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.

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

We, the undersigned medical professionals, write to acknowledge and encourage your efforts to calm traffic and make New York City streets safer for bicyclists and pedestrians. As a result of your efforts, from re-envisioning Times Square to building the first protected bicycle lanes in the U.S., more New Yorkers are biking and walking than ever before. Mayor Bloomberg, we urge you to continue to set ambitious goals for how our streets and public spaces can help make all of New York City more healthy and safe.

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.

These changes help pave the way for a city that breathes cleaner air and is in better physical condition. Commuting to work by bicycle or increasing the distance of daily walks has been shown to promote weight loss better than any exercise program or medication we could prescribe. Vital to fighting the epidemics of asthma and obesity is the opportunity for children to have safe places to play and clean air to breathe. The traffic calming infrastructure you have built is as valuable as a playground toward encouraging active youth and instilling healthy habits that will last a lifetime.

Thanks to your leadership, bicycling is the fastest growing mode of transportation in New York City and pedestrian safety is at an all-time high. Mayor Bloomberg, we enthusiastically support your efforts to improve bicycling and walking in New York City. As you shape your legacy, please continue to make safe, complete streets part of the prescription for a healthy New York City.

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:

• CB 1 – Yes
• CB 2 – Yes
• CB 3 – Yes
• CB 4 – Yes
• CB 5 – Yes
• CB 6 – Yes
• CB 7 – Yes
• CB 8 – Yes
• CB 9 – Absent
• CB 10 – Yes
• CB 11 – Absent
• CB 12 – Absent
• Brewer – Yes
• Chin – Absent
• Jackson – Absent
• Mendez – Yes
• Rodriguez – Absent
• Lappin – Absent
• Garodnick – Yes
• Dickens – Absent
• Quinn – Abstain
• Mark-Viverito – Absent
• BP Stringer – Yes

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.

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.

I started edging a bit to the left (no hurry, as far as I’m concerned) when suddenly the driver gunned his engine and passed me quite closely on my right.  Suddenly the driver was heading directly for a woman on a bike riding down the hill from the 72nd Street entrance.  She screamed, very much like you hear in a horror movie, and fell off her bike when she swerved right-then-left to try to get out of the guy’s way, while he accelerated and swerved around her and continued on up the hill toward the 72nd street entrance.

I happened to have my voice recorder with me and I quickly spoke the guy’s license # into it, asked the woman if she was OK (she was), and rode off to chase the guy.  I caught up with him turning left at CPW and yelled at him that I had his license #.  I followed to the next light, hoping to see a policeman.  When there was none, I rode back to talk to the woman.  She was gone and no one there seemed to have witnessed the incident.

I rode on to the meeting I’d been on my way to (now late) and realized that the “safety” of my voice recorder had been on and I hadn’t actually recorded the license #.  I then took off the safety and recorded the number I remembered and cursed myself for no longer being 100 percent sure of it.

On my way home at 4:15 I saw a police van parked at the side of the 72nd Street cut-through near 5th Avenue and told a policewoman the story.  Although she seemed sympathetic, at first she mentioned the possible extenuating circumstances. “Maybe he was authorized to be driving in the park.” To which I replied that if he was authorized, he still shouldn’t be driving recklessly in the park.  She nodded her agreement but told me there was nothing they could do about it anyway because they hadn’t witnessed it themselves.  She said that if the woman had been hurt then it would have been a hit-and-run and they could then use the license number to look for the guy. I said to her that this is why there shouldn’t be any cars in the park at all, and she replied, “Yeah, it would make our jobs so much easier.” I said, “Yeah, I’ve heard that from other police, that they’d like the cars to be out of the park altogether,” and she nodded and said I was right.

Luckily no one was hurt.  Sad that this guy — a white man, gray short hair, about 70 — in his (sporty) very clean white car (I guess I’m a true livable streets advocate because I have no idea what make, model or year car it was) — sad that this guy won’t be called to account.  I do hope he’s shaking in his Corinthian leather bucket seat for a few days.

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.

Ken Coughlin, a member of Community Board 7 and a leading advocate for a car-free Central Park had this to say about DOT’s stance:

DOT’s response is disappointing and puzzling. The request for a trial closing is coming from the community – all the communities surrounding the park. In the past, DOT has been incredibly responsive to community needs and opinions. Moreover, the idea of a car-free trial is consistent with DOT’s other initiatives to make our streets safer and more livable.

But suddenly, all bets are off when it comes to even a short-term closing of Central Park to traffic. The communities around the park, their elected representatives, and the more than 100,000 who have signed the petition calling for a car-free park deserve better than this brush-off.

Added Mel Wymore, the chair of CB 7:

The proposed trial closure is consistent with the Mayor’s and DOT’s clear commitment to pedestrian safety, car-free zones, and data-driven street design. What better place to apply these principles than in Central Park, the city’s most frequented sanctuary? Given broad consensus among multiple communities, it’s a win-win-win proposition.

One thing we’d add to their remarks. A car-free trial might be consonant with the city’s agenda and extremely popular with the communities surrounding the park, but there’s one important Central Park neighbor who isn’t on board. Upper East Sider Michael Bloomberg doesn’t agree with his community board on this one, having consistently opposed a car-free park, even for a trial period.

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.

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.

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:

• She dismissed the 100,000 signatures gathered in favor of a permanently car-free park between 2000 and 2005, which car-free park advocate Ken Coughlin mentioned at a recent committee meeting. “They neglected to mention that the 100,000 signatures were being gathered since 2003, which preceded the current car-free hours,” she said, asserting that collecting so many signatures is easy if you stand on the loop drive and flag down cyclists. Birnbaum neglected to mention that all those signatures were in favor of a permanent, 24/7 car-free Central Park, and that the people who collected them will tell you that the vast majority came from pedestrians, who are much more likely to stop and sign something than cyclists.
• The lengthening of the car-free hours in the park in recent years “has been devastating to traffic,” she said, citing no evidence.
• Birnbaum believes “it’s important that there’s a quick way for traffic to cut through local streets.”
• “The philosophy [behind the car-free park proposal] is based on a Danish engineer who believes that if you eliminate roadways, you eliminate cars. I don’t buy that philosophy,” she said. In reality there is a wealth of empirical evidence that people consolidate trips, shift to different modes, and otherwise alter their behavior in response to reductions in road space, and it doesn’t come from Copenhagen and Jan Gehl.

While those arguments were unpersuasive to most board members Wednesday night, the full board did sign on to a rather virulent declaration of anti-cyclist sentiment, passing a motion opposed to the establishment of shared bike-ped paths across Central Park.

The Central Park Conservancy has been working on a plan to establish four east-west routes that would give cyclists a safe and legal path across the park. While the two routes that the Conservancy is currently considering do not border CB 8, the board took it upon themselves to forcefully denounce the idea of demarcating shared crosstown bike-ped paths inside the park.

The resolution, which took a few minutes for board member Elizabeth Ashby to finish reading aloud, is essentially a lengthy condemnation of people who bike in Central Park. (Sample clause: “Whereas virtually all bicyclists ignore the laws, rules, and regulations in Central Park.”) The full board passed it 33-10 by my unofficial tally. Streetsblog has a request in with CB 8 for the official text of the resolution.

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.

The list of Manhattan community board votes supporting the trial period has grown to be pretty hefty at this point. Transportation, parks, or planning committees from boards 1, 5, 7, 8, 10, and 11 have all overwhelmingly supported the trial, as has the full body of Community Board 7. Only the transportation committee of Community Board 9 has opposed the plan, and then only by a vote of two to one; their full board is expected to readdress the issue when it meets with a larger and more representative set of people.

In all of those votes, only four people have voted against the car-free park trial, compared to nearly one hundred voting for it. As anyone who attends community board meetings knows, achieving that level of unanimity on any topic at all is practically unheard of. Even free ice cream cones would raise the hackles of more than four people distraught over the sidewalk-blocking lines or the excess litter.

As the district bordering the entire northern face of Central Park, CB 10′s vote is significant. “The argument for a trial closing that the committee members appeared to find particularly compelling,” reported car-free park advocate Ken Coughlin, “was that their neighborhood likely has the most to gain based on the overwhelming evidence that the loop is drawing traffic into their district that otherwise would stay on peripheral highways.”

This is what a grassroots groundswell of support looks like. Is Michael Bloomberg watching?

There are two proposals in play. The first would close the park to cars for four months, from the July 4 weekend through the first weekend in November. A second plan, from the Manhattan Borough Board (borough boards are comprised of the borough president, borough City Council members, and the chair of each community board) would end the trial on Labor Day but allows for a DOT extension. Here’s the latest:

• Manhattan CB 7 has approved both the original and Borough Board resolutions by votes of 32-1 and 29-1, respectively.
• The transportation committee of CB 11 approved the Borough Board resolution unanimously.
• The CB 1 Planning and Community Infrastructure Committee also passed the Borough Board reso with a unanimous vote.

In 2006, car-free Central Park advocates delivered a petition with an unprecedented 100,000 signatures to City Hall. Image via Streetfilms

Despite the impressive shows of support from three Manhattan community boards over the last two weeks, the effort to take cars off of the Central Park loop for a summer-long trial hit a major snag last night. In a resounding vote of two to one with two abstentions, the transportation committee of CB 9 voted against the car-free trial.

Before last night, the car-free Central Park trial won the endorsement of five committees in three different community boards, with only one no vote between them all. Those committees were far larger than the CB 9 committee. Wednesday night’s vote at CB 8 was something along the lines of twenty to one. In contrast, it’s hard to say that the two opponents of the car-free trial last night have a much stronger claim to speak for the residents of Morningside Heights and West Harlem than the one supporter.

According to Ken Coughlin, a long-time leader in the effort to get cars out of Central Park, the two people who voted against the trial appeared dead set against it from the start. He also noted that the NYPD representative in attendance at the meeting made his opposition to the car-free park trial no secret.

Taking cars out of Central Park doesn’t require community board support; this is a decision that will be made at the mayoral level. So last night’s CB 9 vote isn’t an insuperable obstacle for car-free park advocates. Given the mayor’s current opposition to taking cars out of Central Park, however, building as strong a grassroots coalition of support as possible is critical.

To that end, it’s possible that advocates could bring the issue back before the full board meeting of CB 9 in two weeks with the goal of having the larger body overturn the committee’s decision.

In 2006, car-free Central Park advocates delivered a petition with an unprecedented 100,000 signatures to City Hall. Image via Streetfilms.

The momentum is growing for a summer-long trial of a car-free Central Park.

Two weeks ago, the transportation and parks committees of Manhattan Community Board 7, representing the Upper West Side, voted unanimously to support such a trial. Last week, the proposal passed the transportation committee of Midtown’s CB 5, again unanimously. And last night, the transportation and parks committees of the Upper East Side’s CB 8 voted to endorse the proposal with only one no vote between them. Three of the neighborhoods bordering the park — those with the most at stake — have now offered unambiguous endorsements of testing out a car-free park.

At last night’s CB 8 meeting, nearly every member of each committee expressed his or her opinion on the proposal, and they were overwhelmingly positive. Though some board members suggested uncontroversial tweaks to the plan, for most the benefits of at least trying out a car-free park were so self-evident they didn’t require elaboration. That’s a rarity in community boards, institutions rarely known for being reserved or concise. As Upper East Side resident Albert Ahronheim said last night, “there’s nothing to fear from this trial.”

Advocates for taking motor vehicles off the loop drive — cars could still drive on the transverses — have been steadily winning car-free time and space for decades. Mayor Bloomberg has stated that he is unwilling to close the park to cars entirely, however, citing concerns about increased traffic on nearby roads.

That’s what makes the idea of a trial period so appealing. Under the proposal endorsed by the community board committees, the city would close the loop to cars for a few months and DOT would study the effect of the closure on traffic. If the mayor is right and the change paralyzes traffic, they can simply move the barriers they put in place and let cars right back in.

There’s good reason to think that Bloomberg’s fears are misplaced, however. A 2008 Transportation Alternatives study found that allowing cars to drive through Central Park actually increased congestion in Harlem, and former Traffic Commissioner Sam Schwartz has said that the long-term impact on traffic of closing the loop to cars would be minimal. Even if that isn’t enough to convince the mayor to take cars off the loop drive right now, it’s more than enough to merit the real-world experiment of a trial period.

The community-level campaign to test out a car-free park continues tonight, when Community Board 9′s transportation committee takes up the issue. A vote at the Borough Board could happen as soon as three weeks from now.

Everyone from members of the City Council to legendary Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving has said that Mayor Bloomberg has the power to make Central Park car-free overnight.

In 2008, students marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and wrote 10,000 letters supporting a car-free Prospect Park. Current campaigns to make NYC's flagship parks car-free haven't seen the same level of local organizing. Photo: Ben Fried

Unfortunately, Bloomberg doesn’t appear disposed to do so any time soon. “If you did not allow cars in the park during rush hour,” the mayor said in March, “the rest of the city streets would be overloaded and it would create an awful lot of traffic.”

So the pressure to keep cars out of parks will have to come from the local level in the communities surrounding Central Park or Prospect Park. The CB 7 votes in favor of a summer pilot are an important step forward on that front; while the full board still needs to pass the resolution, it is likely to do so with that kind of committee vote.

This year, the City Council has become another arena for advancing car-free parks proposals. Upper West Side rep Gale Brewer recently introduced legislation to make Central and Prospect Parks car-free.

But Brewer’s efforts in the Council haven’t gained traction. Only four of her colleagues — Fernando Cabrera, Letitia James, Melissa Mark-Viverito and Daniel Dromm — signed onto the bill. Last month, Brewer decided to drop Prospect Park from her bill in the wake of opposition from Brooklyn officials.

At the community board level, much work remains to be done to build the momentum necessary to make change happen. Ken Coughlin, a long-time leader in the fight for a car-free Central Park, was enthused by CB 7′s support but said he wasn’t aware of any parallel effort in the other community boards surrounding the park.

The Upper West Side appears to be the epicenter of the movement for car-free parks. But for the campaign to succeed, more neighborhoods will have to join the fight.

City Council Member Gale Brewer reenergized the fight for car-free Central and Prospect Parks by introducing a bill in the City Council today. Image: nyc.gov.

Upper West Side City Council Member Gale Brewer introduced legislation today that would restore Central and Prospect Parks to their original car-free status.

Brewer’s bill would ban private vehicles from using the park drives in either park; official vehicles would still be allowed to use the roads. Brewer’s legislation would also commission a study examining the impact of creating car-free parks on motor vehicle and pedestrian traffic flow and on the environment.

We’ll have much more on this new push for car-free parks as it develops, but today it seems worth reminding New York of what car-free parks are really all about. The New York Post, which broke the news of Brewer’s bill this morning, says that the bill will “ban cars,” “restrict vehicles” and “turn Central Park and Prospect Park into no-drive zones.” For them, it’s all about what you won’t be allowed to do.

A more historical perspective would remember that when Central Park was built in 1859, the automobile hadn’t been invented yet (the bicycle hadn’t really caught on either). It was only grudgingly allowed into Olmsted’s masterpiece forty years later, and even then cars needed a permit to enter, according to Transportation Alternatives. Car-free parks are about restoring space to pedestrians and cyclists, not taking space away from automobiles.

As this decades-long debate kicks back into high gear, here’s some more history to keep in mind:

• A car-free Central Park is unbelievably popular. A petition in support of a car-free park was signed by an unprecedented 100,000 people.
• A car-free Central Park also has the support of park administrator Doug Blonsky, the man responsible for running the park.
• Car-free parks wouldn’t snarl traffic. One 2008 study by Transportation Alternatives found that Central Park was actually increasing congestion in Harlem, and former Traffic Commissioner Sam Schwartz said that the long-term impact on traffic would be barely measurable.
• The city has been pursuing an incremental approach to re-creating car-free parks for decades. It has consistently cut back the hours in which cars are allowed and closed many park entrances to them. Most recently, the city expanded car-free time in each park in 2007.
• As long as cars are allowed in Central Park sometimes, non-motorized users’ experience can be threatened even during car-free hours. Recently, the police department have cracked down on cyclists for not following the traffic signals meant to regulate cars and unilaterally expanded the hours when cars were allowed for the holiday season.

Under a proposal by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, traffic lights would tell cyclists to yield rather than stop during off-peak hours. Photo: Ed Yourdon via Flickr.

Whatever you think of the NYPD’s citywide “Operation Safe Cycle,” of which all this is a part, the culture in Central Park for decades has been to allow cyclists to treat the traffic signals as “Yield” signs. Suddenly issuing $270 tickets to anyone who happens to go through a red on a bike while enjoying this most famous of urban oases is a “sick, disgusting, and even somewhat sadistic policy,” to quote a friend of mine not generally given to hyperbole.

If you care about preserving Central Park as a place where cyclists can get some exercise and escape the city, tonight you will want to attend the Central Park Precinct’s Community Council meeting, the precinct’s monthly forum for community input, at 7 pm at 160 Central Park West (the Universalist Church at 76th Street).

Admittedly, when I was in the park spearheading the drive to gather 100,000 signatures for a car-free Central Park, I would sometimes hear complaints about lycra-clad riders treating the park as if it were their personal velodrome. But at tonight’s meeting I and others will argue that if there is a safety issue, the precinct’s extreme solution will do little or nothing to address it. Moreover, requiring cyclists to stop at every red light for the full duration of the cycle no matter the circumstances – and there is, on average, a light every 674 feet on the six-mile loop — arguably removes the park as a viable recreational space for many riders, not just the Lance Armstrong wannabes. (I know several non-racing cyclists who have stopped using the loop.)

The February meeting of the Parks and Environment committee of Manhattan’s Community Board 7, on which I sit, provided some insight into the rationale for the ticket blitz. Precinct Commander Captain Philip Wishnia answered questions and essentially offered two competing explanations: First, he said word had come down from One Police Plaza to zealously enforce all traffic rules against cyclists, and the precinct had no say in the matter. Second, he maintained that the crackdown is an effort to address a purported rise in incidents involving cyclists and other users on the loop drive. Wishnia returned several times to a mishap between a cyclist and a 9-year-old boy, who he said was seriously injured. The logic of Wishnia’s proposed remedy goes like this: Forcing cyclists to stop at all red lights will make it harder for fast cyclists to achieve speeds that could do serious harm to someone on foot.

It became clear, however, that Wishnia has no idea of the scope of the problem he is seeking to address. He said that of 120 reportable incidents involving cyclists in 2010, only 43 involved a cyclist colliding with a pedestrian. And he could not say in how many of these incidents the cyclist was at fault or how many occurred at a crosswalk. A group of recreational cyclists sent a letter to Wishnia last week following up on these questions [PDF], and we hope to get a more thorough response from the precinct at tonight’s meeting.

Many observers, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, have proposed an alternative: simply shift the park’s traffic signals to blinking yellow during car-free hours, and perhaps add a push-button that would turn the light red for pedestrians who wish to cross during high-use times. Unfortunately, according to the Central Park Conservancy the park’s signals would have to be retooled for this to happen, presumably at considerable expense.

On the legislative front, City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez is about to introduce a bill that would require all the lights to blink yellow during non-car hours. To generate momentum, Rodriguez needs people to encourage their council members to sign onto his bill and to express support to Speaker Christine Quinn.

Another common sense alternative would be for the precinct to treat the lights as if they are already blinking yellow for recreational users like cyclists. The idea would be for officers to exercise discretion and to ticket failures to proceed with caution (VTL 1113) or to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks (VTL 1134). At the CB7 meeting, Wishnia dismissed this idea out of hand, claiming it would amount to “selective enforcement.”

Leaving aside that he is misusing this legal concept, the reality is that Central Park precinct officers routinely exercise discretion and treat different users differently. As was recently reported on Streetsblog, motorists regularly drive through the park at 10 to 15 miles per hour above the 25 mph speed limit, right alongside cops. In addition, a precinct officer recently informed a cyclist that officers are using their judgment about whether to ticket red light-running cyclists at the park’s less crowded northern section, whereas a strict zero-tolerance policy is in force further south. This officer’s assurances notwithstanding, cyclists are reportedly still being ticketed in the park’s northern section.

I don’t harbor illusions that anything will be resolved at Monday night’s meeting, but if the crowd of those pleading for reason is large enough, it will send a clear message up the chain of command that the Central Park loop is not the same as Ninth Avenue.

Of course, we would not be having this discussion if cars were not allowed in the park in the first place. Traffic lights were first installed there in 1932, not to regulate recreational users but to keep the cars that had invaded the park some three decades earlier from killing people. Today, cyclists — the sort of recreational user for whom the park was designed — are being forced to adhere to rules created for cars, which is making it difficult for them to use Central Park as a place of recreation. In other words, even when cars are not in the park, their iniquitous influence endures.

The best solution would be to simply ban cars altogether, which would immediately open up a host of opportunities to better regulate and separate loop users. At the least, the recent ticket blitz has sharpened the contradictions inherent in allowing car traffic in this most famous of urban refuges.

Photo: Ken Coughlin

In what’s shaping up to be a yearly tradition, car-free hours in Central Park have been cut back for the holiday season. Each weekday this month, on the southeast corner of the park drive, the park’s pedestrians, joggers, cyclists, and dog-walkers have three fewer hours of quiet and safety.

The stretch of the park drive between Sixth Avenue and Central Park South and E. 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue is already open to cars more than any other part of the park. Year-round, it’s open to cars from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m on weekdays. But between November 29 and December 30 this year, drivers have an extra three hours each day to use Central Park as a shortcut to the Upper East Side.

That means 2010 will actually be the second annual step backwards from the goal of a car-free Central Park. During the 2009 holiday season, the same stretch of road was opened to traffic until 9:00 p.m. For the two years before that, DOT had actually done away with the practice of imposing holiday hours to move more cars through the park.

Last year, Streetsblog reported that the decision to open up the park for longer wasn’t made by DOT, the agency in charge of the city’s streets, but rather by the NYPD.

Photo: Ken Coughlin

This year, the changes aren’t posted where vehicle hours are listed on either the Parks Department or Central Park websites, and the reduction in car-free time isn’t included in DOT’s annual holiday traffic plan [PDF]. The DOT press office referred our initial request to NYPD. We’re awaiting a response from the police.

At least this year, the city put up sufficiently visible signage alerting those on foot or a bike that they’re headed into traffic at hours when there normally isn’t any. Last year, the only signs were laminated 8½ by 11-inch flyers stuck to signpoles. One reader wrote in to say that the same flyers are back, and they’re just as hard to notice. This time, however, park users without an engine also merited the same electronic signs that alerted drivers of their extra hours.

Central Park Conservancy Administrator Douglas Blonsky, former PlaNYC head Rohit Aggarwala, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe and Dasha Rettew of the Climate Group announce greener lights in Central Park. Benepe, Sadik-Khan, and Blonsky could make the park car-free today. Photo: NYC DOT via City Room.

Central Park Conservancy head Douglas Blonsky wants his park to get a lot more bike-friendly, he revealed at a meeting of Manhattan’s Community Board 7′s parks committee last night. Not only is he working to create shared use paths that would allow cyclists to cross the park east-west safely and legally, he repeatedly announced his support for removing vehicular traffic from Central Park entirely.

The context for both positions is what Blonsky called “the skyrocketing use” of Central Park. Estimating that the park is visited 35 million times annually, there are ever more conflicts between cars, cyclists, joggers, strollers, dog-walkers, and other park users each year.

The result is a stream of complaints. Cyclists say park rules force them to choose between violating the law by riding on pedestrian paths, looping miles out of their way, or navigating the treacherous transverses, where a cyclist was killed in 2006. Pedestrians say they feel threatened by the cyclists illegally riding on pedestrian-only paths. “A lot more of the complaints are from the side of people who don’t like bikes on the paths and are afraid of them,” said Blonsky.

With cyclists riding east-west whether it’s allowed or not, Blonsky hopes that re-orienting some existing paths as legal routes for cycling will help everyone get along. He suggested four routes. (It might help to follow along on a Central Park map, available here). The easiest to implement would travel roughly along 102nd Street, a route which he said is already used by as many bicyclists as pedestrians. Another path would travel either on the north or south side of the 97th Street Transverse. Another route would likely pass near the Great Lawn, in the low 80s, but heavy pedestrian volumes might force that path to include a segment where cyclists have to dismount.

Each of these routes would be a relatively narrow shared-use path, perhaps similar in look and feel to the Hudson River Greenway above 103rd Street, and intended for slow speeds. While potholes on the paths might get filled, they wouldn’t be widened or rerouted.

The fourth path would travel along the 72nd Street Cross Drive, making it a slightly different challenge. While the first set of paths are currently walkways under Parks Department jurisdiction, the Cross Drive is a road with car traffic, operated by DOT. “If we didn’t have vehicles in the park, that would be easy to do,” said Blonsky. In the meantime, he suggested that DOT could perhaps reduce the Cross Drive to only one lane for cars.

In the long term, Blonsky also suggested paving pieces of the bridle paths through the park and opening those to bikers as well. That would be expensive, however, while opening the four routes he suggested could happen almost immediately with sign-off from Parks and DOT.

As for when these east-west routes could be open, the ball is in the Bloomberg administration’s court. “Right now, DOT’s looking at it and we have to wait until we hear back from them,” said Blonsky. He explained that DOT needs not only to make a decision about the 72nd Street path but to think about integrating these routes with the on-street bike network.

Blonsky suggested that supporters of his plan contact Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and let her know how they feel. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe has been “supportive of coming up with a plan,” continued Blonsky, but nothing’s official.

“The Parks Department and the Department of Transportation are working together with the Central Park Conservancy to try to develop some shared east-west paths that would allow cyclists traveling at a low rate of speed to traverse the park legally in several locations,” said a Parks Department spokesperson, noting that details are still being worked out.

Every committee member but one, and every community member who showed up to speak, supported the plan to provide east-west access for cyclists. “Although none of these paths is as wide as you want them to be to accommodate every use,” said committee co-chair Klari Neuwelt, “that’s New York.” In cramped quarters, she said, Blonsky’s plan has “the best shot at meeting all those needs.” The committee decided not to pass a formal resolution, however, because Blonsky wasn’t sure whether one would be helpful.

One striking feature of Blonsky’s comments was his repeated support for making Central Park car-free. When one committee member mentioned the danger of allowing dogs to go off-leash in the park, Blonsky replied, “Another reason to get cars out of Central Park.” He brought up a car-free park again as the solution to complaints about cyclists on the park loop ignoring red lights and the inability to bike around the park clockwise. “It’s way too much recreation use blending in with the vehicles,” he explained, “or too many vehicles.”

He implied, however, that such a move wasn’t happening in the very short-term: “I think DOT wants to look at the numbers right now and evaluate them in light of our last reduction [in car-free hours],” he said.

Of course, we're talking about art vending.

The idea dates back to at least the 1990s -- in 2003, the creators of Central Park's "The Gates" appealed to Mayor Bloomberg to drop it -- and is based on the city's claim that artists are taking up too much room, causing congestion and safety issues for park-goers. The new rules [PDF] would curtail the number of vendors and vending locations by up to 80 percent in Union Square Park, Battery Park, on the High Line, and in some sections of Central Park (see maps here). Tomorrow's hearing will be held at 11:00 a.m. at Chelsea Recreation Center, 430 W. 25th Street.

It's not clear who's clamoring for a vendor crackdown. In an informal survey, the advocates at the Street Vendor Project found that most people in Union Square Park like the art vendors just fine.

Whatever the motive, this seems like a solution in search of a problem. The vendors don't impede pedestrian movement any more than the Union Square Greenmarket or the line snaking around Shake Shack in Madison Square Park. Regardless of personal opinions about the quality of their wares, art vendors bring life and vitality to areas intended for human-scale activity. Clearing them out of public spaces en masse misses the point of what city gathering places are all about. To quote urbanist William H. Whyte, "What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people."

If Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe is truly concerned about safety, and park patrons being crammed into tight, contested spaces, he could start with this:

Photo of Central Park loop on Earth Day 2010: Ken Coughlin