Eyes on the Street: Behold the Beauty of a Bare Pedestrian Mall

By Ben Fried
Dec 2, 2009

Here’s a shot of the Park Avenue pedestrian mall at 88th Street, taken by reader BicyclesOnly last night. Thanks to sheer luck, it appears as though no one was caught between the car and the light pole.

A few well-placed bollards could reduce the element of chance here. But recall that back in early 2007, Manhattan Community Board 8 deemed physical protection of these ped refuges too unsightly to support. Lately, CB8 has shown more of an open mind toward street safety measures. Maybe it’s time to bring this idea to their attention again.

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Tonight: Support Major Ped and Bike Improvements at CB3 Meeting

By Ben Fried | Feb 11, 2009

Pedestrian plazas would reclaim six intersections connecting the Allen and Pike Street malls. Apologies for the last-minute heads up, but livable streets supporters in Chinatown and the Lower East Side won’t want to miss this action at Community Board 3 tonight. A DOT project to expand pedestrian space and add center median protected bike paths […]

The Fulton Street Mall: Retail Success on NYC’s Original Transitway

By Noah Kazis | Mar 14, 2011

As the New York Post continues its increasingly tedious assault on pedestrians and crosstown transit riders, its writers always seem to suggest that giving priority to buses in an important retail area is both radical and self-evidently bad for business. If they bothered to look just one borough away, they’d see that nothing could be […]

Construction Begins on Permanent Pike Street Redesign

By Noah Kazis | Feb 28, 2011

When DOT installed four pedestrian plazas and a protected bike lane along the median of Pike and Allen Streets in 2009, the results were impressive. Traffic injuries dropped 40 percent at the pedestrian malls; at the intersection of Allen and Delancey, injuries dropped 57 percent. As impressive as those results are, the Pike and Allen […]

Traffic Injuries Plummet on Allen and Pike After Bike-Ped Overhaul

By Ben Fried | Jun 15, 2010

Evidence continues to mount that NYCDOT’s street reclamation projects are making New York a safer city for walking and biking. The latest statistics come from Allen and Pike Streets, where DOT installed four pedestrian plazas and the city’s first center-median protected bikeway late last summer. The project followed a long campaign by local community groups […]

Eyes on the Street: Un-Plowed Bikeway on Parks Department Turf

By Stephen Miller | Jan 29, 2015

Most of NYC’s bridge paths and protected bikeways seem to have been cleared well in the aftermath of this week’s snowstorm, judging by the lack of snowed-in bike lane photos in the Streetsblog inbox. It’s a different story on Parks Department turf. This stretch, flagged by commenter BBnet3000 yesterday morning, is the center median bikeway on […]

Pedestrian Mall Revolution

By Aaron Naparstek | Mar 18, 2006

The other day, the NYC Department of Transportation unveiled a proposal to build a new pedestrian-only plaza with tables, benches, greenery and bike racks in Downtown Brooklyn along two blocks where Willoughby and Adams Streets intersect. According to a New York 1 report, the bottom two floors of the city-owned building at 345 Adams will […]