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CurbedWire: Broadway Suggestion, Dock Street Reaction

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FLATIRON/MIDTOWN?The rejiggering of Broadway has led to many scenes like the one above, of which a tipster that writes: "Another Manhattan street gets the strange DOT zebra treatment... this time Broadway between Herald and Madison Squares. Why are they bothering to pour the tiny concrete island at 29th Street, instead of making all of the striped area curbed and raised. Driving down Ninth Avenue last week, it was very hard to tell what was going on with the street markings, because with any traffic at all, other cars limit one's view of the striping." But this isn't a typical reader rant. Nope, there's a suggested solution. Read all about it after the jump.

DUMBO?As expected the City Council approved the Brooklyn Bridge-blocking (or so opponents say) Dock Street Dumbo plan, and the Dumbo Neighborhood Alliance has fired off an angry press release to commemorate the occasion. A sampling: "Those who have fought hard to oppose the Dock Street development are disenchanted and disenfranchised by our elected officials, who after wide-spread opposition to this zoning change, which included 25,000+ signatures and postcards, 8 neighborhood organizations, the National Trust, the Municipal Art Society, the Historic Districts Council, Architecture Society of New York City, the Roebling Society – Chapter for Industrial Archeology, the American History Museum of the Smithsonian, Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough, cinematographer Ken Burns, the Roebling Family and more, the 'will of the people' was disregarded." [CurbedWire Inbox]

Bringing it all back to the lights of Broadway, our tipster continues: "Anyway, there are other ways to manage traffic and make city streets safer and more useful for pedestrians - the DOT needs to question its obsession with trendy Dutch street design and consider some alternatives. Why the Rotterdam fetish? Is Paris such a bad precedent? I mean, if they're going to reduce Broadway by one travel lane, what is so wrong with just making the sidewalks on both sides of the street wider (actually, moving the curbs back to where they were historically, before the great mid-20th-century road widening)?" [CurbedWire Inbox]