Perhaps it’s the sense of a centralized hidden hand at work. Returning a public amenity like the street to the perambulating masses should be a source of democratic harmony. You’d think that closing Broadway to traffic would be seen as a grand egalitarian gesture. There’s just not enough space for people.” “But nothing has worked because you’re not reaching the fundamental problem, which is that midtown is basically broken.
“You can try to tweak it with a little signal change here, maybe a traffic lane there,” Sadik-Khan continues. This stretch of Broadway is 140 percent more dangerous than comparable stretches of a midtown avenue. And then there are the people-about 356,000 of them marching through Times Square daily, from aggravated office workers to bewildered midwestern tourist families with roller suitcases. Fifty-thousand cars pass through this point every day, but the knot formed by the intersection of three streets limits traffic speed to roughly four miles per hour. “From a transportation perspective, Broadway has been a problem for 200 years,” Sadik-Khan says.
A biker shoots up Broadway riding in the wrong direction. Pedestrians are spilling into the street. Though it is late morning and nothing like the Hieronymus Bosch tableau of the evening rush, traffic is still crawling and honking through the bizarre convergence of Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and 45th Street. On a recent weekday, Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s Transportation commissioner and the woman who dreamed up this plan, is standing at the heart of Times Square and surveying the mayhem around her. And it will establish the front lines of a growing movement to tilt the balance of asphalt power away from the automobile and toward cyclists and pedestrians. It will become the most visible component yet of Mayor Bloomberg’s citywide attempt to make New York’s streets calmer, greener, and safer. This simple but dramatic act will amount to bypass surgery on the heart of New York.
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The same will happen a few blocks south, where another stretch of Broadway-from 33rd Street to 35th Street, at Herald Square-will be closed to cars and, by fall, dotted with café tables free for public use. In the weeks to come, construction workers will refashion the next five blocks of the boulevard, turning one of the world’s most congested stretches of asphalt into a 58,000-foot pedestrian plaza. Waiting for a pause in traffic, the team will close off Broadway at 47th Street, directing southbound cars east to Seventh Avenue. Sometime early Sunday morning this Memorial Day weekend, a work crew from the New York City Department of Transportation will arrive in Times Square. Photo-illustration by Andrew Eccles Photo: Getty Images (butterflies, birds, rabbit)
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