A coalition of advocacy groups wants to put stickball on Mayor Bloomberg’s second-term agenda. New York’s iconic sport and other idyllic neighborhood activities have been swallowed up, they say, by a transportation infrastructure that has overwhelmed neighborhoods and damaged the city’s quality of life.

The coalition today is opening a two-month exhibition at the Municipal Arts Society, “Livable Streets: A New Vision for New York,” the goal of which is to influence the Bloomberg administration’s development goals.

A co-sponsor of the exhibition, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, Paul White, said New York is falling behind other major cities like London, Paris, and Chicago, which have moved toward upgrading their public transit and are planning for friendlier, safer, and more engaging streets and public spaces.

“Its not about the mega-development. It is about the details, how livable and how hospitable our streets are,” Mr. White said.

The chairman of the City Council’s Transportation Committee, John Liu, a Democrat of Queens, said he agrees that the city is lagging behind.

“If anything,we are just trying to play catch-up when in fact we should just be leading the way,” Mr. Liu told The New York Sun. “We haven’t expanded our mass transit capacity, we haven’t tried to revolutionize the capacity of our roadways and transportation networks. We are struggling even with the basic challenge of balancing pedestrian needs and the needs of motorists.”

The “Livable Streets”exhibition will contain a series of original presentations from transportation and urban planners and an hour-long original movie, “Contested Streets,” which looks at how traffic has evolved in New York compared with other large cities.

Mr. White said a new report by Transportation Alternatives will show that quality of life indicators are higher in neighborhoods with less traffic. A transportation consultant, Bruce Schaller, will release a second new study showing that altering the city’s transportation infrastructure toward public transit and away from automobiles will not have a negative impact on the economy.

Mr. White said politicians have been slow to embrace traffic reduction strategies because they think the change will hurt the local economy – certainly a losing issue with voters.

One such strategy might include congestion pricing. About three years ago, London introduced a policy imposing fees on cars that enter some of its most congested areas in an effort to reduce traffic. Other American cities are now investigating congestion pricing, and recently a probusiness group, the Partnership for New York City, completed a study on how it might function here. Mr. Bloomberg has said the policy will not work in New York.

Mr. White said he is optimistic that the time is right for a change.

“We think that we are very near a breakthrough,” he said, adding that it’s a positive development that Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff will oversee the city’s Department of Transportation in the second term.”He’s a regular bicyclist,” Mr. White said.

The exhibition will run at the Municipal Arts Society through March 29.