Radiating out of Grand Army Plaza are no less than six major wheel spokes, each carrying significant motorized volumes toward every corner of Brooklyn. Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, calls it "the perfect storm of traffic.""This could be one of New York's - one of the world's - great public spaces," he hoped, before conceding, "but now it's just a glorified traffic rotary."Indeed, the great arch, built to commemorate the Union's victory in the Civil War, was meant to be the entrance to Prospect Park. But now, only the most daring and fast pedestrians dare use it as such. Instead, two concentric rows of car traffic clumsily interwine on their ways to and from Flatbush Avenue, Eastern Parkway, Vanderbilt Avenue, Union Street, and Prospect Park West, along with over half a dozen more minor side roads."I'm quite horrified to see how this space has been treated," announced Danish urban planner Jan Gehl on a recent visit to the borough. "People have to jump like Eskimos going from one ice floe to the other."Like White, however, Gehl sees the current mess more as opportunity than obstacle. "This place has the size and grandeur," he said of the 18.5-acre plaza, "of the greatest public squares in the world. Rome, Paris, and London all come to mind. This could become one of the handful of public spaces in the world that everybody knows by name."During last Friday morning's press conference, the planners, park advocates, and pedestrians were all hopeful that the future of Grand Army Plaza would be different than its present. The only politician present, Congressman Major Owens, encouraged the crowd to think also of the past."Monuments should be lived in, not looked at," he began. "I also hope the profundity of this place isn't lost. It was modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and was a Union Army memorial. One of the first regiments for the Civil War was raised in Fort Greene, and one of the first drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation was written inside a church in Fort Greene."I hope more people will come here and kids will ask their parents what this arch means," continued Owens. "It should bring our history alive for generations who have forgotten what it was all about."During the speeches, Transportation Alternatives distributed booklets put together by Gehl and his European colleagues that described alternatives to the plaza's status quo. They ranged from putting a tunnel underneath - too expensive, all agreed - to removing the inner ring of traffic to reconfiguring traffic patterns, narrowing lanes, and changing signal timings."Right now," revealed Aaron Naparstek, a Park Slope journalist and member of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, "we're in the brainstorming stage. We're working with the city and we're hoping to have some quick fixes by the end of summer or the fall."Delila Hall, a city bureaucrat with the Department of Transportation (DOT), was there also to offer vague words of encouragement. "We're glad to be invited today," said the deputy borough commissioner of DOT, "and we're looking forward to working with you on making a better circle." When asked by the Star what specific changes DOT might be on board with, Hall said, "It's still in the formative stages, so we couldn't comment."Transportation Alternatives and DOT have often butted heads in the past over pedestrian versus auto priorities, but White thinks that, "It's not always an either/or. With sophisticated signalization and tighter lanes you can decrease speed but actually increase flow at the same time. It's less herky-jerky and stop-and-start. DOT has always been trying to do that kind of traffic rationalization.""In Europe," advised Oliver Schulze, one of Gehl's colleagues, "our traffic is not as flabby. We have tighter lanes and we can manage more flow with less space. That's because we've had a culture of urban highway engineering for over four decades."When Schulze looked at the statues, fountains, and forests of Grand Army Plaza, he said, "Its current use doesn't reflect the original intent. It was meant to create a sheltered space where people could feel safe in the center. But now it's along the outside that people feel safer. The traffic has totally reversed what it was supposed to be."