 I would like to now invite Miss Jeanette Sadiq Khan to the floor, thank you very much. She is the Commissioner of New York City Department of Transportation, thank you. Well, it's great to be here to talk about a little bit about what we're doing in New York City, to bring sustainable transportation programs to the 8.2 million folks that live there. And I think we heard this morning that cities are the solution and we're looking to sort of build on the natural efficiencies of cities and our framework really began for this work in 2007 when Mayor Bloomberg announced his Plan YC initiative. It was the first time that we'd had actually a sustainable transportation initiative in the City of New York and what we did was it really started out as a planning exercise to see how the city could continue to grow and thrive over the next 25 years. And what the plan concluded was that the only way New York City could continue to grow and thrive was to reduce its environmental impacts and to improve the quality of life in the city's business districts and in its neighborhoods and that if we expanded housing, transportation, and energy capacity we would go a long way to make profound gains in that arena. Plan YC called for a completely new transportation policy and new transportation priorities rather than just focusing on improving traffic and moving cars as quickly as possible from point A to point B. It looked at what we could do to reduce traffic and what we could do to expand public transit and look for new mobility options like building a bicycling into a real viable transportation option for New Yorkers. And all of that really requires a very significant change in the way that we organize our streets. Plan YC didn't set any specific targets for modal targets for how we were going to make these kinds of transitions but we did start with congestion pricing and congestion pricing project that Mayor Bloomberg announced two years ago would have charged New Yorkers $8 to come to the central business district and that would have reduced vehicles into the central business district by some 7%. So some of you may have followed it. It was close to passage. It passed the city council. It had the support by a majority of New Yorkers but it was killed by our state legislature. I think it's important to note that the MTA which is our public transit agency has some money for now but in about two years it's going to be faced with a significant deficit. So I do think that congestion pricing in New York City is a matter of when and not a matter of if. Plan YC set a target of reducing carbon emissions by some 30% by 2030 and our sustainable transportation programs are responsible for about one fifth of that reduction. Interestingly Plan YC also found that continuing population growth in New York City paid off significant national and global benefits because moving a million more people to New York City between now and 2030 where we live energy efficient transit oriented lives is much better than having them sprawl out across America and you can sort of see some of the advantages there. New Yorkers actually have about one third of the carbon footprint of the average American. So if you take a look at the top band there you can see the avoided sprawl benefit. So as the mayor likes to say if you really want to save the planet you should just move to New York City or I suppose another dense city like Istanbul. We have a smaller environmental footprint because our mode shares are already distributed pretty effectively. Only one third of all of the trips in New York City are made by car and less than half of the households even own a car. So I think we can still do a lot to improve on that. You can see there's a dramatic number in terms of the trips that are made by automobile under two miles. And so we're really capturing that increment. What can we do to improve that gap that two mile gap. And so what we're doing in New York City we announced a strategic plan two years ago that is a detailed plan and it provides about a hundred and fifty specific goals and benchmarks. And we just released an annual update which which builds on that. And the goals I think are pretty significant. We've got a lot of quantitative targets that are in there and they really do have some profound implications for the way that we design our streets and the way we use the street between the space between buildings as Jan Gel would call it. Our safety policies in particular call for us to reduce annual traffic fatalities by 50 percent from 2007 levels. And you can see we've got some good work that we've done in that regard already. We've reduced traffic fatalities in the city by 30 percent in the last 10 years. And they're now at the lowest level than they've been since 1910. Which is when the city first started collecting data. And we're really much more in line with some of our global competitors rather than we're twice as safe as the next big American city. So one of the things that we're really working to do is to address the over representation of seniors 65 and above in our traffic fatalities. We cannot significantly reduce pedestrian fatalities in New York City if we do not focus on changing that situation. And so what we've done is we take demographic and crash information and we marry it and we've targeted 25 areas around the city for improved traffic calming and walking conditions. And it's in full swing and while it's tough to assign causality to the changes that we've made at this point we've seen a 36 percent reduction in traffic fatalities from last year to this year. And I think the issue of traffic safety is really critical when you're taking a look at sustainable transportation programs because it's very difficult to talk about getting people to walk more and bike more if they're scared about getting hit by a car. So while we don't have mode share targets we do track objective transportation trends and you can see here that most of the increase in travel demand over the last decade was absorbed by public transit. And what our challenge is is really to continue that trend. So finally in terms of hard targets this is from our strategic plan it's completely built around measurable targets and so we're showing New Yorkers what it is that we're doing and also taking advantage of new opportunities as they arise. So now I'm going to talk about some of the key projects that we've implemented since 2007. I think I really want to underscore that I think the biggest innovation that we've made at New York City DOT is the fact that we're now a fast moving transportation agency and I think that's seen as really an oxymoron in the United States fast moving and transportation agencies. So we're showing results rather quickly rather than waiting for planning studies that take decades or years to get done. So our projects are done very quickly we do them with planters, with paint, with leftover blocks from our bridge programs. At a later date we expect our capital programs to catch up but right now we're basically making these spaces usable overnight and I think it's really important because it gives New Yorkers the sense the tangible sense of a greener city and it's something that they can see touch and feel. That's not to say that there's not a lot of intensive outreach and traffic planning and data analysis but what we're doing is we're implementing the programs very quickly after we finish the outreach. We've really done as much as we can to shift our approach how we look at streets from looking at them as utilitarian corridors to move cars as quickly as possible from point A to point B to treating them as the valuable public spaces that they are and recognizing that they serve a variety of roles. And there are many city places in the city that are essentially over paved and so we're really reclaiming a lot of that over paved foundation actually it's I think of it as a gift from Robert Moses that he paved a lot of New York and so it gives us the opportunity to reclaim it for different purposes. So this is what we've done in on Broadway it was one of our key initiatives this year Broadway Boulevard where we basically took a lane of traffic and inserted a linear plaza and we put a protected bike lane in and it really transformed what had been a wasteland in New York City in Midtown Manhattan and created a whole series of linear plazas from 59th Street to 23rd Street and you can see here what we've done is we've flipped the traditional we've actually this is the piece where we've closed off and we've got the the plaza off to the right when we started this New Yorkers were quite skeptical I remember one of our newspapers a tabloid paper the New York Post was interviewing people and to see what their experience was and there was a guy that was there and he started complaining about how he's never going to use this he's not going to eat his tuna fish sandwich in the middle of traffic covered with carbon monoxide and about five minutes later he was sitting down in the plaza happily chewing away so I think that it's people are responding really well this is what we did in Madison Square on 23rd Street it was the longest expanse of asphalt in the city it was like two football fields and we transformed it into a series of new public plazas and these projects really served as trial runs the ones that we did in 2008 for a much more ambitious quarter project that Mayor Bloomberg announced last February and so what we've done is again this is the transformation of Harold Square on 23rd Street and that's that's another angle and that's Times Square again we're doing a lot of this just with paint and with planters and they're extremely popular and there's actually far less traffic on these segments right now because Broadway is no longer through street it's really a local access street so traffic is moving on 7th Avenue and 6th Avenue uptown and it's provided incredible space for people in the last two years we've transformed 52 acres of roadbed and transformed it into a new public space we're also doing more in other areas this is on 9th Avenue this is something that we did last year and this is what we did one of our first projects in Brooklyn on the waterfront you can see the before and the after there and that one we did actually in about eight hours and we really wanted to show people it you can make a difference it doesn't need to take forever and we're continuing to do work on the South Bronx and Queens and throughout the city rearranging our streets in a new way is is key to our mobility strategy and I feel really passionate about the fact that we've got to do more to make our transport our public transport system work better and that means using our streets and prioritizing our streets differently for buses New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America and it has the slowest bus speeds you can get across midtown Manhattan faster by walking than by taking the bus in fact my traffic commissioner says the only way to get across town is actually to be born there so we're doing everything we can to to address that and I think in Istanbul people understand you know that with the right package of technology and designs and planning you can make a difference and and and you can dramatically improve bus speeds and reliability and we had some early successes our select bus service routes on the big crosstown route on Fordham Road we also did it on 34th Street in Manhattan and with just very simple innovations off-board fare collection giving buses the green light and holding it for them longer riderships up travel times are down and an unheard of this never happens in New York City but 98% of riders supported the new program which is like the second coming never happens we're a very fractured group so we're also doing as much as we can to roll out next bus information we just piloted that this summer and we're going to roll that out system-wide working with the MTA's new leadership and the idea is to build a much more robust really true surface subway system and and these are the routes that we're going to be implementing we've got actually eight routes that we're going to be doing over the next 10 years that have been committed to we're rolling out a new dedicated bus rapid transit route on 1st Avenue we're going to be putting in a bike lane and a bus lane this year and we really do need to have that be a new addition to our public transport system and this is really the way that we're going to have it look in the future this is this is the next phase of what we're going to be doing actually on 34th Street we're also committed to doubling by commuting by 2017 and tripling it shortly thereafter which means building safer lanes so these are the street designs that we've got going on one of the big things is that the pedestrian it's much better for pedestrians because we shortened the crossing distances and when we put these kinds of innovations in we've seen traffic fatalities and injuries go down 30% so I think that taking a look at that and and the volumes are way way up that's on that again a different view of 9th Avenue and again this just used to be this vast expanse of concrete and now you can see it's actually in an appealing green corridor this is a narrower version that we put in on Grand Street and again we've we've seen a 30% improvement in terms of safety on that section of the city we just finished our first two way protected bike lane I would probably take a whole other slideshow to go through all of what we're doing to improve our bike network but the idea is is that we're doing we're making investments to make it better and faster each month and really make cycling a viable option for New Yorkers instead of it being this sort of alternative transportation mode you can see the results that we've we've got from 2007 to 2008 we had a 35% increase in cycling and we had a 26% increase from 2008 to 2009 and if we continue the trend we will have doubled bike commuting by in just three years alone and we've seen a significant drop in injuries as well all of the designs that I've talked about are incorporated in a new street design manual that we just released we had 11 city agencies working together for two years and now all of our designs are integrated into this new design manual and so we are institutionalizing all of the changes that we're making so it's a new operating code really for the streets of New York and so on the private sector side on the public sector side these are the designs that you need to use and so we're bringing a very different DNA to the streets of New York going forward the public seems to be responding pretty well to the changes that we're making the Broadway piece this was there's been a lot of polling obviously the Broadway is the the Broadway project is really a big showcase and this was done by a Quinnipiac poll showed a two to one support of registered voters for the program we also have a report that we haven't released yet which which shows even stronger support for what we're doing along on Broadway we're seeing positive support in in what we're doing on the bus projects and we're seeing tons of cyclists voting with their pedals and I think we've really tapped into a hunger for public space this is in Madison Square what ends up happening is we put out these orange barrels when we block off to start the construction work and about five minutes after we block them off these I don't know where these people come from but they like materialize out of nowhere it's like a Star Trek episode suddenly like all these people are coming out of the air and this actually was an art class that took to the streets about an hour after we started the program we've seen huge crowds come out enjoying the new space we did a series of summer streets project where we closed seven miles of Park Avenue for people to walk play dance cha cha very successful we did smaller weekend pedestrian walks in 15 locations and all five boroughs I'm not saying that we've made converts of the 8.2 million New Yorkers I think that you know my experience in two years at the transportation department is that out of a city of 8.2 million people it turns out there are 8.2 million traffic engineers because everybody has a very strong view of how their streets should be used and that's not surprising it's their front it's where they you know go out and enjoy and eat lunch and do do whatever so there are always those that are resistant to change but we are working as hard as we can we did 2000 meetings last year with stakeholders and every single project that we do goes through some kind of adjustment to reflect the public input but I think the real strength of the approach in New York is that it's the policy of the city of New York to make these changes and plan YC is very clear on this point Ricky asked me to take a look at what I thought the upper limit was in terms of car ownership in New York and I think that you know the fact that we've got a third of New Yorkers only a third getting around by car half of the households don't even have cars if we put in a robust bus rapid transit network at bus a robust bike share program if we continue to do we're launching a car share program in New York I think we're going to start to see some really really profound gains in that regard you can track what we're doing on the web all of the information is is out there so I encourage you to see what we're doing follow us on to see our success in the sustainable streets index and also what we're doing with our strategic plan so I look forward to the discussion and thank you for the opportunity to be here today well thank you very much Jeanette it was an excellent presentation it seems like New York City is going to be a very different city to live in than the city I lived in as a student 15 20 years ago