New York City Opens Its Streets, Some

Any runner with a will and a way will be foolish to pass up the opportunity to run in the middle of the street in Manhattan the next three Saturday mornings.

Running in the middle of the street? Wouldn't that be the definition of foolish?

Any other Saturday morning, yes. But Mayor Bloomberg and his people have wrested parts of Lafayette, Park, Fourth Avenue and 72nd Street away from motorized traffic and will give them over to runners, pedestrians, bicyclists, mimes, chalk artists, street vendors and the rest of the metro menagerie from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. Aug. 9, 16 and 23.

This means, you can complete a traffic-free run of about seven miles from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park on a stretch of pavement that at other times would be overrun by taxis, trucks and an array of other gas guzzlers.

This closed-street initiative follows the failure of Bloomberg's ambitious congestion pricing plan for Midtown Manhattan and parts to the south, which died at the hands of Sheldon Silver and the rest of the do-nothing Albany mafia. So creating a traffic-free route through Manhattan for a total of 18 hours in the summer (when New Yorkers desert Manhattan on weekends anyway) is kind of a sad consolation prize. But if this works out, who knows, maybe Bloomberg will find a way to close streets across the whole island, and for more than a Saturday morning.

For more information on the city's Summer Streets program, click here.