Prospect Park will go car-free for good
The only traffic Prospect Park visitors will have to dodge next year are bikes, because Brooklyn’s best-known green space is becoming permanently car-free, officials announced on Monday.
The move comes after more limited road closures in recent years, including from July 17 to Sept. 11 this past summer, left parks advocates demanding a complete ban on motorized vehicles.
“It needs to be a place for everyone and it needs to be a place that’s safe and it needs to be a place people can fully enjoy,” Mayor de Blasio said at a press conference in Grand Army Plaza.
“When you don’t have those cars whooshing by, it gives you a sense of peace. We need a little more peace in the city.”
The city already had banished cars from the park’s West Drive two years ago, but vehicles are currently allowed on the East Drive during the morning rush hour from 7 to 9 a.m.
The announcement was made before the city managed to finalize an analysis of the impact that this summer’s closure had on traffic in the vicinity of the park, according to a press release from City Hall.
Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg initially told reporters the agency’s analysis was complete — even though the DOT refused to publicly provide any of the findings.
“I guess I’ll put it this way: We got enough of the numbers that I think we decided we’re ready to go car-free and we saw the areas where we’re gonna . . . do some signal-timing mitigations,” she said when pressed on the status of the agency’s review of the data.
Trottenberg acknowledged “minimal” impacts on traffic as a result of the street closures over the summer — particularly in the neighborhoods to the southeast of the park — but DOT officials refused to provide those findings when specifically asked.
“The good news is we saw very minimal traffic impacts, but not no impacts,” Trottenberg told reporters.
“And so again, we want to make sure that we’re respectful of communities outside the park and that on the day we go completely carfree that we’ve mitigated the traffic as best we can.”
Agency officials say they’re planning to adjust traffic signals and make other needed changes based on traffic patterns that emerge after park roads are per- manently closed to cars on Jan. 2.
Maintenance and emergency vehicles will still be allowed to use the park roads.
According to the city, Prospect Park — where the mayor got married in 1994 — averages between 8 million to 10 million visitors a year.
The car-free initiative was the first announced by the mayor during a week when City Hall is temporarily working out of Brooklyn Borough Hall.