Making Room For People On New York City Streets
Chair of Reconnecting America's board of directors leading effort to transform street design in New York City
The utilitarian 1970s-style streetscape of New York could be transformed into narrow European-style roadways shared by pedestrians, cyclists and cars, all traveling at low speeds under guidelines established by the city's first street design manual. And one of the first examples of this new vision will take shape near Times Square when a section of Broadway is turned into a pedestrian mall.
“Lots of things have changed in 40 years, but this part of our infrastructure hasn’t,” Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, told The New York Times in an article on the new street design manual. “If we’re going to be a world-class city, we need guidelines that lay out the operating instructions of how we get there.”
Sadik-Kkan is chair of the Reconnecting America Board of Directors.
Part of this transformation will begin on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend when a work crew from the New York City Department of Transportation will arrive in Times Square and close off Broadway at 47th Street. In the weeks to come, construction workers will convert five blocks of the boulevard into a 58,000-foot pedestrian plaza. The same will happen to the stretch of Broadway from 33rd Street to 35th Street, at Herald Square. By fall it will be dotted with café tables free for public use.
The New York Times explains, "This simple but dramatic act will amount to bypass surgery on the heart of New York. It will become the most visible component yet of Mayor Bloomberg’s citywide attempt to make New York’s streets calmer, greener, and safer."
Sadik-Khan is credited with imaging this transformation of Broadway.
“From a transportation perspective, Broadway has been a problem for 200 years,” Sadik-Khan told The Times. “You can try to tweak it with a little signal change here, maybe a traffic lane there. But nothing has worked because you’re not reaching the fundamental problem, which is that midtown is basically broken. There’s just not enough space for people.”
Sadik-Khan has grounded her Broadway plan on assiduous analysis and computer modeling of traffic flow, according to The Times. She has managed a sophisticated PR campaign that has paid off with support from both the Times and the Daily News, as well as the business-improvement districts.
Posted May 20, 2009
