Banning Cars From Manhattan
Percival & Goodman, Paul
We propose the banning of all cars from Manhattan Island, except buses, small taxis, vehicles for essential services (doctor, police, sanitation, vans, etc.), and the trucking used in light...
...4. Neighborhood and Community In the long run, the most valuable ideal for New York or any other vast city is to become a large collection of integral neighborhoods sharing a met ropolitan center and metropolitan amenities...
...cars are simply not worth the nuisance they cause...
...In general, most big-scale planning and most of what passes for Urban Renewal are humanly indifferent...
...The traffic is congested, speed is slow, parking is difficult and increasingly expensive...
...Manhattan is a world center of business, buying, style, entertainment, publishing, politics and light manufacture...
...This is because of the obvious undesirability, from the motorist's point of view, of driving them into Manhattan...
...At present over 35 per cent of the area of Manhattan is taken up by the roads...
...The idea of peripheral parking has been studied by Louis Kahn and Victor Gruen, as well as the present authors...
...On the whole, given the improvement of the bus-service, most travel about town would be swifter and more convenient than at present with the private cars...
...and he would win next time around, when people had had a chance to think it through and see that it made sense...
...Every street would have to be studied individually...
...In sprawling cities like Los Angeles or Cleveland, of course, one cannot get rid of the cars...
...It is likely that the ban on cars could be lifted on weekends, when the truck and bus traffic is much diminished...
...At present, the * This article will appear also in Program, published by the Columbia University School of Architecture...
...alleviating the crowding of pedestrians...
...Best would be electrics...
...The expense of an onerous requirement of the Building Code for off-street parking could, of course, be dropped...
...it is to counteract the isolation of the individual in the mass megalopolis...
...We have, and need, a dense population...
...The quality of life in our city will not be improved by such planning, but by some elementary social psychiatry and common sense...
...The advantages of our proposal are very great...
...This is hard to conceive, because it is just such concrete issues that are never offered to the voters...
...The new road-pattern allows for superblocks of from six to nine acres...
...It does not merely remedy an evil or provide a way to do the same things more efficiently, but it opens the possibility to think about ideal solutions, human values and new ways to do basic things...
...Likewise there must be provision for cars to pass over Manhattan, going east and west...
...Every street and avenue represents an individual artistic problem...
...and such a complex could well serve as the primary municipal electoral unit...
...It seems absurd for the taxis in a limited speed metropolis to be the same cars designed for travel on superhighways...
...and also 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, Broadway, 9th and 11th Avenues...
...But in this special case of Manhattan, the elementary radical remedy, of getting rid of the cars, would cause very little hardship and have immense and beautiful advantages...
...These piers would be served by bus and taxi...
...The disadvantages of our radical proposal are small...
...whereas the rival programs are both vague and identical...
...The proposed solutions—new traffic regulations, new highways, multi...
...We propose simply to generalize this commonsense decision in order to use it as a basis for important further advantages...
...These piers could be developed for promenade, recreational and even residential use and might be considered as part of the river development recommended in Communitas...
...A large store, e.g., Macy's, might provide pier-limousines for commuting shoppers, including the service of delivering packages to the parked cars...
...But to avoid the boredom of nothing but endless vistas we recommend bridging certain streets with buildings to create other spatial effects...
...it could be so pegged as to be prohibitive...
...and the trucking used in light industry...
...3. Roads We would keep the broad and highly commercial cross-streets, 14th, 23rd, 42nd, 57th, 59th, etc., as two-way bus and taxi arteries...
...The proposed grid of through arteries is such that the maximum walk to the nearest bus stop would always be less than a fifth of a mile...
...an occasional corner is big enough for a softball field...
...Especially during the warm months this would be a great convenience for week-end trips...
...The aim of integral planning is to create a humanscale community intermediary between the individuals and families and the metropolis...
...THE PROBLEM and our solution are probably unique to Manhattan, though our experiment would provide lessons elsewhere...
...The Mayor banned all traffic in the emergency of snow clearance (though his right to do so has been disputed...
...As indicated above, we would keep the existent street pattern in the midtown section—from 23rd to 59th Streets—to serve the shops, theaters, etc., and also wherever there is a special case...
...The present situation is intolerable and all other proposed solutions of it are uneconomic, disruptive, unhealthy, non-urban or impractical...
...The neighborhoods differ since they comprise a wide variety of community functions, administered with relative independence by each neighborhood...
...Less than 15 per cent of those daily entering Manhattan south of 61st Street come by private car...
...the safety of children...
...Instead of the present grid, we can aim at various kinds of enclosed neighborhoods, in approximately 1200 to 1600-foot superblocks...
...The legal problem of the proposed ban should not be difficult...
...With this diminution of traffic, we can, except in certain areas, close off nearly four out of five cross-town streets and every second north-south avenue...
...and parking lots are a poor use of land in the heart of a metropolis as well as disruptive of the urban cityscape...
...We have had a vehicle tax...
...To anyone interested in community planning, the chief advantage of our proposal is that it provides opportunity...
...the area is small pheral parking...
...The remaining gridiron plan of Manhattan is kept...
...These closed roads plus the space now used for off-street parking will give us a great fund of land for neighborhood planning and relocation...
...It is daily visited in throngs by commuters to work, seekers of pleasure, shoppers, visitors on business, and tourists...
...In general, the bus service throughout Manhattan would be expanded, bringing back the 2-deck buses...
...the voters never have real choices to think about, therefore they never learn to think...
...If, however, such a plan as this were offered as an important issue, our guess is that the candidate would lose this year, because he would be considered radical and irresponsible...
...Our aim is to enhance immensely the quality of our city life, with the minimum of disruption of the existing pattern...
...We propose, in addition, the construction of multi-purpose piers in the Hudson and East Rivers for parking cars entering at the main bridges and tunnels...
...Subsequently, and no less importantly, we gain the opportunity of diversifying the gridiron, beautifying the city and designing a more integrated community life...
...purifying the air of fumes and smog...
...The length of a tennis court fits across 9th Avenue...
...Subway entrances would exist as at present...
...S. Means, etc...
...We must keep in mind that with the ending of congestion and the immense cutting down of pedestrian crossing, the speed Iimit for taxis and express buses could be raised to 25 or even 30 miles an hour...
...There is space for recreation and play...
...With plastic invention and aiming at the maximum variety of landscaping, land use and building height, there is here an unexampled opportunity for dozens of eventual solutions that could surpass in urbaneness and amenity the squares and crescents of 18th Century London...
...Since there would be much less need to cross over, it would be possible to eliminate jay-walking, and perhaps provide pedestrian bridges and tunnels...
...We would especially recommend competitions and public referenda, in order to avoid bureaucratic imposition and to educate the community to awareness and concern...
...There would be more taxis...
...It is estimated that the cost of new garaging is $20,000 per car...
...Naturally, in a vast region like New York there will be many thousands of persons who choose precisely to be isolated individuals—that might be why they came here—but these too form a distinctive and valuable element in the federal whole, and they can be provided for in the center and in sub-neighborhoods...
...A neighbor• hood should be planned to increase mutual acquaintance of the neighbors and to give them responsibility for the school, market, playground...
...The cars have caused many and increasingly severe ills, so that the situation is admittedly reaching a crisis...
...Meantime, all the integral neighborhoods share in the great city of the big shops, theaters, hotels, museums and national enterprises...
...Stuyvesant Town covers sixteen acres...
...KII] Toward the ideal of such a city of federated communities, the simple device of banning the cars and replanning the gridiron is a major step...
...The ban should, of course, be leniently enforced to allow for special cases and emergency use (e.g., a family starting out on a trip and loading up...
...All other streets would become pe destrian walks which also act as roads for necessary servicing (fire, garbage, mail, etc...
...At present many thousands of cars of commuters are left at suburban railway stops and at more or less convenient subway stations in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx...
...Given the large fund of newly available land, now wasted on largely unnecessary and always inconvenient traffic and parking, it is possible to develop neighborhoods in a leisurely fashion, with careful study and with no problems of relocation or dislocation of such neighborhood ties as still exist...
...Most of these should be small (half the present length by eliminating trunk space, placing motor under rear seat...
...Streets are at present closed off for play and other purposes...
...Our idea, too, is that local exercise of political initiative on local problems like schooling, housing and planning, would immensely heighten the level of the electorate...
...Consider, for example, that a basically family-residential neighborhood might have a quite autonomous control of its local school, with a certain amount of the neighborhood school-money administered by the local Parents-Teachers Association...
...Finally, conceive that one of our mayoral candidates were convinced of the advantages of this proposal and made it a part of his program in running for office...
...The central Board of Education could dictate minimum standards and see to it that underprivileged neighborhoods get a fair cut of the revenue, but it need not stand in the way (as it does at present) of variation and experimentation...
...it is practical and when simplified it has a sort of grandeur...
...levels, underground parking—all bear the typical earmark of American planning: to alleviate an evil by remedies that soon increase the evil...
...6. Conclusion The above proposal is simple common sense...
...However, it would be convenient to leave the existing street-pattern in the main downtown shopping and business area, in the financial district, and wherever the access for trucks and service cars is imperative...
...Instead they vote for personalities and according to ethnic and party groupings...
...A prohibitive entry fee could be charged...
...These should provide adequate circulation for the residual traffic...
...Consider a particular case...
...Important, and immediate, are the relief of tension, noise and anxiety...
...Certainly they would not look alike...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
