THE HYPOTHETICAL, “IMPOSSIBLE,” NEIGHBORHOOD PLAN

For NYC 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

TRAFFIC CIRCULATION

PEDESTRIANIZED CORE

STREET TREATMENTS

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

Welcome.

This is not a plan for modern day New York City. It is hypothetical.

Currently, we do not operate in ways that allow for large, systemic changes. Our citizenry has been beaten down by incompetence and small mindedness, and even our most ambitious plans for the future of our streets reflect this, asking no more than a few minor treatments here or a lane reconfiguration there. This is not that type of plan. It is one for a city capable of large-scale dynamic change, with vision and courage – the type of city that we might one day become.

This plan uses the neighborhood of Astoria specifically as an example, but is applicable to every neighborhood in the city. If actually implemented, customized plans should be developed to suit individual neighborhoods that are tailored to their specific needs and geometry. These are the bones.

- Miser

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

TRAFFIC CIRCULATION

Cities that have made huge strides building safe, joyous streets didn’t do so by tinkering around the edges. They did it with comprehensive plans that changed everything, often all at once.

Consider the city of Ghent, Belgium:

The majority of the work required to implement this plan was simply switching the direction of streets, utilizing easy to install signage. This ensures that drivers looking to traverse the city can only do so on designated routes, instead of cutting through anywhere.

The process of applying this logic to NYC begins with selecting the streets on which through traffic will be permitted. That is to say, which will allow long distance travel (between neighborhoods or long distance within a single neighborhood.)

After these streets have been identified, direction of travel on the remaining streets should be changed so that traffic is always routed back towards one of these thoroughfares. In this way, every point within the grid can still be accessed, yet only some of the streets are major traffic corridors.

Strategically alternating the direction of travel forces drivers to move towards the main car streets.

This also brings some streets that are currently 2 way down to 1 way. The reclaimed space can then be used for expanded sidewalks and pedestrian spaces, tree pits, bioswales for drainage, bike lanes, and many other more beautiful and beneficial purposes for residents.

It makes many trips by car less direct at the very beginning or end of a journey. This is intentional. It is similar to traveling somewhere by highway. For much of the journey the route is largely straight and direct, and once you get closer to your destination you get off the main road on to smaller ones, and the route becomes less direct, slower, and more localized. Converting urban streets to indirect, less immediately accessible routes is not a weakness, it is a strength because it allows us to not overbuild roads directly to every destination.

Our streets currently, even inside the city, are often built to maximize through traffic, access, and speed, and need to be changed to prioritize local resident's quality of life by instead minimizing traffic.

PEDESTRIANIZED CORE

In every neighborhood, the location where businesses and restaurants are largely clumped should be identified and this area should be pedestrianized. This improves business and tax revenue, by generating foot traffic, the number one determinant of an urban businesses success. Contrary to outdated business  “wisdom,” car parking is not only not a major determinant in urban business success, and is actually detrimental to it. It wastes extraordinary amounts of space and creates an unpleasant environment hostile to pedestrians. In the age of online shopping urban businesses can not compete with convenience and must instead compete with experience.

Currently, the businesses in the central core currently are losing a lot of business from customers in the non-immediate area that would come to the restaurants and shops more often but do not currently because the process of riding a bike or walking to them is too arduous to make casual trips worth it.

Access to parking for residents on the side streets can be maintained via a paid permit system if necessary to keep vehicle volumes extremely low in the pedestrianized zone. This will make parking for the residents nearby that do want to drive easier and less stressful and greatly reduce or eliminate much of the car traffic through residential streets as people circle the block looking for open spots.

The Pedestrianized core should also function as a central hub for a larger street design network of protected bike lanes and bike boulevards.

To support the businesses and enable freedom of movement and safety for the citizens of the neighborhood, bike lanes and pedestrian overhauls should be undertaken in Astoria immediately on:

• Bike Boulevard on 31st Ave.
• Protected Bike Lane on 33rd St
• Bike Boulevard on Newtown Ave
• Continuous lane fixes on Vernon Blvd in front of Rainey and Queensbridge Park
• Connection of Vernon Blvd to Astoria Park
• East/West PBL on 23rd Ave or Ditmars Blvd.

Benefits of a Pedestrianized Core

- Increased business

- Easier to park for residents

- Less noise for residents

- Far more pleasant environment for restaurant patrons

- Cleaner air

STREET TREATMENTS

DAYLIGHTING

Daylighting is the act of keeping the space 20 ft from crosswalks clear, so drivers and pedestrians can see each other. It is required by state law, but NYC has exempted itself from implementing it to maximize parking spaces. This leads to many unnecessary deaths, especially children who are not tall enough to see over car hoods, and often can not be seen by drivers before being hit. Every intersection in NYC could be daylit immediately by following NYS law, and should be further enforced by filling the space with bike share racks, curbs, bioswales and small plants, or bollards to prevent car parking.

This was done in the city of Hoboken, and has led to a remarkable drop in traffic fatalities in all modes – pedestrians, cyclists and car passengers.

Being killed by a car is the #1 cause of death in children under 13 by a wide measure. Daylighting every intersection is not just a street treatment, it is a moral imperative.

Many other treatments should also be widely used, far beyond our current implementation schedule. These include:

Nearly every intersection should have leading pedestrian intervals, to allow pedestrians to cross before car traffic is allowed to move.

UNIVERSALITY

These treatments must be applied at scale, universally.

Our current approach of doing a treatment here and there in small numbers is like renting an apartment realizing the landlord didn't finish the floor renovations. Instead, there are unsafe conditions everywhere with nails popping up through the floorboard all over the place. In such a situation, nobody would go around bending a nail flat here and there and maybe covering another. We’d fix all the nails. We’d make the entire floor safe.

CAR FREE BIKE HIGHWAYS

According to the city’s own data, there are typically over 600,000 trips taken by micromobility per day, and nearly 1 in 8 residents ride regularly.

This is despite less than 1% of the road surface being dedicated to micromobility, and a general feeling among many that the activity is unsafe. With infrastructure that actually allows all ages and abilities to participate (which our bike lanes are supposed to be anyway) this number would likely be several times higher.

That is where Car Free Bike Highways come in. They should be designed with bollards or large concrete planters to allow for modal filtering, allowing micromobility to pass while blocking larger motor vehicles.

These streets should be designed and specifically planned through neighborhoods, not along the periphery, and should be planned with the explicit goal of providing micromobility with the most direct and convenient routes to the larger area’s job centers, especially Manhattan. Where these streets cross roads with cars, there should be physical infrastructure to slow the cars and make them aware they are crossing the bike highways.

This includes raised crosswalks at the intersections, paint and signs in the intersection, textured road surfaces and chicanes just before the intersections.

Raised continuous crosswalks slow cars at intersections and prioritize pedestrians

Because access to emergency and city services must still be maintained on these streets, the “back side” of the streets should have an opening in the bollards so firetrucks and other vehicles can enter going against the designed traffic flow.

These streets will also form the core of a network designed to enable freedom of movement for many who are typically excluded now, including children, the elderly, and disabled who will in the coming years have access to long range electric wheelchairs that can serve as full transportation systems if they have access to safe, car free infrastructure.

The climate crisis, livability standard, and basic fairness require us to make the city safe, appealing, and accessible for these groups as well.

CONCLUSION

A lot of people will say this plan is unrealistic and wildly beyond the operational ability of the NYC DOT to execute. And in some ways they are right. It is currently beyond the scope of the DOT.

But perhaps the reasons for that need to be questioned. Why is it that in the richest city in the world, the seat of American power, the so-called “Greatest City in the World,” can not do what a small town in Belgium can.

For more information, visit our community  

MicromobilityNYC