City officials showed Community Board 5 renderings of the design for the permanent plaza at Times Square last night. Image: NYC DOT

By taking out a troublesome diagonal from the Manhattan grid, the Green Light for Midtown program improved street safety and retail business while creating new public space at one of New York City’s most iconic locations. Pedestrian injuries are down 35 percent and injuries to motorists are down 63 percent, even while traffic is flowing more smoothly than ever. Pedestrian volumes are up 11 percent in Times Square, bringing business to area shops and catapulting Times Square to the second-most expensive retail area in the city.

Yet all anyone ever seemed to talk about were the lawn chairs.

That particular media obsession may finally be ready for retirement, though. NYC DOT and the Department of Design and Construction released plans for the permanent reconstruction of Times Square last night, as reported by DNAinfo. The entire roadway is going to be rebuilt for the first time in 50 years, said DOT spokesperson Seth Solomonow, repairing the utilities beneath the street. Instead of putting the asphalt back in place, however, the city will be installing a plaza designed for pedestrians from the ground up.

The Times Square design, seen from the TKTS booth. Image: NYC DOT.

No longer will you have to step down from the sidewalk to the reclaimed street space. The width of Broadway will be laid with concrete pavers in two dark, alternating tones. In another touch from architecture firm Snøhetta, which designed the project, stainless steel discs will reflect some of Times Square’s neon back off the ground. Benches will be sited to separate areas meant for lounging from areas meant for walking.

The concrete pavers will extend into the roadbed where crosstown streets interrupt the plaza space. Hopefully, that will send a strong visual message to motorists that they are entering a busy pedestrian space.

The new design also includes a bike route through the area, but not on Broadway. According to DNAinfo, cyclists riding south on Broadway’s protected lane would switch to a short contraflow segment on 47th Street, turn onto the west side of Seventh Avenue, cross to the east side of the street at 45th Street, and then cross back onto Broadway at 42nd. For those five blocks, the lane would not be protected.

Construction would begin in 2012 and be complete by 2014, according to DNAinfo.

As seen in this plan, the Broadway bike lane would turn onto Seventh Avenue at 47th Street and run alongside the plaza until it switches to the other side of the street at 45th Street. Image: NYC DOT

The new Times Square: May 25, 2009. Photo: Aaron Naparstek

Two years after Mayor Bloomberg and NYC DOT remade Times Square, the city’s premiere public space is one of the world’s leading shopping destinations.

Crain’s reports that annual rankings from international real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield place Times Square among the ten most desirable retail locations on the planet, topped in New York only by Fifth Avenue and ahead of East 57th Street and Madison Ave.

This is the first time that the Times Square bowtie, between West 42nd Street and West 47th Street, has made the list. It did so with rents averaging $1,350 a square foot. There is no corresponding annual data from the previous year because Cushman only recently started measuring that specific location. However, as of September 2010, rents there averaged $1,000 a square foot.

“Times Square is the center of the world and it has become another place where retailers want to express their identity,” said [Cushman executive vice president Gene] Spiegelman. He noted that the area is especially popular with moderately priced retailers that would appeal to a mass audience, especially a younger clientele.

This would be big news even during an economic boom. While other factors are no doubt at work, at a time when success stories are few and far between only the most intransigent critic would deny a plausible link between skyrocketing commercial rents and the transformation of Times Square from a car-choked mess into, as Aaron Naparstek wrote in May 2009, “a space filled with people and human activity.”

We look forward to copious city press coverage of this unprecedented development.

Photo: Josh Pesavento/Flickr

Ten years ago, after the attacks of September 11, New Yorkers came together in places like Union Square, holding candlelight vigils and creating impromptu memorials to the victims. Following the news late last night that American forces had killed Osama bin Laden, people again flocked to New York’s iconic public spaces. This time the mood was jubilant, and there were a few more public spaces for people to congregate and share a historical moment with other people. Flickr user Josh Pesavento captured these images from the pedestrian plazas in Times Square.

Photo: Josh Pesavento

Photo: Josh Pesavento

Should a pedestrian-friendly Times Square serve as a model for other American cities? Who would ask such a thing? Certainly not the real New Yorkers who constitute the city’s hard-bitten press corps.

No, for meaningful analysis of the use of public space, it’s best to look elsewhere. Case in point: MSNBC’s “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which recently dedicated a full eight minutes to the redesigned Times Square. Spurred by the report that air quality has improved since Broadway traffic lanes were reclaimed for pedestrians, Ratigan asked Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance, and Ben Goldhirsh, publisher of GOOD Magazine, whether such measures are “good for America.”

Ratigan, who used to work in Times Square, was once a skeptic, but two years later he’s a convert who ultimately makes no bones about his “bias.” Yet he still manages to hold a rational discussion about car-free spaces, punctuated by facts and figures, leaving the hysterics and fear-mongering to the pros.

Graph: Office of the mayor

A new study commissioned by the city finds that air quality in Times Square has notably improved since the 2009 installation of pedestrian plazas on Broadway.

Street-level readings taken by the New York City Community Air Survey, a city-wide air quality monitoring program created as part of PlaNYC, show that “concentrations of traffic-related pollutants were substantially lower than measurements from the year before and were less than in other midtown locations.” From a media statement announcing the findings:

The report confirms that major sources of air pollution generated in New York City are vehicle traffic and buildings burning high-sulfur heating oils. Additionally, in Times Square, concentrations of nitrogen oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), two pollutants closely associated with traffic, were among the highest in the city. After the conversion to a pedestrian plaza, NO pollution levels in Times Square went down by 63 percent, while NO2 levels went down by 41 percent.

“The new Times Square is a showcase for New York’s vitality and energy, rather than for congestion and pollution,” said NYCDOT Commissioner Sadik-Khan. “The changes here have been big wins for safety, mobility and business. Now we can see that they have delivered great environmental gains as well.”

The city says that some 250,000 pedestrians enter Times Square every day.

Data from the survey were released ahead of the next edition of PlaNYC and will be used to “inform” unspecified new air quality initiatives. The PlaNYC reboot is set for April 21.

Among the fans of the new Times Square are former President Bill Clinton, who joined Mayor Bloomberg today in announcing a merger of their climate groups, the Clinton Global Initiative and C40. Regaling reporters with tales of the Times Square of old, writes City Room:

Mr. Clinton concluded by recalling that when he was a college student, he was agile — and reckless — enough to dodge the cars zipping through Times Square.

Today, thanks to the pedestrian mall, he said, there is no need. “Now you can be my age and walk in Times Square and not get run down. That is pretty cool, too.”

For the majority of people who use Times Square, Broadway is much broader than it was before the city re-purposed space from vehicles to pedestrians. That's not how the Times has framed the project. Photo: Payton Chung/Flickr

Framing affects the struggle over street space as well. Tabloid headlines about “kamikaze cyclists” and “two-wheeled terrorists” in the 1980s literally framed bike messengers as Public Enemy #1 and emboldened Mayor Ed Koch to try to ban bicycling in midtown. Road widenings are still customarily branded as “improvements” rather than simply identified as expansions. Most news outlets report plane crashes as crashes but call car crashes accidents.

With this in mind, let’s train a verbal lens on the New York Times’ full-page treatment yesterday of the Broadway road diet.

The article, by Times transportation reporter Michael Grynbaum, is exemplary in many respects. It thoughtfully lets transportation guru Jeff Zupan declare that the stepwise transformation of Manhattan’s central thoroughfare is boosting the status of pedestrians throughout town:

“It’s given people a different feeling about walking in the city, that the pedestrian isn’t a second-class citizen who has to always be on the lookout of getting run over.”

On the key issue of traffic flow, Grynbaum notes that Broadway’s “awkward three-way intersections with other avenues created gridlock,” and he has Janette Sadik-Khan explain that “We’re making the [street] network work like it was supposed to.” To back up the DOT Commissioner’s appeal to New Yorkers to embrace Broadway as a “green ribbon,” Grynbaum invokes “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz, whom he dubs “the éminence grise of the city’s traffic circles”:

“It sounds counterintuitive that removing a street can make things better. But it was a mistake in 1811 when they left Broadway in as a traffic street.”

Educational indeed… for readers who make it to the tenth paragraph. But earlier, more prominent passages may imprint a less appetizing picture on other, perhaps more typical readers:

[U]nder the Bloomberg administration, Broadway has been transformed, from a grand avenue that ferried automobiles on a scenic route through Midtown to a narrow passageway with barely more room for cars than a sleepy street in Greenwich Village. (second paragraph)

The Great White Way … has been diminished by a bicycle lane and a green-painted, traffic-free section intended for pedestrians …” (caption)

In two years, roughly three and a half miles of the street’s moving lanes have vanished … For the first time in New York’s modern era, Broadway no longer offers a continuous path from the Bronx to the Battery. (third paragraph)

And, in case anyone missed the point, the full-page diagram tracing the street from Columbus Circle to below Madison Square Park is headlined “Not So Broadway.”

The takeaway, then, is mixed. Readers who go the distance are treated to the wisdom of NYC’s leading transportation lights. But those who merely inhale the first few bits learn that Broadway has been “diminished” even though only the motorized lanes have shrunk; and that parts of the once-Great White Way have “vanished” rather than been repurposed. The “grand avenue” renowned as a “scenic route” through the heart of the city is no more — the implication being that New York itself is being made less grand, even, gasp, “pedestrian.”

Perhaps inadvertently, the piece’s heavy reliance on talking heads may serve to reinforce another negative frame: that Sadik-Khan and other city officials are “imposing” alien ideas on New Yorkers, even though the midtown business community — through the Times Square Alliance — generated the initial momentum for the pedestrian reclamation of Times Square, and even though we know public opinion of the transformations is quite favorable.

The article’s true soul may reside in the lone everyman quoted, whom Grynbaum describes as “a daily car commuter from Queens who was parked on Broadway at 33rd Street the other day“:

I know they’re trying to beautify the city, but it’s killing the drivers. It’s frustrating. They don’t want you to drive into the city.

This fellow comes off as reasonable, even sweet. Yet his “daily car commute” costs other New Yorkers — truckers, bus riders, and his fellow drivers — a collective 3-4 hours in lost time valued at $100 or more each day. Framing the city’s ongoing traffic disaster in these terms may be crucial to maintaining Broadway as a permanent “green ribbon,” not to mention winning the rest of the livable streets agenda, from pedestrians’ rights to traffic pricing, that can make New York a city fit for working and living.

Eight months after New York City changed traffic patterns in midtown Manhattan, transforming Broadway and reclaiming acres of urban space for pedestrian plazas at Times Square and Herald Square, Mayor Bloomberg announced this morning that the trial has proven successful and the changes will be permanent. Streetsblog will post a full report, including data collected from the trial period, later today. Stay tuned.

Update: We'll post highlights shortly from a very interesting press conference and Q&A with the mayor. If, in the meantime, you want to comb through the data in DOT's evaluation report, here's the PDF.

Mayor Bloomberg is expected to announce his verdict on Times Square's new pedestrian spaces very soon. Will the changes be permanent? This morning Bloomberg told radio host John Gambling that we'll find out sometime next week. In the meantime, it seems like the media has decided to fixate on rumors that Midtown traffic speeds may not have increased across the board, without paying much attention to the tremendous difference this project has made for hundreds of thousands of pedestrians every day.

It's been eight months since this part of Broadway went car-free, and maybe it's hard to recall just how bad Times Square used to be for everyone walking around. To really appreciate what we have today, you've got to take a trip back in time to see the crowded, dangerous mess that used to fester at the crossroads of the world. Naturally, the moment calls for a Streetfilms retrospective.

The new Times Square versus the old Times Square -- worth a few seconds of motorist inconvenience on a few streets. Photos: berk2804 and midweekpost via Flickr

As the Times' Michael Grynbaum has reminded us the past two days, Broadway's new pedestrian spaces were sold with a heavy emphasis on easing Midtown gridlock. Safety and economic activity were important indicators from the beginning, but the name of the project said it all: Green Light for Midtown.

The numbers aren't out yet, but Bloomberg revealed at a press conference yesterday that, in terms of moving vehicles, "some of the roads are better; some of the roads are worse." It seems like the trial hasn't quite delivered a win-win-win scenario where pedestrians, merchants, and motorists all received substantial benefits. Instead, we're probably heading for a result that's closer to "win-win-tie."

If you care about livable streets, I think this is a welcome development. It means New York City gets to have a more substantial discussion about what our streets are for and the priorities we assign to them. Ambiguous traffic data leads straight to the question, "What matters more -- safety and livability, or moving cars?"

Bloomberg is already framing the project in terms of safety. "It's not just traffic," he said at yesterday's presser. "One of the things that has happened is pedestrian deaths have come down dramatically in this area. And I don't know how you equate a few lives with a few more seconds of inconvenience."

Amen. The Broadway project is worth doing for several reasons that have nothing to do with vehicle speeds. It's saving lives and improving the public realm for hundreds of thousands of people who used to squeeze onto the sidewalk like poultry in an industrial chicken coop. New Yorkers have noticed, and they approve. Judging from anecdotal merchant reactions and the position of the Times Square Alliance, it's been good for business too.

The most important graphic from the city's initial presentation on this project came under the "additional benefits" section, shortly after the slide about "green signal time allocation."

I, for one, can't wait to read the next Steve Cuozzo column ripping apart the life-saving transformation of Midtown.

This used to be the scene of gridlocked traffic. Photo: berk2804

Seven years ago, when Tim Tompkins took over as president of the Times Square Alliance, one of New York's largest BIDs, security and cleanliness were the top concerns. Despite incessant traffic and "pedlock," few decision-makers were focused, at first, on the vision of Times Square as a world-class public space where people take precedence over motor vehicles.

Speaking to a standing-room audience at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research building last week, Tompkins recalled when the lack of regular stabbings and violent crime seemed good enough for the crossroads of the world, and the quality of public space felt too esoteric to address. Gradually, Tompkins helped build public support for dramatic changes, starting with the re-design of Duffy Square. Working with NYCDOT, Tompkins began chipping away at the space allocated to cars and opening it up to pedestrians. Shortly after the completion of Duffy Square last October, said Tompkins, DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan approached him about closing down a portion of Broadway to vehicles to create public plazas.

Now, cities around the country view the new Times Square plazas as potential precedents for transforming their own under-utilized or overcrowded streets into quality pedestrian space. Streetsblog San Francisco caught up with Tompkins during his west coast trip to talk about the new Times Square, how it came about, and the lessons we can draw from its ongoing transformation. Here is an edited transcript of the interview. 

Matthew Roth: What in your opinion has been the biggest change in Times Square over the past decade?

Tim Tompkins: The challenge of Times Square as a public space had changed. It’s not enough that it's just sort of safe to be there. This is one of the world's great public spaces. What's missing?

Over the last couple of decades we've learned a lot about how to make parks great, and that parks are important to life of the city. I think there's been an evolution over the last decade thanks to organizations like [Streetsblog], and Project for Public Spaces, and Transportation Alternatives that have said, "There is another part of the public realm, there is another part of city life that we need to pay attention to."

The re-designed Duffy Square. Photo: Brad Aaron.

This is a place where you can be still, but you're still in the city. You're experiencing the city, but you don't have to stand or walk through it the way you did before. Finally, we created a place for that observation to happen, for people to see what we called the second best show on Broadway, which is Times Square itself. It’s people watching people in this unique way. And so sometimes it’s about looking up, sometimes it’s about noticing the store across the street, but as much as anything it’s about watching this urban fugue, which is the special nature of a public space in the city, where you’ve got all these different things going on. Different people, different languages, different looks, and a little bit of chaos, but also a tremendous amount of energy.

MR: Now that you've closed portions of Broadway to cars and opened it up to people, what would you say to skeptics of pedestrianization and pilots that limit private vehicles?

TT: Pedestrianization of a former roadway is a mixture of art and science. There are people who have studied this -- you know, what do people do in public spaces -- and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It has to do with design, management, the nature of the space, what’s going on around it. So it’s not an easy thing to get right. One of the great things about this commissioner and mayor is that they’re willing to experiment and see what happens.

We're still learning how to make this work. How to bring some authentic sort of street-style programming back to Times Square without overwhelming it, without it being too noisy for the office tenants, or the theaters. How to have the furniture look good, but not be just like everything else. Even just how you keep it clean so it doesn’t look ratty. Because when it was asphalt it’s like, "Well this is a street, it’s not supposed to look good." The second it was painted red asphalt, then there was this challenge, because people were no longer looking at it as a street that happened to have a chair on it, they were looking at it as a public space, and they were like, "This is not Piazza San Marco, this is crap."  And in some ways they're right, but it's a function of shifting expectations.

MR: What has the reaction been among businesses in the district?

TT: I think that there was definitely concern and fear during a time of economic vulnerability, and you've got to acknowledge that. Longer-term interests, like somebody that owns an office building, they’re there for decades, but you know, restaurants in Times Square live hand to mouth. If Broadway tickets are down 20 percent, their business is down 20 percent. You have to pay attention to the reality of somebody's economic situation. 

"The second it was painted red asphalt, then there was this challenge, because people were no longer looking at it as a street that happened to have a chair on it, they were looking at it as a public space, and they were like, 'This is not Piazza San Marco, this is crap.'"

I think at the same time listen to what they say, and then modify the plan accordingly. There were some issues about theater access on 45th Street, and what was going to happen when you change the traffic patterns. We had conversations and DOT was great. They sat down and they said, "Okay, we were initially thinking we wouldn’t let you make a right turn, but we’re going to modify the plan and allow that to happen," and that addressed a really big issue. So that’s another case where it's important to have the conversation between the private interests and the government that’s doing it. And to say, you know, maybe that might not have worked, and then we would have had to say, "Okay, we're three weeks into it, let’s change something else."

The other thing to keep in mind, though, is that you've got to think about your long-term competitiveness. A business understands that you've got a competitive environment. What are your advantages versus some other place? In a place like San Francisco, in a place like Times Square, they're major tourist destinations, and people can choose to go somewhere else. Just like whether it's an amusement park, or it's a beach resort, they’ve got to do some upgrades, they've got to pay attention to the competitive environment and say, "What’s going to keep people coming here?"

Newly digitized AAA mag: crazy for cars, mad about pedestrian streets.

The “test project,” now four months old, has been criticized by some as both tacky and ill-suited to the location. While we tend to agree, we are more concerned with serious safety issues created by mixing cross-town traffic and pedestrians, particularly where many of them are vacationing tourists. We also have yet to see the environmental and congestion benefits to justify the experiment’s costs.

The pedestrian plaza concept was the brainchild of city transportation officials intrigued with the idea of importing the pedestrian zones common in Europe to New York City. But so far, the project appears to be an unnatural fit for the heart of America’s biggest city. After all, Times Square is not Rome, Paris or Barcelona, where piazzas and squares lined with cafes and restaurants evolved naturally in the urban landscape.

Yep, all of a sudden pedestrians are mixing with crosstown traffic. Remember back when that never happened? Me neither.

Have fun picking this apart, Streetsbloggers. I'll just go out on a limb here and wager that the editorialists at AAA, headquartered out in Nassau, don't represent the views of real New Yorkers and probably never walked around with all those "vacationing tourists" squeezed into traffic by the sidewalk crunch at the old Times Square.

After the jump, a nice rejoinder from genuine city dwellers, courtesy of City Room, about the pleasures of having places to socialize in public.

On busy evening in Times Square, at the pedestrian mall on Broadway, E. J. Bonilla and Melissa Oyola found an empty table and two chairs, content among the seas of calm and waves of chaos surrounding them.

This is date night.

“Ever since they hooked this place up, it’s like a lifesaver,” Mr. Bonilla, 21, said. “If you’re with somebody, you’re with them because you like each other. You shouldn’t necessarily need something else to help you guys along.”

Photo: berk2804/Flickr.

But maybe you had your doubts. Maybe the "It's just for tourists!" argument seemed like it might gain some traction. Maybe fears of Carmaggedon would win out.

Today's Q Poll settles the question: Car-free Times Square is a hit. Fifty-eight percent of New Yorkers think it was a good idea to close Broadway to cars and give more space to pedestrians, compared to 35 percent who don't. A surprisingly high number of New Yorkers -- 44 percent -- say they've seen the new Broadway for themselves. That translates to about three and half million people.

When it comes to transformative regional transportation policies, however, advocates still have a steep hill to climb. Majorities oppose East River bridge tolls and congestion pricing, even when the question explicitly states that funds would be used to limit future transit fare increases. Skepticism about the MTA's ability to deliver mega-projects like the Second Avenue Subway and the 7 line extension is very high.

Perhaps most importantly, among transit riders who think the quality of service has declined recently, blame falls on the MTA more than the state legislature. Much more, in fact -- 59 percent to 19 percent. This is troubling.

For the time being, it looks like Pedro Espada and company can rest comfortably in the knowledge that they won't be held accountable for shortchanging our transit system.

But if you're one of the optimists, here's something to build on. Overall support for congestion pricing stands at 40 percent. Okay, that's pretty sobering, but it's significantly higher than the 29 percent support for bridge tolls (maybe labels do matter). It's also higher than the level of public support for congestion charging prior to implementation in Stockholm. And back when congestion pricing was all over the news, we saw this number swing up and down rather dramatically, depending on the phrasing of the question.

We know the needle can be moved. The next time pricing comes up in the legislature, will advocates mobilize a broad enough coalition to move Albany along with it?

When New York City opened up new pedestrian zones in the heart of Midtown this summer, naysayers predicted a traffic nightmare. Nearly two months later, we're still waiting for the much-feared Carmaggedon.

In this video, Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton takes us on a tour of Broadway's car-free squares and boulevard-style blocks, where conditions have improved dramatically for pedestrians, cyclists, and, yes, delivery truck drivers. As Mark says, the counterintuitive truth is that taking away space for cars can improve traffic while making the city safer and more enjoyable for everyone on foot. There are sound theories that help explain why this happens -- concepts like traffic shrinkage and Braess's paradox which are getting more and more attention thanks to projects like this one. While traffic statistics are still being collected by NYCDOT, there's already a convincing argument that Midtown streets are functioning better than before: To understand it, just take a walk down Broadway.

We've been meaning to post this vid from culture mag ANIMAL New York (h/t Gothamist), which neatly undercuts the argument that the newly pedestrianized Broadway is "only for tourists." Sure, the tourists are grateful not to be jostling for space right next to traffic anymore, but so are lots of people from the five boroughs. It is, after all, where 158,000 people go to work every day. Take that, Andrea Peyser.

During the MTA funding debate, Liu was also a vocal opponent of bridge tolls, a stark about-face given his early support for congestion pricing. Tonight you can see the new John Liu in action, when he makes an appearance on NY1's Road to City Hall at 7 p.m. The topic: Broadway's new pedestrian spaces, a transformation Liu pounced on as soon as the plan was announced.

If you're going to tonight's BRT workshop in the Bronx instead, you can catch the NY1 show again at 10:00 p.m.

The full transformation will take a few months to set up, but come Memorial Day, pedestrians will finally have some breathing room at Times Square.

With all those cars headed out of town, DOT is going to re-route traffic at Times Square around Broadway and onto Seventh Avenue. Come Memorial Day morning, New York City will have brand new public spaces carved out of the street, smack in the middle of Midtown. If you're staying in the city for the long weekend, it's time to party.

The Times Square Alliance will be out bright and early Monday setting up beach chairs. Virgil's Barbecue will be firing up the grill. At some point, a giant movie screen will get unfurled for a noon showing of "On the Town" (it's the last day of Fleet Week, folks). I suspect that I won't be the only New Yorker heading over to Times Square for the first time in ages.

So, this year we're not holding anything back: Happy Memorial Day weekend! We'll see you back here on Tuesday.

Fortunately, according to the AP, the pedestrians' injuries were not life-threatening.

It's not clear how tightly the set was controlled at the time. According to the Post, one of those injured was not associated with the movie, and the car ended up smashed into the Sbarro at the corner of 47th and Broadway, which was open for business.

A scene from Midtown early this morning, after Barack Obama was named president-elect.

On the A downtown from Inwood, new passengers were welcomed with screams and cheers at every stop. It was standing room only by the time the train reached 42 Street.

New Yorkers lined the sidewalks in Times Square. Cars rolled through slowly, drivers honking, with passengers hanging from windows waving Obama signs.

Unlike Times Square, by 2 a.m. NBC's "Election Plaza" at Rockefeller Center had pretty much cleared out.

Photos 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7: Brad Aaron
Photo 6: Jennifer Aaron

Broadway Boulevard takes center stage in a USA Today story on New York City's recent pedestrian improvements. Those who questioned whether people would sit in plazas near passing traffic have their answer:

Bianca Assim-Kon, 30, was initially skeptical about the plazas. "I saw them doing this, and my co-worker and I (said) all the tourists are going to sit there and we're going to laugh at them because they're going to get hit" by cars, says Assim-Kon, who works as a production assistant in a building across the street from one of the plazas. "And now here I am, sitting."

Reading a "chick-lit" novel on her lunch break, she says she can eke calm out of the surrounding cacophony. "I'm a New Yorker," Assim-Kon says. "You learn to focus."

Understandable as those initial doubts may have been, anyone familiar with the work of Project for Public Spaces and William H. Whyte could have predicted that, yes, New Yorkers will even venture across a bike lane for a decent place to sit.

Bonus photo and quote from Whyte after the jump.

"I end then in praise of small spaces. The multiplier effect is tremendous. It is not just the number of people using them, but the larger number who pass by and enjoy them vicariously, or even the larger number who feel better about the city center for knowledge of them. For a city, such places are priceless, whatever the cost. They are built of a set of basics and they are right in front of our noses. If we will look."

Photos: Brad Aaron

Projects like Broadway Boulevard are intended, in part, to reduce auto-pedestrian conflicts.

Yesterday traffic agent Donnette Sanz was buried with her infant son. Two weeks ago, she was crossing a Bronx street on her lunch break when she was hit by a van and thrown under a school bus. Her unborn child was delivered prematurely when Sanz was taken to the hospital. He survived only eight days.

The day before Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly honored Sanz at her funeral in Baychester, a police cruiser was observed "doing doughnuts" in a park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. According to a witness, the spinning patrol car barely missed two kids on tricycles. When informed of this, precinct higher-ups and an NYPD spokesman were unmoved.

Also yesterday, a 10-year-old cyclist was trapped on a median as motorists whizzed by. As he tried to get across the street he was hit by a Mercedes. The scene of the collision is either "not an accident-prone location" (NYPD) or the "worst corner in Queens" (neighborhood resident). The child suffered massive head injuries and remained unconscious at last report. Media accounts took pains to point out that the Mercedes "had the light."

And finally, in Park Slope, an 86-year-old grandfather was hit and killed on Fourth Avenue. Relatives say Antonio Torres was rendered unrecognizable by the collision. The motorist was cited for speeding.

Amid all this carnage and near-carnage, the New York Times dispatched metro reporter William Neuman to the new Broadway Boulevard pedestrian esplanade, apparently to ask lunchtime diners if they thought it was too dangerous to sit there.

Though it looks like it took some doing, Neuman eventually found his money quote:

"It’s a death trap," Mr. Sachinis, a network administrator for a garment company, said with a laugh. "It’ll be up for a month and then somebody’ll get hit and they’ll take it down."

So instead of running a story that asks, say, why a public plaza at the crossroads of the world should ever be considered a "death trap," or putting Broadway Boulevard in the context of other pedestrian- and cyclist-minded improvements across the city, the Times paints the project as a novel intrusion into the rightful domain of speeding cars and trucks.

For our money quote, we turn to commenter Marty Barfowitz:

He's not going to walk down Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn the day after an 86-yo man is mowed down and ask pedestrians standing on the sidewalk if they feel safe. But if he's forced to cover this apparently trivial Broadway crap, he's going to do it with a skeptical eye towards what Bloomy, Janette, DOT and these Streetsbloggy advocacy types are saying.

Not that we haven't seen it before.

Photo: zodak/Flickr