Jessica Alfieri

writes everything you see here.

• A World With No Cars

  Cars are such a “natural” part of Manhattan that I think most of us forget they’re even here.

  Unless they’re almost hitting us in the crosswalk, whirring past red lights and mucking up intersections, or honking obnoxiously and parking where they shouldn’t, despite the “DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT” signs…

  Right, so we know they’re around us all day, every day.

  And Mr. Mayor hears our complaints.

  [He] announced on Monday that he will create a car-free zone on three Saturdays in August, along a 6.9-mile stretch of streets through Manhattan, from the Brooklyn Bridge, north to Park Avenue and the Upper East Side. Cars, trucks and buses will be banned on the streets along the route from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Aug. 9, 16 and 23. The mayor was careful to describe the initiative, called Summer Streets, as an experiment.

  Of course, most of the city will be away during these weeks.  All the more emptiness for me to enjoy, I guess.  Apparently, there’ll also be outdoor dance and yoga classes, plus bike rentals for me to enjoy, too.

  “It’s a new way to use a street, using it more as a park than as a thoroughfare,” said Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives

  But naturally, not everyone is happy.

  “He’s got to be crazy,” Pablo Urema, 49, a worker at a parking lot on Lafayette Street in SoHo, said of the mayor. “We do a lot of business every Saturday morning. No cars for the parking garage means no people for the businesses.”

  Somehow I always forget that parking garages exist until I need to use one.

  Let’s face it, this is a fun plan for people on foot, but some things are going to be a bitch to deal with on those days.  Like my father’s Saturday morning commute to Jersey City to see his mother.  Sure, he doesn’t have to take Park Ave, but we all know what happens when one major thoroughfare is closed - the rest clog the hell up.

  Plenty of people aren’t going to think about that, though.

  Eric Monasterio, 32, a painter who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, said he regularly battled cars as he rode his bike in Manhattan.

  “If it works out they could have a rotating system and have one street open every day,” Mr. Monasterio said.

  Yeah, that doesn’t sound like another monster set of logistics for the city (and our taxes) to coordinate.  Here we go…

  Jun 18, 2008 Bloomberg Mr. Mayor New York street closing

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