Hipster Duck
Senior Member
I found this interesting. There is the same stoking of a "culture war" mentality among pro-car councilors and advocates in New York but, unlike Toronto, there was swift action in closing and pedestrianizing Broadway from Times Square to Herald Square thanks, mainly, to a very powerful DOT commish.
I'll be following this move closely over the next few months to determine whether this actually paralyzes traffic any more on Manhattan than before. I think this will be the litmus test for traffic closings on the rest of the continent, such as our very own, on going Jarvis debate.
Honk, Honk, Aaah
Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s Transportation commissioner, manages to be equal parts Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. As she prepares to close swaths of Broadway to cars next week, she is igniting a peculiar new culture war—over the role of the automobile in New York.
By Michael Crowley
Published May 17, 2009
New York Magazine
Sometime early Sunday morning this Memorial Day weekend, a work crew from the New York City Department of Transportation will arrive in Times Square. Waiting for a pause in traffic, the team will close off Broadway at 47th Street, directing southbound cars east to Seventh Avenue. In the weeks to come, construction workers will refashion the next five blocks of the boulevard, turning one of the world’s most congested stretches of asphalt into a 58,000-foot pedestrian plaza. The same will happen a few blocks south, where another stretch of Broadway—from 33rd Street to 35th Street, at Herald Square—will be closed to cars and, by fall, dotted with café tables free for public use.
Read the full article
I'll be following this move closely over the next few months to determine whether this actually paralyzes traffic any more on Manhattan than before. I think this will be the litmus test for traffic closings on the rest of the continent, such as our very own, on going Jarvis debate.
Honk, Honk, Aaah
Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s Transportation commissioner, manages to be equal parts Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. As she prepares to close swaths of Broadway to cars next week, she is igniting a peculiar new culture war—over the role of the automobile in New York.
By Michael Crowley
Published May 17, 2009
New York Magazine
Sometime early Sunday morning this Memorial Day weekend, a work crew from the New York City Department of Transportation will arrive in Times Square. Waiting for a pause in traffic, the team will close off Broadway at 47th Street, directing southbound cars east to Seventh Avenue. In the weeks to come, construction workers will refashion the next five blocks of the boulevard, turning one of the world’s most congested stretches of asphalt into a 58,000-foot pedestrian plaza. The same will happen a few blocks south, where another stretch of Broadway—from 33rd Street to 35th Street, at Herald Square—will be closed to cars and, by fall, dotted with café tables free for public use.
Read the full article