Times Square
By One doesn’t generally expect to side with Andrew Cuomo against Bill de Blasio. But de Blasio’s apparent openness to his police commissioner’s terrible idea to tear up the Times Square plazas and turn them back into car sewers deserves serious pushback and Cuomo is right to give it. Kimmelman:
It’s hard to grasp his calculus. One of Mr. de Blasio’s big initiatives, Vision Zero, aims to improve pedestrian safety. Ripping up the pedestrian plazas in Times Square, restoring cars and forcing millions of people to dodge traffic again, runs headlong into his own policy.
As an exasperated Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, put it on Thursday: “Sure, let’s tear up Broadway — we can’t govern, manage or police our public spaces.”
“That’s not a solution,” he added. “It’s a surrender.”
The Times Square plazas were devised by the former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. Not for the first time, Mr. de Blasio is creating a peevish impression that, even now, he is running against his predecessor when he needs to be running the city. After the plazas opened in 2009, pedestrian injuries dropped 35 percent, and injuries to drivers and passengers in cars fell 63 percent, according to city records. Skeptics forecast calamity for retailers and commercial real estate. Business boomed. Surveys reported leaps in satisfaction by residents, workers and tourists.
Sometimes public spaces can be messy, and difficult to govern. I don’t have any particularly strong views about how the costumed panhandlers and their ilk should be addressed, or even how much of a ‘problem’ they actually are. But I do know that responding to this kind of challenge by giving up and turning public spaces into deadly car sewers isn’t a progressive position, and de Blasio shouldn’t be entertaining it.