Posted on 01/30/2020 8:08:02 PM PST by karpov
As worsening traffic has put a stranglehold on New York, the country’s largest city has moved to squeeze out cars, taking away street space to make room for bikes and pedestrians, and all but banning vehicles from a major Manhattan thoroughfare.
Now, New York is considering an even more startling step: eliminating one-third of the lanes on one of the city’s busiest highways.
That is the key recommendation from a panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio that was tasked with coming up with a rescue plan for a key stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which is rapidly falling apart under the weight of 153,000 vehicles a day, more than three times what it was built to handle.
Without an overhaul, parts of it could become unsafe and unfit for traffic within five years.
The idea of shrinking the highway to four lanes from six is a remarkable shift for the city, which like the nation, has been shaped by a car-centric culture and is now wrestling with the consequences, including gridlocked streets, polluted air and rising pedestrian and cyclist deaths.
Some elected leaders and policymakers are increasingly recognizing that the future health of the city depends on making it less accommodating to cars.
The notion of eliminating highway lanes is realistic because of another ambitious effort to move cars off the road: congestion pricing. Next year, New York will become the first American city to charge a fee to drive into the busiest areas of Manhattan.
The panel’s recommendation would still have to be adopted by the city’s Transportation Department.
Olivia Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, said city officials were reviewing the findings. “This is a thorny problem that defies easy solutions,” she said. “The external panel has put fresh ideas on the table.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
As a structural engineer, I once belonged to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Lane reduction is one of the tools that civil engineers are using to implement "Smart Growth." Modern civil engineers are using lane reduction, sidewalk jetties, roundabouts, curving straight roads, adding bike lanes, and adding forced turn lanes under the guise of Smart Growth (sometimes named traffic calming) which is part of Agenda 21 to drive people to live in cities to avoid using roadways that no longer work well. I dropped my ASCE membership twenty years ago so as not to associate with socialists in the engineering profession. The lunacy of todays American civil engineers would send a Roman General into a fit.
Should eliminate all outbound lanes. Keep them all in NY.
DeBlasios plan for increased homeless population : less housing
Plan for long wait to have surgery : close more. hospitals.
Bunch of studies done that this actually makes traffic worse and more dangerous, which seems like common sense but common sense is largely lacking in progressives.
If NYC wanted to be efficient and modern, it would make sense to have a significant number of park and ride facilities ringing the city. These would have to be bright, well-patrolled, clean, safe, parking areas (including new multi-level garages) with a well-oiled mechanism for transferring drivers to trains/subway lines to go from the parking areas to anywhere in Manhattan or the buroughs.
Many years ago a very corrupt Salt Lake City mayor named Didi Corradini publicly told people to not bring their cars to the city when all this road construction was going on for the Olympics. We responded by not going at all. After all these years the downtown area never fully recovered. Lol. Those idiots made it hard to get downtown so business moved south. The fool thought all the businesses would come back begging for space. Morons.
They could just increase the speed limits...
Is there now a tent/pooping lane in each direction?
Keep money for cars, spend it on something else.
Simple.
And don’t plan ahead.
There is that slinky effect from automatic transmissions.
Thats ridiculous. reducing lanes on the BQE will make it worse.
It needs to be ADDED TO.
I drove it for decades commercially and personally.
DeBlasio is a communist koranus-licking moron.
Fastest way to reduce congestion is to BAN ALL CITY AND STATE GOVT passenger vehicles not used for emergencies.
MAKE ALL CITY & STATE EMPLOYEES take public transportation. When enough of them get raped and killed, maybe then they will also clean up the subways.
Then remove all high rises over 20 stories. Obiviously all the traffic will back into the feeder roads into the highway if the flow is impeded by reducing the.main highway.
Destroy the highway entirely and there will be zero trafic by that logic.
In reality they will have to block off two lanes at a time to repair it and they know it. The real problem is the highway repair funds have been misappropriated. Politicians loves dem gas taxes.
Then why dont politicians walk to work?
You should explain what a tent pooping lane is. Most have not been to Seattle.
It’s when homeless move their tent cities onto the overpasses. The bathroom facilities are sitting on the concrete side barriers. So convertibles passing under are not a good thing. And never let your washer run low it rains mud.
Many major cities are doing similar type things, eliminating traffic lanes, offramp lanes, and adding bike lanes, etc. Their idea is to force people out of cars and into mass transit through sheer frustration. In NYC it is already the case, but other cities are approving mixed use construction where the bottom floors are commercial and upper floors residential/commercial - in essence keep people sort of trapped into their neighborhoods or reliant on mass transit.
The thing that gets me, particularly about NYC Manhattan, is that it is nearly 100% dependent on importing goods, produce, foods etc. I get out there once in a while and the numbers of commercial vehicles is extraordinary. Just imagine how many trucks each hotel receives every day - they haul away dirty sheets and towels, restock fresh linen, and replenish their kitchens and minibars and restaurants on a daily basis. That’s just hotels. Add in all the other commercial enterprises, and the residents’ own needs. The entire city of 8 million residents is almost 100% dependent on services provided from outside the city. And now they want to make it more difficult and more expensive to service their needs.
Turn it all into a bicycle lane.
Forcing voters by Social Engineering is always a winning strategy. /LOL
Wow. I am really sorry to hear that, E. It really stinks but they’re making life so difficult for residents of one of the world’s greatest cities.
I am so tired of politicians meddling in our lives.
I recall this process in Toronto on a lesser scale. The businesses said people in cars have money. Cyclists and pedestrians less so.
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