Janette Sadik-Khan is one of the world’s foremost authorities on transportation and urban transformation.
She served as New York City’s transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, overseeing historic changes to the city’s streets—closing Broadway to cars in Times Square, building nearly 400 miles of bike lanes and creating more than 60 plazas citywide.
A founding principal with Bloomberg Associates, she works with mayors around the world to reimagine and redesign their cities. She chairs the National Association of Transportation Officials, implementing new, people-focused street design standards, which have been adopted in 40 cities across the continent.
In 2016, Sadik-Khan wrote Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, a book about street design, the public realm and mobility in Los Angeles, New York and other cities.
Drawing on her six years as commissioner and her current work as an international consultant, Sadik-Khan reiterated her call to recapture streets for pedestrians, citing the gains in safety, economic growth, more efficient rapid transit and sheer liveability that result. “Streets are what make a city great and not so great,” she said. “When you change the street, you change the world.”
Prior to her appointment by Bloomberg, she worked for the U.S. Department of Transportation and was a senior vice president of the global engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff. She earned her law degree from Columbia University School of Law.