Grand Street is crazy wide

Last night, heading to a party on the Lower East Side, I decided to drive. As Transportation Alternatives’ recent study (PDF) showed, the top reason most people who drive into or out of Manhattan do so is because it’s faster. And from Hoboken to the LES late on a Saturday night, it sure is, and (once you already have paid the sunk cost of having a car) cheaper too: $4 one-way tunnel fee with E-ZPass, plus 92 cents for gas (9 miles of driving at 21 average MPG for a 94 Camry is .43 gallons at around $2.16 per gallon) versus $5.74 transit ($1.67 each way bulk discounted NY subway fare and $1.20 each way bulk discounted PATH fare).

Anyway, leaving aside the public policy issue of why it should be easier and cheaper to drive, driving from Hoboken to the Lower East Side involves taking Grand Street crosstown through SoHo, NoLita, and Chinatown. And Grand Street is bizarrely wide. It’s not 2 lanes, but it’s much wider than 1 lane. As a result, some cars drive in the middle of the street, some on one side or the other, and some cars (especially taxis) try to squeeze around other cars on either side. It’s quite chaotic.

The advocacy group New York City Streets Renaissance singled out Grand Street as one of a handful of spots in central areas of Manhattan where space given to cars is way out of proportion to the space given to pedestrians even as pedestrians vastly outnumber cars. They created drawings reimagining Grand Street and the others - the square at Astor Place, the intersection of Bleecker and Christopher, and West Broadway. The MAS Livable Streets exhibit includes a video juxtaposing these reimagined panoramas, and including a few more, including one of a bizarrely desolate little triangle at Church and Sixth Avenues in Tribeca, across the street from the new home of The Tank.