Who Owns Downtown's Streets? For One Afternoon, It Was Everyone

Patrick Kennell and Dawn Krigstin with sons Gabriel and Teddy, walk up William Street during Shared Streets on Saturday, Aug. 13. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

There was something different last Saturday about the streets that crisscross 60 blocks of Lower Manhattan.

You could walk on them.

As it turned out, not a lot of people did on that sweltering Aug. 13 afternoon. But that was the idea behind a six-hour city experiment called Shared Streets, in which drivers were asked to slow to a crawl of five miles an hour and give pedestrians and bike riders safe passage on Financial District streets, from State to Spruce and Water to Broadway. It was the first time that the concept “of this size and scale” has been tried in the U.S., according to Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg. (The program, she said, is modeled after ones tried in cities such as Paris, London and Bogota.)

“If you don’t need to drive in this district today, leave your car at home,” Trottenberg said at a press briefing outside Fraunces Tavern, at Pearl and Broad. “Come ride a bike, come walk around. That’s the goal here.”

People—many of them tourists—did walk around, but the majority dutifully stayed on sidewalks, most not knowing that they had special permission to be in the road. To enter the zone, drivers passed partial barricades, manned by police and with large green-and-white “5 MPH” signs. The majority appeared to obey the rules.

“They drive very slow and you feel you can breathe,” said Annalise Dinkelmann, who leads Lower Manhattan Tours and was taking her group on a scavenger hunt through the streets as one of a number of Shared Streets-sponsored activities. “And I have not heard one honk today.”

Indeed, a Trib reporter leisurely walked for nearly two hours along Broad, William, Nassau, Wall and Ann streets without once hearing a honk or angry word from a driver. And cars proceeded slowly. (A Gothamist writer reported a different experience. [1]) But pedestrians were forced off narrow streets to let the occasional truck pass by.

“I mean, who wins?” said Dawn Krigstin, who had been walking down the middle of William Street with her husband Patrick Kennell and two sons when a wide U-Haul forced them to the curb.

Kennell said he was happy to see Shared Streets given a try. As the founder and president of the newly formed Financial District Neighborhood Association, he has been concerned with easing sidewalk and street congestion.

Shared Streets, he said, “is hand in hand with the idea of how we’re going to tackle all of these pedestrian mobility problems.” He compared the idea to a mall parking lot. “You’re walking from your car to the doorway and you’re right in the middle of car traffic. Drivers know to go slow.”

They were both concerned, however, that people who park in the neighborhood overnight and drive out during the day could easily be unaware of the rules.

The city is yet to determine the success of the sharing experiment. Trottenberg said her agency will be evaluating pedestrian counts and feedback from the NYPD. She noted that other cities have broadened the program beyond lighter-trafficked summer weekends.

“We decided, let’s start on a Saturday in August and see how people feel about the concept,” the commissioner said. “If this goes well, we’ll see. We might expand it to [more] times and places throughout the city.”