i already *feel* crowded a lot of the time. on the streets, in the subway, at businesses. we could ramp it up more so that it's more like manhattan in that sense, but is that a plus?
I agree. I've taken to changing my walking route in order to avoid overly crowded sidewalks that are really unpleasant to navigate. My route changes only help a little bit. I was interested to read Jadasie's post from another thread, pasted below, that shows the increase in pedestrian traffic over the past ten years. It really is too crowded here!
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Here's another data set (Excel file), this time from the DOT, measuring neighborhood foot traffic:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/misc/nycdot-bi-annual-pedestrian-index.xlsThe latest count is from May 2016, which shows that the stretch of 82nd street from 37th Ave to Roosevelt has the following single-day pedestrian counts:
Weekday (7-9am): 2868 (counted on 5/11/16)
Weekday (4-7pm): 9190 (counted on 5/11/16)
Saturday (12-2pm): 5285 (counted on 6/4/16)
In May 2007 those numbers were:
Weekday (7-9am): 1739 (5/9/07)
Weekday (4-7pm): 4753 (5/9/07)
Saturday (12-2pm): 3114 (5/12/07)
That's roughly a two-fold increase in foot traffic in less than 10 years.