Traffic Calming

After Summer Streets wrapped up last Saturday, I headed over to Times Square to check out the progress on DOT's "Broadway Boulevard" project. The new street geometry and surfacing are mostly in place, while plantings and furniture have yet to arrive. The bike lane was also fully functional, making this pedicab ride across 41st Street a lot more pleasant than it would have been a few months ago.

Remember the Alamo? That's the public sculpture (AKA "The Cube") located on a pedestrian island in the middle of Manhattan's Astor Place. It's a decent landmark for meeting up with a friend, but it always looks forlorn out there with lanes of traffic moving by on every side, a constant reminder that huge swaths of Astor Place and its environs can be reclaimed from vehicles and put to better use.

9th St. and 4th Ave.: "A dangerous crossing that divides surrounding neighborhoods and inhibits street life."

A study released today by Transportation Alternatives puts the congestion and waste caused by cheap metered parking in stark terms. The report, "Driven to Excess" [PDF], quantifies just how far Upper West Side drivers go in search of open spots: 366,000 miles a year, or about the distance from Earth to the moon.

From Streetsblog regular BicyclesOnly comes this shot of construction work going on now at Madison Square. More photos here, and here is DOT's project presentation. When complete, the renovation -- one of two planned for Broadway this summer -- will reclaim over 37,000 sq. ft. of public space from auto traffic.

In the second installment of his "Street Transformations" series (here's the first), Clarence Eckerson shows the progress underway at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza. The package of pedestrian and bicycle improvements you see in the video was first unveiled by DOT last spring. Says Clarence:

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg signed into law Intro 199, a bill requiring New York City's Department of Transportation to collect and monitor data specifically aimed at helping the city "to reduce automobile traffic and encourage more sustainable means of transportation vital to combating congestion, pollution and improving the City’s long term economic health." The new law could signal a significant change for a city agency that has typically measured its own performance based on how many potholes it fills, street lamps it fixes and how well it keeps motor vehicle traffic flowing through the city's over-burdened street grid. 

A tipster sends along these fresh shots of construction on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. The new pedestrian refuges give the street a geometry very similar to what we saw on Broadway in Williamsburg two weeks ago. Below, the remnants of old trolley tracks get unearthed. We're told the foreman says his crew is having a devil of a time working around the tangle of metal.