorkers who signed the card, including:

• Joanne W. from Manhattan, who said new plazas on Broadway “probably saved [her] sanity” while she was on crutches after an accident and couldn’t travel more than a few blocks from her apartment.
• Ian Dutton of Manhattan Community Board 2, who cited shortened crossing distances, protected bike lanes, and new seating areas as recent changes that had made downtown Manhattan safer and more civilized.
• Pasqualina Azzarello of Recycle-a-Bicycle, who described how she’d seen her organization’s youth programs connecting low-income youth with biking grow as the city invested in cycling infrastructure.
• Marcus W. from Jackson Heights, who’s lost 35 pounds since buying a bike last year and thanked the city for the amount of outreach it had done in a study in his neighborhood.

Card signers thanked the city for the pedestrian, cycling, and transit improvements which have occurred since Sadik-Khan was appointed Transportation Commissioner in 2007. These include car-free Times Square, new separated cycling lanes and pedestrian plazas throughout the city, and new bus-only lanes that have sped up buses as part of “Select Bus Service” on Fordham Road in the Bronx and First and Second Avenues in Manhattan.

“New York has the slowest buses in the country, but they move more than 2.2 million people daily. In the past, transportation commissioners have shrugged and said, ‘What can I do?’ ” Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign said. “But not Janette Sadik-Khan. That’s why I call Janette Sadik-Khan the ‘MetroCard transportation commissioner.’ ”

During Sadik-Khan’s tenure, traffic fatalities have reached record lows – there were 269 deaths in 2010, compared to nearly 400 in 2001. In 2009, there were 256 traffic fatalities in New York City – the lowest since 1910, when the city began keeping fatality records.

Julia De Martini Day from Transportation Alternatives cited safety improvements throughout the city, including on Manhattan’s East Side. Day coordinates the East Side Streets Coalition, a community initiative working to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities on the East Side.

Elena Conte of the Pratt Center for Community Development praised the city for safer streets and for Select Bus Service, saying balanced streets and better transit were issues of “basic fairness and social justice.”

“We teach hundreds of kids and adults how to ride bicycles each year, so we are continually seeing first-hand how well-planned infrastructure can change lives for the better,” said Jacquelyn Lewis, Bike NY’s communications manager.

Advocates also challenged some of the recent political attacks on sustainable transportation proposals.

“When a small number of very loud voices are shouting to turn back the clock, it’s important to remember the streets are safer now than at any point in the last 100 years,” said Rich Kassel, Tri-State’s board chair and senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“What kind of city do we want New York to be?” Dan Hendrick of the NY League of Conservation Voters asked. “Will we be a city that looks to the future … or will we be a city that stays stuck in the past?  I’d like to lay down a challenge to anyone who’s thinking of replacing this team in 2013: What type of transportation system do you envision? All of us will be asking.”

Photo: Steven Higashide/TSTC.