Bus Rapid Transit

A More Democratic Use of Space on 34th Street

This graphic tells you all you need to know about the rationale behind DOT's plans for 34th Street, which are getting some play today in the Times and on Gothamist. DOT displayed it prominently at Wednesday's info session about the project.

By Noah Kazis

11:20 AM EDT on April 23, 2010

Image: NYCDOT

This graphic tells you all you need to know about the rationale behind DOT’s plans for 34th Street, which are getting some play today in the Times and on Gothamist. DOT displayed it prominently at Wednesday’s info session about the project.

The biggest group of users — pedestrians — will get wider sidewalks and refuge islands, as well as a major new plaza between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. For the roughly 33,000 daily bus riders, DOT predicts the physically separated busway will improve travel times by 35 percent. Private drivers? Well, they may take up a lot of space, but there just aren’t very many of them.

34th Street is relatively narrow for such an important corridor. This will be a democratic redistribution of scarce space, giving a little more room back to the overwhelming majority of people who use the street.

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.