Two Roads Diverged
Newsweek surveys NYC’s new pilot project for Broadway (with a nice nod to Traffic).
When it comes to New York traffic, Broadway has long been identified as a key culprit. In 1811, urban planners laid out Manhattan’s grid of north-south avenues met by east-west streets, an efficient system of right angles. But those mapmakers left Broadway slicing diagonally through the city, and it’s caused havoc ever since. “Every time Broadway cuts through the grid, it delays traffic,” says Janette Sadik-Khan, New York’s transportation commissioner. It’s especially bad at Times Square, where drivers on Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet heavy crosstown traffic—along with 356,000 daily pedestrians.
Up in Boston, a different idea is being floated: Reopening Downtown Crossing to cars.
Indeed, Downtown Crossing remains one of the last vestiges of a largely discredited idea, the American pedestrian mall, which municipal planners once believed would help cities compete with proliferating suburban malls. In the 1970s, at least 220 cities closed downtown thoroughfares, paved them with bricks or cobbles and waited for them to take hold as urban destinations. Since then, all but about two dozen have reopened the malls to traffic, as planners, developers, and municipal officials came to believe that the lack of cars had an effect opposite of what they had intended, driving away shoppers, stifling businesses, and making streets at night seem barren and forlorn.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 8:56 am and is filed under Cars, Cities, Pedestrians. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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