Car-Free Summer Streets in Manhattan, Coming Saturdays in August
Jun 19th, 2008 by Jervey
[Much of Park Avenue, above, will be closed to cars on parts of Aug. 9, 16 and 23. Right, Lance Armstrong joined Mayor Bloomberg to announce street closings. Photo: Fred R. Conrad/NYT; John Marshall Mantel for NYT]
We’re a couple days late on this–not for lack of excitement, but because it actually took a little while to gather all the relevant articles and video clips. (We actually consider this a pretty essential story.) Basically, we’re going to get car-free access to a long stretch of Manhattan on three Summer Saturdays. We’ll let the various sources explain the rest:
From the Times City Room blog:
Emulating similar experiments in Paris, London, and Bogotá, Colombia, New York City will close off to traffic a 6.9-mile route from the Brooklyn Bridge to East 72nd Street on three consecutive Saturdays, giving New Yorkers to a chance to explore and enjoy “car-free recreation corridors” — well, for six hours a stretch, at least.
In making the announcement, the mayor summoned some star power: the cyclist and seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong and the musician David Byrne of the Talking Heads, who said he commutes by bicycle daily to his work in SoHo from his home in Midtown.The route will run from Lower Manhattan to East 72nd Street via Centre Street, Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue and Park Avenue. Major crosstown routes — including Chambers, Canal, East Houston, 14th, 23rd and 59th Streets — will remain open to traffic. Buses that ride along the 6.9-mile route will be rerouted during the street closings — which have been scheduled for Aug. 9, 16, and 23, from 7 a.m. until 1 p.m. [read the rest]
From Streetsblog, who, predictably, have exhaustive coverage:
While much of the coverage in the Express and New York Sun focused on objections to “closing” or “shutting down” routes for cars, the virtues of opening streets for pedestrians and cyclists were not lost on everyone:
The chairman of the City Council’s committee on transportation, John Liu, said a project like this has been discussed for several years, and would reinforce a trend, rather than posing an inconvenience.
“This is not likely to create a huge ripple in the fabric of Manhattan,” he said. “It may even begin to wean people off dependence on personal automobiles.”
Here’s some Streetfilm video from the press conference, featuring Bloomberg in all his monotonous glory, DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, one Lance Armstrong, and a certain Talking Head:
A great Bloomberg quote:
We have to try different things if we’re going to keep this city vibrant and interesting. We also have to stop talking about global warming and actually do something. I can’t tell you this is going to make a big difference, but it says to people, “There’s other ways to get around.”
And here’s a DOT map of the car-free fun:
And there’s much more buzz on Summer Streets to be found: NYT, News, Post, NY1, Crain’s, Gothamist