Today, Bill de Blasio takes over as mayor of New York City, and Janette Sadik-Khan steps down from her post as commissioner of the Department of Transportation.
She will be replaced by Polly Trottenberg, the current Under Secretary for Policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
In her six-year tenure, Sadik-Khan has made a lot of changes.
She focused on reducing the number of cars on NYC streets. She built hundreds of miles of bike lanes, introduced a hugely successful bike share program, created pedestrian plazas, and transformed Times Square.
Her grand goal was to make it easier and safer to get around in New York, and to make the city a better place for residents and businesses, she explained in a 2011 essay for Slate.
Sadik-Khan was also responsible for managing a $2 billion annual budget and 4,700 employees. She was in charge of maintaining and improving 6,300 miles of road, nearly 800 bridges, 12,000 intersections with traffic signals, and the Staten Island Ferry.
She caught plenty of flack for things like audible cross walk signals to help the blind and taking away parking spaces to make room for Citi Bike stations. But she stood her ground, and the changes were made.
So what's the net effect of Sadik-Khan's work?
New York has hundreds of miles of new bike lanes.
Between 2007 and 2011, the number of New Yorkers commuting by bicycle doubled, meeting a DOT goal ahead of schedule.
To triple that number by 2017, Sadik-Khan led the installation of 350 miles of bike lanes on streets throughout New York, providing a relatively safe way for cyclists to get around.
The bike lanes have aroused plenty of criticism, largely from neighborhood groups. At a 2011 event at the Center for Architecture, Sadik-Khan defended the expansion as a public good:
“Some people have tried to paint bike lanes as elitist, which is really hard to believe because [the bicycle] is the most affordable way to get around town other than walking, and it’s really heavily used by a wide range of social and ethnic groups."
There are guards on duty to keep everyone where they belong.
On the eve of the opening of New York's bike share program, Sadik-Khan announced that Street Safety Managers — who first went to work on the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges in 2011 — would be on duty in areas with heavy pedestrian, cyclist, and vehicular traffic.
Their job was to remind everyone to stay in their designated lanes. They were be on the streets during morning and afternoon rush hours between April and October.
Neighborhood traffic is slower, and safer.
In July 2012, Commissioner Sadik-Khan and Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced they would expand the Neighborhood Slow Zone program to 13 new residential areas, all at the request of local applicants.
The program adds traffic calming measures and reduces the standard speed limit from 30 mph to 20 mph, which Sadik-Khan said would improve safety:
“Our residential streets need to be drawn to this human scale, and by simply reducing the speed of passing cars by 10 miles per hour, we can save lives as we make the streets people walk along more inviting.”
See the rest of the story at Business Insider