>Elizabeth Smith went into Central Park at East 72nd Street expecting to find chaos. It did not take long, even on a chilly morning when the promising sky was clouding over.

>There is chaos — as defined by Smith, the president of the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy — on the drives, the six miles of road inside the park that have been off limits to most cars since 2018. Within 500 feet of where she started, where Terrace Drive branches off from East Drive, she sounded almost like a traffic reporter describing the B.Q.E. in Industry City or the Belt Parkway near J.F.K.

>“All these people come flying down — bicycles, pedestrians, runners,” she said, adding that it was a place where horse-drawn carriages clip-clop along at a far slower pace, shambling in front of the bicyclists and runners, and where pedicabs pass on the right before swinging left. “And there are no traffic signals that anyone is really obeying,” she said.

>Smith called the drives “the most heavily used resource in Central Park” and said they had become more heavily trafficked during the pandemic. She also said they are “extremely complex spaces with competing uses,” and soon they will be extremely well studied. The Conservancy, in partnership with the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Transportation, is beginning a look at who uses the drives, and how.

>They have enlisted the consulting firm run by Sam Schwartz, a former first deputy transportation commissioner who is known as “Gridlock Sam.” Smith said the study would lead to “a community-driven process” that would include presentations to community boards in areas adjacent to the park and other local organizations. She said the feedback would help shape “design interventions” to make coexistence on the drives more peaceful.

>As they are now, she said, “they impinge on the reason people come to Central Park, which is to get away from the city. The city is creeping into the park through the drives.” How different that is from the purpose envisioned by the 19th-century planners who, she said, saw the park as “a place where people could get away from the city and commune with nature and have a respite from urban life.”

>On a drive around the drives, Smith continued her play-by-play with help from Erica Sopha, the conservancy’s vice president for park use and stewardship. They stopped on East Drive with the North Meadow softball fields on the left and the Mount Sinai Hospital complex in the distance on the right, a spot where pedestrians and cyclists could get in each other’s way.

>“You’ve got people who think ‘Oh, it’s not busy here, so I’m oh, going to cross the drive,’” Sopha said. “And you have bikers who think ‘It’s not busy here and this is one straight path that I can just pick up my speed.’ It’s a recipe for conflict.”

>Smith said the potential for conflict would increase as tourism bounced back and visitors joined New Yorkers in the park. “There is a tremendous amount of competition for the use of those drives,” she said. “It’s pedicabs, it’s horse carriages, it’s runners, it’s e-bikes, it’s speed bikes, it’s recreational bikers, it’s pedestrians.”

>Adding to the need to study the drives, she said, is the fact that deliverers often use them because the four transverses “don’t really accommodate bikers,” she said. The push for better crosstown bike routes surged after the death of Daniel Cammerman, who was hit by a school bus as he rode along the 96th Street transverse in 2019.

>The study follows a safety study of the drives in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, which had not been reconfigured since traffic was banned in 2018. The nonprofit Prospect Park Alliance says it is preparing to release the results soon.

>The Central Park survey, in English and Spanish, asks respondents how they reach the park — on foot or on a bicycle, an e-bike, an e-scooter, a moped or some other way. It also asks if they ever feel unsafe there.

>“We’ve always thought of the park as sort of a barometer about the way people feel about the city,” Smith said, “and you know when it’s clean and well managed and beautiful, people think New York is going to be OK.”