City Wants Single Car Lane on Broadway

By Etta Sanders
POSTED MARCH 30, 2007

Community Board 1 wants to put the brakes on a traffic plan that, by the city’s own admission, would snarl traffic on lower Broadway in an effort to discourage car ridership and put more people on buses.

The Department of Transportation unveiled the plan to a CB1 committee on March 19, and the next day the full board voted unanimously to reject it.

Under the DOT plan, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., only buses would be allowed in the western traffic lane of Broadway from Houston to Vesey Street. All other vehicles—private cars, trucks, and taxis—would be restricted to the one other traffic lane. The changes are aimed at easing increased congestion from lane closures and an influx of construction vehicles as the building of the Fulton Street Transit Center gets underway.

“I don’t see how this increases traffic flow. Based on just experience, buses don’t fill a single lane,” said CB1 member Jeff Galloway. “It seems to defy common sense.”

The DOT will build five bus “bulbs,” extensions of the sidewalk that will jut into the parking lane on the west side of Broadway. This will eliminate the need for buses to pull over to the curb to pick-up and discharge passengers, said Lori Ardito, the DOT Commissioner for Lower Manhattan. Four of the five bulbs, which will be located at Houston, Spring, Grand, Walker and Franklin Streets, should be completed by early July.

In an interview with the Trib, Ardito said the goal of the plan is not to better handle the usual amount traffic on Broadway, but to encourage the use of mass transit and to persuade other vehicles, “to stay off Broadway.”

“We’re certainly not going to restrict other traffic, but this certainly will discourage other traffic,” she said.

An even more restrictive contingency plan that would prohibit any cars from turning onto Broadway at 11 intersections and allow only buses and construction vehicles on Broadway between Ann/Vesey and Liberty Streets, could be implemented if traffic gets seriously snarled. The city is “ready to roll it out if we ever have to,“ Ardito said of the contingency plan, “We would like to prevent it any way we can.”

During her appearance before CB1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee,  Ardito was pressed to explain the impact on nearby streets if traffic is diverted from Broadway, even voluntarily. A traffic-modeling project for Lower Manhattan is in progress, she said, but for now, “There is no analysis.”

CB1 is asking the DOT to suspend the plans for Broadway until there is an analysis of traffic in Lower Manhattan that accounts for all of the simultaneous construction projects in the area.

“How can we analyze something when we don’t even know what the impacts are?” said Catherine McVay Hughes, co-chair of the CB1 committee.

Hughes added that increased use of mass transit is a step in the right direction for air quality, if the city buses use ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel. “That’s definitely positive, but we want to make sure that the MTA is doing their part,” she said.

The bus bulbs will cost $100,000 each, according to DOT estimates, and will remain in place at least until the Fulton Street Transit Center is completed at the end of 2009.

The city needs to convince the community of the benefits before proceeding, said Hughes. “We want to know before $100,000 per bus bulb is spent that it’s actually going to work,” she said.

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