Carfree-free Prospect Park?
The Countering a wave of bike-friendly initiatives, community groups rallied on Thursday against cycling activists’ calls for a car-free Prospect Park — saying that such a scheme would clog their neighborhoods with the hundreds of vehicles that currently use park roads during morning and evening rush hours.
The community groups in question include Community Boards 7 (Sunset Park and Windsor Terrace) and 14 (Flatbush, Midwood, Kensington and Ocean Parkway). Their efforts are strictly preemptive. The Department of Transportation has no plans to end rush-hour traffic through the park. But the mere IDEA of refusing to let car traffic run through drive in the park is apparently so galling that they've decided to take action.
What's interesting here is that their argument—at least as portrayed in the Brooklyn Paper—is that constituents are afraid of spillover traffic in their neighborhoods. In other words, they're afraid that if Prospect Park went carfree, their streets would become noisy and polluted.
Two points about that: One, as NYC traffic guru has Sam Schwartz pointed out, closing off one route only leads to increased traffic on agent routes in the short term—a few months. Gradually, drivers adapt to avoid clogged routes by taking different routes, switching to other transportation modes, traveling at different times, and cutting out unnecessary trips. Parkside Avenue between Ocean Avenue and Park Circle—the stretch CB14's Alan Berk is concerned about—is already a clusterfuck during rush hour so it wouldn't be long before drivers learned to avoid it.
Two: This argument is clearly a ruse by car owners to make their case more appealing. If the problem is, as Berk claims, "exhaust emissions and noise" on the streets around the park, how is it any better to have cars driving inside the park? Residents pay a premium to live close to the park, presumably to enjoy the park as a park. Having cars drive through in the park allows roads to carry more traffic, assuring more emissions, not less.
The constituency Berk and his cronies are actually representing are car drivers who DON'T live around the park: people in Midwood, for example, who see our oasis as their route to work. We can agree or disagree on whether cars should be allowed in the park, but these pols should cut the subterfuge.
Just because we live in close proximity to the park doesn't make it our oasis. I am sure that there are people who live in Midwood that see the park as a recreation facility and not a thoroughfare. If this guy represented car owners who lived near the park would it make any difference?
Posted by: Huh? | October 06, 2008 at 08:38 PM