CityLab Daily: When the Bus Takes the Street Back

Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Sign up for the CityLab Daily newsletter here.

Dedicated to the proposition: Cars are “all but banned” from 14th Street in Manhattan starting this morning. (New York Times) The major crosstown street that previously saw 21,000 vehicles a day will now only allow drivers to make deliveries and pick up or drop off passengers for about a block or two before they have to turn off the street. The new plan makes way for dedicated bike and bus-only lanes on a street that had the slowest bus speeds in the nation.

In recent years, other U.S. cities from Seattle to Indianapolis to Boston have begun to try out different forms of dedicated bus lanes to fend off the transit death spiral that lagging bus ridership could spur. Last month, Washington, D.C. made its pilot bus-only lanes into a permanent road feature. To see how fast buses move when there are no cars in the way, check out this mesmerizing GIF from Metro Los Angeles.