TRAFFIC GRIDLOCK DRIVERS
TRAFFIC GRIDLOCK DRIVER

Commuters on their way to work are trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams because streets can't cope with heavy rush-hour traffic. Clearly, many cities across the globe are already threatened by a traffic breakdown. There is an ongoing discussion about how best to organize such mobility. 'Mobility is geared to people, how they get to the doctor's office, the university or school, a restaurant, to the movies, or to visit a friend,' Becker says. The term mobility may not appear in the UN's Declaration of Human Rights, but the right to mobility could possibly be derived from other basic rights. “If they say a hurricane is coming, what would you do - you’d start making preparations.'Mobility is a human right - and mobility is by no means synonymous with traffic,' Udo Becker, a traffic specialist at Dresden Technical University says. “I mean why would you want to bring your car in knowing this is going to go on,” she said.

TRAFFIC GRIDLOCK DRIVERS

Sandra Ritter, 56, a security officer, said she hoped that more drivers would pay attention. Her commute to Midtown by express bus from her home in Bayside, Queens, doubles to two hours each way because of gridlock.

Karen Unger, a legal assistant, said she has come to dread the United Nations session. On a recent afternoon, workers and residents in Midtown Manhattan said they welcomed the expansion of gridlock alerts because something had to be done to take back their neighborhood. Schwartz said the only way he could get around to make inspections was on a bike and people complained that all the attention to traffic problems was detracting from world affairs. Once, however, when President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Schwartz said that United Nations traffic was heavy even in the 1980s, though it did not make his top gridlock days.

TRAFFIC GRIDLOCK DRIVER

“And to lower driver expectations to keep them calm.” “The intent was to reduce the total volume of traffic coming in,” Mr. Schwartz declared that the busiest days would thereafter be known as g ridlock alert days. When asked what he planned to do with that information, Mr. Schwartz, now a consultant, recalled that he had sought to impress a reporter with his grasp of city traffic by compiling daily vehicle counts from the city’s tolled bridges and tunnels. Schwartz shortly after he became the city’s traffic commissioner in 1982. The congestion warnings were the brainchild of Samuel I. A campaign to pass a comprehensive congestion pricing plan to charge drivers in the busiest areas of Manhattan failed in Albany earlier this year. There are many reasons: a fleet of Ubers and other for-hire cars, many of them circulating empty through the streets in search of riders a spike in delivery trucks as e-commerce has boomed and nonstop construction that has blocked or narrowed car lanes. But traffic has slowed to a crawl in recent years with vehicles in Midtown Manhattan averaging 4.7 miles per hour. The number of vehicles driving into Manhattan’s central business district on a typical fall weekday has actually dropped to about 718,000 in 2017, from about 815,000 in 2004, according to city traffic estimates. City transportation officials said that after surveying drivers online, they learned that some drivers did not have enough time to change their plans.

In the past, when gridlock days started in November on the Friday before Thanksgiving and ran to Christmas, the city publicized them with news releases, social media and articles that often appeared on the gridlock day itself. The message to drivers? “Your trip through Midtown will take three times as long.” 1, the busiest stretch of the United Nations session, and at the end-of-the-year holidays. “If you are in the traffic, you are the traffic.”īeginning this week, the city will spend $500,000 on a new campaign to warn of gridlock days on the radio and in internet ads to try to get more drivers off the road on the six weekdays from Sept. week is the most challenging traffic time in New York City and I’m not even sure people know that,” said Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner. By comparison, the mile-long drive took 14 minutes the day of the Rockefeller Center tree lighting. The only time it took longer - 20 minutes - was in a blizzard in March. It took an average of 19 minutes to drive just one mile in Midtown Manhattan on a Monday during the United Nations session last year, up from an average of 10 minutes the rest of the year, according to city data. In fact, United Nations gridlock is now worse than holiday gridlock for the Thanksgiving Day Parade, the tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center or the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square.

Traffic gridlock