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Car-Free Streets

The Crossroads of the World Goes Car-Free

12:44 PM PDT on May 26, 2009

TSquare_band.jpg

I've lived in New York City for just about twenty years now but yesterday was my first trip to Times Square.

Sure, I've been
to Times Square before. Plenty of times. But until yesterday Times
Square had never ever been a destination for me. Rather, it had always
been a place to avoid or, if unavoidable, a place to get in and out of
as fast as possible on my way to somewhere else.

The
New York City Department of Transportation's "Green Light for Midtown"
plan brought me and a lot of other people to Times Square yesterday.
And it kept us there. By simply removing motor vehicles from Broadway
around Times and Herald Squares and inviting pedestrians in with
seating, street performers, good people-watching -- and a naked cowboy
-- New York City has created two great new public spaces for tourists,
office workers and, yes, even jaded residents.

NakedCowboyTough.jpgStreetfilms'
Clarence Eckerson squares off with the Naked Cowboy. Icon Parking
Systems, the Cowboy's sponsor, may be one of the few businesses unhappy
with the new Times Square. The Cowboy is pleased.

The
space is still raw and unfinished and it'll be interesting to see how
it works during the weekday, but my two young sons and I had a blast
yesterday along with thousands of others. Times Square is suddenly a
place worth visiting and staying a while (especially if you're a parent
desperate for an easy, low-cost weekend adventure for your kids).

Tsquare_kids_on_bikes.jpgThe Naparstek boys experience Times Square for the first time. ("Can we get a big TV on the front of our house too?")

With
much of the traffic gone and the space filled with people and human
activity, there's an interesting kind of intimacy and smallness to
Times Square now. Nicolai Ouroussoff articulated this really nicely in this morning's New York Times:

A large part of the design’s success stems from the alteredrelationship between the pedestrian and the structures that frame thesquare. Walking down the cramped, narrow sidewalks, a visitor couldnever get a feel for the vastness of the place. Now, standing in themiddle of Broadway, you have the sense of being in a big public room,the towering billboards and digital screens pressing in on all sides.

This adds to the intimacy of the plaza itself, which, howeverundefined, can now function as a genuine social space: people can mill around, ogle one another and gaze up at the city aroundthem without the fear of being caught under the wheels of a cab.

bway_loungechairs.jpgA more personal Times Square: Sunning in the middle of Broadway.

No
doubt some aspects of the new Times Square will be found to be
successful and others not working all that well. Still, DOT
Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and her team already deserve a ton of
credit for their willingness to experiment and innovate. During the Iris Weinshall era at DOT,
the idea of removing motor vehicles from Broadway was considered a huge
long-shot, a Hail Mary pass, a kind of Livable Streets Holy Grail. It
was difficult to imagine a version of the New York City Dept. of
Transportation that would do it. These guys and their colleagues went
ahead and did it...

JSK_and_crew.jpgNYC DOT's Seth Solomonow, Janette Sadik-Khan, Andy Wiley-Schwartz, Ryan Russo and Sean Quinn at Times Square on Monday morning.

We're only talking about a few blocks of Midtown Manhattan, but the symbolic value of this project is huge. New York City has banished motor vehicles from the Crossroads of the World. That's the headline all around the world this morning.
There may not be much left of Wall Street, but New York City is still
the media capital of the world and Times Square is center stage. The
world is watching (and Tweeting) the DOT's experiment. Just as we saw with the spread of Ciclovia and Summer Streets,
this is an idea that is likely to hop from city to city as mayors
compete to create the greenest, most vibrant new urban public spaces.
Planners in San Francisco are referring to their new Pavement-to-Parks projects as "Janettes."

Gorton_Tsquare2.jpgOpen Planning Project executive director Mark Gorton catches some rays.

The
changes underway in New York City right now are pretty breathtaking and
livable streets advocates deserve some credit too. Yesterday I couldn't
help but think back to a January 2005 dinner at Mark Gorton's Upper
West Side apartment. Former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa was the guest
of honor. Transportation Alternatives' new executive director Paul
Steely White set up the event and Jody Gorton cooked up a delicious
meal for Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins and about fifteen
advocates and civic leaders.

The topic of discussion that
evening was Broadway and it's potential to be a truly great,
pedestrian-only public space. Peñalosa believed it was possible and he
was inspirational in laying out the vision. Project for Public Space
president Fred Kent had been thinking about the idea for 30 years and
he provided the historic perspective. ITDP director Walter Hook had
seen pedestrian streets work all over the world and he talked about
international best practices. Tompkins had to live with the daily
consequences of whatever happened at Times Square and he reminded
everyone of the political realities. At the time it seemed a little
far-fetched, this notion that Times Square might someday be a mostly
car-free space. But here we are five years later and it's happening
along with lots of other good stuff.

It was from meetings like this one that the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign was born and ideas like physically separated bike lanes, car-free streets and a less automobile-dependent city
were popularized and made politically possible in New York and beyond.
If you've been a part of New York City's livable streets movement,
today's a day to pat yourself on the back. As Danish urban designer Jan
Gehl says: "How nice it is to wake up every morning and know that your
city is a little better than it was the day before."

Photos: Aaron Naparstek, Brad Aaron and Nick Whitaker.

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