In recent years, the city has been moving to create more pedestrian plazas in the boroughs outside Manhattan, The New York Times reports.
They add up to 30 acres of land that used to be streets, which is the equivalent of almost 23 football fields, a modest-sounding total that has still had plenty of impacts, some of which are controversial.
“In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of space has been given over to pedestrian plazas,” said Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group, “but it’s important space. It’s high-demand space. It’s in the city’s densest neighborhoods. It’s at crossroads. It’s in key commercial centers. The impact of reclaiming that 30 acres has been enormous.”
Also, he said, in a traffic-choked city, closing streets, rerouting drivers and building plazas sends a message: “Driving culture is not the predominant street culture.”
To people who crisscross them, the plazas look like public parks on the street, but they are different from parks. On the city’s organization chart, they are overseen by the Department of Transportation, not the Parks Department, and in some neighborhoods, they have been met with resistance amid fears that they were a trigger for gentrification, according to The New York Times.
City officials say the plazas have made streets safer for pedestrians.
Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, called the pedestrian plaza program a “very mixed bag.”
“In some cases, there are tables that are put out, and food carts pop up, and it becomes a space for people who are patronizing food carts instead of just hanging out,” he said.
When the city’s pedestrian plaza program began 10 years ago, it was controversial because it wanted to block off some of the busiest streets in the city if not the world. Ten years later, the program has changed the aura and ambience of the city, making it more walkable and, officials say, safer and cleaner — and not just in Midtown Manhattan, where the pedestrian plaza in Times Square served as a high-visibility demonstration project, according to The New York Times.
City officials say that after traffic was rerouted in Midtown, there were 35 percent fewer injuries from pedestrians being hit by cars and 63 percent fewer injuries to drivers and their passengers from fender-benders. And, in the three years after a plaza was created in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, accidents dropped 53 percent and injuries from crashes dropped 62 percent.
“D.O.T. broke some eggs when they created this program, and now we’re all making the omelet,” said Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, the business improvement district that maintains the area and arranges outdoor programs there. “The complex work is how are the ingredients going to be different in Times Square than in Elmhurst?”
By: Heather Longhofer