Business
The Battle for The Streets of New York
On a recent morning, the intersection of East 77th Street and Lexington Avenue presented a vivid illustration of the tumult.
A taxi trying to make a left turn had to maneuver around a Verizon crew digging up the asphalt. A box truck was parked in the bus lane, and the M102 bus, with its accordionlike belly, was forced to change lanes and snake around it.
Dozens of people streamed out of the subway and into the crosswalk. A man pushing a double stroller navigated between the subway entrance and a sidewalk compost box. A woman’s shopping cart wheels got stuck in a crack in the sidewalk. CitiBikes and delivery bikes whizzed by. A cargo bike stopped in front of a FedEx truck that was unloading packages next to a bike lane.
Lively, energetic streets make city living attractive — people to watch, windows to browse, benches to sit on, trees for shade.
But lately, New York City streets are teetering between lively and unlivable. Residents clash over traffic, noise, parking, 5G towers and heaps of trash. Most years, far fewer pedestrians get killed by motorists than in generations past, but last year was the deadliest year for cyclists since 1999.
Still, people who have thought deeply about the state of the city’s streets believe dramatic improvement may be on the way — if New York is willing to seize the moment.
That’s because the city is about to embark on the nation’s first congestion pricing plan, charging most drivers $15 to enter much of Manhattan below 60th Street — and forcing many commuters to find a different way into the city.
The aim is to reduce car traffic in one of the world’s busiest commercial districts and raise money for public transportation.
People, bikes and vehicles compete for space on New York City’s streets.
Karsten Moran for The New York Times
“I think this could be the catalyst for a streets renaissance in New York,” Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s former transportation commissioner, said in a recent interview.
“We have to talk about how we’re going to reclaim that space and make it work for people.”
Of course, congestion pricing, too, comes with a fight. The plan is supposed to start in June, but it faces several lawsuits brought by elected officials and residents from across the region, who describe it as ill-conceived and unfair to commuters who drive because public transit isn’t robust enough to serve their needs.
“They don’t drive because they want to,” said Susan Lee, a member of a coalition called New Yorkers Against Congestion Pricing. “They don’t want to sit in traffic.”
Could congestion pricing actually reduce the number of cars in the city to a dramatic extent? If so, what would take their place?
There are other ideas and experiments in the works for taming New York’s streets, and they raise questions of their own. Could a proposal to ban parking close to intersections improve public safety? Will the Sanitation Department’s garbage containerization plan make sidewalks cleaner? Is there a way to keep package delivery trucks from blocking the streets? Must 5G technology create public eyesores in residential neighborhoods?
In the months ahead, The New York Times will examine the debates raging in neighborhoods all over the city about who and what gets to take up space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.
How did we get here?
Orchestrating the flow of traffic and pedestrians has been a complicated and emotional project for centuries.
New York City’s streets were laid out before anyone knew how they would ultimately be used — long before cars were even invented. The first city planners could not have anticipated Uber vehicles, let alone Amazon deliveries or commuters on electric scooters.
In New York’s earliest days, the streets were a free-for-all. People walked or rode horses. There were no crosswalks or stoplights; if you had to cross the street, you simply walked across the street.
Traffic on Broadway in 1859 consisted of pedestrians, horse-drawn carts and streetcars.
William Notman, via Getty Images
Soon, horse-drawn vehicles used the streets alongside pedestrians, and people dashed between them. (Later, New Yorkers dodged streetcars in much the same way, giving the Brooklyn baseball team its name.)
The arrival of bicycles neatly encapsulated the city’s ever-shifting debate over how the streets should be used — and by whom.
By the 1890s, the streets were full of bikes. Men and women took to cycling through the city so quickly — and dangerously — that it was called “scorching.”
About 100 years later, in 1987, speeding bike messengers were deemed so dangerous that bicycles were banned from Midtown — temporarily.
Today, the city encourages residents and visitors to ride bikes. New York has bike lanes and a flourishing bike share program, plus an explosion of food delivery powered by e-bikes. The renewed popularity has also come at a grave cost: Last year 30 cyclists were killed on city streets, and 395 were severely injured.
“It’s hard to say whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times for bicycling,” said Jon Orcutt, the director of advocacy at Bike New York and the former policy director at the city’s Department of Transportation. “More people are doing it than ever.”
“If you’re not killed — squished like a bug — you can bike across town in 10 minutes,” he added. “It’s easy. It’s really efficient.”
Enter the car — and the car crash
On the evening of Sept. 13, 1899, Henry Hale Bliss, a 69-year-old real estate broker, was riding a Manhattan streetcar on his commute home.
At 74th Street and Central Park West, Mr. Bliss stepped from the streetcar and into the street, where he was immediately hit by a taxi. He died on the scene and is recognized as the first person in the United States to be killed by a car. There is a plaque at the intersection commemorating his death.
“At the end of the Gilded Age, right before World War I, suddenly, there were motor vehicles everywhere,” said James Nevius, an author and New York historian.
The development meant people could move around faster — but it also put more people in danger.
In 1920, there were about 200,000 registered vehicles in New York City; by 1925 that number had more than doubled. A century later, that figure is two million.
This scene of Park Avenue near 57th Street was typical of 1930s traffic. Over 10 million cars went through the Holland tunnel in 1930.
George Rinhart/Corbis, via Getty Images
And yet New Yorkers are still using the same streets that were laid out generations ago. In Manhattan, the rigid street grid was designed in 1811. Avenues are 100 feet across. Cross streets are 60 feet wide, including the space for sidewalks on both sides.
That’s 720 inches in which to fit not just cars but also pedestrians, baby strollers, trash, compost, scaffolding, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters, skateboards, package delivery trolleys, garbage trucks, delivery trucks, food carts, 5G towers, dining sheds, trees, CitiBike docks, buses, taxis, ambulances and on-street parking.
It’s like a giant game of Tetris — except all the pieces just won’t fit.
In fact, some of the pieces are growing larger: In the past decade, the average vehicle got 12 percent longer and 17 percent wider. (Cars’ blind spots have also gotten larger.)
And the number of pieces just keeps expanding. New York City’s population reached 8.8 million in 2020, and the New York region is now home to nearly 19 million people. The city’s population has dropped some in the past few years, but city officials believe that recent population estimates have significantly underestimated the number of newly arrived migrants, which, by some counts, is over 180,000.
Taming the streets
Even as New York’s streets and sidewalks have become more chaotic, there are also plenty of examples of the opposite: moments when the city has tamed the traffic and found new uses for its old spaces.
Over the past 10 to 15 years, sweeping pedestrian plaza initiatives — detouring cars and encouraging space for sitting and strolling — have gradually changed the landscape, from the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens to Times Square.
Times Square was once full of traffic. In May 2009, the city closed Broadway to cars and set out lawn chairs, the start of the area’s transformation to pedestrian plaza.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
The Open Streets program restored pedestrian-first streets, free of cars and safe enough for strolling, chatting and letting kids ride bikes.
The coronavirus pandemic ushered in a chance to rethink public spaces, and the absolute quiet on the streets during lockdown was a reminder that the city isn’t inherently noisy, but traffic is.
And there are plenty of other places to look for inspiration: In Bogotá, Stockholm, London and Paris, certain streets are being closed to cars. There is an effort in Europe to avoid the oversize pickup trucks and SUVs that make American roads so deadly. Paris has designated “school streets” where cars have been removed to make way for children. Cycling is flourishing in Europe; emissions are down.
In New York, Ms. Sadik-Khan, the former transportation commissioner, is among the people thinking deeply about the future of streets — and she is optimistic.
“There’s a new generation of New Yorkers who’ve never known a city without protected bike lanes and bike share,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said. “More people than ever are working from home. Commuting patterns are in flux. There’s the opportunity to make a new deal for people getting around.”
What will a “new deal” look like? And will New Yorkers be on board?
No matter what happens, change doesn’t come without a fight — and many of the battles will be fought street by street and block by block.
Over the next few months, we will take a close look at some of these street fights — and we’re eager to hear about yours, too.
Use this form to tell us what you think about the state of New York City’s streets.
A federal jury sided with OpenAI and its top executives on Monday in a feud with Elon Musk, who accused them of betraying a shared vision for it to guide artificial intelligence’s development as a nonprofit.
The nine-person jury unanimously found that Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit and missed the deadline for the statute of limitations.
Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, the company that launched in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. After investing $38 million in its first years, Musk accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his back.
The jury served in an advisory role, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the verdict Monday as the court’s own and dismissed Musk’s claims.
The trial that began on April 27 in Oakland shed light on the bitter falling-out between the two Silicon Valley titans and the origins of OpenAI, now a company valued at $852 billion and poised to become one of the largest initial public offerings in history.
The high-profile high-stakes showdown between two of the most powerful companies and leaders in technology was billed as a battle that could change the trajectory of AI.
There were two weeks of testimony from the dueling entrepreneurs and other key players in OpenAI’s history, providing a rare inside glimpse into the company, which evolved from a startup to one of the world’s most influential companies.
Musk had fallen out with his fellow co-founders, then, after OpenAI became arguably the most important company in AI, he decided he was not happy with how the trailblazer was managed after he left.
Musk claimed Altman, the startup’s chief executive officer, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman “stole a charity” by exploiting his early support for an altruistic research project so that they could later get rich by turning into a regular for-profit company.
OpenAI and its leaders said Musk was suing them to gain a competitive advantage for his own startup, xAI.
Musk was seeking more than $100 billion in damages — to be awarded to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm instead of to himself — as well as the removal of Altman and Brockman.
The case was seen as an existential threat to OpenAI. If the decision had gone the other way, it would have sparked a shakeup that would have destabilized the company just as it is working to ensure the U.S. takes the lead in AI and prepares for a public offering with a valuation approaching $1 trillion.
Associated Press and Bloomberg contributed to this article.
In 1926, director Cecil B. DeMille hired hundreds of workers to build a set of Jerusalem inside the DeMille Studios in Culver City for the classic silent film “The King of Kings.”
A century later, Jon Erwin filmed his biblical epic ‘The Old Stories: Moses,’ starring Ben Kingsley, on the same studio lot now owned by Amazon MGM Studios.
Except now, much of the architecture, desert location, and supernatural parts of the three-episode miniseries were generated through artificial intelligence. The prequel to ‘The House of David’ series debuts on Amazon Prime on Thursday.
-
Share via
A production that traditionally would have taken months to shoot and require multiple locations was filmed entirely in one week with a crew of just 100 people — who never left Los Angeles.
“We did this massive sword-and-sandal epic, and we never left a soundstage, very similar to how James Cameron does Avatar or how Jon Favreau does ‘The Mandalorian,’” said Erwin, the director of the series. “When you preserve the performance and the work of the crews and the department heads, then you can do things that are incredibly cost-effective for studios.”
As Hollywood grapples with rapid technological change, a growing number of filmmakers and companies in Southern California are using AI tools to radically rethink how films and TV shows are made.
“Some are still resisting, but many are recognizing that, for better or worse, AI is here and not going anywhere and it is important to reimagine what film creation can look like in light of the new possibilities AI creates,” said Victoria Schwartz, director of the entertainment, media, and sports law program at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law.
A screen of LED panels called “the Volume” is used to film scenes for director Jon Erwin’s series “The Old Stories: Moses.”
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Erwin is among the first working directors at a major streaming platform to fully integrate AI into a commercial production.
Last month, he launched Innovative Dream, a Manhattan Beach production services company backed by Amazon. The company will rent its virtual production facilities to other studios and develop training programs for emerging filmmakers.
Although much of Hollywood is bracing for AI to hollow out jobs, Erwin argues the opposite: that AI, applied ethically around human performances, can return at least some production jobs that have been outsourced even as other positions are eliminated.
“I think the greater threat of job loss in our industry is actually just how expensive things have gotten and how long they take to make,” Erwin said. “If you can make things quicker, and you can make things at a price point that studios will say ‘yes,’ you can employ more people in aggregate and create jobs.”
Although computer graphics have been essential to Hollywood since the 1990s, they traditionally required hundreds of artists and months of post-production work to place actors or crowds in digital worlds. Much of the labor-intensive visual effects work known as rotoscoping was outsourced to shops in India and other countries with much lower labor costs than in California.
By 2019, productions such as Disney’s “The Mandalorian” series advanced this further by using massive LED screens to project images of photorealistic digital worlds — “Star Wars” ships, forests, or deserts — as actors’ performed in costume in front of them. A virtual art department spent months designing the digital environments, and then loading them onto the large screen on the day of the shoot.
AI takes the process a step further.
Through “Moses,” Erwin is championing what he calls “hybrid” filmmaking: a workflow that marries live-action with AI-enhanced workflows in virtual production. The process combines what used to be separate phases — filming with actors and visual effects — to occur almost simultaneously. Scenes shot on set is made available to multiple editors and AI artists within minutes on the production floor, as they show near-finished sequences back to the cast and director.
“You can create assets in three or four days, not 10 weeks. And that means you can actually kind of generate the environment while you’re shooting,” he said.
Erwin, 43, grew up in Alabama and built his career around faith-based films such as ‘I Still Believe’ and ‘Jesus Revolution.’ He had spent years trying to tell biblical stories at the scale portrayed in the source material.
When he pitched “House of David,” a drama about the life of King David, studio executives were initially skeptical. “I was told to just come up with a smaller idea,” he said.
To portray Goliath’s origin story, actors were filmed on green screens and AI was used to generate a mythical sequence involving dark sky, rain, mountains and angels with wings.
It marked one of the first integrations of generative AI in a major commercial production. The series, which premiered last year was viewed by 44 million viewers worldwide and reached No. 1 on Prime Video in the U.S.
By Season 2, the team used 30 different tools, both traditional and AI, to generate images, sounds and video. They pivoted from shooting solely on location in Greece to filming some parts in L. A. in front of an LED wall.
AI was used to generate battle scenes and expand the background crowd size to thousands of people in a fraction of the time traditional CGI required. The use of AI-generated scenes jumped from 70 in Season 1 to 400 shots in the second season.
Jeff Thomas, a generative AI filmmaker who directed two episodes of Season 2, said each episode was made for less than $5 million, defying studio consensus that the show required a “Game of Thrones”-level budget of $12 million to $15 million per episode. Erwin declined to disclose the budgets for the “House of David” series or the “Moses” prequel..
“The Bible describes that battle as there was 100,000 people on each side. Well, it’s never been portrayed like that because we’ve never had the resources,” Erwin said. “We’re finally able to show that scope and scale.”
Erwin conceived of the idea of “Moses” over Christmas, wrote the script in January and created a four-minute trailer entirely created by AI. Amazon greenlighted the series later that month.
Kingsley had a short window before his next commitment, so Erwin prepared and shot all three episodes on a soundstage in a week — a project that would have previously taken six months to prepare.
For the pivotal Red Sea scene, Erwin generated the water volumes and tidal waves in less than hour using AI models from Chinese company Kling AI and Palo Alto-based Luma AI, which would have taken weeks in the traditional process. They wrote text prompts that explored 18 different variations of the sea parting and discarded the ones that didn’t work, enabling Kingsley to react to a tidal wave projected onto a 360-degree LED wall screen.
“‘Moses’ really represented a whole new method of filmmaking for me,” Erwin said.
For “The Old Stories: Moses,” director Jon Erwin used AI for wide shots, stunt-heavy battle sequences and to generate large crowds to showcase the grand scope of biblical stories. The red line he said he wouldn’t cross is using it in place of actors.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
For crucial scenes portraying the palace hallway in Egypt, where Moses talks to the Pharaoh, they built cardboard boxes as the columns in the palace, and “reskinned” them with intricate carvings using AI. Although the set could accommodate only 20 extras, they used AI to create hundreds of background actors.
Erwin also used generative AI to synthetically expand partially built sets featuring sand and rocks and to “de-age” Kingsely to appear as a young Moses.
But some things were off limits for AI, including Kingsley’s performance.
“I just think our faces are so intricate and the micro expressions are so intricate, so that’s always real,” he said.
Instead, AI was used to co-design the character: Erwin originally imagined a bald Moses, but based on Kingsley’s feedback, they fine-tuned the look with weathered hair and mustache.
“The line in the sand for me is replacing an actor,” Erwin said. “I don’t want to be in the industry if I can’t work with actors.”
Jon Erwin’s “hybrid” production involves generating a variety of environments such as forests, deserts, or battle sequences using AI, and projecting them on the LED screen.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
When asked about the background extras displaced by AI crowd generation, Erwin said that’s the wrong way to think about it.
“It’s not a comparison of what would “Moses” have cost otherwise. It’s a comparison of “Moses” would have never been made otherwise, and that’s the way you have to think about it,” he said.
Overall contraction in Hollywood has led to fewer films being shot on location in Los Angeles, and a 30% drop in entertainment industry jobs since its 2022 peak.
“I think you can do those things three to five times faster, at less than 30% the cost,” he said. “I actually see this tool set as an antidote to the job loss problem in our industry.”
Waymo is recalling 3,791 autonomous taxis after a software defect caused some vehicles to drive into flooded roadways, according to a recall report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Association.
The voluntary recall filed April 30 affects Waymo vehicles operating on the company’s fifth and sixth generation Automated Driving System. The software “may allow the vehicle to slow and then drive into standing water on higher speed roadways,” a NHTSA report said.
“Entering a flooded roadway can cause a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash or injury,” NHTSA said.
The recall followed severe weather in San Antonio, during which a Waymo entered a flooded and impassable road, the company said.
In response, Waymo has increased weather-related constraints on its vehicles and says it is working on additional software safeguards.
“We have identified an area of improvement regarding untraversable flooded lanes specific to higher-speed roadways, and have made the decision to file a voluntary software recall with NHTSA related to this scenario,” a Waymo spokesperson said. “Waymo provides over half a million trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments across the U.S., and safety is our primary priority.”
Waymo operates in 10 major cities and has issued prior safety-related recalls. Last year, the company recalled more than 1,200 autonomous vehicles after minor crashes involving obstacles in the road.
The Alphabet-owned company has also come under fire for safety incidents, including striking a child outside a school in Santa Monica earlier this year and fatally running over a neighborhood cat in San Francisco.
According to data collected by Waymo over 170 million fully autonomous miles driven, Waymo is 13 times safer than human drivers in crashes involving pedestrians.
The Mountain View-based company is currently ahead in the race to scale robotaxis across the country, with thousands of vehicles transporting paying customers in cities including Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix.
Competitors Zoox and Tesla are trying to catch up with their own self-driving technology, but have yet to match Waymo’s scale and reach.
According to NHSTA, all affected Waymo vehicles received an interim software update to mitigate the issue, but a full remedy for the recall is still under development.
-
Florida2 minutes agoFlorida man plows truck down Orlando road, hitting vehicles: Police
-
Georgia8 minutes agoVoting Tuesday? Here’s what you need to know
-
Hawaii14 minutes agoExclusive | Kendall Jenner and Jacob Elordi ‘a lot more serious’ after Hawaii trip ‘changed everything’
-
Idaho20 minutes ago9 Best Small Towns To Retire In Idaho
-
Illinois26 minutes agoPritzker blasts Johnson’s push to keep Bears in Chicago: ‘The mayor has no plan’
-
Indiana32 minutes agoIn-state WR Branden Sharpe on choosing Indiana: ‘That winning culture is something I want’
-
Iowa38 minutes agoIowa man sues Nintendo after being denied ‘Pokémon Professor’ status
-
Kansas44 minutes ago
Northwest Kansas community cleaning up extensive damage from weekend storm
