In just a few months, getting around Midtown will be a whole new experience.
The Transportation Department is narrowing streets, widening sidewalks, and creating pedestrian plazas and bicycle lanes in the heart of the city’s busiest arteries.
“New York City’s streets are one of our most valuable resources, but they have been treated more as a utility than as places for people,” said Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.
“Every time we add a new plaza for public seating people flock to it and use it regularly because this is largely a city without seats.”
This week, the city began work on one of its most ambitious streetscape rearrangements to date – narrowing Broadway from Times Square to Herald Square from four lanes to two in order to create space for planters and outdoor seating.
The changes will join several other expansive transportation projects nearby, most of which will be done by fall.
The DOT is working on creating bus lanes on 34th Street from river to river, bicycle paths separated by leafy traffic islands on Eighth and Ninth avenues and public plazas around Madison Square Park between 22nd and 25th streets at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue.
Businesses were mostly supportive if a bit apprehensive about some of the changes due to be finished in August.
“It’s going to increase traffic,” said Haim Dadi, 48, owner of Mr. Broadway Kosher Restaurant at 38th and Broadway. “Our delivery trucks will have a real problem.”