Can a US$350m plan transform Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue into a grand boulevard?

MANY New Yorkers have come to avoid a stretch of Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan that is perpetually choked by traffic and throngs of tourists clogging the sidewalk.

Now there is a plan to restore the lustre of the famed thoroughfare by revamping a central portion of it into a showcase boulevard for strolling and shopping such as the Champs-Elysees in Paris, Calle Serrano in Madrid, or Bond Street in London.

Fifth Avenue is home to office towers and luxury stores such as Rolex and Harry Winston. It is also a major transit corridor, with more than 40 local and express bus routes carrying thousands of daily riders. Bus speeds there are among the slowest in the city.

The proposed redesign, which was announced on Thursday (Oct 17), would span 20 blocks south of 60th Street, between Central Park and Bryant Park. It would significantly widen the sidewalks, add seating areas and plant more than 200 trees – while taking away two of the avenue’s five traffic lanes.

It was developed by a committee of city officials, business leaders and park stewards, which was formed in late 2022 after previous plans to update Fifth Avenue stalled, including one to create a busway to give buses priority over cars. There have been years of efforts to reimagine the corridor.

Street design is often contentious in New York City, where opposing groups fight over every inch of public space.

On Thursday, the plan drew support from New Yorkers who welcomed the pedestrian improvements to a chaotic street, but also criticism from drivers who said it would make traffic worse, bus riders who saw it as a step backwards from the previous plan for a busway, and cyclists who have pushed for a protected bike lane.

“An exclusive process produced an incomplete plan that caters to luxury boutiques but ignores how their workers get to work,” said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesperson for Riders Alliance, an advocacy group for transit riders. “Fifth Avenue should be a busway, prioritising safety and connectivity for public transit riders, emergency vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists.”

Still, some transportation experts and urban planners said that it was a good start towards addressing the need for more open space and better mobility, including more protected bike lanes, in the most congested part of the city.

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Kate Slevin, the executive vice-president of the Regional Plan Association, which supports the Fifth Avenue redesign, said that “as the plan advances, we hope it can go even farther” and lead to “a longer-term vision of surrounding streets in midtown”.

Even before the pandemic, retail sales along the avenue had lagged, as many shoppers stayed away, said Madelyn Wils, the interim president of the Fifth Avenue Association, which runs the business improvement district. “The sidewalks are crowded, there are lots of obstructions, and there’s no seating or greenery,” she said. Wils said that remaking Fifth Avenue for pedestrians would increase foot traffic, which in turn would increase property values and retail sales and generate more tax revenue and fees for city coffers.

More than 5,400 pedestrians an hour, on average, descend on a given block of Fifth Avenue along this midtown stretch during the evening rush hour – far more than motorists and bus riders – but they have to squeeze into a disproportionately small share of the street space, said Liu Ya-Ting, the city’s chief public realm officer.

Fifth Avenue is 100 feet (30m) across, with sidewalks on both sides that take up a total of 46 feet, while the traffic lanes take up 54 feet. Under the new plan, the sidewalks would be expanded to cover a total of 67 feet and the traffic lanes reduced to 33 feet.

“For us, it’s really about sort of balancing the street and finally giving pedestrians the space they need on Fifth Avenue,” Liu said.

The plan is expected to cost more than US$350 million and would be paid for through public and private financing, according to city officials and business leaders.

In 2020, then mayor Bill de Blasio, announced that the city would carve out a busway on Fifth Avenue, which would have severely restricted car traffic to allow buses to move faster between 34th Street and 57th Street. But that project was put on hold indefinitely in 2021 after opposition from businesses. There are now two bus lanes and three car lanes on Fifth Avenue. The new plan would keep one bus lane and convert the second into a shared lane. City officials said that, in reality, cars already use that bus lane to make turns off the avenue.

Two of the three car lanes would be removed, including one often blocked by delivery trucks and cars pulling over, city officials said.

A bike lane would not be added. Instead, city officials said, a nearby bike lane on Sixth Avenue would be expanded into a two-way bike lane.

Aaron Donovan, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s buses, said that MTA leaders were reviewing the plan. Still, he pointed out that “a proven effective tool for speeding up buses is dedicated bus lanes”.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect briefed on the redesign and a former director of planning for Manhattan, said that he supports the new plan but would like to see a protected bike lane on Fifth Avenue or somewhere else on the East Side of midtown Manhattan. “The West Side has way more bike lanes than the East Side does,” he said.

The redesign would also shorten crosswalks on the avenue, a safety measure that allows pedestrians to get across faster, and raise them to the level of the sidewalk, essentially creating speed bumps to slow down traffic.

A public meeting about the plan will be held on Oct 29, and the overall design could be revised. But the plan does not require major approvals that could block it entirely, city officials said. Construction is expected to begin in 2028.

The sidewalks on Fifth Avenue were once much wider but were narrowed in the early 1900s to make more room for traffic, said Samuel Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner who consulted on a traffic study for the new plan.

“It’s correcting a mistake that was made a hundred years ago,” he said.

Historically, he added, traffic volumes have declined on city streets that were redesigned for pedestrians, including stretches of Broadway in midtown, as drivers found alternate routes or turned to other transportation modes.