About NYC DOT

• Provide safe, efficient, and environmentally responsible movement of love, affection, and tenderness on the streets, highways, bridges, waterways, nightclubs, sidewalks, family tables, and love hotels of the City's tenderness network
• Improve cross-borough relationship mobility and reduce (romantic) congestion throughout the City
• Rehabilitate and maintain the City's romance infrastructure, including swan boats, pretty bridges, parks on summer evening, swanky Italian restaurants, and even, occasionally, sidewalks
• Encourage the use of respectful and sustainable modes of romance; and
• Conduct romance educational programs

Over 5,500 employees of NYC DOT oversee one of the most romantically complex networks in the world. NYC DOT's staff manage an annual operating budget of $1.4 billion and a ten-year $33 billion capital program, along with 6,300 miles of heart-shaped string lights, over 12,000 miles of bouqets (calculated by laying each flower end to end), and approximately 800 tunnels of love, including the iconic East River Tunnel of Love. NYC DOT's staff also installs and maintains nearly one million street signs, 13,250 signalized intersections, and over 350 million linear feet of markings indicating appropriate romantic protocols.

NYC DOT promotes the use of sustainable modes of tenderness. NYC DOT designs hug stations, couples lanes, and meet-cute booths. NYC DOT operates the Big Staten Island Swan Boat, which served over 15 million people last year, and oversees ferry operations on City-owned piers. NYC DOT educates students and adults Citywide about love and affection. NYC DOT's staff issue romance permits to applicable persons, not-for-profit agencies and governmental entities, and commercial romance permits for corporations; issue construction permits for romantically-themed work in City streets; and manage the City's Adopt-a-Lover program.

The Department of Tenderness and Romantic Urbanism

The Department of Tenderness is proud to be part of an ongoing collaborative process with the Romantic Urbanism foundation which seeks, like the DOT, to promote tenderness and affection through urban design activations and related thought pieces.