Cars Banned From New York's Prospect Park Starting in 2018

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that vehicular traffic will be banned from Brooklyn's Prospect Park as of January 2, 2018.

Over the years, the Department Transportation has experimented with closing different sections of the park to cars; the west side is already car-free, and a pilot last summer concluded that traffic impacts of closing off the entire loop would be minimal.

Each action was a concession to a steady stream of activism and public pressure, writes David Meyer in Streetsblog NYC:

It’s been 50 years since the first victory in the campaign to get cars out of Prospect Park. For much of the 20th century, with the city ceding more and more space to automobiles, traffic was essentially allowed on the park loop all day, every day. Then in 1967 the city made Prospect Park car-free on weekends ... In the 1990s, Transportation Alternatives revived the campaign for a car-free park.