Willoughby Plaza was one of the very first asphalt strips formerly dedicated to cars that was closed to vehicles, taken over and transformed into a space for pedestrians, helping to inaugurate the city’s popular if occasionally controversial NYC Plaza Program. Before Times Square and the Broadway Boulevard, before the new Grand Army Plaza or Fordham Plaza, before Janette Sadik-Khan even became DOT commissioner, there was Willoughby Plaza.

And now it is permanent, a thoughtfully designed, well-integrated piece of the streetscape rather than a bastardized piece of roadbed dressed up as well as DOT and the local business groups could manage. This is the dream for all 50 (and counting) of the city's new temporary plazas, and 16 finished spaces are already in the works. But standing in the freezing cold with Commissioner Sadik-Khan and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz trading barbs, one wonders how many more plazas might be in store for the city.

"It's a pleasure when the commissioner and I can be on the same side of a project," the Beep said, a veiled reference to his disputes with DOT over the Prospect Park West protected bike lane, among others.

Past disputes aside, both agreed this was not only a boon for pedestrians but also shopkeepers and landlords.

"You saw the frenzy of new interest from retail stores and restaurants like Shake Shack and Panera Bread, and it's just a wonderful sign of the energy that's coming to the downtown streetscape," Commissioner Sadik-Khan said. "It doesn't take an economics degree to understand just how much pedestrian space can contribute to the bottom line of local businesses."

"This is a new landmark for Brooklyn," she added.

Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, who helped secure federal funds to pay for the project, concurred. "This has already become a destination for people walking and biking over the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, and this new plaza will bring more people here to stay," she said.

After the ribbon cutting speeches—which lasted all of seven minutes, no doubt due to the frozen ears everyone was suffering from—Design and Construction Commissioner David Burney pointed out to The Observer that this is about much more than pedestrians, but involved a full overhaul of sewer and utility pipes and lines under the street. "It's an infrastructure improvement as much as anything, and this is just the cosmetic side of it," Mr. Burney said, gesturing around the plaza, which had new planting beds and christmas lighting strung from the trees but was otherwise little more than a very large and generous 14,000-square-foot sidewalk.

Inside Shake Shack after the event, Commissioner Sadik-Khan spent a few minutes discussing the future of the plaza program with The Observer. First off, why had it taken so long for this plaza to go from temporary to permanent? Five years is actually the average time for city capital projects to get approved and built, Ms. Sadik-Khan explained, once all the various agencies and approvals, contracts and designs are factored in.

She stressed that lots of community outreach, something she has emphasized with every one of these projects, as adding time, but time worth taking. Contrary to popular belief, the plazas are only installed after a community group or local business improvement district requests them.

"It depends on what the construction season looks like, but pretty soon, these are going to be popping up all over town," Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

Various surveys, reports and community board votes have shown widespread support for most of these plazas. Still, some politicians have vowed to reverse the mayor and his street reshapers once he leaves City Hall. Is this program established enough to continue once Ms. Sadik-Khan and her cohort is gone?

"This is set in stone," Ms. Sadik-Khan said, pointing out the window. "And all across town, the public is setting it in stone. If you look at the demand, at the applications that are in the door, there's just no end in site to the number of communities that want more pedestrian space and more space to meet and sit down and create a more livable community."

And it was not just local residents pushing for these new plazas. "You have to understand, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, working on behalf of the business community down here, has been pushing for this for years," Ms. Sadik-Khan said. "And we're seeing the same push all across the city. Businesses get it. They get that additional foot traffic is better for business."

"It's not only a safety project, it's not only a livability project, it's an economic development project," Ms. Sadik-Khan added. "So it's really a triple-bottom-line win for communities all across the city."

But according to the city's Department of Transportation, one out of 10 of us gets lost every week based on department surveys. "And those one the ones who would admit it to us," Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan told The Observer. The department also found that one in three New Yorkers couldn't say which was was north and one in four out-of-towners could not say which of the five boroughs they were in when asked.

To help with this confusion, the city will begin installing 150 wayfinding signs in four city neighborhoods starting in March. Midtown, Chinatown, Long Island City and Prospect Heights and Western Crown Heights will all be getting the new signs, which include major local landmarks and destination, all streets and estimated walking times, since the focus is on helping pedestrians get around town.

"Whether you're a life-long New Yorker or a first-time visitor, everyone knows the feeling of walking out of a building or a subways station and being turned around, not knowing where you are," Ms. Sadik-Khan said. "These maps will help everyone in the city get around."

The signs will be located at high-traffic pedestrian locations, like business districts and subway stations. One of their keen innovations is that the signs are formatted in "heads-up mapping," meaning that they are oriented the way a person is looking. Rather than putting north at the top, what is in front of map readers is at the top, what is behind them is at the bottom. The map on the other side of the new signs is therefore "upside down."

Another interesting innovation is the maps are laser printed directly onto the glass. "Don't you just hate those crinkly paper maps?" Ms. Sadik-Khan said. "This will never happen with ours." But the ink can be wiped away and the glass reprinted as the map changes, allowing for easy updates without having to make a new map.

The city began seeking designers 18 months ago, with the winning bid coming from a consortium known as PentaCity, made up of graphic design studio Pentagram, map makers City ID and industrial designers Billings Jackson. This was actually the first project with Pentagram, launching a long-term relationship that has led to other projects already unveiled, like the LOOK safety campaign and new parking signs, with still more to come.

The project cost $6 million to develop, with 80 percent of that money coming from the federal Department of Transportation and much of the rest from local business improvement districts in the four neighborhoods, which have agreed to pay for, install and maintain the new signs. "These neighborhoods have a little bit of everything—premier business districts, residential neighborhoods, landmarks, cultural destinations," Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

Many of these BIDs already have their own signs, but they are of inconsistent design and quality. "There's a real cacophony of signage out there," Ms. Sadik-Khan said. The goal was to unify all the wayfinding signage, including a new font called Helvetica DOT that Pentagram designed special for the department, a throwback to the same font gracing the subways.

The design program included creating a mapping system that will now allow additional maps to be printed by other BIDs in the city simply by calling up the appropriate blocks and printing them out, requiring only production costs be covered. A version of the maps will also be installed in all new bike share stations.

The signs will not only help people get around but also boost the local economy, the city believes. "Studies have shown people have a four-block mental map and this will help expand them," Ms. Sadik-Khan said. "That's good for business, that's good for communities, that's good for everybody. People will start to mix it up, exploring new neighborhoods and even new blocks in their old neighborhoods."

"This will really wipe the confusion of where to go off the map."

Michael Beirut, streetscape chauffeur. (Twitter)

Michael Bierut is one of the most renowned designers in the world. As a principal at Pentagram, he has created logos, identities and campaigns for everyone from United Airlines to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Citibank to New York and The Atlantic, Saks Fifth, Princeton and Yale, even Walt Disney and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for which he designed an updated “doomsday clock.”

Still, one of the greatest typographical minds of our time could never make sense of the city’s parking signs.

“On the occasions I drive and try to park on the street, I tend to get as confused as anyone,” explained Mr. Bierut, who lives in Westchester and normally takes Metro-North into the city. “I have received many tickets and been towed twice. I am so paranoid now that I will park in a garage for even a 15-minute errand.”

Perhaps now he can start parking on the street again.

On Monday, the city’s Department of Transportation unveiled new parking signs it created in partnership with Mr. Bierut and a team of designers at Pentagram. Simplified from four signs down to two—one for commercial vehicles, one for everyone else—the new signs feature a unified, streamlined design meant to convey the details in a straightforward way with as little clutter as possible. Previously, parking signs had been the work of the city’s sign shop, a no-nonsense place, the kind of outfit where the difference between left-aligned text and center-aligned text holds little meaning.

“Design conventions for the parking signs were basically almost 19th century in their character,” Mr. Bierut said. “It’s like if you were doing a playbill for vaudeville performances at some music hall in 1895. You’d have everything in capital letters. You’d decide what was important, make that the biggest. A little less important, something smaller. A little less important, something smaller. And you’d center everything. If something was really long, it would be in a squashed, condensed typeface. If something didn’t have that many letters, you’d make it in a wide typeface.

“It was as undesigned as possible.”

The very first thing Mr. Bierut and his designers considered was bigger signs—“you always want more room to play with”—but that was quickly dispensed with because every sign in the city must hew to set dimensions dictated by the sign shop, in this case 48 inches high by 18 inches wide. Besides, the signs might become less cluttered, but the streets would become more so. “No New Yorker wants that, not even me,” Mr. Bierut said.

Once the team had the dimensions, the Pentagram team got to tinkering. “As typical designers, our first inclination is to see if we can turn all the dials all the way down and still have the thing work,” Mr. Bierut explained. They started out by making every single word and letter the same size and set it in—what else—Helvetica. “And then you go from that, and you do this fairly painstaking—but this is what we do for fun—exploration,” Mr. Bierut said.

They tried out various colors and weights and shapes and types of fonts before settling on the current layout. It is similar to the original, with commercial regulations on top, but now both signs have the same format, the only real difference being the color of the type and the outline—a federal regulation that Mr. Bierut tried to do away with but couldn’t. “I don’t see why you need the line,” he said. “The sign acts as its own border. But I don’t make the rules.”

The other big debate was over the typeface. “We did one sign that used a custom Helvetica that we had designed for another DOT project,” Mr. Bierut explained. “It looked really beautiful, but in a way that they looked like they would be perfect parking signs in Zurich or Geneva, and somehow didn’t seem New York enough. They felt a little bit unnerving to the people at DOT, I think.”

So what makes a perfect New York City street sign? This is a town that’s always been obsessed with signage and typography, from the spectacles of Times Square to the crown of the New Yorker Hotel. Helvetica has long held sway in the subways, since Massimo Vignelli (Mr. Bierut’s first employer) imported it from Milan in 1966.

“The city of New York’s genius is, and this seems to have been part of its DNA from the beginning, is that it really derives beauty from function and necessity,” Mr. Bierut said. “The emblematic parts of New York often have some pure beauty that someone just did for the sake of it. It’s either people trying to solve complicated problems or someone trying to decide, ‘How do I get people to move into my fancy office building? Well, what if I put a fancy top on it?’ Voila, the Chrysler Building. Sometimes it’s, ‘How do I make my train system kick the ass of every other train system in the city?’ And then you get Grand Central.

“When it comes to the way we do things, it’s just someone trying to figure out how to maximize the value and efficiency and get the job done. And I think New Yorkers just getting the job done has actually created all these icons of inadvertence.”

We can now add the homely parking sign to that list.

Huh? (FX/Tumblr)

At today's press conference unveiling the new and improved parking signs for Midtown, quite a few reporters questioned the actual need for redesigning the street signs. Both Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and City Councilman Dan Garodnick said they had received complaints about the old signs and agreed they required "a PhD in traffic" to decipher.

Among those flunking out on their TCATs? None other than the brilliant Louis C.K.

The Observer was just on the phone with Michael Bierut, the celebrated designer whose firm Pentagram helped the city redesign the street signs. (You can read more about what actually went into the signs in Wednesday's print edition of the paper, and the unusual emphasis New York tends to put on our signage—we're a busy city.) During our conversation, Mr. Beirut reminded The Observer that the first episode of the third season of Mr. C.K.'s show Louie, the title character spends the opening and closing credits puzzling over an embellished version of the city's parking signs.

"It's a sign that's been exaggerated, but only slightly," Mr. Beirut said. "Most New Yorkers would look at that and think it probably existed somewhere because some of our signs were that confusing."

The first scene mostly consists of Mr. C.K. and another driver just making confused faces. "I can't..." Mr. C.K. mutters, before reading off some of the absurd regulations.

"Is it after midnight?" his flummoxed compatriot asks.

"Yeah, but it's also after midnight," Mr. C.K. responds.

One sign reads "2 hour parking, 6 a.m. - 5 a.m., Mon. thru Fri.," the kind of vague window that would confuse anyone. The sign below it reads, "Parking of vehicles only authorized." Bureaucratese at its finest.

The second scene only gets even more ridiculous as they try and puzzle out the meaningless green circle:

No more parking PhDs required. (Matt Chaban)

Park this way. (Matt Chaban)

Twitter has changed the way we communicate, and now it may change the way we drive, at least around Midtown.

This morning, the Department of Transportation unveiled new parking signs that greatly simplify and clarify on-street parking regulations. As Tranportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan joked, "We used to have signs with 250 character on four different signs in three different colors. Now we can say it in about 140 characters on a much clearer sign."

The new signs, common throughout the city's business districts, now feature two separate but similar sections, one for commercial vehicles (in red font) and one for passenger vehicles (in green). There will be 6,300 new signs deployed in the coming months in Midtown, roughly between 14th and 60th streets and Second and Ninth avenues. Similar signs will come to the Financial District at a later period, and then on to the outer boroughs' main commercial areas. The city began rolling out the new signs in October, and 450 have already been installed.

Related: Michael Bierut diessects his new signs and why Helvetica never would have worked >>

Unlike the old signs, which were in a mishmash of colors, fonts and styles, the new ones are in a unified format, putting the length of time for parking first, then the days and times. And no longer are they the creative work of the Department of Transportation's sign shop, but instead a collaboration with Michael Bierut and a team at Pentagram. Among the small but important innovation are the formatting of the signs and the location of the font (justified left, rather than centered, which is considered more legible).

"It shouldn't take a PhD in transportation to understand these signs," Ms. Sadik-Khan.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the new signs would help not only reduce confusion on the streets but also save New Yorkers money. "One of the great things about these signs is they will result in fewer parking tickets for New Yorkers," Ms. Quinn said. "No longer will you say, 'Wait a minute, I thought the sign said you could park there.' These signs will make sure that what you see is what the rules are."

The signs came about after Councilman Dan Garodnick, who represents parts of Midtown and the Upper East Side, proposed a bill to make them clearer. "I always had constituents coming up to me and complaining about how confusing the signs are," he said. When the department heard about the bill, Ms. Sadik-Khan said she told Mr. Garodnick "why bother with legislation," and they set out to come up with new signs.

He said this served an important civic purpose, as well. "The sad part of it is, people deliberately think the city is deliberately trying to confuse them" in order to trick them into tickets," Mr. Garodnick explained.

While the signs may not seem like much, Ms. Sadik-Khan said she views them as equally important as paving new streets, laying down bike lanes or creating pedestrian plazas. "Reducing the clutter and bringing clarity to the rules greatly improves the look of our streets," she said.

Not so fast. (Getty)

While it seemed like the bicycle backlash of a year ago had finally cooled off, and those larcenous lanes were here to say—won't someone think of the motorists!—the cold war is back this winter. The Columbus Avenue bike lane expansion was rebuffed by the local community board, bike share has been delayed a few extra month, Steve Cuozzo thinks bikes are a cancer on the city (O.K., so what else is new?), and now opponents of the Prospect Park West bike lane have finally won a court case.

After complaints over the lane were ignored in court in the spring, Neighbors for Better Bike Lanes appealed the results to a higher court, which today ruled that the lower court had to reconsider the case on technical grounds. The Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court ruled unanimously that judge Burt Bunyon erred in dismissing the case as lacking merit, and now a hearing must be held over the lane (you can read the one-page decision here).

The politically connected Neighbors group, which counts Iris Weinshal, Chuck Schumer's wife and the former DOT commissioner, and Borough President Marty Markowitz among its backers, argued that the lane was a trial until last year, and thus there was time for the group to file a challenge to the lane. Judge Bunyon, however, found that the statute of limitations for the suit had lapsed. The appellate court found that time was not up for a legal challenge, but neither did the judges rule that the lane was wrong, simply that hearings as to its appropriateness had to be heard.

Indeed, the city's Department of Transportation is holding today's decision up as much as a victory for itself. "We’'re confident that the Prospect Park West bike lane is here to stay," spokesman Seth Solomonow said in an email. "We'’re very pleased that three of the four causes of action were dismissed by the Appellate Court, which also returned to the trial court one claim for a limited finding on a technical issue. We are fully confident that the trial court will decide that there is absolutely no merit to what is left of this case."

Opponents of the lane have been calling for legal discovering all along, insisting the city was hiding something—without any proof, but the suggest that something was being hidden creates an implication that is hard to deny. Now, they may get their day in court, but it still does not ensure a victory.

Still, the group remains undeterred.

“We are gratified by the Court’s decision, and we look forward to finally forcing the truth from the Department of Transportation,” Jim Walden, the Neighbors' attorney, said in a statement. “As we have maintained all along, DOT broke the rules, fudged the data, and orchestrated actual harassment against people who disagreed with its tactics. It is just shameful."

Or delightful, if you're a cyclist. "In the meantime, local residents will continue to enjoy the safety that this community-requested and supported lane has provided every day for the last two and a half years," Mr. Solomonow said.

Repeatedly, the lane has been overwhelmingly supported in local surveys and community board votes.

Beep beep. (Sam Sifton/Instagram)

For all the complaints about the city's planned bike share system, is there any better way to get around right now? Social media is already flooded with reports of horrendous traffic—see the Instapic at left from The Times’s Sam Sifton, Journal transit reporter Ted Mann reports on Twitter that "City without subways: Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn is a titanic clog of traffic in the morning rush."

"The deli will be open for breakfast shortly," announces Mile End. "No MTA & heavy traffic delays slowing us down." The Times has a pretty handy graphic of just how horrible it is.

The only thing thicker than the traffic is the tweeting and Facebooking about it. And the reports of multi-bus, multi-hour commutes, sans subway, are piling up.

This reporter will be riding his bike, and he can't help but wonder if a lot more people would be, too, if they had the chance.

There was certainly a lot of schadenfreude this summer when it turned out the Citibike bike share program would be pushed back until next year. Well, if there's another terrible hurricane, perhaps that would be a good thing, but for now, it's kind of a bummer. It reinforces the idea, stressed time and again by DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, that the city needs as many transportation modes as possible. For example, my commute would take half as long by bus if the East River Ferry service were back up and running, rather than taking three or four buses up into Queens and over the bridge. Heck, I could cut the buses out, just walk to the East River, hop the ferry, then trek across Manhattan.

The same could be said for those 10,000 bike share bikes. The problem would probably be trying to get ahold of one, but once you did, buzzing by all those back-to-back cars would be a breeze. Also, maybe people will want to invest in their own folding bike for the storage unit, should these freakish storms cease to be freak occurrences but instead an annual tradition. If anything, the equity issue comes back up—the outer-lying areas of the city, which were not due for one of those 600 bike share stations, would be out of luck.

But what about idiots trying to ride bikes in the middle of a hurricane? According to a DOT spokesman, there is a kill switch on the system. Flip it, and all the bikes lock into their stations and cannot be removed. D.C. has apparently used such systems during major blizzards.

Meanwhile, for those thinking of using the buses, good luck figuring out the best route. The MTA has its route maps here, along with status for the buses, but there is no easy way to link them up. Normally, we would turn to Google Maps, but when you do "bus only," Google annoyingly offers routes that include subways. There may be one all-bus route offered (usually with travel times three to four times what they would be on the subway, never mind the traffic you will encounter), but still—when it says "bus only," shouldn't that be what you get?

Hop Stop is not much better, suggesting the East River Ferry as a good route, which as mentioned, is not running. This may be more the MTA's fault, making it hard for these tech-savvy firms to sync their sites with the latest transit advisories, but it would be nice for everyone to figure it out.

This is not just a storm issue, either. For handicapped New Yorkers, the buses are the only piece of the standard mass transit system they can reliably take, given the lack of accessibility on the subway. We'll give Google a pass for now since Chelsea is without power, but hopefully it can fix this in the future.

Now, back to all that traffic. If there was ever any question that mass transit is the lifeblood of this city, one need only walk the car-clogged streets of the city, the avenues and bridge-bound bottlenecks.

Maybe the state ought to put this into perspective when it comes to hiking the fares next year. Isn't the MTA too valuable to gouge everybody for?

This is not to suggest that unsafe cycling is ever acceptable, but as more people take to bikes, and the city's population continues to grow, park pathways are bound to get busier. Action by users is important, but also be operators.

As it has done with Prospect Park, following another spate of high-profile injuries, the city's Department of Transporation and Parks Department have reached an agreement to change the arrangement of traffic lanes to make more room for bikes and runners and less for vehicles. The measure is meant to make everyone safer.

“Central Park is New York City’s recreational oasis and this redesign will provide park visitors with safer and wider paths to walk, jog or bike,” Parks Commissioner Veronica White said in a release.

"Central Park's signature drives will now have even clearer markings to help every park user have the best and safest experience possible," echoed DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

In almost every place, the number of vehicle lanes will be reduced to make for wider lanes for bikes and joggers. The one exception is in the lower loop, where a defacto carriage lane exists and one must remain for cars. There, new dividers will be put in to try and separate bikers and joggers, keeping everyone separate and safe.

Will this prevent all injuries? Of course not. People need to pay attention and respect everyone. But as we see time and again, the power of the paint can be quite powerful.

Don't forget to tip your driver and look out for bikes. (NYC DOT)

(NYC DOT)

Last week the city's Department of Transportation (in partnership with the fed's Department of Transportation) unveiled new LOOK! crosswalk decals and bus banners to remind pedestrians and drivers to pay attention to each other while making their way across the busy cityscape.

Now the department, along with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has unveiled new stickers that will adorn the doors and windows of the city's 13,000 cabs. They implore occupants to "LOOK! for cyclists." These are accompanied by a new 30-second spot in everybody's favorite ad-viewing venue, Taxi T.V.

“This safety campaign takes the message to New Yorkers and visitors that you need to take a second and take a look around whenever you get out of a car,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said in a release. “The best protection that bike riders and pedestrians have is our attention, and there is one thing everyone can do—look.”

The idea is to make cab riders, especially those who might not be from town, more aware of their surroundings. The city has recorded seven deaths because of dooring incidents over the past five years.

Like all good taxi ads, TLC commissioner David Tassky said these new spots will really get people's attention: "We believe the stickers and video will really resonate with riders and inspire them to pause for that critical second before they open the door and exit the taxi. It’s that moment of pause that could make all the difference in the world to both a bicyclist and the taxi passenger alike.”

The rationale has been to make the streets more pleasant for everyone—not just drivers but pedestrians and bikers, too—and to improve safety as a result. That we are back at pre-transformation levels may simply be a result of an anomalous year, not to mention that, safety measures or not, many New Yorkers like these changes. All the same, it seems like a setback for the data-driven Bloomberg administration and his streets czar.

Last year saw 291 fatalities overall, a rise of 23 percent from last year, which saw 236 accidents. Of this year's deaths, 115 were drivers or their passengers, 176 were cyclists or pedestrians. These numbers have been declining since 2007, when the city saw 310 traffic fatalities, 127 for people in cars, 180 for those out of them.

According to Department of Transportation spokesman Seth Solomonow, the problems lie most with drivers.

"By far the single biggest increase in traffic fatalities was for motor vehicle occupants (drivers and passengers), and there were 19 more fatalities last FY among motorcyclists alone than the FY before," he wrote in an email. "Large numbers of fatal crashes were overnight and/or highway crashes and about half involved speeding, drunken driving, red-light or stop-sign running."

If anything, this calls for greater vigilance and only strengthens the case for roadside interventions. "This underscores the importance of our sustained safety campaigns targeting speeding, drunk and distracted driving and it’s also behind our push for legislation in Albany to expand red-light cameras and install the city’s first speed cameras," Mr. Solomonow wrote.

He did point out that accidents had fallen, to 176,482 from 179,112 in 2011 and 183,278. In 2010, there were 177,996.

Streetsblog points to another cause in the spike of deaths: decreased traffic enforcement by the NYPD. This has been a pet issue for pols and street advocates of late, and while budgets are tight, perhaps it is an area the administration might begin focusing its attention on more. Why not trade stop and frisk for traffic stops?