It's the Brian Lairr Show on WNYC.

I'm Kusha Navidar filling in for Brian.

Next up, we're going local with Gothamist and WNYC reporter Liam Quigley.

He is our Parks and Sanitation Reporter.

So naturally, listeners, we've got one park story for you and we got one sanitation story for you.

In sanitation news, we'll unpack why we as a city are not composting as much as we were last year.

That'll be towards the end of the segment.

But first, we're talking parks.

There's been a lot of buzz recently about one of the most chaotic intersections in Brooklyn,

maybe all of New York City.

I don't know.

I start most of my jogs there, so I may be biased.

But we're talking about Grand Army Plaza.

Earlier this week, Mayor Mamdani announced plans to ban cars from the southern side of the notoriously dangerous roundabout.

Right now, the soldiers and sailors memorial arch stands on a kind of island in the middle of Grand Army Plaza.

So the hope is to expand the pedestrian-only area from the entrance of the park all the way

to the arch.

And that'll mean saying goodbye to the maze-like collection of crosswalks and bike lanes

and six-lane traffic that separates the actual entrance of the park from the symbolic entrance.

So again, we've got Liam Quigley Parks and Sanitation Reporter at Gothamist, WNYC, here in the studio to talk first about the new big plans for Grand Army Plaza. Liam, so great. Always great to hang out with you and talk to you. Welcome. Hello. Good to see you. Okay. Okay, so first, Grand Army Plaza, a deeply stressful intersection, if you can hear it from my own voice, as most

Brooklynites can attest. Can you lay out what's so dangerous about the Plaza right now? Yeah, this is

kind of a big expanse of crosswalk that every light cycle becomes a mess of drivers kind of plowing their way through to

...