What happens when New York City streets become too crowded even for New Yorkers
(WASHINGTON POST) Emily Badger — A New York City street is not like a street anywhere else in America. It is more frenetic, more teeming, more daunting, more commercial, more electric, more lawless, more infested, more sticky, more musical, more neon.
Everywhere, lines are blurred or disobeyed. Pedestrians creep over the curb into the roadway. Restaurants spill out their doors into patio seating. Shoppers who intend to buy nothing at all gawk from the street through the windows instead. And now a UPS truck is honking at a cab dislodging its passenger mid-intersection, and several strangely insistent men want to press in your hand fliers for half-off sandwiches.
“If you look at a typical street — say, 20 years ago — you had cars and you had an occasional truck,” says David King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University. “And that was it.”