Watch this film in Spanish Guadalajara, Mexico is showing how amazingly transformative a ciclovia-style road closure can be for its citizens. In 7 years, their inaugural Sunday event Via RecreActiva has grown from just 7 miles with 35,000 participants to 41 miles with 400,000 users every Sunday. It goes from 8 am to 2 pm. It covers 6 municipalities. The diversity of activities features traditional ciclovia staples like aerobic classes and music, but also some new wrinkles including free haircuts for children and a city that clearly knows how to hula hoop!

Another unique aspect of this story is that one of the forces behind the success of the Via RecreActiva is a civil association called Guadalajara 2020, a group of primarily made of  business owners, real estate people and entrepreneurs who envision Guadalajara to be a healthier, greener and more humane city.

That mission includes bringing better transit to the city, making it safer to walk & bike and create equality and empowerment among its people. Perhaps it is best put by Guadalajara 2020's President, José Palacios Jiménez, who told us:

"...we would like to be able to remove the cars from the entire city. Because with all the information we manage to get, we are able to understand that the biggest problem of humanity are the cars."

Guadalajara does feature  public spaces on par with the greatest in the world, but also faces many extraordinary challenges with horrible traffic and unsafe pedestrian environments on nearly every street.  It's refreshing to see business folks not only speaking out and understanding the real solutions, but investing their funds to create an organization like Guadalajara 2020.

Some of the most well-known highway removals in America -- like New York City's Miller Highway and San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway -- have actually been unpredictable highway collapses brought on by structural deficiencies or natural disasters. It turns out there are good reasons for not rebuilding these urban highways once they become rubble: They drain the life from the neighborhoods around them, they suck wealth and value out of city, and they don't even move traffic that well during rush hour.

Now several cities are pursuing highway removals more intentionally, as a way to reclaim city space for housing, parks, and economic development. CNU has designated ten "Freeways without Futures" here in North America, and in this video, you'll hear about the benefits of tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle, the Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx, the Skyway and Route 5 in Buffalo, and the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans.

Streetfilms would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

As you’ll see, thanks to committed volunteers and strong leadership from District 25 Council Member Daniel Dromm, they overcame initial hesitation from the local community board’s transportation committee — which voted the idea down — to make it happen.

The fight was worth it, Dromm told us. “It was recognized just about two weeks ago in The Queens Tribune as being one of the best things about Queens – this play street,” he said. “So imagine if we hadn’t done it?” Indeed. We hope other electeds are in tune with their neighborhoods as much as Council Member Dromm.

All summer long, 78th Street was filled with a warm, family atmosphere, sometimes well after sundown. As for next year, there’s talk of possibly giving this car-free street even greater permanence.  Stay tuned.

Called "DIY Streets," the program brings neighbors together to help them redesign their streets in a way that puts people, safety, and streetlife first. So far, individual streets have benefited from DIY redesigns in 11 communities in England and Wales. Recently Streetfilms got a walk through of one successful DIY project -- on Clapton Terrace in London. With the people who made it happen as our guides, we saw how planners and neighbors collaborated to transform a place where speeding used to rule into a local street with calm traffic and safe space to socialize.

Can the DIY model work on a bigger scale than an individual street? We're about to find out: Residents of the London Borough of Haringey will soon be working with Sustrans on the first neighborhood-wide DIY project.

But as you walk and bike the city, you also quickly become aware of something else: Most Copenhagen's city streets have a speed limit of 30 to 40 km/h (19 to 25 mph).  Even more impressive, there are blocks in some neighborhoods with limits as low as 15 km/h (9 mph) where cars must yield to residents.  Still other areas are "shared spaces" where cars, bikes and pedestrians mix freely with no stress, usually thanks to traffic calming measures (speed bumps are popular), textured road surfaces and common sense.

We charmed you last month with our look at bicycling in Copenhagen, now sit back and watch livable streets experts Jan Gehl and Gil Penalosa share their observations about pedestrian life. You'll also hear Ida Auken, a member of Denmark's Parliament, and Niels Tørsløv, traffic director for the City of Copenhagen, talk about their enthusiasm for street reclamation and its effect on their city.

Taking the PARK(ing) Day concept to a more permanent, logical level, the Parklets Program has begun experimenting with trial spaces allowing businesses to convert parking spaces into outdoor public spaces and cafes.  The first was installed in March outside the Mojo Bicycle Café on Divisdero Street where two parking spaces were reallocated to people-space; now cafe tables & chairs, benches, bike parking, and plants sit over a raised platform over the asphalt.  If all goes well thru the evaluation period, the idea is to eventually turn the process into a regular permitting process that business groups and communities can apply for.  It looks good: owners of Mojo say business is up 30% and they have had to hire more staff.

The Pavement to Parks program has already transformed a number of community spaces in the Castro, Showplace Triangle and Guerrero Park. We briefly look at those at well in this video.

As you'll see during our ten mile journey, Mr. Cohen offered up some very decisive opinions about car-free Central Park, weighed in on the ethics of  "bike salmoning" (riding wrong way in bike lanes), whether he stops for red lights (you might be surprised by his answer), and comments on how transformative our streets have become for pedestrians and cyclists.

He also doesn't hide the fact he has a massive "policy crush" on NYC DOT chief Janette Sadik-Khan.

In this episode, Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White shows how planning for cars drastically altered Park Avenue. Watch and see what Park Avenue used to look like, how we ceded it to the automobile, and what we need to do to reclaim the street as a space where people take precedence over traffic.

Special thanks to Jonathan Weiner, without whom this past year would have been impossible. Thanks also to Katie Brodie and Nico Martin Presents for the great crew of smiling servers, impressive spread and delicious mash potatoes bar (which was quite the hit), B-Haul for the (Tasty) tunes, super volunteer Denyse Trepanier, the LGBT Center, Swirl Wine Bar, SFBC and its volunteers for weathering the rain to provide valet bike parking, Supervisor David Chiu, Supervisor Eric Mar, Judson True, Leah Shahum, Andy Thornley, Gabriel Metcalf, Chris Carlsson, Dave Snyder, John Hamilton (for the great Streetfilm you see above), Mike and Sarah Sonn, Brooke Dubose, Greg Riessen, Gary Fisher, and many, many more...

Here's to a wonderful 2010 and many more reasons to celebrate the San Francisco Bay Area and its improving public realm.

Not soon after starting as a volunteer for Transportation Alternatives back in the 1990s I can recall reading of a push to open the High Bridge during a postcard campaign directed at then Parks Commissioner Henry Stern in 1998. In the years since, there have been many community groups, non-profits, and public agencies which have gotten involved in raising public awareness and advocating for its re-opening. City Parks Foundation, The High Bridge Coalition, and C.L.I.M.B. just to name a few.

Although over the years there have been many announced target opening dates and talk of getting the capital funds needed, of recent there is much momentum. Very early in 2010, community input and design will finally begin. Then we can hope it will not be long until we can all walk and bike across this magnificent structure.

We were able to speak with the organizers and as well as conference registrants, and also got to a chance to chat with some of those on the marquee such as Jan Gehl (Gehl Architects, Copenhagen), Janette Sadik-Khan (Commissioner, NYC Department of Transportation), Kristina Alvendal (Vice Mayor of Stockholm) and Gil Peñalosa (Walk and Bike for Life, Ontario), about the future of walking and the vital importance of this conference in inspiring world leaders.

So sit back and enjoy. This year over twenty countries participated. New York City featured about 50 spaces filled to the gills with people, sod, chairs, food, fun, games, and in one case - bubbles galore! You'll also get a look at "Hex Pack Patio" the POP.Park winning design from Samina Iqbal.

In this video, Streetfilms funder Mark Gorton takes us on a tour of Broadway's car-free squares and boulevard-style blocks, where conditions have improved dramatically for pedestrians, cyclists, and, yes, delivery truck drivers. As Mark says, the counterintuitive truth is that taking away space for cars can improve traffic while making the city safer and more enjoyable for everyone on foot. There are sound theories that help explain why this happens -- concepts like traffic shrinkage and Braess's paradox which are getting more and more attention thanks to projects like this one. While traffic statistics are still being collected by NYCDOT, there's already a convincing argument that Midtown streets are functioning better than before: To understand it, just take a walk down Broadway.

Though some neighborhood constituents voiced skepticism that the plaza would be empty at best, or filled with miscreants and vagabonds at worst, the plaza's success is hard to dispute. In fact, so many people are using the new space and enjoying the tables and chairs, the businesses around the plaza have contemplated leaving the furniture out later than sunset, which was the initial closing time agreed upon between them and the Castro/Upper Market Community Betterment District. This film takes an in-depth look at the construction of the plaza with some of the agencies responsible for it, and includes some entertaining man-on-the-street interviews.

The 100 Public Spaces Programme improved the public realm of London through streetscaping, transportation and public space planning. In this interview, we take a special look at—and a visionary zoom around—Aldgate, a neighborhood in East London undergoing considerable change, including an inclusive transformation from car-dominated streets to a large public park.

Design for London is now part of the London Development Agency's Design, Development and Environment Directorate. The 100 Public Spaces Programme has transformed into new public space initiatives under the current mayor, Boris Johnson, with a focus on the legacy of the Olympics site in East London. The Aldgate neighborhood's public realm continues to become more people friendly with transportation planning and parks.