Widened sidewalks, fewer left turns and new stop light patterns are among the changes that could relieve the chronic traffic mess that is Canal Street, according to a recently released long-term study. Left unchanged, the report warns, Canal and its neighboring side streets will only grow worse.
The federally funded Canal Area Transportation Study, conducted over eight years by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, outlines a battery of recommendations to the city Department of Transportation as part of its future reconstruction of the street.
Chief among those changes are major alterations to the layout of the street itself. The report recommends that the city:
• Eliminate one lane of eastbound traffic between Broadway and West Broadway.
• Widen both the north and south sidewalks between Broadway and West Broadway by as much as seven feet.
• Widen the corners and outlaw left turns at every Canal Street intersection between Lafayette to Elizabeth Streets.
• Prohibit left turns at Broadway, West Broadway and Greene Street.
• Stagger crossing signals for pedestrians at some intersections.
“Canal Street is not just a regional corridor, it’s a main street for the people in the communities that surround it,” said Lisa Daglian, spokeswoman for the Council. “This is an opportunity for us to make some lasting improvements.” If left unimproved, Daglian said, her group predicts that the problems plagueing the entire Canal Street corridor–between Houston and Walker Streets–will be half again as bad in the next 20 years.
Congestion of both cars and people on Canal Street is at its worst on the weekends and particularly on Sundays, according to the report. Car and truck traffic in both directions rarely exceeds average speeds of more than 10 miles an hour from late morning well into the evening hours. The problem is only exacerbated by the thousands of pedestrians per hour traversing Canal Street’s sidewalks, contending with food vendors, peddlers and shop owners whose carts, tables and display racks often force them to share space with moving vehicles.
The chaotic confluence of vehicles and pedestrians doesn’t just undermine the flow of traffic, Daglian said, it jeopardizes safety. In a two-year stretch—from 1999 to 2001—the study shows more than 2,100 accidents occurred along Canal between the Manhattan Bridge and the Holland Tunnel, including 171 at Lafayette Street, 220 at Broadway and 188 at Hudson Street. More than 90 of those accidents involved pedestrians, according to the study.
The city has already implemented several short-term changes to the corridor based on the Council’s first round of recommendations in 2005. Those included high-visibility crosswalks and a lane for buses and cars with at least two riders on the Manhattan Bridge. Whether any of the council’s longer-range fixes are adopted in conjunction with the yet-to-be-designed Canal Street reconstruction remains to be seen. A spokeswoman for the DOT would say only that the city is studying the Council’s findings, and did not comment on the reconstruction.
UPDATE (Jan. 19): At a public review of the NYMTC's study, a spokesman for the council said the city's reconstruction of Canal Street would likely begin in 2015.
“We believe that some of the recommendations are certainly being used to inform the reconstruction, but there’s no pen to paper yet,” Daglian said. “We’ll need to speak to them as they’re developing their plans.” The Department of Transportation, Daglian said, was among the stakeholders who contributed to the study.
Several other proposed changes were examined in the study and ultimately scrapped from the final recommendations. The ideas included: making Canal Street one-way eastbound and pairing it with a westbound-only Grand Street; a bus and car pooling lane entering the Holland Tunnel (rejected because it would cause longer back-ups at the Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge) and two-way-tolls on the Verrazano Bridge. The toll change, long advocated by many in Lower Manhattan, was shelved, according to the report, because it would require Congressional approval.
Two public reviews of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council’s final report will be held Jan. 19 at 3 p.m. in the council’s offices at 199 Water St., 22nd floor, and at 7 p.m. at P.S. 130, 143 Baxter St., in the auditorium.