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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> Just to get to his apartment in the financial district, he has to contend with hordes of commuters and selfie-snapping tourists clogging narrow sidewalks.

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

View on HN

Have you seen the streets in lower Manhattan? If they get any narrower there wouldnt be any room for cars. There are also already tons of bike lanes. Most New Yorker's don't drive - they walk, bike, take the train, or taxi/uber. Don't you think if the answers were this simple someone would have done this already?

The problems may be more political than technical.

As uncommon as car ownership is in NYC, it's incredible how much friction there is around reducing roadway for cars. Every bike lane added in the city is a hard fought battle. So I think you're absolutely right—the solutions are well understood. Changing car culture is difficult.

Perhaps because while most people don't own cars, they do depend on them (even if only in special circumstances) in the form of cabs.

If that were what was mostly going on there'd be a heck of lot less on street parking. Essentially none of Manhattan should have any on street parking at all. Some standing zones for deliveries and pick up / drop offs (but not loitering forever, I'm looking at you black cars) and that's it. You'd be able to cut width of a typical street by 1/3.

You don't understand why people might like cabs, trucks, busses, and emergency vehicles? People don't drive their own cars already.

None of those need street parking – in fact, you'd dramatically improve their experience if the parking lanes were replaced with dedicated transit / bike lanes, etc. and a few dedicated taxi/etc. loading spaces.

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.”

http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf

There's NYC and there's NYC. Manhattan is a small part of NYC: Staten Island, you must have a car. Large swathes of Queens and even Brooklyn have no pub transport (buses can be pretty awful due to traffic although they do exist). I think that's a big block of people opposed. Another political consideration is that the State of New York has control over elements of policy that would otherwise be anti-car. For example, the congestion tax they wanted to bring in, it was the state government that killed that.

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...

Getting rid of cars is a feature, not a bug.

I think getting rid of cars isn't going to fix the problems the people in this article are complaining about. It's the age old problem that plague all popular cities around the world: tourists versus residents. And having visited places like Florence, Paris and Barcelona, I'd rather see the residents get their way.

Residents aren't the ones with cars. No one in this area own a car.

Except the residents (and workers) use taxis, Ubers, black cars, etc. And, as the article notes, the local businesses need to get deliveries, repair people, etc. I would guess the issue doesn't come so much from owners' private cars traveling through the area.

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.)

Residents use the subway. Taxis are mostly for visitors: tourists, or day trippers from the periphery.

What are "black cars"?

Private car services. Like a taxi, only prebooked. Uber uses many black car companies in NYC.

As untog says. Limos in other words. In addition to people booking them for theater or such, it's very common for downtown law firms, investment banks, etc. to have an account with a private car firm so that people working late can just call up to get one to take them home.

Black cars aren't limos. A more accurate way to describe them would be unmarked taxis that are dispatched not hailed. What us New Yorkers call a car service.

> Black cars aren't limos.

What's the difference?

Might be size (I'm not in NY).

Standard definition of a limo is an extended wheelbase and partition between the passenger and the driver. I suppose one could argue the details but that's how the distinction is understood in an NYC context at least.

They have "limo licenses" but yeah, few if any of them are actual limousines in wheelbase / shape. Most are towncars or upscale SUVs.

Private car services and/or illegal taxies.

Couldn't they eliminate more of the street and make them one way? I feel like you would make a single lane then, but then driving wouldn't use so much space.

> make them one way?

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.

>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.

> 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.

You put the heavy things on the bottom. The lighter things on top.

(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.

This is an interesting idea. It would require a sea change in the city.

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).

I have yet to see a single DT Manhattan denizen in my professional circle who does not subsist solely on Chinese takeout and phone order pizza (sarcasm:)

So you move up your business to the pedestrian floor level.

Part of the problem is a lack of alleys, so delivery trucks have to park in the street and block traffic. If zoning required an off-street loading dock area for all buildings it would start to help as new buildings are built. I'm not sure if that's a rule or not.

Where's the space for that?

It comes out of the building footprint. Building owners won't be happy, but everyone else would.

>Part of the problem is a lack of alleys, so delivery trucks have to park in the street and block traffic.

There are walled-off backyards and "gardens" within big blocks. Just make them open

Courtyards are largest where alleyways would be least needed, on residential blocks.

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.

A much easier solution is to dedicate a space on each block to deliveries only, and make parking a car in it a massive fine/immediate license suspension.

I'm ok with having cars drive through the area. I just don't approve of people leaving them idle on the street. Taxis, Ubers, and black cars aren't parking. Delivery trucks are stopping, but only for a few minutes. A third (or more) of the street space is devoted to vehicles that aren't in use. Those cars could be placed in garages or parked on the street in another part of town where the owner can subway to where they're going.

Ideally, streets would be used only by pedestrians, but I acknowledge that's not feasible.

That can be hard to accomplish without also making life more difficult for ambulances, police, and fire departments.

Not at all. In Jerusalem, Yafo Street is now pedestrian and light-rail only. Even still, police vehicles routinely drive on Yafo Street, and coexist with the light rail by not parking on the tracks. When police vehicles have their sirens on, pedestrians get out of the way. Deliveries occur on side streets and alleyways.

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.

Manhattan has 4x the population density of Jerusalem (twice the population in half the space). On top of that, it's an island so alternate traffic routes sometimes don't exist.

Is only Yafo blocked? Blocking a street is one thing, but eliminating cars from Lower Manhattan is another.

Ban all passenger vehicles, cut the size of the roads, expand the subway: you've just made life easier for emergency vehicles to get where they're going. Taxis are horrendously space inefficient in a city choking on people.

Vienna's city center is car-free except for police and ambulances. It's a medieval city so it's much worse than Manhattan in regards to narrow streets and not having been designed for cars.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places

Spoken like a true car hater. I don't like cars either, but getting rid of an old way of travel is a lot more difficult than a simple software switch.

What's funny about that characterization is, living in the suburbs, I spend quite a bit of time driving recreationally, and I can't rely on public transit, so I appreciate cars a lot. However, Downtown Manhattan is not the suburbs, and it's an inappropriate place for passenger vehicles. I don't think it qualifies for the "old way of travelling" bucket in that context: subways are already the standard.

This is Manhattan we're talking about. Walking + transit gets you pretty much everywhere.

> Have you seen the streets in lower Manhattan? If they get any narrower there wouldnt be any room for cars.

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.

I would imagine the advent of delivery drones would be a nice solution to getting supplies in and out of dense urban areas, after which there would be no need for allowing vehicles (other than emergency or public transportation).

Yeah good luck getting a drone to deliver a 400pound pallet of soda.

The biggest delivery truck traffic is for furniture, goods (one or two UPS trucks for an entire building), or garbage. No amount of drone tech can reduce/eliminate truck traffic for an entire building.

The slightly more sane idea would be to look in the other direction, and build underground. That would be extremely expensive and have to deal with all sorts of issues, but at least it's physically possible.

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.

Or build the street up 1 level and have an underground level on the current street - isn't this basically how Chicago built sewers?

close. at chicago, they also lifted the buildings 1 floor up. if you don't do that, building owners will be mad at the loss of their first floor.

One thing Tokyo does on smaller streets is have no sidewalk at all, but people can just walk in the middle of the street.

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

I noticed this behaviour in the smaller streets of Hong Kong as well. Makes a ton of sense to me.

> If they get any narrower there wouldnt be any room for cars.

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"."

Oh really, tons of bike lanes? Well, there are at least an order of magnitude more car lanes than bike lanes, so surely reallocating some of them for bikes will be no problem then, since there's a veritable smorgasbord of space for cars as it is. Bike lanes can handle much higher peak loads of people, so they're a more efficient use of space.

> 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.

It would be actually easy to take space from cars in boroughs other than Manhattan. It just takes some push and a champion.

Really? I had the opposite experience. If you take away even one parking spot, people in Brooklyn go absolutely insane. The city was considering putting in bike lanes in my neighborhood, and tons of people showed up to the meeting in opposition to it. They all had their own reasons, but it was pretty clear that the 2 real motivations were a general dislike of cyclists, and a desire to not lose parking spots.

http://gothamist.com/2016/06/22/yell_louder_cyclists.php

Why doesn't someone just build a huge commercial parking lot, and rent out parking spots? In a dense city like NY, it may actually work

There's parking garages all over the city.

There are plenty of these too. But street parking is always free or at least ~an order of magnitude cheaper, which is why people don't want to lose them

Incredible idea, I wonder why nobody thought of that.

Step 1: Find a huge open space that can be paved over.

Japan has giant vertical parking garages with automated lifts. 15 stories, but it only requires a small piece of land. I'm sure you could make some money on that

Less snarky answer than most people are giving you: street parking is free, while parking garages cost like a significant portion of your monthly rent per month.

Probably because supporters rarely show up to city council, just the opposition

So those three whiney obnoxious people get there way while the reasonable people suffer

>If they get any narrower there wouldnt be any room for cars.

Americans like gigantic cars. They need to make them smaller, like in Japan

Narrow lanes decrease car speeds and reduce accidents and fatalities.

Get rid of cars in the area? The area is easily walkable for its size. Doesn't Paris do this downtown?

> So make the sidewalks wider.

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!

> 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.

Taxis are still more or less personal vehicles in terms of density/efficiency.

Except that they don't park.

I live down here (a block up from Wall St) and the only place on Wall that I've had any issues with has been the barricades put up after 9/11 in front of 1 Wall that narrow the foot traffic down to a single (often covered in scaffoding) sidewalk. Otherwise, Wall is pretty navigable.

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.

> 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!

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.

>So make the sidewalks wider. I can think of nowhere in the US more appropriate to allocate more space to sidewalks than Manhattan.

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.

And when delivery trucks can't get to restaurants and Mom and Pop stores then what happens? What happens when a fire truck or ambulance needs to get to someone or some place in an emergency?

Delivery trucks already just drive on the sidewalks, and illegally parked cars/trucks already impede fire trucks and ambulances.

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.

It's actually very crazy. I've witnessed delivery trucks double park and instantly get parking tickets. I think (and the article seems to confirm it) they just look at the ticket as a price of doing business in NY, and pass it along to their customers.

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.

>paranoid regulators

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?

This is from 1977. An accident caused by a structurally unsound helipad almost 40 years ago should be a reason why we never allow drones to deliver packages in the city?

> “It appeared it was a structural fault that had nothing to do with the flight,” he said.

In Medina, SA, there is a law that every hotel must have a helipad.

A helipad would be sorely needed on Trump Towers for President-elect. I wonder if they would change the law for him.

He's not suggesting eliminating car lanes, just street parking. And if the next claim is "well what happens when someone parks in the street", this is already an issue with double-parking.

And why specifically "Mom and Pop" stores?

Where do vehicles that makes deliveries stop? How to the delis and restaurant that serve the day population down there get their supplies?

The area is filled with Mom and Pop shops and these are typically hit the hardest.

Look at european cities with pedestrian-only streets: They allow delivery vehicles on those, too.

That’s a solution that could work there as well. Only allow buses and delivery vehicles and emergency vehicles on the street.

But those need to parking spaces to they can unload and make deliveries. Manhattan is unlike any European city, it is an 8 x 2 mile island laid out in a grid.

Why dedicated parking spaces?

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.

The design is called "Shared Street" and has been difficult to get the community to accept in NYC. I know because we tried. Something about cars going about freely on pedestrian filled roads scares a lot of people.

Well, then create one single lane for cars/taxi/etc through the shared street, limit it to delivery vehicles and busses, and allow parking on the rest.

Pedestrians know they won’t get hurt on the rest, and you don’t lose space.

"In pedestrian areas of Barcelona, trucks are allowed with permits and at certain hours for loading/off-loading. This works just fine."

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/20/will-barcelonas-superb...

Maybe they need to implement Super Blocks [1]. Focus traffic to specific streets, open up entire streets to pedestrians and bikes. I was recently in lower Manhattan and I was struck by the sheer number of sidestreets.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/nyregion/what-new-york-can...

They could also consider elevated walkways for businesses and other public places in places where converting streets isn't a viable option.

This is what I was thinking. I believe the movie Her uses an ultra-dense future Los Angeles where the main (human) character lives and works in high-rises, and walks between them on elevated walkways[1] as the location. An elevated walkway that zig-zagged across the road and had stairs to the regular sidewalk once or twice a block seems like an interesting approach.

1: http://static.srcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/her-joaquin-phoen...

It's fairly common in Hong Kong's denser parts like Central. I was able to get around much of the heavily trafficed areas without needing to be at street level.

It's the oldest part of New York, and many of the streets in the financial district are as small as they can get. Parts of FiDi are reminiscent of old European cities. You can not narrow the remaining streets without introducing significant congestion; one does not simply shrink Broadway.

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 can not narrow the remaining streets without introducing significant congestion; one does not simply shrink Broadway.

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.

>Yes, congestion for cars might go up.

If you do not use cars, car congestion goes down

Congestion for cars in most dense cities tends to stay pretty much constant: Add lanes, and car use goes up until congestion is pretty much back to "normal". Close lanes and more people pick alternate modes of traffick until congestion is back to normal.

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.

MTA is already wildly overburdened. As much as I hate cars in NYC, you can't just eliminate an entire form of transportation without thinking of the consequences.

I don't think a change like that would happen without people thinking of consequences though.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/met...

Sounds like they thought of the consequences and didn't heed the warnings ;)

Yes thank you.

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.

It's always the same in HN threads discussing differences between Europe and USA. These kinds of "discussions" are reminding me about Parkinson's Law of Triviality.. people on HN discuss topics they know only little about the most. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Examples)

Indeed and you really notice it when its something you yourself might be intimately familiar such as having lived in an area for a long time and its obvious when some "highly opinionated" folks likely have never even visited let alone lived there.

> If your views disagree with the "more bikes no more cars!" knee-jerks reactionaries you are branded a subhuman.

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.

It's definitely important to be thoughtful of MTA capacity, but FiDi is probably one of the best suited parts of the city to make such a change with minimal MTA impact.

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).

At the rate you go, you would have to turn entire areas of Manhattan into car free zones. They proposed congestion pricing but that died quickly.

>So make the sidewalks wider. I can think of nowhere in the US more appropriate to allocate more space to sidewalks than Manhattan.

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?

Even if you accept that as entirely true, that likely means more people walking instead of using cars, and since cars use far more static and dynamic space (negotiating obstacles/other cars), eliminating even one lane and filling it with walking traffic would likely be a very large net win.

There is a lot of free space above the street. Go up for pathways.

So make the sidewalks wider.

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.

So take a car lane and use that space.

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.

Lower Manhattan is the historical city center. You can't simply "make it wider" any more than you can make historic Rome or historic Paris "wider". Even if you make lower Manahattan pedestrian only, that won't fix the congestion problem because New Yorkers already regularly walk on the roads when there isn't enough room on the sidewalks. In other words, the sidewalks are already "wider".

This is also why adding dedicated bike lanes is tricky. Bikes are avoiding pedestrians on the road/bike lanes, not other cars.

Since you speak as someone who doesn't seem to know Manhattan at all:

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.

As someone who does, in fact, know Manhattan quite well, you have to be kidding. Nassau Street has parking on both sides for most of its length. John Street has parking on one side. There's no reason that empty car storage couldn't be sacrificed for expanded sidewalks and dedicated bike lanes.

With the exception of the one block stretch between Pine and Liberty, Nassau street doesn't have parking on both sides of the street. In fact when you get to Pine there's a security barrier and there no parking or cars allowed - all the way past the stock exchange.

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.

Congestion pricing. Eliminate parking for sidewalk space and include delivery zones or dedicated delivery times with the street closed to traffic otherwise.

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.

Do you know who pays for congestion pricing then? Manhattanites will. That increased cost of delivery will be passed on to everyone in the form of increased prices.

The correct answer is probably to allow car deliveries/parking at certain times of the day (late evening and early morning?) and have the streets be pedestrian/biker only outside of those hours.

"In pedestrian areas of Barcelona, trucks are allowed with permits and at certain hours for loading/off-loading. This works just fine." http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/20/will-barcelonas-superb...

Ah, they need to add a second floor to this street

So I provided an actual picture of the street in question and gave an accurate block by block description of the parking situation and was down voted?

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.

I think you might be downvoted for talking past everyone saying that delivery trucks and fire trucks don't need parking spaces. There is a lot of street parking in the financial district, and almost none of it is ever used for deliveries or cabs or anything except people storing their vehicles for long periods of time.

But I also took time to explain about a recent project that "did" increase the sidewalks significantly in Astor Place about a mile and a half away from the district in question. And this did nothing to reduce congestion or making navigating the streets any better for pedestrians. That of course was downvoted too. But pointing out examples and facts doesn't seem to matter.

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