Cars Out of Parks

Earth Week, April 1991. Over 400 New Yorkers demonstrated to ban motor vehicles in Central Park. Photo: George T. Nelson.

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Transportation Alternatives began campaigning in 1989 to close the Central Park loop drive to motor traffic. In 1990, T.A. began working to close Brooklyn's Prospect Park to cars as well. To those who use the city's parks for walking, running, cycling, skating and other forms of active recreation, as well as for those who go to parks to experience nature in the city, the advantages of a car-free atmosphere — chiefly respite from speeding, polluting automobiles — are compelling. Parks without cars are not a luxury, but an essential antidote to the crowding and pollution of the surrounding city.

For many New Yorkers, the parks are the only place to exercise and play —the only sanctuary. When the Central Park carriage drive is filled to capacity with cars — as it is every rush hour — the fragrance of trees and grass is overpowered by the smell of exhaust; the sounds of birds and wind in the trees are drowned out; cycling and jogging in the park become uncomfortably like cycling or jogging on city streets, and just as unsafe.

Background

Invoking precedent can pose problems when discussing the original intent of Central and Prospect Parks' designers, Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. When both great parks were constructed in the second half of the 19th century, neither the automobile nor the modern bicycle had been invented. However, the parks were clearly designed to be, first and foremost, a retreat, a place for walks and quiet contemplation.

Central Park loop drive. Extending the ban on cars to weekdays could ease weekend crowding among cyclists, skaters and strollers. Photo: George T. Nelson.

“The Park is a ground appropriated and arranged for the enjoyment of all the classes that inhabit a great city,” wrote Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. “The design has been so to plan and arrange it that the visitor may immediately on entering be led ... to divest himself of the thoughts and reflections that attend upon city business life, and to give himself up to an hour of undisturbed recreation.” [1] As Jerome B. Kauff wrote in 1979 in the Report and Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Central Park Drive Closings (which curiously concluded that cars should be allowed to continue using the drives), “The Park drives were specifically designed for recreational use, not as major arterial highways for commuter traffic to and from the central business district.”

Around the turn of the century, years after Central Park was completed, the then-gravel carriage drives were paved, new entrances cut through the Park's southern end, and the Park gradually opened to motor traffic. By the mid-1960s, according to Kauff, auto commuters, the taxi industry and midtown and downtown businesses took these extra north-south routes for granted.

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