
Downside of Lower Manhattan’s Boom: It’s Too Crowded - dankohn1
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/nyregion/lower-manhattan-crowding.html
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TulliusCicero
> Just to get to his apartment in the financial district, he has to contend
> with hordes of commuters and selfie-snapping tourists clogging narrow
> sidewalks.

So make the sidewalks wider. I can think of nowhere in the US more appropriate
to allocate more space to sidewalks than Manhattan.

> Ms. Starr, for one, has all but stopped using the Citi Bike system to
> commute. She used to ride from her apartment in TriBeCa to her office on
> Maiden Lane in the financial district nearly every day. But as more
> pedestrians and cyclists filled the streets, she had to concentrate to avoid
> running into anyone or being run into.

Sounds like they need separated bike lanes then.

Manhattan is the densest major city* in the country. The amount of space
allocated to cars on the roads should be the bare minimum: enough for
emergency vehicles, business deliveries, surface transit, the handicapped, a
limited number of taxis. With only a tiny amount of space per person, you
really have to push for denser forms of transportation. Personal vehicle use
should be at a minimum in Manhattan.

> In Lower Manhattan, people are not the only obstacle. Construction on
> streets and buildings is everywhere. A labyrinth of imposing metal
> scaffolding hems in available walkways and forces pedestrians closer
> together, or into the street.

The solution here is to cut into space on the road to provide more walking
space.

* I know it's only part of a city but you know what I mean

~~~
BorisMelnik
Have you seen the streets in lower Manhattan? If they get any narrower there
wouldnt be any room for cars. There are also already tons of bike lanes. Most
New Yorker's don't drive - they walk, bike, take the train, or taxi/uber.
Don't you think if the answers were this simple someone would have done this
already?

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

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

~~~
solatic
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.

~~~
criddell
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.

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dankohn1
I commute from Tribeca to the WeWork Charging Bull via Citibike along the
busiest [0] and one of the best separated bike lanes in America. I do have to
deal with lots of tourists walking on the bike lanes (which might be improved
with better signage), but I still feel incredibly privileged to have such a
pleasant commute.

Within the Financial District, the solution is to de-prioritize cars and make
more room for people. The initiative of closing off FiDi to all through
traffic and sharing streets equally between people, bikes, and cars [1] is
incredibly promising, but was poorly marketed and executed. I rode along the
streets with my 7 and 9yo sons and we had cars honking at us, even as we moved
at a reasonable speed.

[0] [http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/10/19/at-riverside-park-
look...](http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/10/19/at-riverside-park-looking-to-
more-bike-lanes-to-soothe-bikeped-conflict/) [1]
[http://www.streetsblog.org/2016/06/16/new-twist-for-
summer-s...](http://www.streetsblog.org/2016/06/16/new-twist-for-summer-
streets-this-year-a-low-car-zone-way-downtown/)

------
bobbyadamson
This is mainly a problem during rush hour, when traffic is always a problem
everywhere. It might be exacerbated in that area but so much so that an
average resident feels like they should be complaining about it? If your
commute is from TriBeCa to FiDi (adjacent neighborhoods) and you're upset
about losing 10 minutes to 'tourists' (even though, more often than not,
people holding me up are clearly people who live here who don't know what
common courtesy is) then talk to my coworker who lives on Staten Island and
has to traverse water and take four forms of transportation to get to work, or
my old boss who comes down from the tippy top of Washington Heights through
some of the biggest tourist traps in the city and has to deal with more stops
than you can count on your fingers.

I live in the Lower East Side and we like to go to the Financial District
every now and then because NO ONE IS THERE. Go there for dinner or drinks on a
Friday night or go walk around and make your way toward Battery Park on a nice
Saturday afternoon. It's almost creepy, like a ghost town.

> It means never getting that babysitter on a Saturday night, or abandoning
> hope of ever getting tickets for Shakespeare in the Park.

Ok then don't have kids? Move to Jersey? Well-to-do people are displacing less
fortunate people all over the city, talking down to them about not being able
to afford to rent or buy groceries, and then they're complaining about
problems like this?

I also used to ride CitiBike and yes there are people but there are also
people if you drive a car, there are bikes and cars if you walk. This is a
commute not a Sunday stroll or trail ride. You're participating in traffic, it
can be dangerous and you need to pay attention which is true everywhere in the
world.

Obviously there are crowding problems in New York City, I take the train like
four stops to work and I absolutely hate the traffic as much as anyone, but
the anecdotes in this article are pathetic relative to some of the other
living issues people are facing here.

------
rumayor
Barcelona has the answer: close many blocks to cars.

[https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-r...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-
rescue-barcelona-spain-plan-give-streets-back-residents)

~~~
ng12
That's not the problem. The FiDi has no throughways, only local traffic. The
only vehicles down there are taxis doing pickups/dropoffs and delivery trucks.
It's just massively more dense than Barcelona.

~~~
chris_7
No more taxis, then, deliveries and access-a-ride ( _shudder_ ) only (and
deliveries only at night).

The bankers can walk.

------
baron816
I live in the area. Right outside my building is one of the heaviest
trafficked areas in the city. A building across the street is being
demolished, which means that side's sidewalk is closed off. On this side, a
wheel chair ramp in front of a coffee shop eats up half the sidewalk. So on
trash days, there is only enough space one person to pass through the
bottleneck.

In other places, you have very precious sidewalk space taken up by signs in
front of restaurants, sidewalk sheds, lamp posts, panhandlers, mailboxes,
people smoking cigarettes, and of course, piles of trash.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to live, but there definitely needs to
be some big changes. I think we should remove street parking to expand the
sidewalks.

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davidw
"Nobody goes there any more - it's too crowded" \- Yogi Berra.

~~~
jraines
it becomes non-paradoxical if you tweak it to:

"Nobody goes there _by choice_ any more - it's too crowded"

Obviously it's still not "nobody" for LM - or anywhere - but things change and
people get stuck with the new reality sometimes.

~~~
davidw
I don't think anyone's ever gone to Manhattan with the expectation that it
would be a staid, static and relaxed kind of place. Change is a constant in
big cities like NY.

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bane
Not a New Yorker, but living in the middle of the East Coast I've been to,
done business in, and toured NYC many times.

The Financial District is cool, but why anybody would want to live there who
doesn't work there is beyond me. It's a short walk from any of the residential
areas to any of the major financial firms, it's a miserable slog anywhere
north of Chinatown.

And it's not like it's cheap, 800sq ft 1 bedrooms run well above a million
dollars.

There's other problems which, at this point, seem to matters of inertia rather
than planning:

\- NYC is one of the few, dense, major cities without service alleys for trash
pickup and delivery. A casual observer might notice that NYC blocks are solid,
not hollow, the middle is still full of building. In other cities, with other
designs, an access alley allows for service vehicles to enter a mid-block
courtyard to provide service functions. As a result both delivery vehicles and
waste vehicles block the street with both their presence and the materiel they
move in and out.

\- The regulations around inspection scaffolding are absolutely out of control
rent-seeking. I would be comfortable in saying that there isn't a highrise
block of the city that's doesn't have this scaffolding present on it. While it
does provide some minimal protection from the elements, it's more like walking
through a construction site than a an arcade. The regulations should either be
changed to get rid of this nonsense, or to make formal arcades a requirements,
thus presenting new facades to the city. I'd actually be in favor of the later
since NYC suffers from pretty much the worst of all seasons: cold and wet in
the winter, and hot and miserable in the summer.

I love love love NYC, but it's not without its imperfections.

~~~
krschultz
The requirements around scaffolding are kind of an annoying middle ground of
rent seeking. You are required to put them up, but then you aren't charged
enough for them while they are up to incentivize anyone to take them down. In
some cases the scaffolding goes up and the company that owns it goes out of
business or the contractor goes bankrupt and it just gets left there.

~~~
bogomipz
who is doing the rent seeking though?

For years they would leave the scaffolding up so they sell advertising on it
and the fine was laughably small compared to the revenue generated from
selling ads. That was outlawed a few years back though.

This is an interesting look at the phenomenon:

[http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160124/REAL_ESTATE/16...](http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160124/REAL_ESTATE/160129960/scaffolds-
are-everywhere-in-new-york-city)

------
hasbroslasher
I suggest that we build elevated walkways covering every busy street in
(lower) Manhattan. You know it's going to happen _someday_ , so why not get it
over with. And then we'll be one step closer to Coruscant.

I'm envisioning something like an extrawide catwalk built over some of the
busier streets with either ladders or stairs down to the next floor of the
city. They'll either attract tourists or they'll become the pedestrian
superhighways of the city.

~~~
nashashmi
And truck/delivery/car service entrances working at ground level. There is a
location or two where that could work. I also have been thinking of the same.

~~~
hasbroslasher
I have a feeling the stores on 5th Ave would be less optimistic. Like I said -
I think this idea is an eventuality in such dense urban centers.

------
schlagetown
One obvious answer here: makes far more sense to increase population of NYC
outside of Manhattan. Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx combined (excluding
Staten Island since it's not accessible by subway) are TEN TIMES the size of
Manhattan. Not all this space is a quick commute to Manhattan…but there are
plenty of neighborhoods in these boroughs that are nowhere near as densely
populated as lower Manhattan, and are still within a ~30 minute commute to
downtown.

------
jakozaur
Another less sensational, but lengthier and more informative read on that:
[http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans/trans...](http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans/transportation/td_fulllowermanhattan.pdf)

~~~
blitzkrieg3
It's also a 20 year old read.

Edit: Many of these proposals in that have either been followed or exceeded,
largely as a result of the September 11th attacks. Most notably Broad street
is completely a pedestrian plaza, closed off to traffic.

------
than
Nobody goes there anymore.

------
h4nkoslo
Megalopolises continue to be hellish to actually live in, news at 11.

------
onion2k
If where you live changes you have the choice of either staying and accepting
the change or leaving to live somewhere else. Trying to hold back progress
(for some value of 'progress') is futile in the extreme.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _you have the choice of either staying and accepting the change or leaving
> to live somewhere else_

The third option is trying to effect another change.

------
eternalban
We never had these problems before the disneyfication of Manhattan. This city
wasn't designed to be a tourist destination. Manhattan was already over
burdened by sucking in most of the other boroughs' residents and the bridge
and tunnel crown in for work. Add to that the hordes (literally) of tourists
who walk around as if this _working city_ is a park or a shopping mall and you
get what we have now.

[p.s. For years I heard the old saw about "loving Paris and hating the French"
and wondered as a (yep) tourist why do the Parisians hate us so much? :) Since
the past decade I have nothing but sympathy for Londoners and Parisians. Now I
get it.]

~~~
bogomipz
Oh please, Manhattan has always been a tourist destination. That is not new.

The Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, Grand Central, The Statue of
Liberty, Central Park, 5th Ave, Rock Center. The high concentration of tourist
sites predates the "Disney-fication" of Times Square which was too seedy for
many years to be a tourist destination.

That old trope about French hating Americans is a bad stereotype. As a long
time visitor I can tell you this is simply not true. People in London, Paris
and New York get annoyed by inconsiderate people whether they be local
inconsiderate people or inconsiderate people from abroad. And there is no
shortage of inconsiderate residents in any of those places.

~~~
eternalban
> The Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, Grand Central, The Statue of
> Liberty, Central Park, 5th Ave, Rock Center.

Exactly. Designated tourist areas. The rest of the island was ours.

