FOOT TRAFFIC: In New York City, a stretch of the Great White Way has been repurposed as a pedestrian plaza.
Image: Jim.henderson via Wikimedia Commons
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In New York City, land of the ubiquitous yellow taxi, cabbies and other motorists find themselves with a bit less room to operate these days.
The city closed several blocks of Broadway in 2009 to create a pedestrian plaza around Times Square—a much-publicized experiment that in February became permanent policy, even though it did not improve traffic flow as much as hoped. The Big Apple has also dabbled in shorter-term but larger-scale street closures, barring cars on a stretch of streets leading from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park on a series of summer Saturdays in 2008 and 2009. And on June 7, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a somewhat less sexy but nonetheless significant change in the city's infrastructure, instituting dedicated bus-only lanes on Manhattan's East Side to speed transit up and down the island.
Each of the measures instituted in the U.S.'s largest city turns over what had been primarily automotive-ruled space to pedestrians, cyclists or mass transit. In doing so the city follows a trend that has caught on in Europe and Latin America—in some cases long ago—but that has been slow to take root in the U.S. If New York and other American cities such as Portland, Ore., prove to be on the vanguard domestically, the changes there could portend a shift in the way urbanites in the U.S. use their streets in the years and decades to come.
"It clearly is a trend," says Lester Brown, president of the nonprofit Earth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "I think there are many cities that are ahead on this. Several years ago I was in Stockholm, and already there were many blocks where cars were banned."
Paul Steely White, executive director of the New York City nonprofit advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, says that the popularity of repurposing urban streets around the world gave advocates more leverage to argue for them in the U.S. "By saying that so many disparate cities around the world, from Bogotá to Copenhagen, are heading in this direction, it made it easier to make the case," White says.
Brown points to Enrique Peñalosa, who served as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, from 1998 to 2001, as a pioneer in the kinds of changes now reaching the U.S. "He's the one who really redefined things when he took office," Brown says. The city's bus rapid transit (BRT) network, TransMilenio, is in many ways more like a subway system, with its own median-protected lanes and station platforms for loading and unloading passengers. Similar BRT systems have sprung up in places such as Mexico City and Ahmedabad, India, giving over lanes of the road exclusively to bus traffic.
"Thinking about why these kinds of reclamation make sense, I always talk about the spatial efficiency of walking, biking and buses," White says. "When you think about what cities are, they are defined by their density—by definition the space between buildings is limited." The car, he adds, is the lowest density mode of transportation; that is, a person traveling by car takes up far more space than someone on a bicycle or on a bus. "In many respects cities are all the same in terms of supply and demand," White says. "There's always more demand for street use than there are streets."
Looking forward, White sees a more malleable future for the way streets are used. With retractable barriers, city planners can create so-called time-flexible streets, which might be open to vehicle traffic during part of the day and pedestrian-only at other times. "You're accommodating peak use—that could be peak deliveries in the morning and peak pedestrian use during lunchtime," he says. "That's something I think you'll see more of, and something we're pushing for."
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16 Comments
Add CommentOn the same roads, before peds & cyclists moved in on car territory, cars moved in on what was horse and buggy territory, and before that, horse and buggy territory moved in on what was... cyclist and pedestrian territory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCars R Coffins
Don't forget Denver!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBikes R 4 kids in neighborhoods. Please don't kick my ass, Hotblack. Will you be my ghetto BFF? We could get a tandem!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt was in the 1950's, the time after WWII, that the assault on mass transit took place, for it is to be remembered that every major and minor city had mass transit. Cars took on the territory of subways, trolleys and buses. See the USA in a ....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is good for GM is good for America. So grew our love, obsession, for the automobile. Now after five decades of the great fossil fuel fix, they want to wean us off of the gasoline habit and bring things back to where they were in the fifties. The things that New York is doing to "help" deal with the congestion, seems to be of limited value, and there seems to be no real evaluation of if any of theses measures, dedicated bus lanes and car-less zones. What good is a dedicated bus lanes if there is non-city buses and others in these lanes? There are a lot of good ideas being thrown around, but are they really working, and what of a federal oversight committee to separate the wheat from the shaft.
I think you meant "wheat from the chaff".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe're moving full circle. More than a century ago, before cars took over America, bicycles were one of the primary types of vehicles on the road. In fact, American streets and roads were initially paved to accommodate bicycles. Sometimes it pays to be patient and have a long memory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is probably lovely to walk around the city that way, but if you buy very much stuff you can't carry it around very far and you need to go to your car to put it in. I can see that as a real problem. People will just have to buy less!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will be a real problem if you want to buy something - and carry everything with you. That is the problem with mass transit - you can't carry everything with you. People will just have to buy less!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a dream.... . I dream of a city free of pollution where there are no homeless and poverty is no more. A city where the transportation grid is driven by meg-lev technologies and and bike and pedestrian walk ways stretch from north to south, east to west. Where the housing is energy efficient and powered by community based solar technologies that feed endlessly into the modern smart power grid. Ecologically sustainable cities that is designed with the immediate ecology in mind, let the city fit the ecology and not the ecology fit the city. A city in balance with nature so that both can live in harmony with each other. What is good for nature is good for humanity. Is it really overpopulation that is at the heart of all of our problems, or is it the belief that we can go any where and do anything without suffering the consequences of our actions? Is it consumerism that drives pollution, or is it that the ones who produce don't care where the things they produce end up at? But! Ultimately, who really has the power to change all of this? Who will be the catalyst for creating the cities of the future? They used to say, "if you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout buying less - in NYC and other large cities people shopped all day long and had the stores send them their purchases - mostly the same day by bicycle or truck. It's just a matter of getting that economy going again. It's much more efficient to have yours (and everyone else's) materials delivered than to drive and fill up your trunk.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI meant "..used to.."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI meant "..used to.."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It is probably lovely to walk around the city that way, but if you buy very much stuff you can't carry it around very far and you need to go to your car to put it in"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf I need to get some groceries, I can get to one of the _three_ grocery stores within five minutes of walking distance in the German city I live in.
The grocery stores here are generally not as large as their American counterparts, but they are a lot more common and thus easy to walk to - thus, less time is required for shopping in them. It all balances out.
A key enabler to this cute idea depends on where the people come from. In New York City and other very large cities you have many urban dwellers and the empty streets work well for those folks to get around. I have seen many MidWest cities, where there are no city dwellers, become ghost towns over night due to the lack of space for more cars so folks could get into town. People won't ride bikes and busses into desolate places in foul weather. Be careful! Build it and they will leave.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThrocky, Your note implies that the bike deliveries are relatively near by. Do all cities have urban nearby shopping dwellers. I bet not. You theory is part right, but does not apply to all cities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't understand how blocking off streets is supposed to help with auto traffic. It will make room for more pedestrians but the <a href="http://www.bannerstakes.com/carts.html">retractable barriers</a> won't do much to keep cars moving. They need to figure out a different way to help auto traffic.
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