4/17/2023 0 Comments Donovan richards![]() “He’s taking a very strong stance saying having the community boards actually reflect the community will help result in the same transportation outcomes he’s advocating for,” said Transportation Alternatives Queens Organizer Juan Restrepo. Safe streets advocates happily greeted the combination of street safety and community board reform as a hand-in-hand effort. Most of you who have attended a community board meeting know there needs to be a makeover from top to bottom,” Richards said, before laying out a future plan to deal with board diversity, member conduct, transparency and modernization of board by-laws. ![]() “In order for the Queens community boards to excel at greater heights, the boards need to be better reflective of the neighborhoods they serve. The Queens BP called community boards “vital, small-d democratic institutions” in his speech, but also said the boards need to be rejiggered. (The next mayor will also be bound by the Streets Master Plan, which calls for 250 miles of protected bike lanes and 150 miles of dedicated bus lanes every five years, instead of the city’s current piecemeal approach.)Ĭrucially, Richards is also delving into community board reform, to ensure his plan doesn’t get bogged down in a morass of four-hour meetings where people insult widows in an effort to block a protected bike lane. Richards’s agenda also comes at a time when mayoral candidates across the Democratic Party’s ideological spectrum are proposing massive expansions of the city’s protected bike lanes and turning it into a real connected network. The push for a fully connected, protected bike network in Queens is not shocking to hear from Richards, who years ago was pushing for lower parking requirements and improved transit infrastructure for his Far Rockaway district even in the face of community board demands for parking. You should be able to ride from Forest Hills to the Flushing Bay promenade or pedal from Glendale to Glen Oaks without fear,” said Richards, who is currently serving the last year of his predecessor’s term, and will be on the ballot in the June primary for a full four-year ride. “We can transform our bike network into a borough-wide interconnected web for all our families to enjoy, and making the bicycle a legitimate mode of transportation no matter what neighborhood you come from. It means expanding Citi Bike further into Queens, building bike parking hubs at subway stations, embracing the push for the Five Borough Bikeway and ensure that a buildout of protected bike lanes makes a real network that To Richards that means more than just finishing the city’s work on the Queens Boulevard bike lane or making Northern Boulevard safer. To fix that, Richards said he wants to make it possible for people to safely bike and walk in every part of the borough, no exceptions. We owe that much to the 25 pedestrians, 33 motorists and one cyclist who lost their lives on our roads last year alone,” he said. So the safety of our streets will always be a top priority in my office. Sometimes it means being late for work, but for far too many families it means a funeral. ![]() “For millions of us, no matter how we get around, not a day goes by where the system doesn’t fail us. Richards laid out his agenda as one that fixes a transportation system that not only fails to get people where they’re going on time, but whose fixes have a life and death imperative to them. “Enough is enough, lives are on the line with every change of a traffic light,” Richards said in the first of what he hopes will become yearly addresses. Queens Beep Donovan Richards laid out an ambitious, aggressive transportation agenda in his 2021 State of the Borough, an agenda that focuses heavily on creating a safe and humane transportation system that benefits every inch of the city’s largest borough (and also positions him nicely for re-election). Don’t tell this borough president, “No one bikes in your neighborhood.”
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