New York City – Legislation To Give NY’ers a ‘Fair’ Warning

New York City – New Yorkers fed up with unanticipated street closures because of outdoor fairs could get relief this summer.

Councilman Dan Garodnick (D-Upper East Side) has proposed legislation that would require the city to create an interactive online map showing all street fairs at least one week before they descend upon neighborhoods.

The bill — which stands a good chance of garnering support from street-fair-weary Mayor Bloomberg — mandates that the Citywide Event Coordination and Management agency design the map to show all block parties, fairs and festivals that would interfere with normal traffic patterns.

It would be searchable by the time, date and borough of each planned event. Garodnick said he hopes Web users also will be able to search by individual street.

The information would be posted on the city’s Web site.

“This is a service that the city should be providing today. People are frustrated by sudden street closures that they didn’t know about and therefore couldn’t avoid,” Garodnick said.

Garodnick’s district is home to the lion’s share of the city’s summer festivals, and his constituents frequently carp about the unpredictable traffic changes they bring.

“From May until October, street fairs are a regular event in Manhattan,” he said. “If you’re driving, you can’t move, and you should be able to know with some predictability what is happening in your neighborhood.”

Bloomberg has long bemoaned the abundance of street fairs. A city crackdown has reduced the number of events from close to 390 in 2004 to a seven-year low of between 310 and 315 in 2010.

Jonathan Bowles, who has studied the Big Apple’s street fairs in his role at the think tank Center for an Urban Future, said Garodnick’s bill would come as a relief to most New Yorkers.

“[The fairs] can really wreak havoc on your plans because people seem to run into them, and there’s little warning of where they are. It could make what should be a 15-

minute commute stretch into well over an hour,” he said.