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Posted Aug 2, 2012, 7:19 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
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Mayor Bloomberg’s transportation reforms have unclogged New York’s streets and made them safer.
Read More: http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_...portation.html
Quote:
Back in February 2009, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that, in three months’ time, New York City would permanently close Broadway to car and truck traffic in Times Square and Herald Square. The plan would “ease traffic congestion throughout the Midtown grid,” the mayor said. Though he called it merely a “targeted adjustment,” everyone understood that the initiative marked a big shift away from a century’s worth of New York transportation policy, which had generally tried to ease traffic by adding ever more space for cars. Many New Yorkers were upset by the proposal. “I’m worried because I don’t know if it will work,” Charlotte St. Martin, the director of the theater industry’s Broadway League, told the New York Times. “I certainly don’t want things to be worse for theatergoers.” A cabdriver, Garba Mahaman, got right to the point: “Now they’re going to make it worse.” City public advocate Bill DeBlasio spoke for many when he later complained, “We cannot make such a fundamental change to Times Square without first giving the community a greater say.”
Three years on, it’s clear that the worriers were wrong and the mayor right. Midtown traffic flows better, not only for cars and trucks but for the majority of people who use the area: pedestrians. A walk down the closed section of Times Square—Broadway between 47th and 42nd Streets—makes it hard to imagine changing things back. Where stuck drivers once fumed, people sit happily in chairs munching on dumplings. More important is that the district’s huge crowds can now walk down the middle of the street instead of overflowing the sidewalk. Though drivers in New York City are a minority, outdated traffic engineering long allowed them to reign unchallenged, with clogged streets and too many accidents the results. Over the past five years, however, the city, led by transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, has devised ways to reduce that dominance. Through several new initiatives, mostly outside Times Square, New York has been rationally using its limited physical space to get more people moving more quickly—and that means not in automobiles. New York has achieved its improvements on the cheap. Better still, the changes have saved lives.
Closing Broadway was a straightforward solution to a serious problem: frustrated car drivers and even more frustrated pedestrians. Broadway wasn’t like other city avenues. A diagonal thoroughfare, it cut not only across streets, as Manhattan’s other north-south avenues did, but also through other major avenues. Indeed, its intersection with Sixth and Seventh Avenues was what created Herald Square and Times Square, respectively. So three separate sets of drivers, rather than the usual two, had to share those spots. Many were unfamiliar with the area, faced too many choices, and didn’t have enough time or room to make them effectively. The drivers competed with pedestrians, too—more than a quarter of a million daily in Times Square, ten times the number of drivers there. The number of pedestrians has been swelling yearly since the 1990s, when the seedy district was transformed into a tourist hot spot. Ellen Goldstein of the Times Square Alliance, a group of business and real-estate interests, recalls that Times Square “rehabbed itself so very quickly” that “we went from not much to huge numbers [of pedestrians] in a short time. We spent many years worrying about the lack of pedestrian space.” By the new millennium, Times Square’s walkers were crowding off the sidewalks and into the car-choked avenue. The city government had to give them more room somehow—hence Bloomberg’s solution, closing Broadway to cars.
The change hasn’t, as many drivers have fretted, made traffic worse in Midtown; in fact, it has sped things up by reducing confusion. Back in 2008, drivers averaged only 6.7 miles per hour in Midtown West, where Broadway is. In just one year, the closure improved speeds overall to 7.2 miles per hour, a 7 percent increase. By tracking GPS data from 2 million taxi trips, the city found that northbound cabdrivers between Fifth and Ninth Avenues (the area through which Broadway slices) went 17 percent more quickly in 2009 than in 2008. Southbound drivers did see a 2 percent slowdown—not surprising, since they had lost Broadway, a one-way avenue running south—but it was far exceeded by the substantial northbound gain. As a control measure, the city measured speeds on the unaffected east side of town and found that they increased by about 5 percent (the recession accelerated traffic, since fewer cars entered the city). The mayor’s plan also improved life considerably for Broadway’s primary constituents. In the first year of the pedestrian plazas, Times Square attracted 11 percent more walkers than it had the previous year, climbing to 22,381 people per hour at peak times, on average. Herald Square attracted 6 percent more people on foot, a peak-time hourly average of 17,311. The new people aren’t all tourists; they include walking commuters, who’ve switched routes because they find Times Square more pleasant, as well as local residents and workers. A Times Square Alliance survey found that two-thirds of workers in the area liked the changes. “I used to not go out at lunchtime,” Goldstein says, because the four-block walk from 46th Street to 42nd would take 20 minutes. It now takes three.
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I know they're building a subway, but there's seems to be space for more than that. If they wanted to, they could build an underground city.
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