It’s time to set Broadway free
WASHINGTON – On a recent visit to New York, traversing Times Square felt like running a gantlet. Sure, the cars are gone, thanks to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose administration began prohibiting traffic on six blocks of Broadway in 2013 to create a vast plaza. But in short order, the vehicles seem to have been replaced with Minnies and Mickeys, Elmos and SpongeBobs and half-naked or flag-painted buskers.
Earlier this year, to end the chaos, Mayor Bill de Blasio briefly talked about reversing his predecessor’s decision, before deciding that the show could go on.
Perhaps it’s time to embrace a more radical solution – to think bigger, not smaller.
Closing just a small portion of Broadway merely created a self-contained three-ring circus. Instead, why not close off Broadway to traffic for a far longer stretch – perhaps even from one end to the other – creating an unfettered corridor for bicycles and pedestrians that would slice across much of Manhattan?
Other cities, mostly in Europe, have aggressively “pedestrianized” long stretches of major avenues by banning automobile traffic, with few regrets and many positive results.
This summer Mayor Anne Hidalgo of Paris made miles of roadway along the Seine River car-free for the summer and has permanently banned cars on more than 2 miles of the Right Bank. Likewise, Hamburg, Madrid, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Zurich all now prohibit cars on some major avenues in the city center.
“It requires leadership and vision,” said Holger Volkmann, a transportation expert with the World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. “Hidalgo made a name for herself by taking this on.”
And it’s not just Europeans who are thinking car-free. This summer, Montreal and Philadelphia closed miles of central streets to vehicular traffic – albeit in temporary experiments. In this city, my new home, I ride to work each morning down a protected two-way bicycle highway that flows down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House.
In the past five years, New York has made significant progress in reclaiming streets for people, with projects like its popular bike-sharing program. “It was important to have that flagship around Times Square,” Volkman said. “But it will be a shame if New York City doesn’t come up with bold new ideas to make that part of a new vision.”
In general, Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to make New York streets more people friendly have carried over into the de Blasio administration. “We’ve started the process of recapturing cities that were focused on autos,” said Polly Trottenberg, Mayor de Blasio’s commissioner of transportation, noting that New York has continued to build out its network of bike lanes, lowered the speed limit and redesigned streets “to better allocate the balance” between those behind the wheel and everyone else.
Last year, it started the Summer Streets program, in which certain roadways were closed to traffic during parts of weekends. In August, the city tried out its first Shared Streets day in Lower Manhattan, during which cars could drive into the historic zone but were advised by the police upon entering that they should travel no more than 5 mph.
In Paris, Mayor Hidalgo described her effort to pedestrianize major arteries as an “almost philosophical project, which consists of seeing the city in another way than through the use of cars.”
Imparting that kind of vision should be fairly simple in New York, a city where auto ownership is expensive and difficult.
But New Yorkers are a stubborn lot, fiercely protective of the familiar. When, in 2011, the Bloomberg administration first proposed putting bike lanes along Prospect Park West, progressive residents of Park Slope were up in arms in protest. (“Don’t get me wrong, I love bike riding, but …”
There is often initial resistance to pedestrianization, said Michael Replogle, former director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and currently the deputy commissioner of transportation in New York. In many cities, restaurants and stores have argued that such efforts reduce customer flow and make deliveries difficult. (A number of European cities allow deliveries during off hours.) But Replogle said there were various solutions to address those concerns, and that studies of pedestrianization generally showed positive economic benefits for restaurants and retail stores.
“There’s no city that has tried it that said, ‘No we want to go back to cars,’” he said.
Trottenberg acknowledged that she didn’t know of any “full-throated program to close Broadway” to car traffic at the moment. But she added that the city was continuing to experiment.
In fact, Broadway meets many criteria that typically render pedestrianization a success: The 1, 2 and 3 subway lines offer ample public transportation from top to bottom to serve as an alternative to auto use. And the other north-south avenues, with their synchronized lights, are better for getting up and down Manhattan anyway. Who in their right mind wants to drive on Broadway?
Many cities have used temporary closings to test how more permanent vehicle bans and restrictions would affect traffic and to persuade citizens of their merit. Philadelphia’s “free streets” program this September had its origins in the 2015 papal visit, when widespread street closures to car traffic proved popular.
But taking back major corridors from autos is often a process of gradual acclimatization. In 1987, Zurich residents began voting on proposals to remove cars from Limmatquai, one of its major car-choked thoroughfares. Time and again it was voted down. With tests and temporary closures of limited portions of the road, however, its citizens and shopkeepers slowly came around. Since September 2004, the driving of motor vehicles, including motorcycles and scooters, has been forbidden.
Trottenberg said her department’s work was “very granular, block-byblock,” teaming with community boards and churches, for example, to understand their concerns about potential impact. “Part of the way you get to a place is you have to help people envision what it would be like,” she said.
Several weeks ago I was back in New York, where the bike-sharing program now reaches up into my old neighborhood on the Upper West Side. I thought about renting a bike on Broadway and 110th Street to get to Columbus Circle. But contemplating the buses and taxis whizzing by, I chickened out. As I descended into the subway, I thought how great it would be to instead sail down a car-free Broadway.
Imagine that.
Six blocks with no traffic is just not enough
Elisabeth Rosenthal, a former ‘New York Times’ correspondent, is the editor in chief of Kaiser Health News and the author of the forthcoming An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How to Take It Back.