At breakfast time outside Pastis, the Meatpacking District's perma-hot bistro, sunlight spreads through a cobblestone plaza. It should encourage goofy sprints or balletic dips. But then a stream of black cars, SUVs and zippy subcompacts threatens to shred your ankles.A new campaign is fusing software with community organizing to reject how the city's Department of Transportation shapes places like this.The New York City Streets Renaissance Project sprung from the bike commute that Mark Gorton, a jock/engineer, endures from the Upper West Side to TriBeCa. He started it a few years ago to connect traffic-weary residents groups with new advisors and tools. Now it's live. Its advance work—recruiting organizations with lots of members—falls to Transportation Alternatives and the Project for Public Spaces. The former recruits other membership groups while the latter trains community groups to design streets for pedestrians, cyclists and cars to share. Gorton's baby, an evolving online traffic-tracker and discussion forum called The Open Planning Project, forms the campaign's techie substrate. Its potential heft has won surprising allies.NYC needs traffic calming—and stickball.For the first time, Transportation Alternatives' energy-bar experts are training the breakfast-buffet types at property owners' associations in Times Square, Herald Square and Union Square to advocate for wider sidewalks. "With the support of BIDs," says TA executive director Paul White, "we think we have a chance of breaking political gridlock." And the theorists at PPS, on Gorton's dime, led a July workshop for 50 people at the Meatpacking District's community board. That workshop involved soliciting ideal street conditions from residents. The group's collective aim: a municipal "pedestrian blueprint" that lets FedEx,. Falun Dafa and frail old ladies coexist. And Gorton intends to make this blueprint cover neighborhoods that grand plans usually ignore."I see my role as solving overarching problems that make it hard for local groups to make progress," Gorton says. Forget the stereotypical brownstoner in a Fair Isle sweater, filibustering for peace and quiet at a public hearing. Gorton, hyperkinetic enough to get away with wearing a v-neck sweater with no shirt underneath, wants noisy streets. But he wants the noise to come from local kids, not truckers gunning through a shortcut.Gorton, White and Project for Public Spaces Vice President Ethan Kent all pose pedestrian flow as a competitive issue for our city's marketer-mayor and business leaders. Gorton espouses a discipline called "traffic calming," in which engineers lay speed bumps and bottlenecks to encourage cars and bicycles and pedestrians to share. "The approach to traffic calming that I would like to see does not currently exist here. You need to look at cities like Portland, Seattle, Copenhagen, Paris, Melbourne, Bogota, etc." But the Streets Renaissance Project hopes to promote traffic calming through local cases.By spring, the Open Planning Project hopes to spread principles for shrinking car traffic using a public web-site with mapping software. A February Streets Renaissance Project exhibit at the Municipal Arts Society will show, among other things, how nexuses from Myrtle Avenue to Times Square could look with more humane traffic plans. Some spots, like the ellipse where Ninth Avenue spills into Gansevoort, could become "places for kids to play stickball in the street!" says Gorton. "Who's against stickball?"The July PPS workshop, which Gorton funded, spurred an independent study of the area's peculiar traffic patterns. An upcoming effort at Petrosino Square, between the Vaderesque new Jean Nouvel condo tower and the edge of Little Italy, may do likewise. Both these efforts stir populism near new condos that use parking garages as enticements. Meanwhile, TA is coaching businesspeople to treat cars as parasites on the retail economy. "Right now, pedestrian conditions are so dismal that people in Times Square are staying in their offices at lunchtime," says White.Of course, this flavor of advocacy demands proof. Here, Gorton's software distinguishes the Streets Renaissance Project from isolated efforts. By simultaneously training citizens around town while letting them swap DOT stories, Gorton hopes to educate the bureaucracy with tactics its engineers can defend to higher-ups. If citizens learn to map traffic and swap stories of municipal chicanery, the effect could (eventually) make DOT steps as rational as the Compstat mapping system made police patrols in the ‘90s. "Some New Yorkers believe the current traffic situation is intractable," writes OpenPlans' Jacqueline Arasi. "This is also how we thought of crime during the 80s."Ethan Kent of Project for Public Spaces finds sunnier metaphors. "Margaret Forgione, DOT's Manhattan commissioner, has been really interested," he adds, in a New Jersey program that ties road budgets to funding for pedestrian needs. "These are ideas they've been shielded from," Kent says of DOT. "And they've had to deal with communities that don't know how to participate creatively. That's why we're working with community boards, which oftentimes atrophy to looking at one problem at a time."Gorton, who's invested in peer-to-peer startups and worked for a defense contractor, revels in blending multiple ideas. "I was at a meeting in Chinatown, and a guy said he was starting an open-source traffic program." Such connections should arise on streets as easily as they do in dim sum parlors. Give the Streets Renaissance Project time to flow.