Dear Commissioner Weinshall,

We call for a car-free Prospect Park.

We include New York City's major environmental, transportation and civic organizations and three former commissioners of the Department of Transportation. Given Brooklyn's scarcity of parkland, and the intensive use of Prospect Park, we feel very strongly that making Prospect Park car-free would be a major step forward for Brooklyn, its quality of life and environment. Indeed, there are few things that would provide such a big boon for Brooklyn, at so little cost.

We understand that you have expressed concerns about the traffic impacts of a car-free park on surrounding communities. Collectively, we have many decades of experience in transportation, traffic and land use planning. We have seen the exhaustive traffic studies and analyses that DOT conducted in and around Prospect Park throughout the 1990's. Based on all of this, we believe that the negative impacts of a car-free park will be minimal and positive impacts, great.

To help resolve questions about potential traffic impacts and to provide a respite from traffic for park users, we ask that you move enact a three month car-free trial period. Specifically, we request you make the summer of 2003, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, a Car-Free Summer in Prospect Park.

We understand that these are increasingly lean times for the Department of Transportation. As such, we ask that you allow this three month car-free trial to proceed regardless of whether DOT has the resources to conduct another series of detailed traffic studies. The information gathered from 1994 through 1997 during DOT's exhaustive Prospect Park Drives Alternate Use Studies provides a bounty of baseline data. During the 2003 Car-Free Summer in Prospect Park, volunteers from our organizations, DOT, the police, city council members, and other community groups can work together to monitor the traffic situation without taxing DOT's resources.

Month by month and year by year, traffic problems grow worse in Brooklyn. In the last weeks of August we saw three horrendous traffic tragedies in the neighborhoods around Prospect Park. In Prospect Heights a 3-year-old girl was nearly killed by a mini-van. In Park Slope an eight-months pregnant mother was run down in the middle of the afternoon by a drunk driver as she strapped her 3-year-old into her safety seat. And in Borough Park a 4-year-old girl, Ziporah Gelb, was killed by a careless speeder. It's difficult to keep calling these "accidents" when incidents like these keep happening.

DOT's capable and experienced traffic engineers know that one of the most effective ways to reduce car traffic on neighborhood streets is to reduce the capacity of the major roadways that dump the traffic onto those streets. We have numerous examples of this "disappearing traffic" phenomenon at work -- from the elimination of cars from Washington Square Park in 1958 to this year's closure of the Queens Boulevard Bridge. Experience dictates that closing the Prospect Park Drives will, more likely than not, reduce traffic in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the park as drivers find different routes, times of day and modes of transit to get to their destinations.

Brooklyn has the lowest percentage of parkland of any borough, both by acreage and population. Prospect Park is one of the very few places in Brooklyn where people can come to breathe fresh air and escape the mechanized tumult of city life.Your agency's own studies have shown that it would not be a great hardship to remove car traffic from the Park Drives. We urge you to approve a Car-Free Summer in Prospect Park next year.

Sincerely,

John Kaehny, Transportation Alternatives