Times Square did it, Dimes Square did it, now Williamsburg’s beloved Ascenzi Square is taking the plunge and returning a traffic lane to the people. According to flyers posted around the neighborhood, Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design, M.S. 577, and the local fire house are collaborating on plans to pedestrianize N. 4th Street between Metropolitan and Roebling. The flyers solicit the neighborhood’s feedback on the proposal, linking to a survey that can be found here.

Pedestrianization would expand the adjacent Ascenzi Square in a similar fashion to Sister Nicodema Plaza, one block to the east, an example specifically cited in the survey, but it is also likely to draw to mind the more contentious effort currently underway to pedestrianize “The Bedford Slip” in Greenpoint.

That effort —initiated by transportation activists associated with North Brooklyn Open Streets and the North Brooklyn wing of Transportation Alternatives and backed by numerous local elected officials— has yielded the temporary closure to traffic on the one block stretch of Bedford between Manhattan and Lorimer, but is still waiting on the Department of Transportation’s approval to make the change permanent. You can sign their petition in support of the project here.

And thanks to the way in which the BQE obtusely intersects with the Williamsburg street grid, the neighborhood is rich with additional opportunities to pedestrianize these sorts of slip lanes, bringing both enhanced public spaces and pedestrian safety to the neighborhood.

Those benefits might sound overstated given the modest size of these reclamations, but the because these intersections typically don’t have stop signs and allow drivers to turn off Meeker at much shallower angles than the right angles found at a more standard intersection, they accommodate much higher speeds. Thats a dangerous recipe for those crossing streets like Jackson and Withers.

Unfortunately, as Daniel Trubman and Stephen Smith have pointed out on Twitter, New York City’s high construction costs mean that any such efforts to close these street stubs to cars will likely be limited to flexposts, boulders and planters, rather than the installation of more permanent curbs and sidewalks, but thats outside of my pay grade. For now, give me the boulders you can muster, DOT; Sisyphus was happy and I will be too.