PART IV 



AUTOMOBILE THROUGH-TRAFFIC 



The successive steps in the formation of routes of automobile 

 travel within and through and near Bronx Park, largely controlled 

 as they have been by considerations entirely independent of the 

 Botanical Garden, and the interjection of the Botanical Garden 

 into the area traversed by or affected by these routes, have 

 resulted in a situation quite unprecedented, so far as we know, 

 in any of the important botanical gardens of the world. 



Many of these botanical gardens are substantially self-con- 

 tained, free from intersecting through-routes of vehicular travel, 

 and subject to design and management for botanical garden pur- 

 poses alone. Most of them, like Kew, have no roads for public 

 vehicular travel within them at all. The Arnold Arboretum, 

 more nearly comparable in size with the New York Botanical 

 Garden than is Kew, but because of its confinement to woody 

 plants presenting less administrative difficulties in controlling 

 public abuse of its collections than is the case where more strictly 

 garden-like elements are involved, has roads open to the public 

 in the daytime, but it is completely closed at night and up to the 

 present time the roads have not been open to automobiles. 



In an area the size of the New York Botanical Garden, we 

 believe that automobile roads for circulation within the area 

 are necessary and desirable, although for the public benefit to 

 be derived from the Botanical Garden as such it is extremely 

 desirable, as heretofore indicated, that every possible care should 

 be exercised to minimize the danger and annoyance of frequent 

 crossings at grade of these roads and the main routes of circulation 

 for people on foot. 



But the successive and almost independent steps in the develop- 

 ment of the main lines of through-travel for automobiles in this 

 part of the Borough of the Bronx, have placed the Garden in the 

 path of some of the most important of these lines and thrown 

 upon its roads a burden of through-traffic which is already a 

 very serious problem and bids fair to become immensely worse. 



The completion of Bronx River Parkway, debouching from 

 the north into what was evidently designed as a local loop 

 road for circulation wholly within what is now the Botanical 

 Garden, taken in connection with the prior opening of the Grand 

 Concourse (laid out long after the establishment of Bronx Park 

 and the design of most of its roads), opens through the Garden, 

 on roads very ill adapted to the purpose, what is plainly destined 

 to be one of the most busily thronged automobile thoroughfares 

 leading in and out of Manhattan. 



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