‘Pedestrianize’ the Financial District, Lower Manhattan Council Member Says

It’s past time to pedestrianize the Financial District — and for the Department of Transportation to conduct a long-awaited study of the possibility, City Council Member Chris Marte charged on Thursday.

The dense downtown area grows more and more residential by the day, but DOT has yet to even start work on a traffic study paid for by the Council nearly a decade ago, Marte said in a splashy video posted on social media.

“It’s time to pedestrianize the Financial District. The Financial District was built for walking, not for traffic,” Marte said. “It’s one of the most transit-rich, walkable parts of our city, and it’s becoming one of the fastest growing residential neighborhoods with new families, seniors and kids. … We’re tired of waiting.”

The city has considered removing cars from the southernmost neighborhood in Manhattan since at least the Giuliani era in 1997. FiDi’s famously winding and narrow streets date back to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, yet the area is overrun by cars — many of them illegally parked thanks to government placards.

Between 2010 and 2020, the population of Lower Manhattan (which includes the Financial District and Battery Park City) boomed by 34 percent to roughly 60,800 people, according to the Downtown Alliance.

In 2016, Marte’s predecessor Margaret Chin secured $500,000 for a city study. In 2019, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would look into “new pedestrian priority streets,” the Tribeca Trib reported at the time.

The City Council-funded research was supposed gather data on auto and foot traffic, curb use, off-street parking stock, garbage pickup, construction and crashes, with the goal of creating a pilot pedestrian priority area.

The Financial District Neighborhood Association also released a proposal to turn many of FiDi’s streets east of Broadway into shared streets, prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists, while restricting parking and capping speed limits at 5 miles per hour.

The pandemic stalled progress on the city’s work. In recent years city officials have given lawmakers and residents “the runaround,” Marte said in a letter sent to DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez in tandem with the video launch [PDF].

“Since taking office, I have been assured almost every season that the study will start the next season,” the Council member wrote. “The time for excuses is over. The Department of Transportation must begin the study this Fall, or else all trust with the community will be gone, and I will expect the $500,000 allocated to this study to be returned to my Council office’s discretionary budget.”

An agency spokesperson declined to give an estimated timeline for starting the work, saying only that the agency is “actively preparing an update.”

“We received the letter this morning and are reviewing it. We are actively preparing an update on this important project for both the Council Member and the community,” DOT rep Anna Correa said in a statement.