In New York City, land of the ubiquitous yellow taxi, cabbies and other motorists find themselves with a bit less room to operate these days.
The city closed several blocks of Broadway in 2009 to create a pedestrian plaza around Times Square—a much-publicized experiment that in February became permanent policy, even though it did not improve traffic flow as much as hoped. The Big Apple has also dabbled in shorter-term but larger-scale street closures, barring cars on a stretch of streets leading from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park on a series of summer Saturdays in 2008 and 2009. And on June 7, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a somewhat less sexy but nonetheless significant change in the city's infrastructure, instituting dedicated bus-only lanes on Manhattan's East Side to speed transit up and down the island.