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.
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