PAU | N.Y.C. | Not Your Car—Why we the people must “dominate the streets.”

N.Y.C. | Not Your Car—Why we the people must “dominate the streets.”

New York, NY

Program

Transit Proposal

Client

The New York Times

Collaborators

Transportation: BuroHappold Engineering

Size

New York City-Wide

Status

Ongoing Advocacy Project

Following the Covid crisis of 2020-2022 and the eventual development of a seemingly viable vaccine, New Yorkers along with a fellow urban citizenry the world over returned to the same polluted, congested, and unequal cities they had in the past. The question remains, as it did before the crisis: can we collectively envision a more just urban future in which we the people “dominate the streets?”

During quarantine and months of remote work, from New York to New Delhi, brilliant blue skies hovered above our cities, an ephemeral side effect of our global pandemic. With traffic worldwide drastically reduced in response to the painful economic shutdowns, our streets were largely devoid of their usual vehicular congestion; global carbon emissions were reduced substantially. Such a dramatic transformation of our streets—the building block of any city’s public realm—demands more debate on their true purpose given both the pre-COVID pedestrianization measures implemented along thoroughfares like New York’s 14th Street and the riverfront of Paris, as well as the protester drumbeat of “Whose Streets? Our Streets,” a question that demands answers in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and countless other black citizens on streets that are so ruthlessly patrolled. In N.Y.C. (“Not Your Car”), PAU, in collaboration with Farhad Manjoo and the Op Ed desk of the New York Times, explored the potential of our streets in a unique moment of political upheaval and environmental crisis to consider the inequities and predation caused by private cars in our supposedly public realm.

Building on the work of similar past proposals listed below, PAU in conjunction with the New York Times and our transportation planning partners at BuroHappold propose a singular, sweeping change—to ban all private vehicles in Manhattan other than taxis, buses, emergency and freight vehicles, Access-A-Ride, and ride share services—in order to transform not only Manhattan but all of the boroughs that are forced to bear its traffic. We believe such a change would usher forward a vastly more equitable, ecological, and enjoyable city that would recover faster from its current economic and inequity crises because as our proposal illustrates, our streets would engender fairer health outcomes, better climate resilience, responsible waste management, and faster, more pleasant commutes for essential workers who today must compete for invaluable space on our clogged regional arterials with those wealthy enough to drive into and within Manhattan.

In crafting such a provocation in the service of public debate, we eschew the image of a techno-futurist bourgeoisie utopia that is often associated with such proposals; instead, PAU sees this proposal in the service of everyday New Yorkers and achievable in the near term, using existing infrastructures, technologies, landscapes, and NYCDOT street furniture templates. Beyond the transportation and air quality benefits, which are legion, of particular focus for this study are the spatial potentials of freeing up traffic lanes and curbside parking for public use.

PAU believes that streets belong to the people, to the bus riders and bicyclists and walkers and strap-hangers that give New York its energy, its waning sense of egalitarianism, its sense that regardless of who we are or where we are from, we meet on the sidewalks eyeball to eyeball. To promote such positive social friction, we propose a series of public, commercial, social, and transit infrastructure projects alongside the private vehicle ban that would benefit all New Yorkers, regardless of borough, ability, race, economic status, age, or commute. In addition to more space for pedestrians and cyclists and wheelchair users, and improved accessibility with the addition of mid-block crossings, PAU proposes the following street side infrastructure components that communities could agree upon and deploy through a self-determined process. Such components could include homeless outreach stations for social workers and staff members of the Department of Homeless Services, employment centers, bike repair facilities, library micro-branches, Pre-K facilities, more bus stop shelters, public seating areas, new self-cleaning public toilets, multi-purpose canopies, and more formal market stalls for street vendors. Street side initiatives would also include solid waste management and composting sites (helping to rid our current condition of mountains of sidewalk garbage).

The proposal offers health benefits across our boroughs, such as reductions in childhood asthma in disadvantaged communities that have historically suffered from commuter vehicular congestion. In terms of larger environmental impact, we anticipate that the project would result in a substantial reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (which also correlates to declines in public health) of up to 25% and carbon dioxide reductions of up to 30% in Manhattan, and 10% and 12% respectively in the outer boroughs (BuroHappold). In doing so, “Not Your Car” would become a model for other cities across the globe, while also following the strides that came before through global congestion pricing and other initiatives in urban areas.

In most cities, New York included, a staggering 30% of land is dedicated to roadbed, land that is disproportionately used by private vehicles, often empty while parked curbside. Yet the vast majority of New Yorkers, more than 85%, do not own private cars and have little say in how this shared public space is used. In terms of ecological impact, most people are now also familiar with the intense environmental damage of the influx of automobiles in daily life, which account for 24% of global carbon emissions (IEA).

New York City is a particularly bad offender in terms of its lenience on private vehicles in Manhattan. Private autos comprise approximately 56% of the 705,000 vehicles (auto, van, taxi, truck) entering into the Central Business District daily. This creates massive traffic slowdowns; in 2019, travel speed in Manhattan was about 7mph and 5mph in Midtown. Alternatively, when streets, such as 14^th street, were closed to private vehicles, the M14 bus speed increased 24% alongside ridership up 30%. Similarly, a Queens to Brooklyn connection, LIC to Dumbo for example, could also be improved by a Manhattan car ban, reducing a 57-minute bus trip to 35-minutes when coupled with traffic reduction spillover from Manhattan. All in all, a ban on private cars in Manhattan would account for a 70% reduction in existing vehicular traffic in Manhattan, leaving far more room for public transit, deliveries, emergency vehicles, bikes, and pedestrians.

Of course, as noted above, PAU is not the first to consider the profoundly positive impacts of a private car ban in parts of New York City, joining the likes of urban theorists Percival and Paul Goodman dating back decades, to our dear colleague the indefatigable transportation thinker Sam Schwartz, and other projects such as Driverless NYC, Perkins Eastman, The Street Vendor Project, and BuroHappold, who also contributed tirelessly to the work for this project. However, one only need a taste of the possible to imagine the probable. Experiments such as Summer Streets in New York City offer a view of the road ahead, and the populist demand for such programs and ideas will not go quietly into the night.

Manhattan Bridge

West 46th Street

Park Avenue

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd at 125th St

FDR Drive

46th St.

125th St.

Park Ave.

FDR

Banning private cars from Manhattan could decrease traffic by 60% in the borough and 8% in surrounding areas, making bus commutes from the surrounding boroughs and counties much quicker.