Businesses may benefit from this move. People driving past in cars are unlikely to stop by a local business in Manhattan. People passing by on foot are much more likely to.
The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.
Reducing traffic has other benefits in terms of making a place more liveable. If a street is full of vehicle traffic and noisy, it is a place people don't want to be & so pass through quickly. If you make the space nicer, people are more likely to want to dwell and spend money with local businesses & restaurants.
Manhattan can be quite unpleasant at times, but it's been really nice to see recent efforts to try to improve that:
- Partial pedestrianisation of broadway
- The 14th Street busway
- New protected bike lanes
Baby steps for sure, but better than doing nothing!
> The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.
In addition to making for a more pleasant environment, it's also worth pointing out that in a dense urban area, cars are pretty terrible in terms of people throughput compared to alternatives. People traveling in cars take up way more space than the same number of people riding buses, subways, bikes, or even walking, and the cars don't have enough extra speed to make up for it (in fact they're probably slower than everything except the pedestrians). This doesn't matter as much in less urban areas where there's plenty of room to spread out and the higher speeds that enables, but in downtown areas cars are realistically a pretty slow way for a bunch of people to get around.
You have no way of knowing if traffic is a bottleneck for revenue of all of these companies. That sounds like a far fetched idea that might possibly apply in rare cases.
The article has evidence of modal shift. Car journeys are down, but both subway ridership and foot traffic are up.
Reducing traffic has other benefits in terms of making a place more liveable. If a street is full of vehicle traffic and noisy, it is a place people don't want to be & so pass through quickly. If you make the space nicer, people are more likely to want to dwell and spend money with local businesses & restaurants.
Manhattan can be quite unpleasant at times, but it's been really nice to see recent efforts to try to improve that:
Baby steps for sure, but better than doing nothing!