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Soho
Was This Street Made for Walking?
By JAKE MOONEY
ON a weekend stroll down Prince Street in SoHo, past the vendors with foldout tables heaped with jewelry and movie scripts, the crowds flocking in and out of the Apple store, and the milling clusters of overtired out-of-towners, it might seem hard to imagine that the neighborhood could suffer from more foot-traffic congestion than it already does.
But that peril, along with the daunting prospect of still more tourists, is the main reason many local residents oppose a plan suggested this month by the city's Department of Transportation to declare summer Sundays on Prince Street car-free from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The plan drew heated opposition from about 200 people at a meeting on March 11 of the Traffic and Transportation Committee of Community Board 2.
On Thursday night, the full board voted to reject the idea, asking the department to explore car-free zones in a different form or perhaps on a different street.
Taxi drivers and other critics said that it would never work, but three weeks after Paris was sprinkled with 10,000 self-service bicycles, the scheme is proving a triumph and a new pedalling army appears to be taming the city’s famously fierce traffic.
Bertrand Delano�, the city’s mayor, and his green-minded administration are jubilant at the gusto with which Parisians and visitors have taken to the heavy grey cycles that have been available at 750 ranks since July 15.
Nowhere is the project being watched with greater interest than in London as the city prepares for London Freewheel day next month, when miles of roads will be car-free for the day. After witnessing first-hand the ease with which Parisians have taken to pedalling, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor, has asked Transport for London to develop a similar plan for London and bring together several smaller schemes across the city.
In Paris there have been few teething troubles with the high-tech system that supplies the bikes for up to €1 per half-hour — but one is a result of residents using them to glide downhill to work and then taking public transport home, resulting in gluts of bikes at some low-level stands and shortages at higher altitude stations, such as Montmartre.