City planners have a radical strategy to solve traffic problems
Tired of traffic? Relief is at hand, as city planners everywhere explore a bold way to solve the problem. From the February 28 edition of AFR Magazine.
Janette Sadik-Khan was instrumental in closing New York’s Times Square to traffic. Murray Hall
When Janette Sadik-Khan rose to be transport commissioner of New York City in 2007, she inherited one of the worst traffic problems in the US, and possibly the world.
Times Square – the Midtown Manhattan entertainment hub – was gridlocked all day and much of every night, while 350,000 pedestrians spilled off overcrowded footpaths and weaved in and out of the vehicles, often with disastrous results. A wide range of solutions had been tried to improve the woeful safety, to ease the appalling congestion and to clean the filthy air, except the most dramatic of all.
