NEW YORK — Start singing a lullaby for Broadway. The famous street is being shut down at the crossroads of the world: Times Square.
To speed traffic and give pedestrians more elbow room, New York City will close five blocks of Broadway around Times Square to traffic. The famed Great White Way between 42nd and 47th streets will become a pedestrian zone with benches, tables and landscaping.
Farther south, two blocks of Broadway at Herald Square, home of Macy's flagship store, also will be closed.
Broadway's diagonal, generally north-south path slices across Manhattan's street grid, forming odd-shaped blocks at the heart of Times Square and creating fearsome traffic jams where three streets meet.
"It's pretty hard to argue that we could do anything to make it worse," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in announcing the plan Thursday.
The $1.5 million project, which will run from Memorial Day until the end of the year and could become permanent, diverts vehicles onto north-south avenues, eliminating the three-street intersections. Vehicles will still be able to cross Broadway on east-west streets.
The street closing will make more room for pedestrians, who outnumber cars in Times Square by more than four to one. More than 350,000 people a day come through Times Square, which has one of the highest rates of pedestrian injury and death in Manhattan, says city Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn.
Many of those crowding the sidewalks are among the 47 million tourists who visited last year. On weekend nights, sidewalks can be so packed that pedestrians often walk in the gutter.
Other cities such as San Francisco are studying plans to alter traffic patterns on signature downtown streets.
Dozens of cities, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Tampa and Tulsa, turned downtown streets into pedestrian zones in the 1970s to compete with suburban shopping malls — only to reopen them to vehicles when stores suffered from lack of foot traffic and the streets became grim and empty at night.
New York's plan is the reverse, says Wiley Norvell of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group. "We're not trying to lure crowds to a vacant downtown with some planters and a nearby parking lot," Norvell says. "We have crushloads of pedestrians. This is about giving them room to breathe."
But do they want it? The crowding is what makes Times Square special, says Janet Anderson, 20, a student from Glasgow, Scotland. "It would be easier to move about," Anderson says, "but it wouldn't be New York, with all the chaos and craziness."
I think this is going to be a bloodfest of a competition. Findlay, John Burroughs, and North Central are all crowd favorites and Wheaton-Warrenville is fresh off yet another Grand Championship win this weekend. Can anyone really be sure of anything? Having seen only one of the groups attending the competition so far this year there's no way I could make a prediction, but I'm not assuming anything, either. This one may purely come down to who wants it the most.
alright, i may have to take this back now, apparently judges don't want to score their show... Atleast not the ones at Ben Davis. That is, if pike and franklin central both beat NC... which in my opinion is... crazy
FAME New York 2009
