On Wednesday, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Councilmember Carlina Rivera will introduce a bill that would require the city to open up as much as 75 miles of streets throughout the five boroughs in order to give pedestrians and cyclists room to maintain proper social distance and slow the spread of COVID-19. Mayor Bill de Blasio has repeatedly shot down the idea, even as other major cities around the world, including Oakland, Minneapolis, Boston, Berlin, Paris, Portland, and Bogotá, have instituted similar programs.
"It doesn't fit our reality in terms of safety," de Blasio told reporters on Monday, when asked about the council's bill.
But some former city officials, epidemiologists, and safe street activists say the city council's plan is feasible, and if carefully and strategically implemented, could provide New Yorkers living in the city's densest residential neighborhoods with crucial public space as the weather gets warmer.
"Of course New York City could do it," said Sam Schwartz, better known as "Gridlock Sam," the former NYC Traffic Commissioner who now runs his own traffic engineering firm. Schwartz argued that the city has a long history of closing streets for the public good. "Going back to 1970 when I started in government, John Lindsay closed Madison Avenue from 42nd to 57th Street for picnics during Earth Week, and he did it [again] in 1971. We were way ahead of the rest of the world."
Schwartz also pointed to the difficulty of social distancing on New York's sidewalks. "How could we stay six feet apart if we have six foot sidewalks or even 10 foot sidewalks?" he asked. "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."
If this were a normal spring, the city would already be planning for tons of street closures, said transportation expert Bruce Schaller, who is also a former deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation. "People close streets all the time for different reasons, for construction, for road work and the like, without having police officers at every corner," he said. "So I don’t really understand what the mayor’s issue is here."
Schaller, who led NYC DOT's efforts on congestion pricing in the early 2000s, thinks there is nothing but upside in opening the streets now. He believes the neighborhoods that have the highest rates of the virus should be prioritized: "So that’s like Jackson Heights in Queens, and areas of Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx, where people are really jammed together inside and need to get out.”
De Blasio has cited two main reasons for his opposition to opening up streets to pedestrians. “The problem with the additional street closures is you have to attach enforcement to them,” de Blasio said when he ended a short-lived pilot program last month, in which a few blocks in four boroughs were closed to vehicular traffic for about ten days. “If we don't attach enforcement to them, we're very concerned they become new gathering points and we do not want to seem to be solving one problem by creating a new one.”
There has been mixed messaging on social distancing from the government and public health experts. On the one hand, the best way to contain the virus is to discourage people from going outside whatsoever except for essential trips.
“I am sure that leaving your apartment brings joy and I assume it is good for our mental health," said Dr. Yrjö Gröhn, a professor of epidemiology at Cornell University. "However, if the goal is to avoid all risk, one has to realize we do not know how willing and/or capable people are to keep social distance in crowded streets. Furthermore, one has to recognize the social distance would definitely be far greater than six feet if there are runners or even bikers in the street."
On the other hand, avoiding "all risk" is not exactly feasible for most New Yorkers, and with summer approaching and no end in sight to the state's stay-at-home order, people will need to leave their un-air conditioned apartments but likely won't be able to go to the beach or the pool.
"It's to everyone's public health benefit to have more people active, reduce congestion, reduce air pollution," said Dr. Christopher Morrison, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. "And where there's mixed land use between motor vehicles, pedestrians and other road users, there's greater incidences of crashes and injuries. And so to the extent that we can open up land-use and we can open up roadways for pedestrians and non-motorized vehicular-use, it's generally beneficial."
Park Avenue
De Blasio's insistence that the city needs lots of NYPD officers to close down streets is aligned with the deference he has shown to the police department over his two terms in office.
"No mayor has given the NYPD more money, more power and more authority," said Nick Encalada-Malinowski, civil rights campaign director at social services group VOCAL-NY. "We've seen the mayor at every possible opportunity undermine efforts at improving transparency and accountability between the NYPD and public."
The mayor has urged New Yorkers to call 311 and report social distancing violations to the police, despite the NYPD's long track record of racially biased policing of low-level offenses. ("NYPD unquestionably has been enforcing in all kinds of communities and I've asked them to consistently put out reports so people can see the whole truth of the many times when enforcement was done across many communities," de Blasio said on Monday.)
The Oakland "Slow Streets" plan, which appears to be the inspiration for the city council's upcoming bill, does not rely on the police whatsoever. Drivers are not completely banned from the 75 miles of roads—rather, they share the streets with pedestrians in many cases. Emphasis is placed on discouraging anyone from driving except for making necessary trips, and encouraging people to use the streets to safely get fresh air while social distancing.
"There are essential activities: mail deliveries, food deliveries, emergency response -- all sorts of things that streets need to accommodate," said Ryan Russo, the director of the Oakland Department of Transportation and one of the architects of the "Slow Streets" plan. "But the bigger idea here is, could we do some interventions to streets that recognize that activity in the road that's happening and see that the local traffic that needed to be on those streets could go slow enough that everyone would be safe and a family could go on a bike ride."
Russo, who previously served as a deputy commissioner at the NYC DOT, said he has been in contact with officials from New York. He also acknowledged the difference in size of NYC and Oakland ("We are a city of 420,000 people with basically the population density of Staten Island"), and that every city is facing unique circumstances in this complicated and challenging crisis.
Oakland's plan features traffic barricades set up at strategic intersections, either closing a local street down entirely to non-emergency traffic or warning pedestrians and bikers that they could be sharing the road with drivers. There are indications that other cities are looking closely at their plan as a template to emulate or adapt.
“I guess I would ask why would you need them [police officers]?" said Schaller, the former DOT deputy commissioner in the Bloomberg administration. "We don’t have cops for example at every street corner. What we have are traffic signals that are designed to protect pedestrians crossing the street. Signs are put at the end of streets when it’s closed for road work or utility work or that kind of thing. You don’t see cars crashing through [those] signs.”
Oakland's "Slow Streets" program
As for how to bring this to life in NYC, Speaker Johnson said that he plans to work with safe streets advocates, councilmembers, and "hopefully the administration" to determine the best way to open up 75 miles of streets without overburdening the NYPD. "The issue is so important and so urgent that we are taking legislative action to make it happen ourselves," Johnson said.
The bill will require the city to create new open or recreational spaces in neighborhoods with insufficient existing spaces and increase space in dense neighborhoods with crowded parks. And they want to do so while ensuring essential businesses stay open and can get deliveries without impediment, and that hospitals and medical facilities are avoided.
Brooklyn Councilmember Brad Lander, one of a dozen lawmakers who have signed on to support the bill, said that councilmembers have already been invited to suggest streets in their districts that might fit best for the program, especially ones where existing bike or pedestrian lanes are insufficient, and sidewalks are particularly narrow.
"We suggested half a dozen just in my district, and not just a half dozen blocks, but a half dozen multi-block streets," Lander told Gothamist. "And I know my colleagues did as well. It would work to close quite a lot of side streets of New York City and still have a central traffic be able to get through."
Lander thinks there's nothing exceptional about NYC that prevents us from opening the streets. If anything, there's plenty of evidence that it already works here: "Think about how every summer in New York City, there's block parties," Lander said. As part of the DOT's annual Summer Streets program, the city last year closed seven miles of streets in Manhattan for several weekends. "They put the horses up at one end, the barricades up at the other, and people follow the rules. People are mostly following the rules in our parks, but it's hard to do when they're so crowded. And they will follow the rules on our streets when they're closed."
He remains hopeful that the mayor will come around to the city council's bill: "I think there's been times when he has ultimately changed his mind even when he was pretty dug in on something. And with enough support, that can happen here."
What happens if the city doesn't take some action before summer begins? Already, people have been taking matters into their own hands. Some have argued that instead of relying on City Hall, community leaders and activists could work directly with local precincts and community affairs officers to shut down certain streets for the betterment of the community at large, as has happened with Shore Boulevard in Astoria last week.
Throughout his decades as one of the leading transportation engineers in the United States, Gridlock Sam has had a lot of time to imagine what the city might be like with just a little more space.
"Right after 9/11, I lived in lower Manhattan and I was working at the site restoring transportation," he said. "It took about a month, October 12th—I remember exactly when it was—that the birds returned. But the reason I was able to hear birds everywhere was there was so little traffic. So you'd be surprised the things that you'll hear, you will see, you will smell, or you won't smell, once streets are relatively free of automobile exhaust and noise."
(Additional reporting by Dylan Campbell)
