Scot Bathgate, our Kiwi correspondent, sends a link for a New York Times piece on the transformation of Broadway – which should be compulsory reading for anyone attending the City’s Open House on the Hornby Street cycle track this Wednesday, September 8, from 11 am to 7 pm at the Pacific Centre rotunda (701 West Georgia Street).
Broadway Is Busy, With Pedestrians, if Not Car Traffic
It is Manhattan’s most famous thoroughfare, known around the world for its theater marquees and giant Macy’s. It has come to symbolize the outsize aspirations and swagger of New York.
But under 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.
In two years, roughly three and a half miles of the street’s moving lanes have vanished — nearly half of the total between Columbus Circle and Union Square — and in some spots automobile traffic has dropped by a third. Dozens of parking spaces are gone, replaced by bicycle lanes and pedestrian picnic areas. For the first time in New York’s modern era, Broadway no longer offers a continuous path from the Bronx to the Battery.
The metamorphosis is set to continue after Labor Day, when the city will remove one of the two remaining driving lanes in the five blocks north of 18th Street by Union Square. By autumn, nearly all of once-bustling Broadway from 33rd to 17th Streets will be reduced to a single lane of moving traffic, save for an occasional stub for left turns.
And for more information on Vancouver’s proposed transformation of Hornby Street, including block-by-block diagrams, go here.
Now that Vancouver is becoming very cycle friendly, maybe the focus can turn to making it more pedestrian friendly. Maybe losing some lanes of traffic and replacing them with wider sidewalks and placing picnic areas near coffee shops. Robson and Denman seem like good places to start.