Downside of Lower Manhattan’s Boom: It’s Too Crowded
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So make the sidewalks wider. I can think of nowhere in the US more appropriate to allocate more space to sidewalks than Manhattan.
> Ms. Starr, for one, has all but stopped using the Citi Bike system to commute. She used to ride from her apartment in TriBeCa to her office on Maiden Lane in the financial district nearly every day. But as more pedestrians and cyclists filled the streets, she had to concentrate to avoid running into anyone or being run into.
Sounds like they need separated bike lanes then.
Manhattan is the densest major city* in the country. The amount of space allocated to cars on the roads should be the bare minimum: enough for emergency vehicles, business deliveries, surface transit, the handicapped, a limited number of taxis. With only a tiny amount of space per person, you really have to push for denser forms of transportation. Personal vehicle use should be at a minimum in Manhattan.
> In Lower Manhattan, people are not the only obstacle. Construction on streets and buildings is everywhere. A labyrinth of imposing metal scaffolding hems in available walkways and forces pedestrians closer together, or into the street.
The solution here is to cut into space on the road to provide more walking space.
* I know it's only part of a city but you know what I mean
One of the reasons for this is that street parking is usually subsidized well below the market rates and so drivers will spend a significant amount of time looking for a cheaper parking space rather than simply parking in a garage, and they're using road capacity until they either find a space (and then block the lane while they slowly attempt to parallel park) or give up and pay to park off-street:
“In 2006, surveyors interviewed drivers stopped at a traffic signal in the SoHo district of Manhattan, and 28 percent reported they were cruising for curb parking. A similar study in Brooklyn found that 45 percent of drivers were cruising. The same results might be found on many other streets in New York because off-street parking is generally far more expensive than on-street parking. In midtown Manhattan, for example, the price for the first hour of off-street parking is often about $20, while curb parking is only $1. Parking for an hour at the curb saves $19, but drivers first have to cruise to find a space on the street.”
I still agree that congestion control, disincentives for car use, wider sidewalks, all should be done. Some of us wish NYC could declare independence so we could choose our own policy, but that's a different story...
I was adding that I made the mistake of passing through Times Square on my way to some destination a number of months back. As in the article, you literally could not walk on the sidewalk which was effectively blocked by the mass of people. Times Square (like areas of downtown) is an extreme example, but things do get really crowded. (And you can't just do away with road traffic there. You're at intersection of two major N-S avenues.)
What's the difference?
They are one way. Almost the whole of Manhattan is.
Broadway is already narrow. Seventh not so much, but car traffic there can frequently be as bad as foot traffic. I'm not sure what a good answer would be.
Add second floor above the road. And on top of it, a third floor.
Like an expressway? What about exits, turn-offs, on-ramps? Where would the city find the land to build these?
Most vehicles driving around Times Square are at least fairly local; they're not looking to bypass Midtown Manhattan. If they wanted to, they would probably have driven the short distance to FDR Drive or the West Side Highway.
(Literal plexiglass cieling)
Pedestrians
Bikes (if not with pedestrians)
Transit vehicles (in what is now a service tunnel/grid)
Yes, this would actually require ventilation engineering, but a city should anyway. You might also push for highly restricted emissions vehicles. CNG, Hydrogen, and Electric come to mind as things to consider for a white-list.
You'd have to fight a lot of business owners. Most transit in Manhattan is by foot, and you will have separated pedestrians from commercial entryways. As it stands, a great deal of storefronts—even in the most commercial and highly trafficked parts of the city—are in mixed-use buildings, with apartments in the upper stories. Now most potential customers, instead of walking past shop after shop, are walking past residences. Signs may point out what lies below. Presumably this would cut into businesses which rely on customers popping in without planning to; if you weren't going to exit onto that block for something else anyway, why make the climb down to commercial level just for a little something that caught your eye?
And how did it catch your eye? Stores could no longer entice with a storefront, by showing off their inventory and sales. Restaurants, bakeries, and coffee shops could no longer waft out onto potential guests. They'd be in virtual basements, and would be much less attractive for that reason alone. Manhattan has a history of severing its residents from one thing or another—waterfronts are the first to come to mind—but I would be surprised to see them do this.
Of course, not everything has to remain as is and the city may evolve (as it has before), but this sort of plan would require much more work than building a tiered roadway.
Maybe in the future, when 'brick and mortar' starts to fail even in densely populated areas, the problems described above won't be problems anymore. But then, neither would the traffic; and the tiered roadway would be redundant, and not worth the money to maintain (nor the daylight lost).
There are walled-off backyards and "gardens" within big blocks. Just make them open
For most blocks where unloading is a problem, courtyards are narrow, uneven spaces that frequently do not run the length of the 'interior' block.
The city would also have to justify reclaiming two lots per block—on either end of the courtyard/alleyway—in a city which already has a housing shortage.
Ideally, streets would be used only by pedestrians, but I acknowledge that's not feasible.
The Jerusalem municipality closed literally the busiest street in Jerusalem to private vehicular traffic and the results could not be better. It turns out, "induced demand" isn't just an idea which explains why you get more traffic when you build more highway lanes, it can also explain how to get more foot traffic, too. So business is booming, and the area is vitalizing even more.
Is only Yafo blocked? Blocking a street is one thing, but eliminating cars from Lower Manhattan is another.
It does have AMAZING transportation which NY might lack though (haven't been in NY yet).
The main shopping street is car-free too. It's great.
It'd be well within the realm of reason to consider closing a bunch of the narrowest/most heavily foot-trafficked streets in lower manhattan to cars and only allowing delivery trucks during certain hours of the day. It's an extremely impractical place to drive anyway.
The actually realistic solution is to focus on developing housing and infrastructure in the outer boroughs; Brooklyn and Queens are full of the absolute worst kind of inefficient quasi-suburban accumulated sprawl.
Because there's so much foot traffic on these streets, the only reason you'd drive down them is if you really need to
I don't think this works as well in planned cities like NY without getting rid of all the one way roads to offer alternative paths
Relevant: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-36791485
"A spokesman said the project would contribute to the mayor's aim of improving air quality and make Oxford Street "a far safer and more pleasant place to visit"."
> Most New Yorker's don't drive - they walk, bike, take the train, or taxi/uber.
Yes, and those non-car modes should obviously have more surface space. If way more New Yorkers walk than drive, why is there more street space for cars than peds?
> Don't you think if the answers were this simple someone would have done this already?
No. Politically it can be very difficult to take space away from cars, even when it's obviously the right thing to do.
Step 1: Find a huge open space that can be paved over.
So those three whiney obnoxious people get there way while the reasonable people suffer
Americans like gigantic cars. They need to make them smaller, like in Japan
To be fair, almost all of that mass of people is found on Wall/Broad Streets right near the NYSE, Federal Hall, Trinity Church. All of the relevant part of Wall/Broad was shut to vehicles after 9/11. The entire width of the street from sidewalk to sidewalk is essentially one big sidewalk.
> Sounds like they need separated bike lanes then.
The city does have them, in the modern avenues and streets where they could take back a lane and install them. On the avenues, they're even separated from traffic by a parking lane. The issue is that in the oldest parts of the city (FiDi area) dating back to the 17/18th centuries, you can't just will the buildings to move and make wider streets.
> Personal vehicle use should be at a minimum in Manhattan.
The vast majority of people use subways and buses :) Nearly every subway line has a stop within 2 blocks of the area mentioned in the article. There's also multiple ferry stops and even a helipad!
Exactly. If you pay attention to the cars on the road, personal vehicles aren't the problem. There are simply that many taxis, ubers, buses and delivery trucks.
Come to think of it, the only other place where it's unpleasant to walk is over on Church by WTC where there's only a single sidewalk. Hopefully all of that opens up soon.
I am aware. And that's exactly why it should be a no brainer to trade low efficiency car space for high efficiency walking and biking space.
This is also why adding dedicated bike lanes is tricky. Bikes are avoiding pedestrians on the road/bike lanes, not other cars.
I live in the Financial District and I agree this is needed. They should ban street parking in the area and use the extra space to widen the sidewalks.
None of those parking spaces are ever open to delivery trucks, they're occupied 24/7. Eliminating street parking would just get rid of a row of parked cars.
The city actually could really enforce this by towing these trucks, which would put a stop to this practice, but they are probably addicted to the ticketing revenue and don't want to put a stop to their "free money."
Then there is the problem of how would the restaurants and stores get their inventory if the delivery trucks are effectively banned from parking?
It seems like there might be a great technological solution that involves rooftop deliveries by drone, but that is probably some years out, and likely to be stifled by paranoid regulators that don't like the idea of UAVs flying so close to skyscrapers, especially in an area that is constantly under the threat of terrorist attack.
Like the paranoid regulators who banned helicopters after one fell off the top of the Pan Am building. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/helicopter-flips-park-av...
What could go wrong with a dense network of flying objects carrying heavy deliveries over densely trafficked thoroughfares?
> “It appeared it was a structural fault that had nothing to do with the flight,” he said.
A helipad would be sorely needed on Trump Towers for President-elect. I wonder if they would change the law for him.
And why specifically "Mom and Pop" stores?
The area is filled with Mom and Pop shops and these are typically hit the hardest.
That’s a solution that could work there as well. Only allow buses and delivery vehicles and emergency vehicles on the street.
Just make one wide road, of one type, and allow pedestrians to walk anywhere, and delivery vehicles to park anywhere on it.
We do the same here, it works well.
Pedestrians know they won’t get hurt on the rest, and you don’t lose space.
http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/20/will-barcelonas-superb...
There are already dedicated bike lines. The article even states:
"But as more pedestrians and cyclists filled the streets, she had to concentrate to avoid running into anyone or being run into"
A contributor to that crowdedness is the amount of other bikes and pedestrians.
And why on earth get rid of Taxis? There are plenty of legitimates needs for Taxis. Trains break regularly and there is always MTA maintenance where your train is not actually running or the route is being altered during maintenance to the point that it can't not get you where you need to go. Taxis are still the best way of getting to and from the cities airports.
Lower Manhattan is the oldest part of the city, the streets like John Street and Nassau mentioned in the article are typical of the area. They actually predate cars. They are single lane streets that are the narrowest in the city. They were designed during the era where horse and buggies were the dominant mode of transport.
It is not possible to widen the side walks. So no the solution is not to cut into space on the road. Those roads have businesses on them that need to get deliveries.
While I am big proponent of alternative transportation, just blindly stating "more bikes, less cars!" is a hugely naive oversimplification.
For those who don't know how ridiculously narrow the streets are down there this a typical stretch of Nassau Street:
https://www.nybits.com/images/photo/nassau_street_01.jpg
So how do deliveries work to businesses on Nassau Street when you eliminate parking? They don't matter? What happens to the price of goods when their delivery becomes much more expensive? The block that does have parking on both sides of the street on Nassau is used extensively for deliveries. In fact if you do a Google Street view of it you will see a Fed Ex truck parked there. Arguably an important thing in an area that is largely financial companies and law offices.
On street view I see maybe one delivery truck per block. Otherwise a very large portion of the street is dedicated to empty car storage. You've seen delivery zone parking before, right? The entire problem is how much space private vehicles take up versus the amount of public space that is available to people. The imbalance is huge and unfair and it's a matter of when, not if, that balance is going to be adjusted to a reasonable state.
I know that area like the back of my hand. I was no doubt down-voted by someone sitting thousands of miles away from Manhattan someone who probably doesn't know the area at all.
There seems to be a real binary attitude on Hacker News that if you say anything that doesn't completely agree with the "we need more bikes!" crowd that you are automatically a horrible anti-environmental person. It's very knee jerk reactionary.
I absolutely hate the amount of cars on the street. The reality however is that there are many other complications, practicalities and nuances to consider and I have tried to bring some of these up. Just saying "more bikes no cars!" is really naive.
I recommend sitting in on a city planning meeting in NYC or talking to someone from the D.O.T some time about these issues. I have done both on more than a few occasions. There are so many unique challenges of an island of this density that there is no one solution.
I will also mention that there was a multi year project to widen sidewalks around Astor Place and Cooper Union in lower Manhattan recently. This is nearly complete. And the result is that this has done nothing to reduce the congestion on the street.
But as you can from the comments here. If your views disagree with the "more bikes no more cars!" knee-jerks reactionaries you are branded a subhuman.
It does not matter if you disagree for reasons that are based in practicalities and not ideological ones. But more people will down vote you rather than engage in a dialogue. Yet everyone like to complain that Facebook is the echo chamber.
Wow, talk about an exaggeration! I see no one 'branding others as subhuman' for their opinions here. Just because most people at HN disagree with you doesn't mean they're barbarians at the gates.
> It does not matter if you disagree for reasons that are based in practicalities and not ideological ones.
Ironic considering the reasons for supporting car dominance of land area in the most densely populated area in the country are mostly ideological rather than practical.
You can start with parking spaces: even if those are mostly for commuters (which I'd be surprised to hear), and all of them stopped driving if we got rid of free parking (instead of paying for a parking garage), how many more MTA riders would eliminating parking create? FiDi is very small geographically (so not many parked cars fit anyway), yet it's serviced by almost all subway lines (so you can distribute the new load over many lines).
1: http://static.srcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/her-joaquin-phoen...
Downtown is also a major turnaround point for traffic, and significant commuter hub. It's too simplistic to suggest narrowing the streets without considering the impact it has on the rest of the city. That southbound traffic has to go somewhere, and your solution would probably just bump the traffic problem elsewhere.
As mentioned, there are separate bike lanes, but also quite a few suicidal pedestrians. I used to commute by bike from Wall Street, and the danger was always a pedestrian on their phone.
In other words, this is a complicated problem where all solutions can have negative consequences.
You're stuck in the traditional American mindset of only thinking about cars. Yes, congestion for cars might go up. But you're not taking the space and throwing it into the ocean; it's going to other, more space efficient modes. Total congestion, then, goes down.
In Manhattan of all places, worrying about car commuters seems hilariously misplaced. This area has the best transit in the entire country. People will adapt.
If you do not use cars, car congestion goes down
Which is one more reason to not pay attention to car congestion when deciding what to close, and instead make such decision based on how congested the sidewalks and public transport is.
That tells me that you haven't been to (Lower) Manhattan. Most of the streets there are narrow, and the sidewalks just as narrow. There's barely any room for expansion.
Surface transportation land use is necessarily zero sum. As you get more and more people, the only rational course of action is to take space away from low efficiency modes and give it to high efficiency modes.
I wonder how much that would solve and how much it would make worse? I think that I've heard that adding more lanes to roads can make congestion worse because more people use the roads. I wonder if the same would be true for pedestrian walkways?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/nyregion/what-new-york-can...
Within the Financial District, the solution is to de-prioritize cars and make more room for people. The initiative of closing off FiDi to all through traffic and sharing streets equally between people, bikes, and cars [1] is incredibly promising, but was poorly marketed and executed. I rode along the streets with my 7 and 9yo sons and we had cars honking at us, even as we moved at a reasonable speed.
[0] http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/10/19/at-riverside-park-look... [1] http://www.streetsblog.org/2016/06/16/new-twist-for-summer-s...
I live in the Lower East Side and we like to go to the Financial District every now and then because NO ONE IS THERE. Go there for dinner or drinks on a Friday night or go walk around and make your way toward Battery Park on a nice Saturday afternoon. It's almost creepy, like a ghost town.
> It means never getting that babysitter on a Saturday night, or abandoning hope of ever getting tickets for Shakespeare in the Park.
Ok then don't have kids? Move to Jersey? Well-to-do people are displacing less fortunate people all over the city, talking down to them about not being able to afford to rent or buy groceries, and then they're complaining about problems like this?
I also used to ride CitiBike and yes there are people but there are also people if you drive a car, there are bikes and cars if you walk. This is a commute not a Sunday stroll or trail ride. You're participating in traffic, it can be dangerous and you need to pay attention which is true everywhere in the world.
Obviously there are crowding problems in New York City, I take the train like four stops to work and I absolutely hate the traffic as much as anyone, but the anecdotes in this article are pathetic relative to some of the other living issues people are facing here.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-r...
The bankers can walk.
In other places, you have very precious sidewalk space taken up by signs in front of restaurants, sidewalk sheds, lamp posts, panhandlers, mailboxes, people smoking cigarettes, and of course, piles of trash.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to live, but there definitely needs to be some big changes. I think we should remove street parking to expand the sidewalks.
"Nobody goes there by choice any more - it's too crowded"
Obviously it's still not "nobody" for LM - or anywhere - but things change and people get stuck with the new reality sometimes.
The Financial District is cool, but why anybody would want to live there who doesn't work there is beyond me. It's a short walk from any of the residential areas to any of the major financial firms, it's a miserable slog anywhere north of Chinatown.
And it's not like it's cheap, 800sq ft 1 bedrooms run well above a million dollars.
There's other problems which, at this point, seem to matters of inertia rather than planning:
- NYC is one of the few, dense, major cities without service alleys for trash pickup and delivery. A casual observer might notice that NYC blocks are solid, not hollow, the middle is still full of building. In other cities, with other designs, an access alley allows for service vehicles to enter a mid-block courtyard to provide service functions. As a result both delivery vehicles and waste vehicles block the street with both their presence and the materiel they move in and out.
- The regulations around inspection scaffolding are absolutely out of control rent-seeking. I would be comfortable in saying that there isn't a highrise block of the city that's doesn't have this scaffolding present on it. While it does provide some minimal protection from the elements, it's more like walking through a construction site than a an arcade. The regulations should either be changed to get rid of this nonsense, or to make formal arcades a requirements, thus presenting new facades to the city. I'd actually be in favor of the later since NYC suffers from pretty much the worst of all seasons: cold and wet in the winter, and hot and miserable in the summer.
I love love love NYC, but it's not without its imperfections.
For years they would leave the scaffolding up so they sell advertising on it and the fine was laughably small compared to the revenue generated from selling ads. That was outlawed a few years back though.
This is an interesting look at the phenomenon:
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160124/REAL_ESTATE/16...
I'm envisioning something like an extrawide catwalk built over some of the busier streets with either ladders or stairs down to the next floor of the city. They'll either attract tourists or they'll become the pedestrian superhighways of the city.
Edit: Many of these proposals in that have either been followed or exceeded, largely as a result of the September 11th attacks. Most notably Broad street is completely a pedestrian plaza, closed off to traffic.
The third option is trying to effect another change.
[p.s. For years I heard the old saw about "loving Paris and hating the French" and wondered as a (yep) tourist why do the Parisians hate us so much? :) Since the past decade I have nothing but sympathy for Londoners and Parisians. Now I get it.]
The Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, Grand Central, The Statue of Liberty, Central Park, 5th Ave, Rock Center. The high concentration of tourist sites predates the "Disney-fication" of Times Square which was too seedy for many years to be a tourist destination.
That old trope about French hating Americans is a bad stereotype. As a long time visitor I can tell you this is simply not true. People in London, Paris and New York get annoyed by inconsiderate people whether they be local inconsiderate people or inconsiderate people from abroad. And there is no shortage of inconsiderate residents in any of those places.
Exactly. Designated tourist areas. The rest of the island was ours.
New Yorkers have the same reputation for the same reasons: we're busy and you're the 500th person to ask me how to get to Times Square. If you ask me about the best place to get food in Flushing or how the subway was built? Love to help out. Parisians seem the same.
I guess that's your point about tourists, but they just need to be more respectful I guess.
There are downtowns around the world that are denser than lower Manhattan, but are still better.
No city was. The problem is, everyone still wants vacations.