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 Much of the action takes place in pedestrian plazas carved into
Broadway, souvenirs of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's efforts in
2009 to make parts of the city more accessible to the public.
It all contributes to a boom in Time Square's retail business and
billboard advertising, plus fewer traffic accidents.
But New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton would rip out
the plazas to combat what city officials call aggressive
solicitation of tips by topless women coated in body paint and
hucksters dressed like cartoon and superhero characters who pose for
pictures with tourists.
"I'd prefer to just dig the whole damn thing up and put it back to
the way it was, where Broadway was Broadway and not a dead-end
street," Bratton told radio station 1010 WINS on Thursday.
Not everyone agrees.
"He's out of date and clearly way beyond his shelf-life if he thinks
we should go back to the 1980s. He's confusing Times Square with
Boston Common," said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning
and policy at New York University.
 "New Yorkers may not like everything that goes on in Times Square,
but we are not going back," said Moss, referring to the old traffic
pattern that created even more congestion.
Bratton's idea will be considered by Mayor Bill de Blasio's newly
created task force that is looking for a way to limit the
solicitations without violating freedom of expression and
panhandling rights.
"It had not occurred to me that anybody would have possibly seen
what's happening in Times Square as something that needed to be
solved by turning it over to cars," said David King, assistant
professor of urban planning at Columbia University.
The Times Square Alliance, which promotes the section of the city
known as The Crossroads of the World, contends that businesses in
and around Times Square are frustrated by the hustlers and hawkers.
"The solution to dealing with 50 hustlers and petty thieves
shouldn't be to put the 450,000 people who walk through Times Square
every day back out into the street," said Tim Tompkins, the
alliance's president.
Times Square pedestrian volume is up but traffic related injuries
are down, said Caroline Samponaro, deputy director of Transportation
Alternatives, an urban planning and advocacy group. "The number of
injuries for all road users is down 40 percent since the plazas were
installed," she said.
Urban planners around the United States began favoring plazas 50
years ago to help increase commerce in declining cities. Back then,
Times Square's legitimate businesses competed for attention with
peep shows and prostitutes.
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Now, Times Square's plazas and the buzz around them reflect what
proponents tout as the upside of diverting traffic in the name of
public space.
Street plazas, however, do not always work to a city's advantage.
A 2013 study for Fresno, California, showed that U.S. pedestrian
malls had an 89 percent failure rate with most either removed or
repurposed.
Buffalo, New York is one example where traffic is slowly returning
to its main street.
"Back then it was thought a European model of a downtown plaza would
help Buffalo revitalize itself," said Ernest Sternberg, a professor
of urban and regional planning at the State University at Buffalo.
"That concept did not work. It is hard to know how much of the
decline was caused by the plaza itself or the population and
business decline that was happening at the time," he said.
Time's Square's street plazas could be given back to taxis, trucks
and buses. But for the time being, while the task force considers
options, people pack the space day and night.
"After six years and $40 million spent by the city constructing the
plazas, it would be a terrible mistake to eliminate them as the
number one complaint from visitors before their construction was the
lack of pedestrian space," said Fred Rosenberg, president of the
Times Square Advertising Coalition.
He said it was imperative to find a solution to the "harmful and
negative activities" in the area without denying tourists and New
Yorkers the "bright lights and excitement of Times Square."
(Reporting By Daniel Bases; Editing by Toni Reinhold)
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