The City, however, has refused to address community calls for traffic reduction and calming. The official response to a WNBC-TV story on the rally was that through traffic should be accommodated by eliminating parking and adding lanes during peak travel times.

The civic groups organizing the rallies--the Neighborhood Streets Network and Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Columbia Street Associations--are developing a traffic calming plan to propose as a test to Mayor Giuliani. The test will be cheap and easily reversible, but will demonstrate that traffic calming will lead to less traffic and improved quality of life. The test would reduce street capacity by returning peak period parking to area streets. It would also turn many traffic lights into all-way stops and build sidewalk extensions at major intersections to lend more of a community feel and pace to local streets.

As it becomes increasingly apparent to DOT that highway additions are unacceptable and that neighborhoods will fight hard to reclaim streets from commuter traffic, the City will have no choice but to either quash growth or develop a more balanced and efficient transportation system based on traffic calmed neighborhoods and safe, reliable transit.