[pulakm]

New York Times has been killing it with their visualizations. It would have been nice to have 2013 pictures overlaid on the 2003 pictures though, to really understand what the changes were. In some pictures, like Times Square, I had to flip back and forth a couple of times and still wasn't sure what exactly the changes were (can't see any obvious bike lane in that image, which is supposedly what it's representing).

[potatolicious]

A lot of the photos are aerial, I'd imagine it'd be nigh impossible to get them lined up so perfectly to overlay each other, but it would be very nice indeed.

On the Times Square picture: the entirety of Broadway (the slanted street on the far right) has been closed to traffic and is now entirely a pedestrian mall. It's not just Times Square, large stretches of Broadway has been reconfigured for bikes and pedestrians.

Interesting sidenote: they've been digging up Broadway in Times Square lately to put actual sidewalk in its place. My guess is that Bloomberg is doing this to cement his legacy and throw up additional barriers in case future mayors want to re-automobile-ize Times Square.

[pulakm]

Fair point. Perhaps some labels on the images, at least, would make it clear what they were trying to point out. The Times Square picture in particular was confusing because I saw the pedestrian mall, but thought that the point was about bike lanes which a pedestrian mall isn't.