But at a community board meeting on Monday night, street safety advocate Alex Duncan presented a third option to truly reimagine the corridor by repurposing an additional lane of Park Avenue from car drivers and also eliminate some cross-street traffic to provide an unbroken pedestrian and cycling experience.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/wider-park-avenue-plan.png\")
Notice how some cross-streets are closed to cars. Graphic: Alex Duncan<\/p>\n
\u201cMy idea is to specifically amplify the main goal, which is putting the \u2018park\u2019 in \u2018Park Avenue,’\u201d said Duncan, best known as Miser on the Reddit Micrombility NYC sub<\/a>. \u201cAnd a park isn\u2019t very good if it\u2019s broken up every 100 feet by car traffic. We can all agree that we wouldn\u2019t do that to Central Park.\u201d<\/p>\n Duncan told attendees at the Community Board 6 virtual meeting that he liked DOT\u2019s proposal, but added that if city officials are \u201cbeing honest,\u201d they\u2019d see that their design (right) \u201cis still kind of a six-lane highway.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is our chance to fix this,\u201d he said. \u201cDesign for the traffic that we want in the city and not what the traffic that we have. I don\u2019t think just replicating the chaos of lots of cars speeding through and turning all over the place and getting in pedestrian and bikers\u2019 ways is a good principle to start with.\u201d (Duncan\u2019s segment is here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n CB6 Transportation Committee Chairman Jason Froimowitz called it an \u201cinteresting\u201d proposal because it would create \u201cmore continuous pedestrian space without the cross streets [and] would improve the pedestrian experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Agency rep Nicholas Pettinati also called the plan \u201cinteresting,\u201d but couldn\u2019t comment further because it was the first time he\u2019d seen such a thing, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cObviously the traffic implications are the thing we would have to study,\u201d he added. \u201cI don\u2019t know if we can actually close off those cross streets from a volume perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n In a subsequent interview, Froimowitz praised the DOT\u2019s proposals as great starting points, but questioned the notion that \u201cthe standard for public realm or street safety projects should be zero impact on vehicle traffic.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe question should be whether the overall design produces a safer, more useful, and more people-oriented street,\u201d said Froimowitz, who made it clear he was speaking for himself, not his committee or in any official capacity. \u201cVehicle throughput is one factor to consider, but it shouldn\u2019t be the only one or automatically outweigh the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and everyone else who uses the street.\u201d<\/p>\n Duncan also focused on that notion that vehicle thru-put must always be maintained \u2014 a stance that undermines so many of the DOT\u2019s sustainability, safety and public space goals.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to reduce demand for cars in Midtown Manhattan,\u201d Duncan said. \u201cPark Avenue can\u2019t be both a park and a highway. Congestion pricing has shown how much better our city can be when we lean hard into the reduction of cars, and massively reducing the amount of surface area in the city dedicated to their movement and storage is the next huge opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n Duncan\u2019s proposal came as the East Coast Greenway Alliance was already mulling how to influence DOT to add more green to its plan.<\/p>\n Sofia Barandiaran, the group\u2019s New York & New Jersey manager, had reached out to Streetsblog independently of the CB6 meeting to propose writing an op-ed on the subject of how Park Avenue could be New York\u2019s first true \u201cgreenway street.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBy pairing green infrastructure that protects us from flooding with bicycle and pedestrian space that empowers us to move safely and sustainably, we can create a blueprint for the streets of tomorrow,\u201d she told Streetsblog.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for DOT said the agency will consider all feedback and will continue to look at traffic flow during the design finalization process.<\/p>\n Manhattan Community Board 5 will take up the DOT proposal on May 28 at 6 p.m., but the location has not yet been announced (check here for updates<\/a>). If you want to tell DOT what you think, the agency is conducting an online survey here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How about a plan to put the \u201cpark\u201d back in the plan to put the \u201cpark\u201d back in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":776644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-776643","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116526157988853583","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/260427_Park-Ave-without-Bike-Lane.jpg\")
This version, without a bike lane, maintains a lot of space for cars. Graphic: NYC DOT<\/p>\n