Red Ken lives! Only he's moved across the pond, had massive surgery and now looks and sounds just like the Big Apple's mayor, Mike Bloomberg. Oh wait, it is Bloomberg. And he's lost his frigging marbles. To wit: According to the NYTimes (via Motor Authority ) the city is conducting a series of one day experiments and a nearly 7-mile stretch of road running from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Upper West side will be car, truck and bus free. This should prove quite (in)convenient for trust-funded socialites needing the services of their Williamsburg coke dealers. The "Summer Streets" program will run for three Sundays in August. If it proves successful the Mayor says they'll do it again. We'd like to know what metric they use to measure "success." Most people late for appointments? Most revenue lost by a single parking lot? Most miles walked by ticked-off bus riders? Store with the most missed deliveries? People often ask me why I left New York. Here's my new answer, "Officials are planning to run fitness, dance and yoga classes along the empty streets and will also rent out bicycles as part of the event." Joy.
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Good lord. Get a grip, man. He’s talking about a couple of SATURDAYS (you know, leisure time?), and basically one street; and in New York, where most people don’t drive, it’s guys like you that were making things a pain for everybody else rather than the reverse.
Johnny – it’s gonna be OK. Every weekend in June 1/2 the streets in Brooklyn are closed for block parties, gay pride parades and street fairs. Ask any New Yorker, there’s always another way to get there.
Oh, and the coke dealers live in the Bronx.
He just might get away with it, since it seems inoffensive enough. Centre St, Lafayette St, 4th Ave and Park Ave, will be closed from 7am to 1pm on Aug 9th, 16th, and 23rd. 13 streets, including Canal St, E. Houston St, 8th St, 14th St, 57th St, and 59th St (but not Delancey St) will remain open for cross-town traffic.
The streets will be open for local residents and deliveries.
Official Press Release
I’ll be there, camera in hand, to see how this all goes down.
Bloomberg is a bloomin’ idiot. He will figure out a way to squeeze some type of tax into this scheme. I can’t imagine what the traffic is going to look like on the streets surrounding this one.
A quick google map shows it to be one street. It starts off as Centre St, splits in two (one becoming Lafayette St after two blocks), merges back into Lafayette St, becomes 4th Ave, and then turns into Park Av.
It’s still going to be a pain in the ass for anybody coming in through the Holland Tunnel trying to get to the Williamsburg Brdige since they have to come up Centre St to get to Delancey St to get on the WB. That’ll be a definite point of interest for me.
veefiddy:
Not the good ones
Is that photo from the back lot of Universal Studios?
So, closing off a stretch of road for three Saturdays so that people can enjoy a summer stroll makes Bloomberg a Marxist/Leninist? I think you may be a just a tad hyperbolic in this instance, Jonny.
BuckD: Obviously you didn’t live in San Francisco when they tried this shit on Market Street.
Utter fail.
Closing Park Avenue? Not good.
Can’t see that it is a big deal. After all it is not really driving there it’s jostle, jostle, accelerate to 25, stop, jostle, honk, finger, honk, jostle, stop, accelerate to an unbelievable 40, stop, honk, finger to an anger management flunkee, panic, windows up, accelerate, breathe. I’ve been there.
Obviously you didn’t live in San Francisco when they tried this shit on Market Street.
Utter fail.
Closing Park Avenue? Not good.
Market Street runs as a diagonal that serves the entire core. Park Avenue is one street within a massive grid with plenty of parallel substitutes. I don’t see these situations as being comparable.
If the right streets are selected, this could work very well. It should bring more people into the streets, putting them in a position to hang out and spend money.
Done right, this is a great idea. Done poorly, it could be a mess. Execution will make all the difference here.
Jonny Lieberman :
June 18th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
BuckD: Obviously you didn’t live in San Francisco when they tried this shit on Market Street.
Utter fail.
Closing Park Avenue? Not good.
Aren’t the Wackos still doing that all over SF, just with unofficial approval from the City. It seems to me that they have this bunch of idiots who get out on their bikes once a month and ride around intentionally blocking traffic. I’m sure it works great to encourage others to ride a bike and stop polluting mother earth.
Pch101:
Um… are you saying that Manhattan doesn’t have enough pedestrians?
Anyhow, my point is that roads are for cars. This proposal makes as much sense as closing down water pipes for mice habitrails.
Well at least there’s plenty of room on the subway trains….
Still, no matter where it comes from, the coke arrives via bike messenger, so it isn’t all bad.
a taxpayer-funded politician shuts down the taxpayer-funded roads. nice.
“Frankly my dear I don’t give a ****”
I think NY is a prime city that could do with no car zones. It does get cold in the winter and stifling hot in the summer so if they could create walkways that have shelter from wind / weather and yet open them for breezeways in the summer. There’s a lot of studies on urban reclamation and shutting out traffic – often the zones change with smaller markets supporting local residents (no Walmarts or super groceries) which thrive, it encourages telecommuting and people wound up relocating in order to live close to work, crime was reduced (as no more getaway cars – ease of hiding weapons on person is harder than in car and police presence was more personal due to bike and foot patrol). It has to be done correctly with the right balance – and forcing the residents to do it is normally not the right way.
Jonny is absolutely correct on this one. Bloomberg is an idiot just trying to raise his standing with the global hoaxing, green weenie, communists… Cuz he’d still like to run for president, if not this year maybe in four more.
As much as I love to drive in nyc (I know, I’m crazy), I’m not sure that this will be a big deal. It’s on saturday, there’s not a lot of traffic on saturdays in the city. I think there’s room for this. It will be kinda cool to be able to rollerblade or bike up and down park ave. As much as you might think nyc is not car friendly, it’s even less bike friendly. I love riding a bike in the city, but it’s not for the feint of heart. Crocodile wrestling might be more dangerous, but not by much.
I was way way against bloomy’s congestion pricing plan, but this not so much. Let’s see how it goes.
As for getting to WillyB, uh, you can cross Park ave. I don’t see that as a problem. Besides, most people call their guy and it gets delivered…
To get from the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge, you have to take Canal St over to Centre St, then turn on Kenmare St, which becomes Delancey St.
The problem is that if Centre St is closed, the only other way to get up to the WB is to travel up the Bowery. Unfortunately, you can’t turn north up the Bowery from Canal St.
Of course, if you turn up W. Broadway and cut across Houston St and get to it through the FDR drive, that could work, but I usually stay away from W. Broadway because it’s such a nightmare during normal hours, I can’t imagine how it’ll be when everybody is being diverted that way.
Most people seem to be looking forward to being free of horns, traffic jams, rude drivers, and the omnipresent congestion. Of course, this just moves the congestion elsewhere. Wow, street “gentrification.” Doesn’t matter to me one way or another…don’t live there. I don’t see why the Mayor wants to do this, but at least it does not come with a price tag to play.
I think the photo is from Disney Hollywood Studios (former MGM studios) in Florida.
I’m also going to have to pretty much disagree with the entire tone of this post.
I’ve known several cities which close off a major street for pedestrian-only use during major summer weekends or holidays. It is hardly the end of the world, and people really seem to enjoy it. There is a world of difference to someone walking down a street when the cars are gone, the noise is reduced, and all the bikers and bladers come out for a look — it’s usually a change of pace and a good time.
At any rate, I would find it very hard to imagine the street looking like the wasteland shown in the photo that accompanies the post — it will more likely look like this,
just hopefully with fewer silly face masks. (That’s Cambridge, MA, where Memorial Drive, a major riverfront road, is closed on certain Sundays — which is probably a bigger deal, in relative and absolute terms, say number of lane miles closed, than the New York proposal).
You also have to consider that cities like New York shut down major streets all the time for all sorts of events, like the Thanksgiving Day parade, the Marathon, the St. Patrick’s Day parade — as well as all the freaky liberal crazy stuff like the Gay Pride parade and the like. A few more “events” per year hardly makes for a lunatic communist revolution, and is probably a good thing overall.
It is tempting as a lover of cars and of driving to write this off, but I think it’s folly to dismiss it. This is actually the work of a brilliant Colombian mayor, Enrique Penalosa of Bogota. In Colombia they call it the Ciclovia and it encompasses the entire city, a city much larger than New York. He has been working with a number of community groups in Manhattan to plan this and the request for this has come, not from the Mayor’s office, but from the people of NYC. A far cry from Mr. Livingston’s methods.
Go here to watch a very informative interview with Mr. Penalosa about the Ciclovia and one possible vision of a New New York.
If they follow the Columbian model the busses and will still run. It is a way to give everyone in the city, children and adults alike, a chance to go out and play in the streets in the same way that suburban dwellers are able to. If you lived in the middle of a place as dense as Manhattan you might be calling for this too.
(I do not live in Manhattan but have spent a great deal of time there and follow its development closely as it can point to things which might also make my city better.)