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.
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
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.
> 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.
So those three whiney obnoxious people get there way while the reasonable people suffer
Step 1: Find a huge open space that can be paved over.
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.
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.)
Ideally, streets would be used only by pedestrians, but I acknowledge that's not feasible.
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.
What's the difference?
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"."
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...
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.”
Americans like gigantic cars. They need to make them smaller, like in Japan