On repeated visits to NY, frustrated by the inefficiency of getting from A to B, one of my repeating dreams is the idea of closing every other street (both N-S and E-W) in the grid system to cars, and only allowing bikes, scooters, skateboards, and maybe buses. (Delivery traffic strictly outside daytime hours).
Imagine the transport utopia that would gradually develop, as more any more people not only feel safe to ride bikes, but realised that it represented the most efficient solution.
That sounds a little like the Barcelona superblock model, which I like. Less transit oriented and more "creating spaces for people to stay/live/eat/etc" oriented though.
Wow that is a fantastic idea that I would love to come to the States. Walking around in the city I always felt like this [0]. I have been really pushing for a car-free downtown on Sundays, its amazing how "human" you feel when you can walk around and interact without the drone and smell of traffic being a constant presence.
I live in Barcelona and while I personally love the Superilles, many of the locals who live near/in them hate them. They all say it's a huge inconvenience. That said, as a Canadian coming from one of the most car-centric cities in Canada (Calgary), anything that focuses on not driving is refreshingly wonderful.
I think if streets were limited to delivery traffic and construction you would be fine. Note that this needs to be real deliveries. Sort of like pornography I know it when I see it, but I'm not sure I can define it well enough for a law to work.
You could ban delivery vehicles over a certain size so that only small autonomous delivery bot could do the last 100 yards between the main drop off spot and the delivery van/truck.
Time to disrupt the notion of 'delivery': Sign up to drop off a package or two and get access to the internal city streets for x hours. What could go wrong?
That is why it is hard. Delivery needs to have a definition that doesn't allow that. Probably it needs to be so strict that a delivery driver cannot even buy a soda at the store they are delivering to.
I like this but I think we could go further in that we probably don't need 4 lanes for bikes and scooters. It would be super awesome to turn these center lanes into a space for food trucks or farmers markets, etc. It would be interesting to have just two lanes in each direction like this that formed a square or rectangle and see what happens.
this is happenning. more and more streets in Manhattan are being closed to traffic and they become just walking places. For an example, look at a good chunk of Broadway around Time Square. If I remember correctly, some urban planner told Mayor Bloomberg about the Copenhagen model, and he liked it, and we embarked in a multi-decade plan to move in that direction.
Reducing car traffic and increasing pedestrian walking areas in NYC is very good. However, bike lanes are not a real answer. NYC needs better subway systems... more lines and more on time.
If I recall correctly some residential parts of Seattle have a system like this. They don't outright disallow cars, but every other street is full of sufficient traffic calming measures that make it highly undesirable to drive down.
Portland, OR has a number of these "bike boulevards". They make a huge difference. It's not every other street. But given a car-heavy street that is a major path from A to B, a parallel one block away is designated. Cars are still allowed to use them, of course, but not exactly encouraged.
Frequent speed bumps are laid down, and (just like for its partner car-centric road) all cross intersections have stop signs leading _into_ the boulevard. They're generally in good surface shape. You can roll right along at full speed, mostly just watching for pedestrians (the lack of cars also makes them pleasant for walking).
Not really possible without a mostly-grid road system, of course, but where it is, it's awesome.
On repeated visits to NY, frustrated by the inefficiency of getting from A to B, one of my repeating dreams is the idea of closing every other street (both N-S and E-W) in the grid system to cars, and only allowing bikes, scooters, skateboards, and maybe buses. (Delivery traffic strictly outside daytime hours).
Imagine the transport utopia that would gradually develop, as more any more people not only feel safe to ride bikes, but realised that it represented the most efficient solution.