When NYC Streets Become Too Crowded Even for NYers

A New York City street is not like a street anywhere else in America. It is more frenetic, more teeming, more daunting, more commercial, more electric, more lawless, more infested, more sticky, more musical, more neon.

Everywhere, lines are blurred or disobeyed. Pedestrians creep over the curb into the roadway. Restaurants spill out their doors into patio seating. Shoppers who intend to buy nothing at all gawk from the street through the windows instead. And now a UPS truck is honking at a cab dislodging its passenger mid-intersection, and several strangely insistent men want to press in your hand fliers for half-off sandwiches.

“If you look at a typical street — say, 20 years ago — you had cars and you had an occasional truck,” says David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University. “And that was it.”

The cars and trucks are still there. But now there are tour buses bringing tourists who wouldn’t have come to New York 20 years ago. There are food trucks, and cab stands, and bikeshare stations. There’s Uber, and commuter buses and bike lanes. There’s a guy on a pedicab, taking up the space of a car but moving at the speed of a trike, with an entire family in tow.

Then there are the construction sites, because condos are rising everywhere, and as they do, they need to borrow just a little strip of the street, too. So they park industrial-scale dumpsters in the road and barricade the sidewalk with cement roadblocks. “Sidewalk closed. Use other side.” Except, on the other side, there’s another condo coming, too.

And don’t forget the delivery trucks — so many delivery trucks. Because Amazon Prime will send in two days what you used to walk to the store for. And the rate’s all the same, so why not order another package — I just need kitty litter! — for what you forgot yesterday?

“We have all this action on the streets,” King says. “The problem with this is all of these new uses are essentially competing for the curb.”

Every square foot of the public way in New York City, especially Manhattan, is reaching the limit of its carrying capacity. If the city wanted to cram more in — mobile health clinics? More fire trucks? Another round of pedestrian plazas? — it would need to open some new spatial dimension.

This is the backdrop against which Uber, an app service that now has nearly 26,000 drivers and 19,000 cars in New York City, became embroiled with City Hall this year in an existential fight over its contributions to “congestion.”

City officials warned that Uber’s runaway growth was to blame for slowing travel speeds in Manhattan to 8.5 miles an hour (a claim that’s near-impossible to prove given everything else occurring on the same streets). Uber took out attack ads. Mayor Bill de Blasio blasted the company from the Vatican. Things only grew uglier from there, before an 11th-hour detente.

The conflict, though — and it’s not resolved yet, as Gov, Andrew Cuomo is expected to announce next month a statewide standard for the ride service — isn’t just about technological disruption, or entrenched taxi interests. It’s about space — some of the most valuable space in the country’s largest city. Its public streets.

“In New York, transportation has superseded schools and housing as the source of the most intense political conflicts,” says Mitchell Moss, the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at NYU. “We no longer have the intense fights about school boards, or even about rezoning — but bicycle paths, taxis, even the regulations on bus drivers have turned out to be the most intense topics for political mobilization.”

That’s because there’s so much more competition now for a finite asset that can’t be expanded, and because absolutely everyone interacts with that problem. Every New Yorker has fought for a cab, or tripped over a tourist, or been nearly grazed by a car, or spent far, far too long trying to get where they need to go. Political fights over transportation aren’t abstract, like affordable housing, or inequality. They’re viscerally, instantly relatable. They’re about how you’ll get to the dentist tomorrow.

Even if de Blasio wanted unlimited ice cream trucks and horse-drawn carriages and high-speed buses, they simply would not fit.

This article appeared in print on page 6 of the December 25th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.