> Have you seen the streets in lower Manhattan? If they get any narrower there wouldnt be any room for cars.

It'd be well within the realm of reason to consider closing a bunch of the narrowest/most heavily foot-trafficked streets in lower manhattan to cars and only allowing delivery trucks during certain hours of the day. It's an extremely impractical place to drive anyway.

One thing Tokyo does on smaller streets is have no sidewalk at all, but people can just walk in the middle of the street.

Because there's so much foot traffic on these streets, the only reason you'd drive down them is if you really need to

I don't think this works as well in planned cities like NY without getting rid of all the one way roads to offer alternative paths

I noticed this behaviour in the smaller streets of Hong Kong as well. Makes a ton of sense to me.

I would imagine the advent of delivery drones would be a nice solution to getting supplies in and out of dense urban areas, after which there would be no need for allowing vehicles (other than emergency or public transportation).

The biggest delivery truck traffic is for furniture, goods (one or two UPS trucks for an entire building), or garbage. No amount of drone tech can reduce/eliminate truck traffic for an entire building.

The slightly more sane idea would be to look in the other direction, and build underground. That would be extremely expensive and have to deal with all sorts of issues, but at least it's physically possible.

The actually realistic solution is to focus on developing housing and infrastructure in the outer boroughs; Brooklyn and Queens are full of the absolute worst kind of inefficient quasi-suburban accumulated sprawl.

Or build the street up 1 level and have an underground level on the current street - isn't this basically how Chicago built sewers?

close. at chicago, they also lifted the buildings 1 floor up. if you don't do that, building owners will be mad at the loss of their first floor.

Yeah good luck getting a drone to deliver a 400pound pallet of soda.

Oh really, tons of bike lanes? Well, there are at least an order of magnitude more car lanes than bike lanes, so surely reallocating some of them for bikes will be no problem then, since there's a veritable smorgasbord of space for cars as it is. Bike lanes can handle much higher peak loads of people, so they're a more efficient use of space.

> Most New Yorker's don't drive - they walk, bike, take the train, or taxi/uber.

Yes, and those non-car modes should obviously have more surface space. If way more New Yorkers walk than drive, why is there more street space for cars than peds?

> Don't you think if the answers were this simple someone would have done this already?

No. Politically it can be very difficult to take space away from cars, even when it's obviously the right thing to do.

It would be actually easy to take space from cars in boroughs other than Manhattan. It just takes some push and a champion.

Really? I had the opposite experience. If you take away even one parking spot, people in Brooklyn go absolutely insane. The city was considering putting in bike lanes in my neighborhood, and tons of people showed up to the meeting in opposition to it. They all had their own reasons, but it was pretty clear that the 2 real motivations were a general dislike of cyclists, and a desire to not lose parking spots.

http://gothamist.com/2016/06/22/yell_louder_cyclists.php

Probably because supporters rarely show up to city council, just the opposition

So those three whiney obnoxious people get there way while the reasonable people suffer

Why doesn't someone just build a huge commercial parking lot, and rent out parking spots? In a dense city like NY, it may actually work

There are plenty of these too. But street parking is always free or at least ~an order of magnitude cheaper, which is why people don't want to lose them

Less snarky answer than most people are giving you: street parking is free, while parking garages cost like a significant portion of your monthly rent per month.

There's parking garages all over the city.

Incredible idea, I wonder why nobody thought of that.

Step 1: Find a huge open space that can be paved over.

Japan has giant vertical parking garages with automated lifts. 15 stories, but it only requires a small piece of land. I'm sure you could make some money on that

Getting rid of cars is a feature, not a bug.

Spoken like a true car hater. I don't like cars either, but getting rid of an old way of travel is a lot more difficult than a simple software switch.

What's funny about that characterization is, living in the suburbs, I spend quite a bit of time driving recreationally, and I can't rely on public transit, so I appreciate cars a lot. However, Downtown Manhattan is not the suburbs, and it's an inappropriate place for passenger vehicles. I don't think it qualifies for the "old way of travelling" bucket in that context: subways are already the standard.

This is Manhattan we're talking about. Walking + transit gets you pretty much everywhere.

That can be hard to accomplish without also making life more difficult for ambulances, police, and fire departments.

Not at all. In Jerusalem, Yafo Street is now pedestrian and light-rail only. Even still, police vehicles routinely drive on Yafo Street, and coexist with the light rail by not parking on the tracks. When police vehicles have their sirens on, pedestrians get out of the way. Deliveries occur on side streets and alleyways.

The Jerusalem municipality closed literally the busiest street in Jerusalem to private vehicular traffic and the results could not be better. It turns out, "induced demand" isn't just an idea which explains why you get more traffic when you build more highway lanes, it can also explain how to get more foot traffic, too. So business is booming, and the area is vitalizing even more.

Manhattan has 4x the population density of Jerusalem (twice the population in half the space). On top of that, it's an island so alternate traffic routes sometimes don't exist.

Is only Yafo blocked? Blocking a street is one thing, but eliminating cars from Lower Manhattan is another.

Vienna's city center is car-free except for police and ambulances. It's a medieval city so it's much worse than Manhattan in regards to narrow streets and not having been designed for cars.

It does have AMAZING transportation which NY might lack though (haven't been in NY yet).

The main shopping street is car-free too. It's great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places

Ban all passenger vehicles, cut the size of the roads, expand the subway: you've just made life easier for emergency vehicles to get where they're going. Taxis are horrendously space inefficient in a city choking on people.

I think getting rid of cars isn't going to fix the problems the people in this article are complaining about. It's the age old problem that plague all popular cities around the world: tourists versus residents. And having visited places like Florence, Paris and Barcelona, I'd rather see the residents get their way.

Residents aren't the ones with cars. No one in this area own a car.

Except the residents (and workers) use taxis, Ubers, black cars, etc. And, as the article notes, the local businesses need to get deliveries, repair people, etc. I would guess the issue doesn't come so much from owners' private cars traveling through the area.

I was adding that I made the mistake of passing through Times Square on my way to some destination a number of months back. As in the article, you literally could not walk on the sidewalk which was effectively blocked by the mass of people. Times Square (like areas of downtown) is an extreme example, but things do get really crowded. (And you can't just do away with road traffic there. You're at intersection of two major N-S avenues.)

I'm ok with having cars drive through the area. I just don't approve of people leaving them idle on the street. Taxis, Ubers, and black cars aren't parking. Delivery trucks are stopping, but only for a few minutes. A third (or more) of the street space is devoted to vehicles that aren't in use. Those cars could be placed in garages or parked on the street in another part of town where the owner can subway to where they're going.

Ideally, streets would be used only by pedestrians, but I acknowledge that's not feasible.

Couldn't they eliminate more of the street and make them one way? I feel like you would make a single lane then, but then driving wouldn't use so much space.

> make them one way?

They are one way. Almost the whole of Manhattan is.

Broadway is already narrow. Seventh not so much, but car traffic there can frequently be as bad as foot traffic. I'm not sure what a good answer would be.

>Broadway is already narrow. Seventh not so much, but car traffic there can frequently be as bad as foot traffic. I'm not sure what a good answer would be.

Add second floor above the road. And on top of it, a third floor.

> Add second floor above the road. And on top of it, a third floor.

Like an expressway? What about exits, turn-offs, on-ramps? Where would the city find the land to build these?

Most vehicles driving around Times Square are at least fairly local; they're not looking to bypass Midtown Manhattan. If they wanted to, they would probably have driven the short distance to FDR Drive or the West Side Highway.

You put the heavy things on the bottom. The lighter things on top.

(Literal plexiglass cieling)

Pedestrians

Bikes (if not with pedestrians)

Transit vehicles (in what is now a service tunnel/grid)

Yes, this would actually require ventilation engineering, but a city should anyway. You might also push for highly restricted emissions vehicles. CNG, Hydrogen, and Electric come to mind as things to consider for a white-list.

This is an interesting idea. It would require a sea change in the city.

You'd have to fight a lot of business owners. Most transit in Manhattan is by foot, and you will have separated pedestrians from commercial entryways. As it stands, a great deal of storefronts—even in the most commercial and highly trafficked parts of the city—are in mixed-use buildings, with apartments in the upper stories. Now most potential customers, instead of walking past shop after shop, are walking past residences. Signs may point out what lies below. Presumably this would cut into businesses which rely on customers popping in without planning to; if you weren't going to exit onto that block for something else anyway, why make the climb down to commercial level just for a little something that caught your eye?

And how did it catch your eye? Stores could no longer entice with a storefront, by showing off their inventory and sales. Restaurants, bakeries, and coffee shops could no longer waft out onto potential guests. They'd be in virtual basements, and would be much less attractive for that reason alone. Manhattan has a history of severing its residents from one thing or another—waterfronts are the first to come to mind—but I would be surprised to see them do this.

Of course, not everything has to remain as is and the city may evolve (as it has before), but this sort of plan would require much more work than building a tiered roadway.

Maybe in the future, when 'brick and mortar' starts to fail even in densely populated areas, the problems described above won't be problems anymore. But then, neither would the traffic; and the tiered roadway would be redundant, and not worth the money to maintain (nor the daylight lost).

I have yet to see a single DT Manhattan denizen in my professional circle who does not subsist solely on Chinese takeout and phone order pizza (sarcasm:)

So you move up your business to the pedestrian floor level.

Part of the problem is a lack of alleys, so delivery trucks have to park in the street and block traffic. If zoning required an off-street loading dock area for all buildings it would start to help as new buildings are built. I'm not sure if that's a rule or not.

A much easier solution is to dedicate a space on each block to deliveries only, and make parking a car in it a massive fine/immediate license suspension.

>Part of the problem is a lack of alleys, so delivery trucks have to park in the street and block traffic.

There are walled-off backyards and "gardens" within big blocks. Just make them open

Courtyards are largest where alleyways would be least needed, on residential blocks.

For most blocks where unloading is a problem, courtyards are narrow, uneven spaces that frequently do not run the length of the 'interior' block.

The city would also have to justify reclaiming two lots per block—on either end of the courtyard/alleyway—in a city which already has a housing shortage.

Where's the space for that?

It comes out of the building footprint. Building owners won't be happy, but everyone else would.

Residents use the subway. Taxis are mostly for visitors: tourists, or day trippers from the periphery.

What are "black cars"?

Private car services. Like a taxi, only prebooked. Uber uses many black car companies in NYC.

As untog says. Limos in other words. In addition to people booking them for theater or such, it's very common for downtown law firms, investment banks, etc. to have an account with a private car firm so that people working late can just call up to get one to take them home.

Black cars aren't limos. A more accurate way to describe them would be unmarked taxis that are dispatched not hailed. What us New Yorkers call a car service.

They have "limo licenses" but yeah, few if any of them are actual limousines in wheelbase / shape. Most are towncars or upscale SUVs.

> Black cars aren't limos.

What's the difference?

Standard definition of a limo is an extended wheelbase and partition between the passenger and the driver. I suppose one could argue the details but that's how the distinction is understood in an NYC context at least.

Might be size (I'm not in NY).

Private car services and/or illegal taxies.

> If they get any narrower there wouldnt be any room for cars.

Relevant: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-36791485

"A spokesman said the project would contribute to the mayor's aim of improving air quality and make Oxford Street "a far safer and more pleasant place to visit"."

The problems may be more political than technical.

As uncommon as car ownership is in NYC, it's incredible how much friction there is around reducing roadway for cars. Every bike lane added in the city is a hard fought battle. So I think you're absolutely right—the solutions are well understood. Changing car culture is difficult.

There's NYC and there's NYC. Manhattan is a small part of NYC: Staten Island, you must have a car. Large swathes of Queens and even Brooklyn have no pub transport (buses can be pretty awful due to traffic although they do exist). I think that's a big block of people opposed. Another political consideration is that the State of New York has control over elements of policy that would otherwise be anti-car. For example, the congestion tax they wanted to bring in, it was the state government that killed that.

I still agree that congestion control, disincentives for car use, wider sidewalks, all should be done. Some of us wish NYC could declare independence so we could choose our own policy, but that's a different story...

Perhaps because while most people don't own cars, they do depend on them (even if only in special circumstances) in the form of cabs.

If that were what was mostly going on there'd be a heck of lot less on street parking. Essentially none of Manhattan should have any on street parking at all. Some standing zones for deliveries and pick up / drop offs (but not loitering forever, I'm looking at you black cars) and that's it. You'd be able to cut width of a typical street by 1/3.

You don't understand why people might like cabs, trucks, busses, and emergency vehicles? People don't drive their own cars already.

None of those need street parking – in fact, you'd dramatically improve their experience if the parking lanes were replaced with dedicated transit / bike lanes, etc. and a few dedicated taxi/etc. loading spaces.

One of the reasons for this is that street parking is usually subsidized well below the market rates and so drivers will spend a significant amount of time looking for a cheaper parking space rather than simply parking in a garage, and they're using road capacity until they either find a space (and then block the lane while they slowly attempt to parallel park) or give up and pay to park off-street:

“In 2006, surveyors interviewed drivers stopped at a traffic signal in the SoHo district of Manhattan, and 28 percent reported they were cruising for curb parking. A similar study in Brooklyn found that 45 percent of drivers were cruising. The same results might be found on many other streets in New York because off-street parking is generally far more expensive than on-street parking. In midtown Manhattan, for example, the price for the first hour of off-street parking is often about $20, while curb parking is only $1. Parking for an hour at the curb saves $19, but drivers first have to cruise to find a space on the street.”

http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/CruisingForParkingAccess.pdf

Narrow lanes decrease car speeds and reduce accidents and fatalities.

>If they get any narrower there wouldnt be any room for cars.

Americans like gigantic cars. They need to make them smaller, like in Japan

Get rid of cars in the area? The area is easily walkable for its size. Doesn't Paris do this downtown?