Streetsblog New York City

Transportation Alternatives and the New York Chapter of the American Association of Family Physicians today released a letter to Mayor Bloomberg, signed by 140 medical professionals from a broad spectrum of specialties, praising the city’s bike and pedestrian infrastructure as essential to the health of New Yorkers. It’s a solid counterweight to the hysteria surrounding the recent Hunter College bike-ped crash study:

Considering that streets and sidewalks make up 80 percent of New York City’s public space, the pedestrian plazas, car-free spaces, neighborhood bike networks and world-class bicycle lanes you have created are vital to the public health of our city. In piloting Safe Routes to School and Safe Streets for Seniors programs, reducing car hours in our largest parks and producing events like neighborhood play streets and Summer Streets, you are pioneering the redistribution of our public space for health’s sake.

While one can imagine a tsunami of ink engulfing the city if over a hundred doctors and other providers had joined up to condemn bike lanes and public plazas, with media types refusing to print a positive word about measures that are making streets safer, it will be quite a feat if this ringing endorsement pierces the news cycle.

Read the text of the letter after the jump; see the original with signatures here.

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Last week, automated traffic counters were seen popping up on the loop drive in Central Park. That led many to believe that the Department of Transportation was gathering data to set a baseline for future changes to the hours cars are allowed into the park, a fact which has now been confirmed.

Wrote Manhattan DOT Commissioner Margaret Forgione in a letter to Community Board 7 Chair Mel Wymore [PDF], whose board led the push for a car-free trial:

“We recently received and reviewed your resolution to implement a pilot program to establish a car-free summer on Central Park’s Drives. While there are no changes planned at this time, we will be collecting data this summer on the volume and speeds of vehicles using both the Park Drives and the surrounding streets. This data can inform any future plans for reducing the amount of time that the Park Drives are open to vehicular traffic.”

A summertime trial of a car-free Central Park has earned the support of every community board in Manhattan but one, several City Council members, and Borough President Scott Stringer. Even so, that proposal was rejected for this summer by Mayor Bloomberg, who preferred to study traffic patterns more before even testing out a car-free park. Those studies are now officially underway.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer rallied for a car-free summer in Central Park five years ago, and voted in favor of a similar proposal yesterday. Photo: Transportation Alternatives

Though Mayor Bloomberg has ruled out the possibility of implementing a car-free Central Park trial this year, opting for further data collection instead, public support for the proposal continues to grow. At a meeting of the Manhattan Borough Board yesterday, the car-free trial picked up support from still more community boards and new City Council members.

The Borough Board consists of every City Council member and representatives from every community board in Manhattan, as well as the borough president. The board was unanimous in its support for a car-free trial. (The full roll call, provided to Streetsblog by car-free park activist Ken Coughlin, is available at the bottom of this post.)

Of Manhattan’s 12 community boards, 11 have now voted in support of the plan. The only exception is CB 12, which was absent from yesterday’s meeting and had not voted on the proposal previously.

Elected officials, too, voted in favor of the trial. Borough President Scott Stringer, a long-time supporter of such a plan, voted yes. So did Council Members Gale Brewer, who has sponsored legislation to take cars out of both Central and Prospect Parks permanently, and Dan Garodnick, who supported a car-free trial in 2006. Rosie Mendez was the only other council member to vote; she too was in support. As is her practice, Christine Quinn abstained in deference to her citywide duties as council speaker.

No council member has publicly opposed a car-free trial this year.

Here’s the full Borough Board roll call: Read more…

Central Park advocate Ken Coughlin tells us he’s spotted a traffic counting strip on the park loop, near Tavern on the Green.

The theory is that the city is gathering traffic data this summer as a baseline for a car-free park trial next year. That would jibe with recent remarks from Mayor Bloomberg and references to park data collection reported in the Times earlier this month.

Over the spring, supporters of a car-free trial lined up endorsements from every community board surrounding the park, and had hoped to free the park for recreational use from the July 4 weekend until Labor Day. The mayor was unmoved to implement a trial this year, but recently hinted that something might move forward once the city collected sufficient data.

“We are doing studies,” Bloomberg said on July 12. “Until we really can understand the traffic patterns and what effect it will have, we’re just not going to go and rush to do it.”

A request to DOT for confirmation that the city is indeed counting cars in the park was not immediately answered.

Say what you will about yesterday’s Corey Kilgannon piece extolling the “guilty pleasure” of driving on the Central Park loop, it’s refreshing to see the New York Times veil of objectivity stripped away, revealing the naked windshield perspective beneath.

I mean, here it is, raw and unfiltered. Driving on city streets is miserable (“the doldrums of Midtown traffic”), and…

As a reporter who covers stories all over the city and suburbs, I often need a car. When heading uptown from the paper’s newsroom in Midtown, I regularly find myself using the park drives.

Kilgannon’s elegy to Central Park motoring is several shades more reasonable than another classic in the windshield perspective genre: John Cassidy’s infamously irrational anti-bike treatise from this March. Where Cassidy, an economics writer at the New Yorker, came across as an entitled boor, utterly clueless that streets should not be designed to maximize the convenience of his evening Jaguar excursions, Kilgannon writes with awareness and remorse. Enjoy it while you still can, he says to Central Park motorists, we don’t belong here.

In his eagerness to share one last drive on the loop with other motorists, however, Kilgannon hands out instructions that will probably confuse anyone who actually takes him up on the offer:

Say you find yourself slogging up Avenue of the Americas, which ends — as well it should, that confounded, car-congested corridor — at 59th Street, the southern border of Central Park.

If it’s between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on a weekday, you’re in luck: Drive right in, and you are beamed, Star Trek-style, from the doldrums of Midtown traffic into a bucolic, meandering, charming thoroughfare of trees and lawns and lakes.

It’s true that people are allowed to drive into the park during those hours, but only from that entrance at Sixth Avenue and 59th, and they can’t go north of 72nd Street unless it’s the p.m. rush. Try driving into the park at any other point during those times, and odds are pretty good that you’ll do it during car-free hours. Later on in the piece, Kilgannon lays out the full schedule of where you can drive on the park loop and when, which is still pretty complicated.

Shortly before I read the Kilgannon piece, we got a tip in the Streetsblog inbox that explains why the confusion needs to end. Reader Albert Ahronheim wrote:

About 2:15 pm today I was on my bike, slowly riding west on the 72nd Street cut-through (i.e., during car-free hours in that location), among let’s say dozens of cyclists, pedestrians, dog walkers, joggers, etc., when I heard a car coming up behind me.  Annoyed as usual by this all-too-often situation, I turned my head to find out what parks emergency I’d have to get out of the way of, and instead, there was an ordinary-looking car (i.e., not parks, police, ambulance, etc.) approaching me quite briskly.

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Every community board surrounding Central Park has supported taking cars off the park loop for a summertime trial, but DOT has no plans to give kids and families more car-free time to bike. Photo: Asterix611 via Flickr.

The July 4 weekend is upon us and with it, the height of summer. If Manhattan’s community boards had their way, summertime would mean a trial closure of Central Park’s loop drive to cars.

A resolution to try out such a closure from “the summer months through Labor Day” earned the support of Community Boards 5, 7, 8, 9, and 11. Unanimous committee votes from CBs 1 and 10 showed those boards’ support. Every board surrounding the park has taken a stand in support of such a trial.

Given that summer is now in full swing, we checked in with the Department of Transportation to see whether they were going to listen to these communities and try taking cars off of the loop for the summer.

“There are no plans at this time,” was all that a DOT spokesperson would say. That’s not a hard “no,” but at this point in the summer, it’s awfully close.

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By unanimous voice vote, the full board of Manhattan CB 11 has passed a resolution endorsing a summer trial for a car-free Central Park. Says park advocate Ken Coughlin, “We have the agreement of all the boards surrounding the park and are now waiting for a response from DOT on whether they will move ahead with a July 4 weekend to Labor Day closing.”

The proposal has gained near-universal support at the community board level, with hundreds of board members voting in favor and only a handful of votes against, and is simpatico with the wishes of Central Park Conservancy head Douglas Blonsky. But it will need a push to overcome resistance from Mayor Bloomberg.

Coughlin says the next step will be a public campaign by Council Member Gale Brewer and others. (Streetsblog has messages in with Brewer’s office for details.) The Manhattan Borough Board must also cast an official vote on the resolution, Coughlin says, “Which will give us another opportunity to raise the issue, but we hope we won’t need it by then.”

Not only would the trial give users much needed room and the freedom to enjoy the city’s premier green space without having to dodge cars and suck exhaust this summer, the effect would spill over into surrounding neighborhoods, which could expect a major drop in cut-through traffic. Given the benefits and such a diverse base of approval, it’s hard to imagine what constituency the mayor would be playing to by refusing to close the Loop Drive for two months.

Manhattan Community Board 9 became the latest to endorse a car-free Central Park trial last night. By a vote of 32-9 with five abstentions, the board overwhelmingly overturned the 2-1 vote of its transportation committee, which had been the only committee in the borough not to endorse the plan thus far.

CB 9 is the fourth full board to vote in favor of taking automobiles off the Central Park loop drive for a trial period starting this summer, joining CBs 5, 7 and 8. In addition, committees from CBs 1, 10 and 11 have also endorsed the plan.

Before the meeting started, City Council Member Robert Jackson announced that he was in support of the trial, though not ready to take cars off the loop drive permanently. “I’m willing to try anything,” Jackson said.

Brad Taylor, a board member, explained the importance of taking cars off the loop to the West Harlem community. If the drive isn’t closed, he said, “traffic that wants to cut across to Midtown will be coming through our community. If they don’t have that option, they’ll stay where they are on the East Side or the West Side.”

Car-free park advocate Ken Coughlin cited a 2007 survey that found one third of the drivers on the Central Park loop came from the Bronx, ten percent from New Jersey, and six percent from Westchester. That adds up to 1,200 to 1,800 cars per day “that would not be on Harlem streets if it were not for the availability of the Park Drive,” he said. “Harlem has the most to gain from this trial.”

Said Lenna Nepomnyaschy, a long-time resident of the community district, in support of the proposal: “Having cars in the park is unbelievably horrible to see. All of a sudden the cars come in, there’s honking, there’s exhaust, there’s anger. There’s just not enough space for everyone.”

In order to ensure that the trial provides information that is as accurate as possible, the board amended the resolution to request that the car-free period extend sixty days after Labor Day, in order to be able to measure the effect of the closure on heavier traffic days.

Manhattan Community Board 8 voted Wednesday night in favor of a car-free Central Park trial this summer, joining an increasingly long list of community boards in support of the proposal. My unofficial tally of the roll call had the final vote at 36-8 in favor.

The car-free park trial has picked up committee votes at no fewer than seven community boards, as well as full board votes from CB 7, CB 5, and CB 9 (we’ll have more on the CB 9 vote later today). So far, the proposal seems to be on track to pick up an overwhelming show of public support from the districts surrounding the park, which will be needed to have a shot at overcoming Mayor Bloomberg’s opposition.

The CB 8 vote, which comes from a district bordering the park on the Upper East Side, is notable because the board has reverted to displaying one of the more virulently anti-bike stances in the city, and any proposal perceived to benefit cyclists must overcome a certain level of ingrained resistance.

Board member Michelle Birnbaum is probably the most consistently vocal opponent of bike and pedestrian improvements on CB 8. At a recent transportation committee meeting, she objected to the installation of marked crosswalks and pedestrian signals at an approach to the East River esplanade that crosses underneath the FDR Drive at 96th Street, saying that devices like advance-stop bars would cause traffic to back up too far on the highway service road, and that the city can’t put “plazas and umbrellas” everywhere.

Birnbaum was the only CB 8 member to speak against the car-free park proposal Wednesday night, which was introduced by transportation committee co-chair Jonathan Horn as “another proposal about Central Park and bicycles,” following the board’s vote against shared bike-ped paths across the park (more on that below).

Some highlights from Birnbaum’s unsuccessful attempt to sway the board against the car-free trial:

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Amid the flurry of community board votes this week on the proposed trial to make Central Park car-free this summer, we missed tonight’s CB 8 full board meeting.

The car-free trial resolution has pretty much sailed through in CB votes across Manhattan, and it cleared a combined vote of the CB 8 transportation and parks committees with only one vote against. As always, turnout is key. CB 8 is one of the districts bordering the park, all of which will have to pass the resolution in order to have a chance of overcoming mayoral resistance.

Tonight’s meeting will be held at 6:30 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, 430 E. 67th St. Auditorium.