Do you wish for unimaginable things like swimming in the Hudson River without contracting some sort of disease? It sounds far-fetched but placing parks strategically around the city can help make that possible. Not only will more of those "green streets" make avenues look nicer, they'll be helping the environment in a big way.
From Streetsblog:
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.[...]
Stormwater is captured by a drainage pipe on the north side of the blockbuster (right), where it is channeled under the sidewalk and into the soil of the planting bed. Any excess is stored in a chamber beneath the soil, where the plants can soak it up in times of drought.
"That's less water that our sewer system has to deal with," says Bram Gunther, the head of Forestry and Horticulture at Parks, who has been instrumental in implementing the new Greenstreets. He points out that by storing the water for later use, this Greenstreet won't require Parks to send a water truck out on the street to keep it maintained. "Anytime you get to recycle water, that's a good thing."
That is definitely a good thing, and despite some neighborhoods complaints, we need to build more of them. Treating our rivers like/with crap is wrong. Wrong for the wildlife that lives in the river and the overall ecology of the Hudson. Something so simple as a park can help solve that, and to me, that is a no brainer. See how easy it is to be green?
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