City to make two Broadway lanes bikes, walkers only for seven blocks

BY PETE DONOHUE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Thursday, July 10th 2008, 10:52 PM

The Great White Way is going green.

A seven-block stretch of Broadway south of Times Square is being transformed into a boulevard featuring landscaped plazas, giving a Parisian flair to the heart of the city.

The city Transportation Department is halving the traffic lanes between 42nd and 35th Sts. from four to two to free up space for benches, chairs, umbrellas, trees, flowers and a bicycle lane.

Combined with similar projects underway just to the south on Broadway at Madison Square, the department is "reclaiming" for pedestrians and cyclists street space greater than all of Bryant Park [it's actually 10,000 square feet bigger than Bryant Park]," Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said.

"We're doing everything we can to improve the quality of public spaces in New York City, and this is one of the important initiatives," Sadik-Khan said, adding Broadway will become the "the Great Green Way."

The Broadway Blvd. is expected to be completed by the middle of next month. The Madison Square project, well underway, also is slated for completion later this summer.

Transportation Alternatives, the leading advocacy group for pedestrians and cyclists in the city, said the Broadway Blvd. project is a milestone.

"Broadway was really designed to be the great promenade of New York City, and this returns it to being the great walking street of the city," spokesman Wiley Norvell said. "Walking on Broadway is harrowing in this day and age, but it's about to get a lot more pleasant."

It will be safer for cyclists because the bicycle lane will be placed between the plaza areas and the sidewalks - many feet from southbound traffic, he said.

The Broadway Blvd. is the latest in a series of going-green changes to the city landscape undertaken by the Bloomberg administration. Similar transformations of blacktop to plazas, walkways and bikeways have been completed across the city, including: Gansevoort St. in the Meatpacking District; 14th St. and Ninth Ave.; Pearl St. in DUMBO, Brooklyn, and Grand Army Plaza, also in Brooklyn. The Department of Transportation also is planning to ban cars from a section of 34th St. to create a public plaza and bus-only lanes.

All that green is starting to make taxi drivers and other motorists see red.

"Pretty soon, everyone will only be able to get around town in a water taxi," said Bhairavi Desai, head of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. "Taking away space can't be the substitute for congestion pricing. For taxi drivers, this means access to less passengers, more congestion and less areas for cruising for fares."

Bloomberg championed a pricing plan to charge motorists to enter Manhattan south of 60th St. to reduce traffic and raise mass transit funds. The state failed to authorize it earlier this year.

pdonohue@nydailynews.com