Because you can’t have too much of a good thing, I report for the Village Voice today on New York’s experiment with shutting Manhattan streets to traffic:

After trial runs in the hinterlands of Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue and Montague Street, the NYC Summer Streets program landed in Manhattan for the first of three consecutive Saturdays this weekend. The big question: Would taking a contiguous strip of avenues from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park and shutting it to cars (driven or parked) draw more than the trickle of folks who attended the earlier experiments?

The answer: Hell yeah. Helped along by a crisp, breezy morning that felt more mid-May than mid-August, Lafayette Street, Fourth Avenue, and Park Avenue were thronged with bicyclists, joggers, more bicyclists, stroller-pushing pedestrians, and still more bicyclists… [read more]