Mayor Bill de Blasio announced today that after much debate, the city will open at least 40 miles of streets to pedestrians and cyclists as we enter the summer, with the goal of opening 100 miles total. That plan includes opening streets in and around parks and in the parts of the city that have been hit hardest by coronavirus, expanding bike lanes, and widening sidewalks.
"Some places we'll be able to expand sidewalks," de Blasio said during a press conference Monday morning. "Use the example of what we did over the holidays around Rockefeller Center, where you open up the sidewalk space into the street more, but with the proper kinds of barricades." Last winter, the city closed two midtown blocks to vehicular traffic (49th and 50th Streets) as well as at least two lanes for cars and buses on Fifth Avenue in a temporary strategy to alleviate overcrowded and chaotic sidewalks.
With the city still in the grips of the pandemic and warm weather right around the corner, it's more important than ever to consider how the narrow sidewalks of the city hamper New Yorkers' ability to properly social distance.
"How could we stay six feet apart if we have six foot sidewalks or even 10 foot sidewalks?" Sam Schwartz, better known as "Gridlock Sam," the former NYC Traffic Commissioner, told us in an interview earlier this month. "Many of our sidewalks were narrowed starting almost a hundred years ago, to make more room for cars. We then made room for parked cars. And now's the time to maybe rethink our city."
Polly Trottenberg, the head of the Department of Transportation, told the City Council during a hearing about the open streets legislation on Friday that "there's probably a good percent of sidewalks in NYC, counting trees and street furniture and other things, you're not gonna have six feet between two folks. I've seen New Yorkers being adaptable, stepping out of each other's ways. We know as weather gets warmer, it's going to be a bigger challenge."
Thanks to a new interactive map, we don't have to rely solely on anecdotal evidence about how much of the city lacks the sidewalk space to properly socially distance—we now have more concrete data.
Sidewalk Widths NYC, which you can use below, was developed over the last month by urban planner Meli Harvey, who works as a computational designer at think tank Sidewalk Labs.
"As an urban planner, I spend a lot of time thinking about how public space is designed, and how people use it," she told Gothamist. "The pandemic turned the rules of public space upside down almost overnight. As people negotiate this new reality they've become hyper-aware of how qualities like sidewalk width impact their ability to maintain social distance."
She explained that the sidewalk data had already been collected by the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and was available online. The challenge was finding a way to measure the width of the sidewalks: "Sidewalks can be very complex shapes, in particular around parks where you have dozens of paths intersecting in very complex ways," she said.
The sidewalk outlines provided by NYC Open Data were all derived from aerial imagery, and much of it was produced in 2014, which means there are some inaccuracies and changes that have occurred in the years since. But "that being said, they are accurate enough to provide a good impression of how sidewalk widths vary from street to street, and neighborhood to neighborhood."
Among other things, Harvey was surprised to discover that sidewalk widths get much thinner in the outer boroughs. "This is likely an artifact of how planning priorities have changed as the city has grown out from the center," she said. "Presumably, cars became the preferred mode of transportation over the last century. This is unfortunate because these are also places that have been hit hard by COVID-19."
Meli, who has lived in NYC for the last eight years, agrees with former city officials, epidemiologists, and safe street activists who say opening up large amounts of streets throughout the five boroughs is achievable and necessary during this crisis.
"NYC should open more streets and lanes to pedestrians and cyclists to aid with social distancing. It'll likely be a slow return to 'normal,' and New Yorkers are looking for safe ways to get around. Why not promote these clean and efficient forms of transportation by creating more space for them?"
