Holiday Season in New York
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2018
⏱️ 21 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Nicole Gelinas joins Seth Barron to discuss the chaos that commuters and tourists endure on a daily basis in midtown Manhattan—especially during the holiday season.
Every year, city officials are criticized for their poor handling of holiday crowds and the traffic that fills the streets. This year promises to be even worse. As Gelinas has documented, tourists visiting the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center are being funneled between police barricades and concrete bollards, while cars move freely down the wide avenues.
Traffic in midtown has gotten measurably worse in recent years, even as tourism has reached record-highs. The city is considering proposals to close midtown streets to vehicles during the holidays, but officials will have to be more creative to solve a problem that grows more unmanageable every year.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. |
| 0:07.5 | It's the holiday season, and that means New York City's midtown is bustling with residents and tourists hoping to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center or buy presents at one of the best shopping districts in the world. |
| 0:20.4 | But this year, the streets are in utter chaos. |
| 0:23.6 | Just a few blocks from our offices, you can watch commuters and tourists alike navigating their |
| 0:28.6 | way through a maze of NYPD barricades, concrete ballards, some of which are designed to stop vehicle-based |
| 0:35.6 | terrorism. Everybody's blocking the box. |
| 0:38.8 | It's unbelievably congested in a way I've never seen before. |
| 0:42.5 | Coming up on the podcast, Nicole Jelineas and Seth Barron will talk about the madness in Midtown Manhattan. |
| 0:49.6 | But before I forget, I wanted to remind our New York City listeners about signing up for our e-newsletter, |
| 0:55.6 | The Beat. You can find that at www.thebeatmi.com. That's it for me. The conversation between Nicole and Seth begins after this. Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. |
| 1:31.7 | This is your host, Seth Barron, associate editor of City Journal. |
| 1:35.6 | New York City, like most major cities, has terrible traffic, and it's getting worse. |
| 1:40.6 | Right now, with the holiday season in full flower, getting around Midtown Manhattan is a bit of a nightmare for drivers and pedestrians. |
| 1:49.6 | Joining me on the show today is Nicole Jelineas. |
| 1:52.3 | Nicole is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor to City Journal. |
| 1:57.4 | She publishes widely on topics including transit, transportation infrastructure, and municipal finance. |
| 2:06.2 | Nicole, thanks for joining us on the podcast. |
| 2:08.4 | Thanks for having me back, Seth. |
| 2:10.3 | So is traffic as bad as it seems? |
| 2:14.5 | Yeah. |
| 2:15.3 | If you look at the average speed of midtown traffic, it's gone down to below |
... |
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