Where Is Our Post-Car City?

We need to be building it right now. Instead, we're stuck in traffic.

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YEARS AGO, one of the many storms that flood Riverside Park cracked open a playground's paving. The sinkhole has gone unrepaired, and it's come to look like an establishing shot for a film about an abandoned metropolis, seen through the rusting frame of a tire swing surrounded by crowd-control barriers. It's grown deep and wide enough that a bear might choose to hibernate in it. As the toddlers who might have played there grow into tweens, it sits like a wrecked mini-microcosm of a place with no time for the future. The public realm, the 40 percent of the city that we all collectively own, is a Swiss cheese of neglect and procrastination, pocked with stalled projects and discarded plans. The city feels stuck and sluggish, prey to an uncertainty that's especially acute in the spaces we all share: parks, subways, and, most of all, streets, where pedestrians scoot past agitated mutterers or calculate their chances of survival before stepping into a crosswalk.

For New York to endure as a global capital, it must rebalance power in the streets. We know what a post-car city could look like, since parts of it were mapped out before the future got indefinitely postponed. As you wend your way to La Guardia, spare a thought for the N-train extension through Astoria straight to the airport, an idea that was first floated in different form in 1943, fleshed out and partly funded in the 1990s, and finally scotched, largely because of local opposition, in 2003. Two decades later, a different much-debated, ever-more-expensive dream of a La Guardia AirTrain was quashed too. Has any other city ever had a higher ratio of plans to finished projects? The coming mayoral election presents a chance to sort through that big basket of proposals, feasibility studies, reports, and designs; pluck out the promising ones; and stop shrugging and sighing that it's all so hard.