The fastest, cheapest way to transform your city
Cities have acres of land hiding in plain sight that could be turned into plazas and parks. They just need the courage to make use of it.
High-speed rail projects are typically measured in decades and billions of dollars. Ditto for new subway lines. Apartment buildings usually take at least two years to approve, design and construct, and can cost as much as $1 million per unit in expensive cities.
All of these urban development projects can and should be faster and cheaper. But only up to a point. There’s no way around it: Building hard infrastructure costs money and takes time — usually longer than an elected official’s term in office.
But there is one type of urban infrastructure that can be conjured up almost instantaneously, at very low cost. It’s already in place, hiding in plain sight. Pedestrianizing a city street immediately transforms an automotive transportation artery into a park or plaza. All you need are traffic cones and some backbone.
Last month, I wrote about the conversion of San Francisco’s Great Highway into Sunset Dunes park for CityLab. Where there were once speeding vehicles, there are now skate parks, play areas, art installations, hammocks, reclaimed wood benches, and creative wayfinding schemes pointing to local businesses. Since it opened in the spring, this beachside promenade is now the third most-visited park in the city.
Sunset Dunes has quickly become a beloved recreational amenity and a source of profound political angst. In classic San Francisco fashion, a recall election of Joel Engardio, the city supervisor who championed the creation of the park, is imminent. A major theme in my story is the political risk Engardio took for a project he believed in, and which he felt would benefit the entire city for years to come. Locals compare Engardio to former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, who championed the removal of the Embarcadero freeway in the early ’90s and then lost his subsequent reelection bid. History has since vindicated him.
But there’s another angle to the Sunset Dunes saga that’s worth highlighting. This 17 acre park in one of the most scenic locations in San Francisco was created in two months for under $1 million, about half of which came from donations. As Lucas Lux, leader of the non-profit supporting the park, told me: “I think that’s a really interesting ROI story.”
It is indeed. What if the transformation of the Great Highway into Sunset Dunes park wasn’t a unique story, but a commonplace urban development project?
Starting over a decade ago with New York City’s streets revolution under the leadership of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, and continuing in the wake of the pandemic, car-free spaces have multiplied across the U.S. Outside of local media thunderdomes, we tend not to hear much about these projects because they are executed so quickly and for so little money. Once they’re complete, it’s impossible to imagine things any other way.
Sadik-Khan kicked off this generation of pedestrianizations in 2009, when she banished cars from the section of Broadway through Times Square. She went on to create many more pedestrian plazas in New York, including Herald Square in Midtown and the Pearl Street Triangle in DUMBO.
A few years later, the De Blasio administration banned cars from Central and Prospect parks. (It’s astonishing to think that as recently as the 2010s, joy riders like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were free to drive the Central Park loop and deposit bear cub carcasses in the bushes.) That then created precedent for San Francisco to make John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate park car-free, and for Los Angeles to pedestrianize Griffith Park Drive. Urban parks might be the most obvious places to create car free streets. Usually, as in Golden Gate and Griffith parks, there are alternate routes for cars to access major destinations.
The next big frontier is car-free commercial streets. These are not recreational destinations so much as centers of community life. A car-free main street instantly becomes like a plaza or town square. Seamlessly being able to go back and forth across the street, claiming the entire width for pedestrians, makes an enormous psychological difference in the experience of the space.
Here, the checkered legacy of the pedestrian mall looms large. In the ’60s and ’70s, over 100 U.S. cities pedestrianized their main streets in an effort to make them feel more like suburban shopping centers. Pursued mostly by small and midsized cities, the pedestrian mall concept was a failure in many instances.
In Galveston, Yuma, Fresno, and Memphis, pedestrian malls have been ripped out and repopulated with vehicles. There are some clear patterns to these failures. The street in question was too wide to create an intimate, pleasant pedestrian environment. The surrounding blocks were not densely populated enough to provide a critical mass of people. The better option for these kinds of places is “complete streets” that preserve car access while slowing traffic and creating safe, appealing facilities for bikes and pedestrians. Lancaster, California’s Lancaster Boulevard is the canonical example.
This is not to say car-free commercial streets aren’t worth pursuing. They just need to be set up for success. These streets ought to be narrow. They should be packed with a wide diversity businesses. And a significant number of people need to live within walking distance. These are the factors that make pedestrianized streets in Europe so successful.
Older cities on the East Coast already have a European-style urban form. Once again, the New York City area offers some precedent. Parts of Union Square and Madison Square in Midtown as well as Stone Street and Broad Street in the Financial District are all car free zones. Across the river in Jersey City, Newark Avenue was pedestrianized in 2015. Portland, Maine; Salem, Massachusetts, Boston, Hartford, and Charlottesville all have notable car-free commercial areas. Even if they’re just one or two blocks long, these spaces can improve the feel of an entire neighborhood. Many cities do part-time pedestrianizations on commercial streets during the warm months through programs like Open Streets in New York.1
Pedestrian streets can also work in younger, smaller cities. Silicon Valley, of all places, shows the way. The downtowns of Mountain View, Redwood City, and Menlo Park have all pedestrianized short stretches of their historic main streets. The weather there makes outdoor dining a year round pleasure, so restaurants dominate the scene.
East 4th Street in downtown Cleveland is another restaurant-friendly car-free street. Pike Place Market in Seattle is finally beginning to experiment with pedestrianization, following years of begging by local activists. As I mentioned in my previous post on eco-districts, some ground up new developments are building in car-free streets from the start, most notably Culdesec in Tempe and Mission Rock in San Francisco. (Readers, add any other car-free streets you know of in the comments. It would be cool to develop a running list.)
Even as car-free streets increase in number, the U.S. is only scratching the surface of what’s possible. It’s remarkable to see photos of European cities from the 1970s. Many of them had turned their historic town squares into parking lots. Their high streets were clogged with traffic. Fortunately, from Seville to Copenhagen, that wrong has been righted.
Time for American cities to do the same. Any dense neighborhood where pedestrian traffic is clogging up the sidewalk is a good candidate for pedestrianization. Boston’s North End, New Orleans’ French Quarter, San Francisco’s North Beach and Chinatown, and much of Lower Manhattan could all use the treatment. (Again, readers, where else?) There are clever ways to design these schemes so as to preserve vehicle access — but not through-traffic — to within a couple of hundred feet of every destination within the pedestrian zone. As always, emergency vehicles would be allowed throughout.
New York is where these ideas actually have a chance of coming to fruition in the near future. In the wake of congestion pricing, with significantly fewer cars on the road, advocacy groups have put forward detailed plans to curtail access from the busiest neighborhoods. Advocates have long dreamed of pedestrianizing the Financial District’s irregular colonial-era streets.
Street Plans, the urban design studio led by “tactical urbanism” coiner Mike Lydon, has worked up a “low-traffic neighborhood” plan for SoHo and Little Italy. The plan calls for fully pedestrianizing Prince and Howard streets, and adding 50% more pedestrian space across the neighborhood by diverting a similar proportion of existing through traffic. The plan would increase street seating in the neighborhood by 500%.
When Sadik-Khan pedestrianized Broadway through Times Square, she noted that roughly 90% of the road was dedicated to vehicles, and just 10% was devoted to pedestrians, despite the fact that each group populated the space in roughly opposite proportions. Look at the Lower East Side or the West Village or Williamsburg today. The allocation of space is similarly skewed.
It would be very hard to take seriously the assertion, which some naysayers would surely make, that these areas would suffer economically from pedestrianizations. If anything, having some room to breathe would make these areas more appealing places to shop, dine and hang out.
I’m not counting transit malls here. They, too, have a mixed record, though there are plenty of great ones like Fulton Mall in Brooklyn. Whatever their pros and cons, transit malls don’t fundamentally transform the urban experience in the way that fully pedestrianized streets do. They’re still recognizable as ordinary streets, with a pedestrian zone and a vehicle zone.
Another point worth mentioning that has been used in Europe and Australia, possibly somewhere in the US. Some very busy streets always create son-et-lumiere, and perhaps justifiable anxiety about access if cars are excluded, even if only a small part of the crowds on such streets have driven there or parked in that street). In many places pedestrianisation has been accompanied by, perhaps partly justified by, the installation of light-rail/tramway. In several of the cases you mentioned, Seville and Barcelona but also Bordeaux, Nice, Montpelier and probably many more French towns and cities resulting from their program to give every town of >250,000 a tramway (to decongest downtown, creating at their periphery park-and-rides served by the tram). Or when the street is very wide, like T3-tramway on Paris' orbital Boulevardes des Maréchaux now known as Tramway des Maréchaux; the streets were not closed but a large chunk was devoted to a greenway plus the tramway. The tramway spans >30km and carries about 40m riders per year (bringing some relief to the radial Metro), though rarely seen by visitors because it is entirely circumferential about 5+km from the centre.
In Sydney Australia, which is a closer parallel to American mores with insistence on driving everywhere in giant SUVs, there was the usual ferocious resistance to putting the CBD and South East Light Rail down George Street which was the busiest CBD street at the time, so busy that cars were slower than pedestrians at peak hours (which were beginning to extend across most daylight hours). There was the now usual cost explosion along the way but it has been in operation for 6 years and, so typical of such road reallocation projects, no one could imagine ever reverting to its former car-sewer status. Of course it is boon to retail and includes the Apple Store and the fabulous QVB.
One could also mention that these CBD tramways manage to share space with pedestrians in a way which even I, a militant supporter of pedestrianisation, would not have thought likely. Even in relatively narrow streets crowded with people, like in Seville or parts of Bordeaux, these sleek low-access trams glide silently thru the streets without drama with pedestrians. The pilot project for this type of inner-city zone is Bordeaux which first trialled the wireless trams. The power is supplied via a "third rail" (a metal strip flat on the street surface) which is in the centre of the two tracks but which is activated only in segments that are entirely under the tram as it passes overhead. This means that no overhead catenary and its supporting poles etc have to be squeezed into these ancient streets or to sully often UNESCO listed zones (Bordeaux, Seville etc). Sydney is hardly UNESCO listed but the George Street section (about 3km from the harbour to Central Station) is of this type (no catenary and sharing the street with pedestrians only other than a few authorised vehicles that use it as a "Share Zone".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Île-de-France_tramway_lines_3a_and_3b
I would love for Detroit to incorporate this somehow. Might seem counterintuitive in the city of cars but we have so much potential for rebuilding the city to be more neighborhood-walkable. We sure have enough parking lots to support car free streets 😂