sustaiNYC

The Greenstreet at 110th and Amsterdam helps keep sewage out of city rivers and features a beefed-up, traffic-calming “blockbuster.”

We talked a couple days back about the City Council’s plans for dealing with CSOs (the source of the proverbial poop in our local waters), and now we get a great little report from Streetsblog about the benefit of vest-pocket parks in dealing with runoff and how they make streets safer.

It rained yesterday, sending stormwater streaming down New York City streets and through sewer grates. The runoff mixed with wastewater in the system and overloaded treatment facilities, causing raw sewage to spill into the city’s waterways.

Sound like an ecological disaster? It can be triggered by as little as one tenth of an inch of rainfall in one hour. Called Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO), this toxic broth also contains chemicals leached from roofs and pavement. 27 billion gallons of CSO pour into city rivers and bays every year. Until recently, there was no concerted effort to prevent it.

One of the more unsung PlaNYC initiatives aims to drastically reduce CSO, in part by managing streets more wisely. Certain traffic calming measures, it turns out, can not only make streets more ped-friendly, but also help make the city’s rivers clean enough to swim in. To accomplish this, PlaNYC calls for retooling the Parks Department’s Greenstreets program, and we are starting to see the results.

At their best, Greenstreets — the pint-sized green spaces that Parks began planting in 1996 — have served as modest traffic-calming measures, displacing asphalt with patches of greenery that send cues to slow down. The new breed goes a few steps further: They combine advanced stormwater capture techniques with more overt traffic-calming devices, like neckdowns and bulb-outs.

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Originally by Ben Fried from Streetsblog on February 14, 2008, 7:22pm