Car-free downtown streets

The following is excerpted from a column by an urban planner in a city magazine.

Downtown streets are the most valuable public space most cities own, and we have handed most of that space to cars that are either parked or passing through. When cities give some of it back to people, the results are often striking: more foot traffic, more outdoor dining, fewer crashes, and streets where children and older adults can walk without fear.

People on foot also shop differently. A driver heading somewhere else passes a dozen shops at thirty miles an hour. A pedestrian sees every window. Several studies of shopping streets have found that people who arrive on foot or by bike tend to spend less per visit than drivers but visit more often, so over a month they spend about as much or more.

A car-free downtown is not a war on cars. It is a decision that the heart of a city should be built for the people who are in it, not the people driving through it.

The following is excerpted from comments by the owner of a hardware store at a city council hearing.

I have sold hardware on Main Street for thirty-one years. My customers buy bags of mulch, cans of paint, lumber cut to length. Nobody carries forty pounds of potting soil three blocks to a bus stop. Since the city closed our block to cars on weekends, my Saturday sales are down by a third.

The restaurants love the plaza, and I understand why. People sit outside, have a drink, stay a while. But a downtown is more than restaurants. If the only businesses that can survive on a car-free street are the ones selling coffee and dinner, then we will have a very pretty street that doesn't have what people need.

The following is excerpted from an opinion piece by a member of a city's disability advisory commission, writing about her own city.

I use a wheelchair, and I love a good plaza. Smooth, wide, car-free space is often easier for me to get around than a crowded sidewalk. But every plan for a car-free street has to answer a simple question: how do people get there? For a person who cannot walk three blocks from a parking garage, or whose paratransit van needs to pull up to a curb, 'just walk' is not an answer.

When our city closed its main street, the accessible parking spaces and the paratransit stop disappeared along with the cars. It took eight months of complaints before the city added a drop-off zone at each end of the plaza. Car-free streets can welcome everyone, but only if disabled people are part of the planning from the start.

The following is excerpted from a post on a neighborhood online forum by a resident of a street near downtown.

Everyone downtown seems to love the new plaza. They don't live on Linden Avenue. The cars that used to drive down Main Street didn't disappear; they came here. On weekends we now get a steady line of drivers cutting through to avoid the closed blocks, many of them going much too fast for a street where kids ride bikes. The city put up two signs and called it a day. If you're going to take traffic off one street, you need a plan for where it goes.