CBH Talk | The Long Road to Change: A Screening and Discussion about NYC and Safe Streets
Ben Wolf’s new documentary, Changing Lanes, follows the multi-year fight to redesign Brooklyn’s notoriously dangerous McGuinness Boulevard from a high-speed four-lane thoroughfare into a safer, calmer street with protected bike lanes. Filmed over the course of three years, the documentary traces the evolution of the “Make McGuinness Safe” movement and the political, bureaucratic, and community hurdles its advocates faced.
More than a story about one street, Changing Lanes offers a vivid case study in how grassroots movements take shape: the resistance to change, the grip of the status quo, the messiness of political processes, the wins and setbacks, and the mix of strategy, timing, and luck that ultimately drives — or derails — change in our cities.
Join CBH and Field Notes - a forum for people who shape NYC's public space, climate and parks - for a screening and conversation about this campaign and what it reveals about democracy at the street level. Following the film, director Ben Wolf will be joined by Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, Stuart Shabazz, Founder and CEO of Oonee, and activist Kevin LaCherra for a discussion moderated by Doug Gordon, co-host of The War on Cars podcast and author of the new book Life After Cars.
"Changing Lanes" is 75 minutes.
Participants
Ben Wolf, Director/DP, has served as cinematographer and co-producer on a wide variety of projects, including the feature documentaries Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 (dir. Ben Niles), Ride Rise Roar (dir. Hillman Curtis), Loving Lampposts (dir. Todd Drezner), Obit (dir. Vanessa Gould), The Happy Film (dir. Hillman Curtis/Stefan Sagmeister) and Keeper of Time (dir. Mike Culyba). He also contributed extensively to the photography of Gary Hustwit’s films Helvetica, Objectified, Urbanized and Rams. Splitting his time between Brooklyn and Sicily, he is an avid cyclist, and Changing Lanes is his feature documentary directing debut.
Doug Gordon is the co-founder and host of The War on Cars podcast and the co-author of the book Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile. He has also written for the Guardian, the New Republic, Salon, Curbed, Jalopnik, the New York Daily News and Streetsblog.
As a TV producer and writer with credits for PBS, ABC, Discovery, History, Travel and NatGeo, Doug knows how to tell a good story. Using these skills, he has advised transportation advocacy organizations, climate groups, and mobility companies on communications strategies that make the case for safer, smarter and more sustainable cities.
Doug is a tireless advocate for safe streets for cyclists and pedestrians, a dedicated community volunteer, and helped establish New York's "LPI bill," which makes people on bikes safer at intersections. He is also the transportation chair for Brooklyn's Community Board 6. He lives in Park Slope with his wife Leora and their two children, who love getting around the neighborhood by biking, walking, and public transit.
Emily Gallagher represents the North Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in the New York State Assembly. Since taking office in 2020, Emily has fought to address New York’s deep inequality and dire housing crisis while accelerating the state’s transition to renewable energy. In the 2023 session, she led the charge on two first-in-the-nation policies: the All-Electric Buildings Act to phase out fossil gas hookups in new construction, and the LLC Transparency Act to unmask anonymous shell companies operating with impunity in New York. A member of the Assembly Transportation Committee, Emily has also been a leader on local and statewide initiatives to make streets safer for all users of the road.
Before joining the Assembly, Emily worked as an educator and public historian at the Tenement Museum and other local institutions. In 2015, she became the Community Affairs Director for Hostelling International, where she was focused on sustainability and community engagement in the tourism industry. A longtime neighborhood activist in Greenpoint, Emily spent years organizing for environmental, transportation and housing justice, and to clean up the toxic legacy of the fossil fuel industry. From 2008 to 2015, she co-chaired the activist group Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (NAG) and, starting in 2015, penned a weekly column for the local paper The Greenpoint Star. Gallagher focused on the intersectional nature of the problems facing her community, especially around environmental degradation, health inequality, tenants’ rights and a rapidly gentrifying waterfront.
Stuart Shabazz is the founder and CEO of Oonee, a Brooklyn-based company that develops scalable secure bike-parking and service-network solutions for cities. Under his leadership, Oonee has advanced a modular, concession-driven model for micromobility infrastructure, delivering pilots and partnerships that demonstrate how protected parking, charging, and services can be deployed efficiently across urban environments. Before launching Oonee, Stuart rose to the rank of Deputy Director of Operations at the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, where he oversaw several capital projects and managed the maintenance and programming of a 1.1-million-square-foot portfolio of public space. His work focuses on the intersection of transportation, public space, and urban innovation.
Kevin LaCherra is a fourth-generation Greenpoint resident and a driving force behind the Make McGuinness Safe campaign to redesign the one-mile McGuinness Blvd. to prioritize safety instead of the speed of cars and trucks. Over three years, Kevin helped organize hundreds of parents, neighbors, and a coalition of advocates into a unified strategy that pushed New York City to implement critical road redesign changes. Kevin is still on the front lines to ensure that all of McGuinness Blvd. becomes a template for safer streets citywide.
