Mayor: City Should Look At Prospect Park Car Ban

As bicycle activists prepare to press Mayor Bloomberg to ban cars from Prospect Park, the mayor said yesterday that the city should look at the proposal and added: "It would be great if we could keep cars out of all parks."

The mayor, who already reduced the number of hours that cars can drive in Prospect Park to two hours in the morning and two hours at night between Monday and Friday, cautioned, however, that the trouble with closing parks to cars is that they put traffic on other streets "which may or may not be able to handle it," he said.

In the case of Central Park, for example, he said banning cars is just not a practical thing to do. "I don't know about Prospect Park but it's certainly something we should look at," he said. He said he would speak with the city's Transportation Commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, about the issue.

An advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives, is campaigning for a car-free Prospect Park.