You've got to hand it to Tim Tompkins. In the absence of any real citywide strategy on urban environmental issues, the president of the Times Square Alliance has stepped up with some real vision and foresight. Last Wednesday he unveiled a new urban design for the planet's most prominent public space. If Tompkins can manage to make the vision a reality—and that's always a big "if" in New York City—the Crossroads of the World is going to have a lot less road and a lot more sidewalk in it.

Whether you call it Disneyfication or revitalization, the "new" Times Square also has a new set of problems. Though you're far less likely to be pick-pocketed or murdered, the street-level environment is dreary, hostile and about as clogged as Dick Cheney's arteries. Between 1982 and 2003, pedestrian traffic increased nearly five-fold. With new office and residential buildings going up all over midtown, conditions are only going to grow more claustrophobic in coming years. Employees who work in and around Times Square overwhelmingly cite "congestion" as the number-one reason why they would consider working somewhere else. Tompkins calls it "pedlock."

The solution for "pedlock" is clear. Stop dedicating so much of Times Square's valuable public real estate to cars and trucks. Give some space back to human beings in the form of wider sidewalks and places to sit, eat, watch and take a load off. This is exactly what the Times Square Alliance is proposing to do. Its plan calls for widening sidewalks and reducing road space, redesigning Duffy Square and permanently wiring up the streets for big media events. Most significant, the Alliance proposes to completely revamp the way traffic flows by getting rid of the 7th Avenue-Broadway crossover between 44th and 45th Streets.

While the plan represents a true paradigm shift in urban-design thinking in New York City, it doesn't go as far it could. London saw fit to ban cars from one of the busy arteries surrounding Trafalgar Square. Combined with a congestion pricing system that charges motorists a fee to drive into high-traffic areas with great mass transit, the results have been a stunning success. There is every reason to believe that making 42nd Street car-free could be equally successful. But, for now, lacking any leadership from City Hall, we suspect Tompkins is going to find it enough of a challenge just to get the cars-first engineers at DOT to widen the sidewalks a little bit. More power to him.

3:34 PM | Link |