Mayor Bloomberg announced last week that the city would try to facilitate pedestrian and vehicular circulation downtown with a new footbridge serving Battery Park City at Rector Street and a temporary surface road to be built between Vesey and Liberty Streets on West Street. The road will provide access to and from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The Mayor said the projects would be completed in May.

An oversight amid these improvements is some provision to better move buses in and through Lower Manhattan.Seven local and twenty three express bus routes — three from Brooklyn, three coming from elsewhere in Manhattan and seventeen from Staten Island — stopped in Lower Manhattan prior to September 11^th.Several private bus companies also served lower Manhattan.And an additional seven express bus lines used the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to access Manhattan points further north.

Even before the September, the longest part of many express bus rides was navigating lower Manhattan.Now, buses emerging from the Battery Tunnel must make a tight loop down Broadway and past the clogged construction site at South Ferry in order to turn north on the FDR Drive or Water St.Both immediate and permanent rebuilding of West Street and downtown more broadly ought to include bus lanes or other measures to ease circulation of buses and their thousands of passengers. 

Last week, Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg also announced support for burying the West Side Highway between the World Trade Center site andthe World Financial Center/Battery Park City.The highway was damaged during the September 11^th attacks.Depressing the roadway would provide easier access between the areas to its west and the rest of lower Manhattan, though engineering issues and costs have yet to be explored in any depth.

Meanwhile, Rebuild Downtown Our Town, a coalition of citizens, business and professional organizations and property owners, released a white paper outlining objectives for Lower Manhattan. “Permanent carpool rules should be applied to Lower Manhattan, as its infrastructure and the needs for pedestrian only streets could not absorb peak time automobile traffic in pre-9/11 times.Transportation in the World Trade Center area should be transformed to maximize connections between public transportation systems and minimize auto dependency.Transportation infrastructure should include a multi-modal hub (long distance rail lines, subway, bus, water, transit, connections to airports, commuter service, etc.) that will create locational demand for Lower Manhattan.”(See www.architect.org for the full report.)

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