Various experts weigh in on New York’s Broadway experiment

A better place for everyone?

Wendy Natt, Mar 11, 09.

A group of planners, architects, authors, and a libertarian policy expert express their range of opinions on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s planned experiment to turn several sections of Broadway, including Herald Square and Times Square, into a pedestrian mall, both to improve traffic flow and to provide the city with more outdoor, pedestrian public spaces. The New York Times Freakonomics blog asked these individuals to discuss the potential value of large, urban, pedestrian spaces, factors that have led to the success or failure of other pedestrian malls in the US, and whether they think the Broadway idea has a chance of becoming a popular, economically viable pedestrian attraction. Here are a few excerpts:

Sam Staley, director of urban land use policy at the Reason Foundation says that existing travel patterns along Broadway must be the guide to planning these areas:
“Times Square and Herald Square are key destinations for tourists, day-trippers, workers and city residents. Given Manhattan’s extraordinarily high density and mix of land uses, a pedestrian mall along these blocks of Broadway could be viable. The key is to use the pedestrian mall to reinforce existing walking, shopping and travel patterns. Anyone around Times Square on a Friday or Saturday night probably already wonders why that area is not a pedestrian mall given the foot traffic and vibrant retail street life. The danger is to use the mall concept as a way to ‘re-engineer’ the retail market or pedestrian travel in the city.”

Steve Davies, Senior VP of the nonprofit planning and design group Project for Public Spaces, while optimistic about Mayor Bloomberg’s plan, says it is imperative that the City defines multiple, enduring uses for these spaces if they are to attract a wide range of visitors and have long-term success as public spaces:
“Successful efforts to create pedestrian-only places are driven by a strong vision for how the space should be used and managed. New Yorkers have already shown great enthusiasm for the newly created public spaces and plazas on Broadway and Madison Square. To ensure the success of this latest project — two of the city’s most important and iconic public places — it is essential that the new spaces offer more than just seats amid potted plants.”

Randall O’Toole, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute says that past failures in pedestrian malls - he uses the examples of Kalamazoo, MI and Buffalo, NY - have shown us two things:
“First, in most situations, automobiles drive retail. Pedestrian malls don’t create pedestrians; they only work on streets that are already dominated by pedestrian traffic.

The second lesson is that cities are very slow to learn from their mistakes. Once a street is closed to cars, it can take decades to reopen it even if closure is quickly followed by going-out-of-business sales.”

O’Toole says the car-free zones on Broadway may or may not create enough pedestrian traffic to thrive. He warns that any measures to bar traffic from Broadway should be both experimental and easily reversed.

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