NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux presented their design for New York City’s Central Park — then called Greensward — in 1858, they designated spaces by speed. The park’s traverses could handle crosstown carriages. Bridle paths were for foot traffic. And the drives would be treated as a promenade for all, split first between pedestrians, soon bicycles, and, later, cars.
“There should be separation of ways, as in parks and parkways, for efficiency and amenity of movement,” Olmsted wrote, “and to avoid collision or the apprehension of collision, between different kinds of traffic.”
More than 150 years later, the same principles apply. On an average morning, the park is awash in a sea of movement. The traverses function as roadways for cars, trucks, and buses chugging through Manhattan. The bridle paths are filled with tour groups, dog-walkers and parents with strollers. The drives, though — a 6.1-mile loop through the park — are a scene of something else entirely.
Any visitor will sense “the apprehension of collision” that Olmsted cautioned about. Scores of runners, solo or in packs, thread their way past lumbering horse-drawn carriages and pedicabs bearing selfie-snapping tourists. There’s a constant stream of bikes and scooters, electric and analog, traveling at varying rates of speed. Pedestrians are somehow in between, planning their crosswalk hops like Frogger. It has echoes of Tokyo’s famed Shibuya crossing: a daily symphony of people, all vying for space in what is now the world’s most popular urban park, with an estimated 42 million visitors a year.
Central Park’s popularity is especially noticeable on warm summer days, when its 18,000 trees lure crowds to one of the coolest spots in the city. The rising tide of complaints about high traffic on the drives has prodded the Central Park Conservancy, the four-decade-old nonprofit that serves as the private steward of this 843-acre open space, to overhaul these routes for the first time in a generation. The group is rethinking how people move through the park, redrawing markings to prioritize pedestrians and separate vehicles by velocity. It’s a response to a question that many cities are facing as they try to accommodate new transportation modes: What does the rapidly changing landscape of urban traffic look like within the borders of New York City’s famous artificial wilderness?
I first heard about these plans back in 2022 — I was a scholar-in-residence at the Conservancy that year. I didn’t participate in the study, but a that time it was clear that the loop — and the pandemic-era surge in physical activity pressing — was becoming a pressing issue amongst visitors and staff. Getting crowds under control is a high-stakes dilemma, as the park has often been cited as a barometer of Gotham’s general health. Its degradation mirrored the 1970s fiscal crisis; its slow revival tracked the great urban comeback. For Betsy Smith, the Conservancy’s president and CEO, this work isn’t any different. “If Central Park can solve this,” she told me recently, “anyone can.”
A Fork in the Road
After Central Park’s drives were paved over in 1912, cars dominated for more than a century, leaving just a few feet for anyone else. In 2018, the park went permanently car-free (except for authorized vehicles, like police or maintenance staff). But the layout of the roads was left largely intact, with traffic signals, marked lanes and other autocentric ephemera still in place. What has resulted is a confusing web of who uses what, where, and how.
When the Conservancy commissioned Sam Schwartz Engineering (now TY Lin) for a study in 2023, the firm set out to pinpoint pressures. It presented at community boards, held open houses and distributed an online survey, which over 10,000 people completed. Planners studied user patterns, analyzed crash data and met with local stakeholders.
They also sought advice elsewhere. Efforts to banish car and truck traffic inside major urban parks to make room for walkers and cyclists predate Covid-19, but the trend picked up dramatically during the pandemic. In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the second-most popular US park, the closure of JFK Drive was made permanent by referendum in 2022. There, park officials faced a similar squeeze from the mix of bike and scooter riders that claimed the roadway. “There might be kids learning to ride, but then other people going really fast,” said Brian Stokle, a planner with San Francisco’s Parks and Recreation Department.
At Sunset Dunes, the new park-née-highway next door to Golden Gate, two lanes have since been inked on the roadway: one slow; one speedy. “We’re still working on the right way to convey that message,” Stokle told me. “We want to hit that sweet spot — not make it overly like a road with classic regulations, but still maintain safety.” (Iconography so far includes snails for the slow lane and seagulls on skateboards for the fast lane.)
Central Park’s drives are narrower and busier than their West Coast counterparts. But the complaints sound familiar: Lycra-clad cyclists on racing bikes are inches from teens tottering around on rented Citi Bikes; pedestrians feel intimidated at crossings; intersections are a merging mess. Serious injuries from collisions between bikes and pedestrians are very rare — but they do occur. Earlier this month, a cyclist died after striking a pedestrian and crashing in the park.
The grievances have at times put the Conservancy in an uncomfortable political position. Critics of e-bikes who want an outright ban often live in the affluent Manhattan neighborhoods that adjoin the park, and tend to overlap with the organization’s donors. The city’s parks department has obliged to some degree, recently barring bikes from a popular boardwalk and reversing a car-free street in a park on Staten Island. (Both have since been scaled back after backlash.)
But ultimately, the drives fall under the jurisdiction of New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT), and a playbook exists: The eastern drive of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, another Olmsted-Vaux design, was revamped to better manage bike traffic last year. Central Park would be an iteration on that theme, at a much grander scale, said Sean Quinn, a deputy commissioner there. “We knew we had to go above and beyond here.”
Workers Ahead
On an April evening, a pair of NYCDOT crews made their way slowly toward each other from opposite ends of the park. A major road redesign is typically preceded by milling and paving, where asphalt is ripped up and relaid with a fresh coat. But when 115,000 people touch that pavement per day, a strategy is essential to minimize disruption. So paving work on the new Central Park paths was done overnight.
At 59th Street, the asphalt-laying truck’s engine roared while crews redirected traffic. Since the drives are considered arterials, the highway team was assigned. Their typical duties involve laying down pavement as high-speed traffic flies past; the park was a comparatively peaceful job site. “The guys didn’t mind a break,” said Eric Brown, an assistant commissioner. “We still have cyclists and runners go right through at five in the morning, but we’re used to it.”
This wasn’t unfamiliar soil. One stretch in particular, from Grand Army Plaza to East Drive, had frequent visits: It’s where the horse-drawn carriages concentrate, leading to more wear-and-tear.
Striping crews arrive a few weeks later. Thermoplastics — the white paint for lines, the green paint for bike lanes, the tan-ish paint for pedestrian spaces — are installed in batches. Because of a rainy spring, installation has taken longer than expected. If it’s sunny out, though, you’ll likely see a contractor and some cones.
Gradually, the new design is coming into view. Pedestrians get lanes that are sometimes up to 19 feet wide. Another 10 for slower bikes next to them, with a narrower passing lane to the right. And every crosswalk — about 80 in total — is being repainted for the first time since anyone can remember. (Records of the drives’ upkeep are scattered.) Particularly busy crossings will get “rumble strips,” which act as bike-sized speed bumps, and timed signals. Eventually, every traffic light will switch to blinking yellow.
Park users are adjusting to the new layouts. On a recent sunny afternoon, walkers and runners were spread out across the reclaimed space. A delivery worker on an e-bike easily maneuvered around a guided group of sightseeing cyclists — a new entrant to the mobility mix. “We gave any remaining real estate over to pedestrians where we could,” said David Saltonstall, the Conservancy’s head of government relations, policy and community affairs, as we drove by in one of the organization’s electric carts. “We had to do what we could with the infrastructure we had. Hopefully it makes sense to people.”
Thinking Outside the Park
Carl Mahaney cycles through Central Park regularly, typically with his 9-year-old child in the cargo bike load in front, on the way to work or school. in tow. That experience has made him an encyclopedia of routes and dreams. As the director of StreetopiaUWS, an advocacy organization that fights for street safety improvements on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Mahaney leads campaigns to make the neighborhood easier to walk and bike. Central Park, naturally, eats up a big part of his portfolio.
The new paint and signage is welcome, he said, but he’s underwhelmed by the limited scope of the work. “This design exercise could have unlocked some imaginative and creative interventions,” he said. “Maybe they could have done it on a budget, or piloted it in a certain section of the park. Instead, we just got kind of the same thing.”
In conversations, Mahaney has pushed the Conservancy to think bigger. What about turning the sparsely used sidewalks along the 86th Street Traverse into bikeways to ease the crush of cyclists on the loop inside the park? Or adding protected bike lanes to West 72nd Street, connecting park goers to the Hudson River? “It’s really about embracing the park as part of this larger mobility network,” he said.
That kind of broader transformation would be a new role for the Conservancy. Founded in 1980, the group spent its first decades shoring up Central Park in an era when public spaces in New York City suffered from widespread neglect. Today, the group’s robust operations budget, which raises about $75 million each year outside of city coffers, keeps the park in comparatively pristine shape. An ambitious capital plan, which has invested over $1 billion in its built facilities, is finally making its way north, marked by the opening of the ambitious Harlem Meer, a year-round recreation facility, after a $160 million facelift.
The Conservancy has also started to look past its borders, urged on by both advocates and city officials alike. Its Five Borough program trains groundskeepers in parks citywide. The organization is a partner on the Future of Fifth, a $400 million project to turn Fifth Avenue into a “pedestrian paradise.” Conservancy dollars helped get an effort to reimagine a 26-block-long Open Street in Queens as a linear park off the ground. This next stage for Central Park’s drives is part of that trajectory.
But that work must contend with the realities of maintaining Central Park. Enforcement remains hit-or-miss. Unlicensed pedicabs are a nuisance. A proposal for a shared path will require cooperation from the NYPD. And even if well-resourced, the Conservancy has to work within the city’s processes and budgetary constraints.
For Betsy Smith, the organization tries to needle change where it sees fit.
“We oversee a tremendous amount of public space, which comes with tremendous challenges and responsibilities,” Smith said. “But we strive to make a difference because we’re part of the public realm. If we can do something, we’ll do it.”
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