Beach Chairs Calm Traffic in Times Square

Excerpt from Slate, 16 June 2009

'...[New York City's] Department of Transportation, with the full encouragement of Mayor Bloomberg, has temporarily reconfigured one of the worst manifestations of these two problems - Times Square, the putative "Crossroads of the World." The surface facts are disarmingly simple: The DOT has blocked off Broadway with orange barrels and set out some plastic chairs. If it works, it could be a dramatic reinvention of a long-troublesome place.

For more than a century, Times Square has been bedeviling whatever authority happens to be in charge of moving people through the city's streets with the least amount of congestion and carnage...

Times Square has been congested (and contested) for as long as it has existed, and no amount of tinkering with the traffic lights seems sufficient to solve the problem. And, given the dynamic nature of traffic, any plan that did succeed would be faced with what Frederic Jameson once called, in a different context, a quasi-Sartrean "'winner-loses' logic": It would just bring more traffic. The Brookings Institution's Anthony Downs has called this phenomenon "triple convergence": When a crowded street is expanded, for example, peak-hour traffic conditions may temporarily improve, but the improvements may also simply entice drivers from other hours, other roads, and other modes of travel.

All of which explains why the latest Times Square traffic plan—to close Broadway to vehicular traffic for five blocks—while seemingly the most perverse scheme to date, may actually prove to be the most successful.

Whether it succeeds may, in part, depend on reconfiguring the notion of success. For the real Times Square "traffic problem" nowadays is one of pedestrians. More than 356,000 pedestrians travel through Times Square on an average day, according to the New York City Department of Transportation, while the number of cars is closer to 50,000. Despite this mismatch in "mode share"—the fact that people are not drawn to the place for its automobile-oriented delights—only 11 percent of Times Square is devoted to pedestrian use (and these small scraps are fought over between fast-jaywalking locals and meandering, signal-obeying four-abreast groups of tourists). For many New Yorkers, Times Square has become an anti-place, a media abstraction best not actually visited, but for those who must, those who work there, surveys have shown a vast majority dislike it, with "pedestrian overcrowding" being the primary reason...'