Pedestrianized/Car Light Streets = Good for Biz
New York City: Meatpacking District converts 14th Street to a Ped-friendly Promenade!
Wherever you go in the world you can’t go wrong with making crowded business streets safer and more friendly to pedestrians.
Of course there are large world cities that have massive pedestrianized networks (or a good nucleus) but there are really so many variations that can be tried. In nearly all cases if you make your streets free from the tumult of speeding vehicles and provide comfortable seating & occasional programming, crowds will flock.
Above is West 14th street in the Meatpacking District in NYC. A few months ago they decided that a loud 60 foot roadway was too much and thwarted opportunities to get more folks to linger and shop as they passed thru. So they converted it into a green, relaxing promenade and took back 36 feet of roadway filling it with plenty of places for people to pause. As you’ll see early returns are positive.
London: Using a Bus Gate (and cameras) cars are prohibited from Church St from 7am-7pm
London has so many Low Traffic Neighborhoods that use treatments & strategies for managing car throughput. What they did on Church Street in Hackney on a high street (their term for a main business strip) is pretty simple and easy to replicate. The key implementation is a bus gate at either end that only allows bus traffic from 7am to 7pm daily.
There are also various modal filters on the streets perpendicular to Church as well. All enforced by cameras. Business is up. It’s such a very pleasant place to shop and eat!
Stockholm has vast car-free streets, but Drottninggatan is freakin’ phenomenal!
Stockholm is an amazing city. And its biggest beloved shopping areas are free of auto traffic making for happy shoppers. Combining car-free spaces with great access by transit and using congestion pricing they encourage people to leave the car at home and enjoy a welcoming atmosphere.
Drottninggatan which links to Götgatan stretches through the city for a few miles and you can sometimes walk forever without seeing a single vehicle. And when you do come to one of the few intersections that crosses it, pedestrians always have the right of way. See it above!
Montreal turns many of its most popular shopping destinations into fun open streets during summers!
I’ve long been an admirer of the way Montreal goes all out in summers. For three months they close down many of their busiest commercial streets for people to stroll, shop, eat and bike (slowly), This Streetfilm is four years old but the program hasn’t changed much which features miles of open streets yearly. The one above on Rue Saint-Denis is 1.5 miles(!!) long and has great food, shopping, and ample seating. But Montreal also keeps it fun with all sorts of activities and art displays.
New York City: Watch how Broadway has become a people paradise!
And finally I leave you with this as we return to NYC to see how much NYC’s Broadway has transformed over the last 20 years. The big move was Times Square’s pedestrianization in 2009, but since NYC DOT has been making modifications between the southern tip at the battery up to 72nd street to keep it from being a long thru travel corridor by taking back public space and retro-fitting it for local deliveries, resident car trips or neighborhood visits.
Please feel free to watch the entire video (it’s one of my proudest achievements to have all these archives, but starting watching at 11:49 if you want to jump into the thick of how restaurants and biz are thriving and see the unique NYC DOT design modifications they have made to better manage flow.
