Summer Streets of NYC

Guest blogger May Joseph is the artistic director of Harmattan Theater, a group interested in water politics and urban ecology of New York City.

Picture Park Avenue South’s magisterial approach to Grand Central Station filled with human movement along its broad avenue. Picture the view from Grand Central looking uptown, all human scale movement in different states of propulsion. The image you conjure is the impossible scenario of Manhattan without cars. At least a portion of the center of Manhattan, Park Avenue, Lexington, Madison, without cars. The event is called Summer Streets, an experiment Mayor Michael Bloomberg initiated last year through the Department of Transportation.

Introducing urban dwellers to a day without cars, at least a few hours without vehicular transportation, forces city people into new relationships with their environment. One of the most spectacular views of this event is the view from the elevated causeway at Grand Central Station normally clogged by vehicular traffic and impossible to access visually. The absence of cars creates a clarity of the city’s movement flows. People of every stripe and persuation, skaters, wheelchairs, segueways, bikers, runners, toddlers, perambulators, dancers, yogis, enjoy their city on a scale unimaginable before.

Summer Streets began last year as an incentive to New Yorkers to keep the dialogue on congestion pricing alive in the minds of the city. What if the city looked towards alternative transportation networks other than cars for primary commutes within the city? Rearranging individual relationships to traveling in the city and dependency on the car allows a recalibration of other issues as well: those of health, energy consumption, social encounter, speed, quality of life, air quality, pollution, noise levels, stress reduction and increased longevity of life through exercise. All of these benefits make the scenario of a green beltway offering alternative transportation networks increasingly attractive to New Yorkers. Since last year when the Hudson River Park Trust completed a large part of its parkway, and continues to work towards completing the greenway on the west side of downtown Manhattan, New Yorkers have increasingly become accustomed to cycling instead of taking other transport to work and play. Within a year, the use of the green beltway on the west side of Manhattan has exploded. The ongoing development of Riverside Park on the Upper West Side expands this beltway all the way to the northern tip of Manhattan. It is now possible to commute to Brooklyn from the west side of Manhattan entirely by bicycle.

Summer Streets invites a greater scale of greening the city’s streets towards alternative networks of transportation. The suspension of cars opens up new possibilities of using the public space of the street to allow multiple encounters of urban possibility alongside that of transportation. This taste of a desirable future is full of potential, as New Yorkers increasingly seek more ways to engage with the street in a Jane Jacobs immersion in human scale development. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s call to learn from Copenhagen, has expanded to learning from Amsterdam, London and Chicago, as New York City finally explores energy management in a sustained and bottom-up way.