Hey fellas, look out! I'm walking here!

What kind of drivers are most to be feared if you're a pedestrian in New York City? If you're thinking cabbies, think again. If you're about to cough up one of those hoary jokes about women drivers – don't. A New York Times article about a study from the New York City department of transportation tells us:

" ... In 80 percent of city accidents that resulted in a pedestrian’s death or serious injury, a male driver was behind the wheel. (Fifty-seven percent of New York City vehicles are registered to men.)"

The article notes that even though a lot of pedestrians are killed in New York traffic, "New York is now far safer to travel within than most other American cities, with half the per capita fatality rate of Atlanta, Detroit or Los Angeles. But New York still trails world capitals like Berlin, London, Paris and Tokyo, all of which are statistically safer."

The report itself lists a number of key findings. Here's one: "Traffic fatalities in 2009 were down by 35% from 2001." Here's another that made me chuckle: "Most New Yorkers do not know the city’s standard speed limit is 30 m.p.h." I think drivers the world over must be about the same. Everyone wants to go faster than the limit. For the record, Charlotte's standard speed limit is 35 m.p.h. unless otherwise posted.

Let's talk window shopping

The Caldwell Street item sparked some interesting back-and-forth (here's a link) about whether one-way or two-way makes much of a difference for pedestrian comfort.

One commenter points out that the newly reconfigured intersection of Stonewall and Caldwell is so wide that it isn't pedestrian friendly (or bicycle friendly or even motorist friendly) at all. Others say sidewalk width and street-level retail are more important.
Here's my take: They're all important.

If the sidewalk is narrow (one commenter mentions Seventh Street uptown between Seventh Street Station parking deck and Tryon) pedestrians will be turned off.

If there's nothing interesting to look at – that is, if you're walking on a wide sidewalk but you're going past a vacant corporate plaza, a surface parking lot, a parking deck, a blank office wall, or even windows into office buildings – pedestrians will be turned off.

And if the cars are zooming past, as they tend to do on one – way streets when the lights are timed to let you cruise at 35 and hit them all green – then pedestrians will be turned off.

So reverting one-way to two-way is a good first step but if it's the only step it may be a waste of time. I continue to maintain that street-level retail shopping (or as the late jeweler and City Council member Al Rousso used to cry, "Window-shopping! We need window-shopping!") is what's key for uptown, and it's going to be incredibly difficult to achieve because:

• We've spent two decades demolishing storefront buildings until the few that remain are too far from each other to create any retail synergy.

• The city's uptown zoning still allows new development without street-front retail. It requires ground-floor retail, not street-front. Thus we get Founder's Hall and the shops inside office towers. To window-shop requires leaving the sidewalks and streets entirely. Unless you're in an urban scene as dense with stores and lively sidewalks as, say, New York or Paris, that's anti-urban.

NYC banning traffic on Broadway

(Photos show Herald Square before and after, courtesy of www.nyc.gov)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week he'll bar auto traffic from several blocks of Broadway. It's a way to try to reduce congestion in the Times Square and Herald Square areas. While it may sound like a crackpot idea, there's some counterintuitive evidence that, in other cities where streets were barred to traffic, the overall traffic did, in fact, diminish. Newsweek has a rather in-depth article on the proposal and the underlying thinking.

The New York Times web site has a kind of pro-con debate among urban observers such as architect/planner Alex Garvin and the Cato Institute's Randal O'Toole.

Conventional wisdom in the U.S. has been that pedestrian malls didn't work – cities that tried them gave them up. Even our own Rock Hill, which turned its downtown into a covered-roof shopping mall, eventually had to pop the top and revert to a more traditional downtown, complete with sky, clouds, rain and sun.

But, as the Newsweek article points out, New York is unique among U.S. cities, due to its population density, rigid street grid, high proportion of residents without cars and excellent public transit services. It's certainly an idea worth watching. That said, Charlotte doesn't have density, a grid or extensive transit, so anything learned from the NYC experiment isn't likely to be applicable here, regardless.