Vive La Sécurité! Paris-Style Gated School Street Coming To Tribeca

Time to do some back-to-school stopping.

The Mamdani administration will mark the start of the school year by cutting the ribbon on a Paris-style car-free street — complete with a first-of-its-kind (well, in New York, at least) movable gate — part of a larger school safety effort that includes the previously promised expansion of 15-mile-per-hour zones around places of learning, as well as street-design upgrades to protect the nearly one million public school students in the five boroughs.

The car-free plaza on Clarkson Street in Tribeca, with its permanent gate, is an upgrade from the current metal barricades that must be moved, repeatedly, by volunteers or city employees, all day. Parents across the city have advocated for this kind of French treat for years.

The gate will be installed across the entrance to Clarkson Street at Hudson Street outside of City As School, a progressive public high school founded in 1972. The gate will block drivers from turning left onto Clarkson from Hudson during the Open Street hours (school days, from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m). The gate can be opened and closed for emergency vehicles, but its continued presence on the street signals its primary purpose: people.

“As a parent of two New York City public school students, I understand the importance of Open Streets as an opportunity to provide safe, open-air environments for children to learn and play — while also providing parents and guardians calmer and more social pickups and drop-offs,” said Department of Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn. “We are using innovative tools to help keep children safe as schools, from new street designs and an expansion of our school slow zones.”

DOT will use the downtown gate as a pilot with the hope of “potential expansion to other Open Streets across the city,” the Mamdani administration added in a statement.

As part of the mayor’s back-to-school announcement, the administration said the school Open Street program has grown to 77 locations, up from the 69 that were confirmed in early 2026. That modest increase keeps the city far behind global peers in designating streets for children. Paris, with one-quarter the population, has 200 school streets, and London, which is roughly the size of New York, has at least 800. As a candidate for mayor in 2025, then-Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani was all-in on school streets, telling Reddit that he would make the program “universal,” meaning schools would have to opt-out rather than opt-in.

Instead, Mayor Mamdani has so-far focused on using power granted to the city by the state legislature (also known as Sammy’s Law) to create 15-mile-per-hour school slow zones at more than 200 locations so far. Shortly after taking office, Mamdani promised to implement the law — which is named after 12-year-old Sammy Cohen Eckstein, who was killed by a driver on Prospect Park West in 2013 — to create 800 school slow zones by the end of the year. The administration says it is on track to install the remaining 600 by the end of the calendar year.

“Every student deserves to feel safe when they make their way to school, and every parent deserves the same peace of mind,” the mayor said in a statement. “Our administration will continue to take action to ensure our streets are safe, especially those surrounding our children’s schools.”

In addition to the permanent gate and the slow zones, the DOT will also implement street safety projects at schools. One such project, traffic-calming measures on 86th Street in Brooklyn from Stillwell Avenue to Shell Road, reduced pedestrian injuries on the corridor by 36 percent since completion in 2021, according to DOT.

More than 300 schools are set to get street redesigns this year, the administration said. Future projects include street improvements on Coney Island Avenue near P.S. 889, three projects in the Rockaways which will add curb extensions are other traffic-calming measures, one project on Elton Avenue in the Bronx, and pedestrian and bike improvements near schools at Courtlandt Avenue, Park Avenue and Morris Avenue in the Bronx.

All that isn’t enough for many street safety activists, including those at Transportation Alternatives, who pointed out that Mamdani has not fully taken advantage of Sammy’s Law by reducing speed limits across whole neighborhoods: