Closing Bell: Park(ing) Day in Flatbush
To celebrate Park(ing) Day today, people in cities across the country took back some valuable street real estate for a variety of non-car-related activities. From StreetsBlog, above, kids get creative on Cortelyou Road in Flatbush. More photos of other sit-ins around town can be found on Gothamist, Curbed and Flickr.
To celebrate Park(ing) Day today, people in cities across the country took back some valuable street real estate for a variety of non-car-related activities. From StreetsBlog, above, kids get creative on Cortelyou Road in Flatbush. More photos of other sit-ins around town can be found on Gothamist, Curbed and Flickr.
Yes – I now (again) live just off of Cortelyou so I am aware of the traffic.
It’s really not that busy compared to other streets – rush hour or not. But I would have to agree, the fire truck issue would make the one-way street idea difficult. I wouldn’t want to restrict buses at all… that was why I suggested the bus lane w/ grass idea. If cars have to find a different way to go east or west, I don’t feel so bad for them (and I own a car and drive *fairly* regularly).
Making Cortelyou one-way wouldn’t really restrict access to the business district, especially if you kept most or all of the parking – just all facing the same direction. The only restriction would be to commuters passing through with no intention of stopping.
I don’t find that Cortelyou needs “calming” per se. It’s nothing compared to other streets. I was thinking about adding some green and making the street more people friendly. Imagine how much cooler (and I mean temperature) the hottest summer day would be… walking down the sidewalk that has a strip of 10-ft wide strip of grass or low-maintenance ground covering and various other plants and trees.
(By the way – I had an image like this in my head: http://www.ruz.net/~trans/media/pictures/mulhouse-tram-on-grass.jpg Grass and trees and trasportation combined! Oh… and we should bring back the tram! There are sooooo many benefits compared to dumpy ol’ buses. But that’s just an aside.)
It could be an interesting experiment… though i agree about the fire trucks and transit, but not anything else.
I don’t know if you’ve been down Cortelyou Road lately tybur6 but it is an extremely busy thoroughfare, especially during rush hours. Every express bus in Brooklyn with the exception of three come through Coretlyou Road along with trucks, fire engines, etc… Making it a one-way street would not be a good thing. Although, I do wish that the city would try unconventional ideas when it comes to traffic calming on Cortelyou and elsewhere.
I meant – “keeping all of the PARKING, but reducing the road to 1-1/3 lanes”
Honestly… the volume on Cortelyou Road isn’t that high. What if it was made a one-way road (keeping all of the trafic, but reducing the road to 1-1/3 lanes)
And making a “park strip” the whole length between flatbush ave and coney island ave?
That would be sorta nifty, no?
Or just making it a grassy bus lane – those designs with the concrete tracks sunken in the ground. But I assume the ridiculous rules wouldn’t allow this because folks wouldn’t know to get out of the way of the bus.
Just throwing out some ideas for a business area without a whole lot of through traffic (relatively speaking). Something to make the road uninhibited for the local traffic… but (perhaps) less attractive to the general trans-neighborhood traffic.
It would be nice if we, as a city, could try some of these unorthodox ideas.