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The Times has a good article about the traffic nightmare that occurs at the intersection of Flatbush, Atlantic, and Fourth Avenues in Brooklyn, and comes up with some great facts:
During the commuter rush, as many as 4,600 vehicles pass through the intersection every hour, according to the city's Department of Transportation. Hundreds more join the flow toward the intersection from Fourth Avenue, which cuts across Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues to the west, servicing South Brooklyn's docks and residential neighborhoods.A few feet below lies a major transit hub - the Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street subway stations, which handle 10 lines, and a Long Island Rail Road station - that serves about 50,000 riders a day. And on the intersection's north side sits the Atlantic Terminal, a mall that houses, among other things, one of the busiest Target stores in the Northern Hemisphere.
This is newsworthy because of the Nets Stadium development currently being planned on this same spot-- a development that many people feel will make traffic in the area much, much worse. Here's our solution to the quagmire: put Flatbush Avenue underground for these five blocks, with cloverleaf exits to and from Atlantic Avenue. Better yet: add congestion pricing to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, to discourage people from coming in during rush hour. To top it all off: add a 4-to-a-car restriction on both bridges, which would hugely reduce the influx of traffic to the bridges at rush hour. Traffic engineers: what are your ideas for solving the problem?
Related: Forgotten-NY on the redevelopment of the area, and Satan's Laundromat's panoramic shots of the area from the WBSB.
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Tunneling Flatbush would be too expensive and would jsut encourage more people to drive. car restrictions, like pricing or mandatory car pooling, are more on target.
In the times article, sam schwartz gets it right when he says, "Your first goal is to get as many people into mass transit as possible", aka a "modal shift" away from driving.
For more details about what this approach might specifically entail, see http://www.transalt.org/campaigns/brooklyn/dbtc/041210blueprintrecommendations.pdf
Well, a first start/temporary solution would be to get the traffic cops to write more tickets. I've repeatedly almost been rundown 20ft. away from traffic cops slacking off talking among themselves. If the cops started ticketing aggressively, the drivers would be less aggressive!
i think one good solution would be to displace the buses, especially right in front of target. when a bus has to stop for a good thirty seconds to a minute to accommodate all the shoppers, which it often does, it has a horrendous shockwave effect on the traffic behind it. put the bus stops on hanson or dislodge all the gypsy cabs clogging up ft. greene place.
also, i'm not an engineer, but i imagine it would help to beef up bus service in neighborhoods that are downstream from the traffic and poorly served by mass transit. also, add more express trains.
Obvs Flatbush can't be buried -- in case you've forgotten, there's an enormous mass-transit hub directly underneath it. But congestion pricing -- or any kind of pricing at all -- on the East River crossings is a no-brainer. Clearly though, if you do Brooklyn & Manhattan, you need to do Williamsburg as well.
Liz,
I don't know much about the area, but keep in mind that the bus is carrying up to 50? passengers, while the cars backed up behind it are extremely spatially inefficient, carrying 1 or 2 passengers usually. I don't see why we should move the buses. Instead, the MTA could implement some elements of Bus Rapid Transit to give them priority on the street.
mike, i agree that buses are a far better way to move people than cars, but they also contribute to the traffic problem by stopping an entire lane of traffic for up to thirty seconds every four blocks. the streets where i suggested stops are equally convenient but are on far less-congested side streets, and could help until someone can figure out -why- all these people are driving instead of riding the train or a bus. plus, moving the bus stops costs next to nothing.
not sure how limiting flow over the brooklyn (and manhattan bridge) would help this. we don't know that people going through that intersection are going all the way there - many of them could be going to work in downtown brooklyn. never mind that most people going over the bklyn bridge take the bqe there, and may be coming from as far away as staten island.
if anything will work, it'll be that the increased congestion, should it happen, will make it that much worse a commute for those people, and maybe they'll just stop driving because taking the subway would be faster at that point?
it's kind of unfortunate that flatbush is the _one_ street that goes directly from where it starts in the sheepshead bay area to downtown/manhattan. unless you count the prospect exrpessway.
it also (tangentially) annoys me that everyone wants to restrict all these drivers, yet they never stop and think about why all these people are driving through awful morning traffic to get to work when there are, in theory, trains that can more easily take them in. the reason? the trains really suck in certain areas of brooklyn. if trains were more convenient and/or safer, there would automatically be less traffic, because it's so expensive to own a car and drive it work and have to pay for parking.
I second what AlexQ said about the trains. Part of the problem is that getting across Brooklyn (meaning roughly east-west) is difficult via subwway in many parts of the borough. The buses are a joke - some of them come once an hour, and when the weather is cold, waiting outside at bus stops without shelter for up to an hour is just not feasible.
a giant bridge for pedestrians to walk over. If you're coming from target, or the LIRR, or any part of the northside of that intersection, and want to get to the south side, where many people live, you have to cross like 3 major roads at strange angles with confusing signs and lights.