Sweltering temperatures on Aug. 13 couldn’t spoil Downtown’s “Shared Streets” event for these kids, who beat the heat the old-fashioned way — with an open fire hydrant.
BY COLIN MIXSON
The city piloted an event called “Shared Streets” in Lower Manhattan on Aug. 13, creating a zone that spanned 60-square blocks where cars were encouraged to slow to a crawl and pedestrians were beckoned off the sidewalks and into the road to play games and explore the area without fear of speeding delivery trucks.
The event — the first for a major city — was not without its kinks, as traffic piled up on Broadway and bewildered tourists were hard pressed to leave the sidewalk, but the experiment was an overall success, according to one community leader.
“I loved it,” said Financial District Neighborhood Association president Patrick Kennell, who brought his kids out for the day. “We had a good time and thought it was really cool.”
The novel approach to the urban streetscape saw barricades erected at intersections south of Spruce Street, where police and agents from the city’s Department of Transportation were stationed to urge drivers to slow to the snail’s pace of 5 mph while in the “shared” zone.
But the leisurely speed limit was more suggestion than law, and drivers couldn’t be ticketed for not obeying it. As a result, many roadsters could be seen revving up once they were clear of the cops, according to one South Bridge resident.
“They have no way of enforcing this 5-mph speed limit, and as they got past them the cars can speed up legally to 25 mph, and there’s nothing the police could do about it,” said Paul Hovitz. “So this business of enforcing 5 mph seemed kind of futile.”
But that didn’t prevent locals from playing sports in the street. Kennell and his kids setup a game of baseball in the road, in a scene that evoked the famous scene from “Wayne’s World,” where Wayne and Garth played hockey in the street outside Garth’s house, occasionally pausing between cries of “car!” followed by “game on!”
“My kids and I were playing ball in the street,” said Kennell. “You yell, ‘car!’ and you run to the side. We all shared and it works.”
The event was not especially well attended, likely due to Saturday’s sweltering temperatures, which prompted a heat advisory from city officials suggesting locals stay indoors and keep hydrated.
Some complained that the barricades discouraging cars from entering the 60-block “Shared Streets” zone caused terrible traffic jams around the periphery.
Hovitz went so far as to criticize the city for not postponing the event, despite the months of preparation that went into it.
“It just amazes me, the city issues an extreme heat advisory telling people to stay indoors or seek out a cooling center, and then on the same day closes the streets and invites people to come out and exercise,” he groused.
Some street-sharers beat the heat with another old-fashioned practice — opening a fire hydrant and splashing around in the spray.
Lower Manhattan is the oldest part of New York City and it shows its age in the narrow roadways and sidewalks of its “pre-grid” streetscape. Local stakeholders have for years been pushing for the city to conduct a thorough study of Downtown roadways to determine new solutions to ironing out traffic woes in the area’s quaint but tangled streets.
Shared Streets was envisioned as a way of not only getting locals out of the house, but of generating information that could lead to better traffic patterning in the future, although the data that was collected won’t be made available until the fall, according to a DOT spokesman.
Locals are also optimistic that the event will draw greater attention to the area’s growing garbage woes, which have been exacerbated by both traffic difficulties and a rapidly swelling residential population, according to the former chair of Community Board 1.
“Shared Streets would have been a lot more enjoyable if we didn’t have to share out sidewalks with bags of trash, especially on a hot day,” said Catherine McVay Hughes.
