This conclusion of “a phenomenal success” is based on “a span of several days.” Again, several days.
I want this to be true. I support this policy decision. I don’t own a car, live in NY, and want to see the streets reclaimed from drivers. Love it.
But if someone declared this experiment a terrible failure after /several days/ I would laugh and say, “please wait a bit so we can examine some real data.”
Please, urbanists, consider waiting a bit before calling this “a phenomenal success.” Let’s have some evidentiary standards.
In the six years I lived in NYC proper, there was a giant flood, a giant power outage, several hurricanes, several blizzards, several city-wide protests, and countless large events taking place on the streets.
That's just a few events I thought of off the top of my head. That doesn't cover the normal ebb and flow of activity in the city - it's pretty busy around Thanksgiving and Christmas, and dead in February, and a zoo in the summertime. How do all those things affect this? What happens when school is out? What happens during shopping season? What happens in heat waves or during snowstorms?
The point is, a lot of different things can happen in the city on pretty annual cycle, and declaring this a success even after a month is pretty silly and potentially very costly.
One can have evidentiary standards which don't in every circumstance require a long time period. For example, there are (rarely) medical clinical trials which are ended early because the experimental group's protocol (say, a drug or a procedure) works so well that it would be inappropriate to wait longer to give all the study participants the experimental intervention.
People who know more statistics better than I do could provide a more analytical description, but basically given the results so far, the likelihood of a "failure" (for whatever definition the city has chosen) is extremely low.
I want this to be true. I support this policy decision. I don’t own a car, live in NY, and want to see the streets reclaimed from drivers. Love it.
But if someone declared this experiment a terrible failure after /several days/ I would laugh and say, “please wait a bit so we can examine some real data.”
Please, urbanists, consider waiting a bit before calling this “a phenomenal success.” Let’s have some evidentiary standards.