New York will take 25% of public space away from cars to give it to pedestrians, bicycles and green areas

The city of New York plans to remove 25% of urban space from cars, in the legislature that has just begun, to give it to public uses, including bus or bicycle lanes, new pedestrian spaces, green areas and wider sidewalks.

“We don’t like to talk about ‘closing streets’, it’s the opposite: opening them for pedestrian and public use”, specifies in an interview with Efe the Commissioner of Transport, Ydanis Rodríguez, appointed by the new mayor Eric Adams, who took office on January 1.

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Within these new public uses will also be the expansion of “open schools”, a continuation of an idea born at the time of confinement by covid-19 and that allowed some school activities to be taken to the streets or squares adjoining schools.

Similarly, the mayor’s office will promote “open restaurants” -what in Hispanic countries are called terraces-, a rarity in New York before covid-19 and that the pandemic “encouraged” them to expand their activity on the street, sometimes stealing entire lanes from the streets, although sometimes they have to resort to heated plastic “bubbles” to allow diners to withstand the frigid winter temperatures.

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The plan, whose deadlines and budget remain to be defined, will be carried out throughout the mandate of Eric Adams, who, like Rodríguez himself, is a recognized defender of the bicycle and likes to be photographed on his saddle.

“Our goal is to go to a city where the car is not needed”, adds Rodríguez, who however excludes any measure that penalizes the use of the private car.

MORE BIKES THAN EVER

On a typical day, 530,000 bicycle trips are recorded in New York, and each month there are 773,000 New Yorkers who use their bicycle several times a month.

With an annual increase of 4.7% in the daily use of two wheels, the number of trips has doubled in 10 years, between 2009 and 2019, but its visibility became especially apparent in 2020, when the majority of local , schools and businesses closed in New York and the streets were emptied of cars.

Today there are 1,375 miles (2,212 kilometers) of bike lanes in the city, but only 546 miles are “protected”—that is, separated by “hard” barriers—which has not helped prevent the relatively high number of cyclists killed in recent years: 28 in 2019, 26 in 2020 and 19 in 2021.

The mayor’s plan is to add 300 more miles of protected lanes, and consider all bike lanes as priorities for cleaning (especially after snowfall), considering that they are “work places” for the growing community of food delivery people, moving at full speed down these lanes.

THE SLOWEST BUSES IN THE COUNTRY

Buses in the Big Apple are the slowest in the United States, according to the city council: with an average speed of 8 miles per hour (12 km/hour), it drops even more during peak hours, which perhaps explains why the number of users has fallen by 13% in four years.

The mayor’s office is working on a plan to improve the bus lanes, to double the number already under 150 miles throughout the city, but above all it wants to implement a system of intelligent traffic lights (there are 14,000 intersections with traffic lights in the city) that allow Buses pass in preference to cars.

The mayor’s office is clear that the bus is the only public means of transport available in the peripheral neighborhoods (and poorer ones) that are hardly reached by the subway, therefore improving the bus service is essential to raise the standard of living of those neighborhoods and fix their population in them, avoiding the exodus from those neighborhoods, as the commissioner recalls.

PEDESTRIANIZATION PROGRESSES SLOWER

Within the mayor’s plans there is also progress in the pedestrianization of the streets, without specific figures in a city and a country where everything remains to be done compared to European models: in New York, the only pedestrian zone (and not completely) it is the one that surrounds Times Square, something that was imposed with great opposition from merchants.

The ultimate goal of all the mayor’s plans is to improve air quality: during confinement, the disappearance of the car from the streets of New York resulted in a 23% drop in microparticle air pollution, and therefore if they are reduced from sustained form of road traffic, the municipality calculates that it will reach a 34% drop.

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