No Cars In Time Square

NYC officials have announced a new plan to ban cars in multiple ares of Broadway to, among other things reduce the traffic flow in these heavily congested parts of the city. They say "the move will reduce pollution and pedestrian accidents and ease traffic flow in the area known as "crossroads of the world"." This change in the road systems will move the city towards a more socially optimal traffic flow by reducing roads as predicted by braess's paradox.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8066590.stm

While Braess's paradox does say that adding resources (roads) can hurt equilibrium (traffic), and it follows that sometimes removing resources can improve it (as in the South Korea example), it seems like it doesn't necessarily follow that banning traffic altogether from a congested area will improve the flow of traffic. How do they know that the cars that would have gone through Times Square will now equally distribute themselves among all the other options? They'll probably all just go to the next intersection over instead, and make that one more congested than it used to be. It seems odd that any cars that would have gone through that intersection will go very far out of their way (more than a street or two) just for the sake of improving other drivers' travel times.