Pedestrianized Streets Are Good, So What Are We Even Doing?

I've always thought my hometown was lame and lifeless all my years growing up. I realized now that it's because it has exactly ZERO public urban spaces or pedestrianized streets. It's just a mess of urban sprawl and strip malls.

Shop owners in the US think that multi lane roads with parking in front of the shop is a prime location, an advantage. But shop owners hardly earn a penny from people in cars, driving in bunches past their shop. You earn money from pedestrians strolling past your shop and seeing something interesting in the shop window. People in cars go to big box stores with endless parking.

the irony is that small towns that focus on walkability often become regional hubs for weekend travel. new hope, pa, for example. people will drive hours and spend 200n bucks a night on hotels just to go to new hope and walk around getting dinner and drinks and visiting shops without realizing they could have the same thing in their little towns. nothing inherently special about new hope. just planned better.

I was living in Eastern France in the late 1970s, when the city of Metz created the country's first "pedestrians only" street. We heard all the usual arguments about how the city center would die. Three years later, a major cross-street was also made pedestrian... and within the decade, all of downtown was car-free, and it still is.

I remember travelling to the US while I was young, and travelling by cars to shops and restaurants and thinking "when are we going to visit the city center, where the places, small streets, cafes and shops are?", not realising I wasn't in a commercial zone, that this parking lot WAS the city center.

Another thing is that most cities in Spain were car-centric in the 80s, we’ve just been moving away from it in the last decades

The first time we visited Europe (from the US) was about twenty years ago. Our first stop was Milano and a few hours after our arrival we attended a performance at La Scala. When we left the opera house at a late hour I was astonished to see thousands of people wandering the streets. I was both shocked and I absolutely loved it. Why did I love it? Because of the way groups of people were strolling and socializing in public on darkened streets. Why shocked? Because people weren't afraid to walk around after dark. We kept returning to Europe after that. The more I saw the more I loved what I was seeing. In 2017 we moved from just outside Austin, TX to a mountain village a bit south of Valencia, Spain. I don't think I will ever become tired of walking pasaos and pedestrian areas filled with locals of all ages and sidewalk cafes. But it all comes back to a basic feeling of safety out on those streets. Something that occurred to me after I'd been here for a while is that in the US we keep our children and elderly family members in boxes. Those boxes are houses, event centers, cars, classrooms and so forth. Some American parents have even been brought up on charges for letting their children go free range. Why? Fear, I guess. It's nice that Europeans don't feel a need keep their families in boxes.

As a European, I was over in Fort Lauderdale many many years ago. The hotel was on the other side of a busy highway and a little further along to the offices I was visiting. I remember my colleague and I arranged to walk between the two places after breakfast and we were struck by how difficult it was to cross the road. We mentioned this to the staff in the office and they were shocked we had not taken a taxi! I mean, as I recollect, it was just a five or ten minute walk and we never even considered a taxi.

There is an ironic point you missed. All those fancy pedestrian streets you saw were open to traffic at some point. If they were broad enough to run a horse carriage through, they naturally moved to motor cars and continued like that until the '90s or '00s, which is when pedestrianization started in earnest in Spain. Even better, almost universally that happened amid much protest about the murder of local businesses by whatever city hall was leading the process.

Baltimore did this to Thames Street in a vibrant bar/restaurant district and some of the shop owners started complaining that they didn't have anywhere for customers to park since the street closed despite the area being CONSTANTLY full of people walking all over because of how popular it was. Refusing to accept that maybe her weird knick-knack shop just wasn't interesting.

It blows my mind that in even relatively more pedestrian-friendly cities in the US, like Washington, DC, you have no pedestrianized streets. The main shopping street in Georgetown, M Street, is always full of people and shoppers, but sidewalks are very narrow and crowded while you have SIX LANES FOR TRAFFIC on the same street

Salt Lake City had a lot of success with temporary pedestrian-only nights on a core section of downtown Main Street during early COVID. They're currently studying making it permanent. Fingers crossed that works out.

I love how absolutely hilarious you are without ever changing your tone of voice. Not to mention the way you talk about "non official businesses" with such humble pride, thank you for that.

I’m from Seville! Fun fact! La avenida de la constitución used to be a 4 lane super busy road and the cathedral was blackened with car pollution!

Cafe culture is why I gravitate towards walkable places in the US. There is something sublime about a good cup of coffee, a walk, and running into friends

The most frustrating thing to me is that people assume we can't change things. Cities are perpetually being rebuilt. With very few exceptions, every building needs taken down and rebuilt, or at the very least remodeled eventually, streets need regular overhauls just from wear and tear. If we set a policy of making significant improvements every time we rebuild something, it will still take decades to complete, but we can still see the first results fairly quickly. No matter how bad a city is, every year we have hundreds of chances to make it better.

In every pedestrian street in the US you need a car to reach it. But, in Europe you can use the public transportation to reach it, walk in the street, enjoy it and return to your house in public transportation. I think this is the big difference too.

My hometown eliminated 20-30 parking spaces in the center of downtown so vendors could set up and restaurants could have some outdoor dining areas. The outcry at first was insane. You'd have thought they were putting in a toxic waste dump as much as people freaked out over the loss of those parking spots. Later on some shop owners complained about people sitting on the benches and heaven forbid someone sits down without having to spend money first, so they removed all of those.

3:18 Great central plazas were a key part of the Leyes de Indias, a set of legislations that among other things specified that all new cities in Spanish America had to have one, that's why you see them on practically every Latin American city today.

Welcome to Portugal! I was in Tavira last week, now back home in Lisbon, living a car-free life, and much happier for it. If you get the chance, visit Braga, they turned the entire city center into a pedestrian only zone.