Transportation Policy

Why not Close New York City's Streets to Traffic More Often?

November 7, 2006

London officials closed the northern side of Trafalgar Square to traffic creating a vibrant new public space.

Via the Manhattan Institute's new blog, Streetsblog learns of a pdf-formatted report entitled A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Famillies, which looks at the housing and transportation expenses paid by lower income families in a number of cities. The report, published by the Center for Housing Policy, a K Street think tank, finds that lower-income families in central cities spend significantly less on the overhead of life than suburban and exurban ones.

Copenhagen, Denmark is not a natural bicycling city. In the early 1960's it was very much of a car town. In 1962 the city created its first pedestrian street, the Stroget, and every year since then Copenhagen has allocated more and more of its public space to bicycles, pedestrians and people who just want to sit and take a load off. The result is a remarkably pleasant city. Danish urban designer Jan Gehl says that the single biggest key to the change has been the development of the city's extensive bicycle network and that the Copenhagen of great public spaces that we see today would not be possible without bicycles.

In his weekly radio address yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg discussed some steps his administration is taking toward a sustainable future, including the creation of an Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, and a Sustainability Advisory Board, which held its first meeting last week.

If New York or other large cities are looking for a solution to congestion and its negative impact on the economy, Hong Kong offers an excellent strategy and success story. I was there a few weeks back working on waterfront issues (that rival New York City for unrealized opportunities), and was struck by changes that have taken place since my previous visit five years earlier. In 2001, there were few streets or districts that were comfortable to walk in or engage with despite being known as a bustling shopping city. In the intervening time the city has undergone a major transformation led by non other than the city's Transport Department.

Of the ten largest cities in the United States, New York has far and away the greatest population density: 26,402.9 people per square mile, more than double the second densest big city, Chicago. The chart at right shows how the largest metropolitan areas stack up in terms of core population, overall population and core population density.  This fact alone should force New York City authorities to think differently than the rest of the country on all sorts of matters of public policy. New York is a quantitatively different animal than the other big American metropolitan regions in terms of percentage of people that live in the core, density and size of the core and size of the metropolitan area.