New York plans to remove 25% of public places from cars

Javier Otazo New York, Jan. 26 (EFE). – New York City plans to remove 25% of urban space from cars, in the legislature just starting, to give it to public uses, including bus or bike lanes, new pedestrian spaces, green spaces or wider sidewalks. “We don’t like talking about ‘closing streets’, on the contrary: opening them up to pedestrians and public use,” Transportation Commissioner Yidens Rodriguez, appointed by new mayor Eric Adams, who took office last year, said in an interview. With Efe.1 January within these new public uses will also be the expansion of “Open Schools”, a continuation of an idea born at the time of confinement by covid and which allowed the transfer of some school activities to the streets or squares adjacent to the schools. Likewise, the mayor’s office will promote “open-air restaurants” – what in Spanish countries are called terraces – which were rare in New York before the spread of the Covid virus and that the epidemic “encouraged” them to expand their activity on the street, sometimes stealing entire lanes of roads, despite They sometimes have to resort to heated plastic “bubbles” to allow astronauts to withstand the cold winter temperatures. The plan, with no deadlines and budget, will be developed throughout the tenure of Eric Adams, who, like Rodriguez himself, is a known defender of the bike and loves to be photographed on his saddle. “Our goal is to go to a city where we don’t need the car,” Rodriguez adds, but he rules out, however, any action that penalizes the use of private cars. More bikes than ever on a typical day, there are 530,000 bike rides recorded in New York, and every month 773,000 New Yorkers use their bike multiple times a month. With a 4.7% annual increase in daily two-wheeler use, the number of rides doubled in ten years, between 2009 and 2019, but its emergence became especially evident in 2020, when the majority of New York’s schools, schools, and local businesses closed and streets were car-free. Today there are 1,375 miles (2,212 kilometers) of bike lanes in the city, but only 546 miles are “protected” – that is, separated by “hard” barriers – which has not helped prevent the relatively large number of cyclists killed in recent years. : 28 in 2019, 26 in 2020 and 19 in 2021. The mayor’s plan is to add an additional 300 miles of protected lanes, and to prioritize all bike lanes to clean up (especially after a snowfall), considering they are “workplaces” for the growing community of Connecticut Food, who move at full speed through these corridors. The Country’s Slowest Bus % in four years. The mayor’s office is working on a plan to improve bus lanes, to double the number already under 150 miles across the city, but above all wants to implement a smart traffic light system (there are 14,000 intersections with traffic lights in the city.) that allows buses to pass preferably on the cars. It is clear from the mayor’s office that the bus is the only public transportation available in peripheral neighborhoods (and slums) that are difficult to reach by subway, and therefore improving bus service is necessary to raise the standard of living in those neighborhoods and stabilize their residents, in order to avoid mass exodus From those neighborhoods, as the commissioner mentions. Slower pedestrian operations progress within the mayor’s plans also to advance in street pedestrians, without exact numbers in a city and state where everything still has to be done compared to European models: in New York, the only pedestrian zone (not entirely) is that which surrounds Times Square, This is something that was imposed with great opposition from the merchants. The ultimate goal of all of the mayor’s plans is to improve air quality: During the impoundment, the disappearance of the car from the streets of New York resulted in a 23% reduction in particulate air pollution, so if reduced from a sustainable form of road traffic, the municipality calculates that it will amount to a 34% reduction . EFE constant