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Slower traffic can make for a friendlier city. But slowing traffic can be done in harsh ways: Speed bumps, traffic circles and the intentional bottlenecks known as chokers are auto-hostile tactics that do little for pedestrians. Gentler measures include tweaking the timing of traffic signals, or using what David Engwicht, an Australian traffic expert, calls “mental speed bumps” — street-side social activities that slow drivers without their knowing the foot is on the brake.

A community project called Ninth Avenue Renaissance, for example, proposes the use of on-street parking spaces on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan for barbecues and the like, adding a dose of intrigue to the street scene that will lead motorists to become curious, and slow down. “New York has these sorts of mental speed bumps,” said Mr. Kent, of the Project for Public Spaces, “but we’ve slowly degraded them by designing a more and more frictionless city for fast walkers and fast drivers.” But street-level friction, he said, is actually good.

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Converting parts of city streets to pedestrian lanes is fine, but champions of “lanescapes” go further and dress up those spaces in various imaginative ways. At Columbus Circle, for example, two lanes of Broadway could be devoted to Jazz at Lincoln Center, with bebop bands spilling into the street. At Times Square, portions of the streets could accommodate legions of out-of-work actors reliving the movie “Fame.”

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More than 10 years ago, Michael Sorkin, who is the director of the graduate urban design program at City College, proposed a plan to channel growth and to encourage a lively social scene in East New York, Brooklyn, a community with large tracts of vacant land.

First, plant a bodacious tree in the middle of an intersection, Mr. Sorkin said. Landscape the rest into a green berm, radiating coolness and quiet. “Immediately it calms the traffic in its lee,” said Mr. Sorkin, who calls his as-yet-untested idea urban acupuncture.

This greened intersection would be linked with vacant lots and pedestrian paths, creating green zones that force development toward the center and encourage pedestrians into those unscripted seductions for which the city is renowned.

“Cities are generators of accidents,” Mr. Sorkin said. “And to the degree that they are happy accidents, that’s the indicator of a good city.

At a news conference after the vote, where Mr. Bloomberg made a rare appearance on the speaker’s side of City Hall, officials sought to play down the narrowness of their hard-won victory, among the closest of this administration in a body that typically votes in near unanimity.

Approving the proposal, Ms. Quinn said, would send a message to the Legislature that the “people who were elected to represent the New Yorkers who live in our five boroughs are sick and tired of our streets being clogged with traffic, we’re sick and tired of the children who live in our city literally having to fight to be able to breathe, and that we see congestion pricing as a solution to this problem.”

But the ultimate fate of the proposal now resides in Albany, where the intentions of lawmakers whose approval is needed remained unclear. Gov. David A. Paterson and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, have expressed their support. But Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who has derailed Mr. Bloomberg’s ambitions in the past, remained noncommittal, telling members of the Democratic conference on Sunday night that he would not take the issue up until the state budget was completed.

If the Assembly waits to act until after the budget, it could threaten the bill’s chances in the Senate, because it would come before the Legislature as a stand-alone item, making approval more elusive. Several council members complained as they voted that the mayor had reneged on a promise that they would not be asked to take up the measure until the State Legislature had agreed to support the proposal.

But other council members took the vote as a sign that Mr. Silver would ultimately back the plan, since Ms. Quinn had said privately that she would not call for a vote until she had an indication that it would gain approval from the state.

But Mr. Silver said that he had made no such assurance.

Like the ground zero and Atlantic Yards fiascos, its overblown scale and reliance on tired urban planning formulas should force a serious reappraisal of the public-private partnerships that shape development in the city today. And in many ways the West Side railyards is the most disturbing of the three. Because of its size and location — 12.4 million square feet on 26 acres in Midtown — it will have the most impact on the city’s identity. Yet unlike the other two developments, it lacks even the pretense of architectural ambition.

On the contrary, as a money-making venture conceived by a cash-starved transit authority, it signals a level of cynicism that should prod us to demand a moratorium on all such development until our public officials return to their senses.

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. . . [A]t ground level, the project is miserably depressing. Although it is described as a public park, the central garden is a meager strip of grass, trees and walkways that would be overshadowed by the buildings on either side. Tishman Speyer envisions a gantlet of stores and cafes, further chipping away at any notion of noble public space and threatening to transform the garden into a glorified outdoor mall.

I’m sorry. Did I say threatening? In fact the park’s eastern end, which would be developed first, would be a glorified mall anchored by a vast outdoor plaza. Encircled by rings of shallow steps, the plaza would extend northward to connect to a proposed pedestrian boulevard. Both the plaza and an adjoining multistory mall suggest the kind of pseudosuburbia that has been eating away at our urban identity since the Giuliani years.

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If recent history teaches us anything, it is that the project is only likely to get worse. This is because of the nature of the urban planning process in New York, which tends to lock in the worst parts of a design while allowing a developer to chip away at what is most original and often most costly.

New York is experiencing the repercussions of such thinking at ground zero, where Daniel Libeskind’s master plan, unveiled by Gov. George E. Pataki to mixed reviews in 2003, is now a distant memory. Various design components have been watered down until they are barely recognizable.

In the Atlantic Yards project, Forest City Ratner acknowledged last week that it would delay building most of the elements of Frank Gehry’s design for that eight million-square-foot development because it is short of financing. If built, the project would be a pathetic distortion of the original design. And the developer already has city approval.

There will be a similar predicament if the city manages to steamroll the Tishman Speyer railyards proposal through the public review process. The broad outlines will be virtually set in stone, from the position of the park to the location of a yet-unchosen cultural institution. So will the site’s density, among the highest in the city. And the architecture within the plan will gradually diminish in quality. The West Side railyards is as good a place as any to start rethinking this disastrous approach to charting the city’s future. The transportation authority could begin by taking the planning process out of the hands of bean counters who have little interest in anything but profit. It could bring in more thoughtful voices from the urban planning and architectural fields. It could take into account the ups and downs of the area’s economy and how a neighborhood of this scale might evolve.