Public Space

This Valentine’s Day, Declare Your Love For the Most Beautiful Street

Just in time for Valentine's Day, here is a new and interesting way to compare streets. At www.beautiful.st, you can compare 200 randomly selected streets in Philadelphia, plucked from Google Street View, two at a time. Vote for the most beautiful and two more images pop up for you to compare.

By Noah Kazis

4:49 PM EST on February 14, 2012

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here is a new and interesting way to compare streets. At www.beautiful.st, you can compare 200 randomly selected streets in Philadelphia, plucked from Google Street View, two at a time. Vote for the most beautiful and two more images pop up for you to compare.

The site was designed by OpenPlans (disclosure: OpenPlans is Streetsblog’s parent organization), which hopes to use variations on this tool as a dynamic way to get community input about street designs. Planners and community organizations could ask not only which street is more beautiful, but which one looks safer or more appropriate for a particular neighborhood.

In the meantime, it’s a semi-addictive way of thinking about urban design. How will you compare, say, a lushly wooded parkside avenue with the dense and bustling commercial area?

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.

Public Space | Urban Design