Pedestrian street
A pedestrian street or pedestrian mall is a street where pedestrian traffic is given partial or total priority over all other kinds of traffic. It is a limited form of an auto-free zone. In some cases wheeled vehicles or transportation systems such as bicycles, inline skates, skateboards and push scooters are tolerated or given special lanes.
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Pedestrian streets in Europe
Many hundreds of European cities have successfully created pedestrian areas often containing more than one street; see auto-free zone.
Pedestrian streets in North America
In North America, the creation of pedestrian-friendly urban environments is still in its infancy. Few cities have pedestrian zones, but some have pedestrianized single streets. Many pedestrian streets are surfaced with cobblestones, or pavement bricks, thus discouraging any kind of wheeled traffic, including wheelchairs. They are rarely completely free of motor vehicles. Often, all of the cross streets are open to motorized traffic, which thus intrudes on the pedestrian flow at every street corner. In a few pedestrian streets with no cross street cars or trucks deliveries are made by trucks by night. Some examples are part of Prince Arthur street in Montreal and the Sparks Street Mall area of Ottawa, Canada.
In the 1960's and early 1970's many mid-sized cities in the United States experimented with installing pedestrian malls in their downtown areas, as a response to the commerical success of self-contained edge-of-town shopping malls. Downtown retailers wanted to preserve their businesses; the cities wanted to defend their tax base. In 1959 Kalamazoo Michigan became the first American city to adopt a pedestrian mall for their downtown area, closing two blocks of Burdick Street to automobile traffic. Ironically, they were working from a plan by Victor Gruen Associates, the same firm responsible for the first modern shopping mall in the country, Northland Shopping Mall in suburban Detroit.
Some notable examples are Ann Arbor Michigan, Oak Park Illinois, the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica California, Ithaca Commons in Ithaca New York, Pearl Street Mall in Boulder Colorado, St. Charles Missouri, Salem, Massachusetts, and many others. Typically these downtown pedestrian malls were three or four linear blocks simply blocked off to private street traffic, with fountains, benches, sittable planters, bollards, playgrounds, interfaces to public transit and other amenities installed to attract shoppers.
Most of these experiments were judged as failures by the downtown retailers and re-converted to streets within twenty years. Pearl Street Mall in Boulder continues to thrive because it is adjacent to the bicycle/pedestrian transit artery Boulder Creek Path and the UC Boulder campus; Third Street Promenade thrives on tourist traffic.
The San Antonio Riverwalk is a special-case pedestrian street, one level down from the automobile street. The Riverwalk winds and loops under bridges as two parallel sidewalks lined with restaurants and shops, connecting the major tourist draws from Alamo Plaza to Rivercenter, to Hemisphere Plaza, to the Transit Tower. Most downtown buildings have street entrances and separate river entrances one level below. This separates the unavoidable automotive service grid (delivery and ambulance/police vehicles) and pedestrian traffic below. It's an extensive system which achieves a nice balance among retail, commercial, office, greenspace and cultural uses. It gives the city an intricate network of bridges, walkways and old staircases, providing haptic and visual complexity. From an urban planning standpoint, the Riverwalk may be the best pedestrian-only realm on the continent, no motor vehicles or bicycles allowed.
In the last decades of the 20th century many urbanists have listed and explained what they see as the virtues of pedestrian streets. Urban renewal activists have often pushed for the creation of auto-free zones in parts or in all of the sectors of a metropolitan area.
See also
References
- Brambilla, Roberto. American Urban Malls: A Compendium. New York: Institute for Environmental Action, 1977.
- Breines, Simon. William J. Dean. The pedestrian revolution;: Streets without cars.Vintage Books, 1974.
- Jacobs, Allan B.. Great streets.Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1993
- Robertson, Kent A. Pedestrian malls and skywalks : traffic separation strategies in American downtowns. Aldershot, Hants, England ; Brookfield, Vermont : Avebury, 1994.
- Rudofsky, Bernard. Streets for People: A Primer for Americans, 1969
Web Resources
An essay on Kalamazoo and Victor Gruen, from 'Delirious LA'
Categories: Urban studies and planning | Roads