In 1997, one of my proposals was greeted with the usual thunderous silence. I proposed creating the Piazza Broadway by banishing cars from the the Great White Way near Times Square. It wasn’t a strictly original idea — a similar scheme had been proposed in the 1970s — although I do believe I was the first to suggest decorating the plaza with a statue of a three-card monte dealer and a pedestrian bridge modeled on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, to be called the Ponte di Tre Monte.

Anyway, the idea went nowhere — until today. Mayor Bloomberg planned to announce that Broadway will become a pedestrian-only zone around Times Square and Herald Square, according to my colleagues William Neuman and Michael Barbaro. The experiment will start in May and could become permanent if if it works.

Will it work? I’m biased, of course, and I can’t claim I based that 1997 proposal on any rigorous analysis. But today there’s a new tool for examining the proposal: a spreadsheet called the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, or B.T.A.. Charles Komanoff, the economist who developed it, calls it the first transparent and publicly available tool to gauge the varying impacts of changing the transportation options in a city with a dense central core, like New York.