Car-Free Streets

New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan unveiled plans to pedestrianize a large swath of Broadway in Midtown Manhattan at a small briefing in City Hall this morning. Intended to improve motor vehicle traffic flow, enhance safety and provide more and better public space to pedestrians, the plan seeks to solve what Sadik-Khan called a "problem hidden in plain sight for 200 years."

Here's a first look at Herald Square with a pedestrianized Broadway, part of a plan reported by the Times, Daily News and Post this morning. Starting as soon as this spring, Broadway will turn pedestrian-only from 47th Street to 42nd Street, and on a two-block stretch on each side of 34th Street. The rest of Broadway from Columbus Circle to Madison Square will get boulevard treatment similar to the changes implemented on an eight-block stretch last summer. Auto traffic will be permitted at cross streets.

Yesterday Miami became the latest American city to pull off a big car-free event, when an estimated 2,000 people (including mayor Manny Diaz) took to the streets for Bike Miami. Mike Lydon at Transit Miami reports:

It's a good day in a city's urbanist evolution when Jan Gehl comes to town, and now San Francisco can add itself to the growing list of cities around the world that have embraced his people-first approach to urban design and planning.

San Francisco held its inaugural car-free "Sunday Streets" event last weekend. New Yorker Jen Petersen was there and files this report.

This week's StreetsWiki feature takes us to the Quartier Vauban in Freiburg, Germany. With an area of 84 acres, the Quartier Vauban is a neighborhood of 5,000 people, designed and built as a sustainable community between 1993 and 2006. Contributor Kyle Gradinger writes that the Vauban "represents the state of the art in environmental protection in terms of transportation, alternative energy production, and sustainable construction techniques."

Powered by thousands of New Yorkers hungry for car-free public space and aided by three consecutive weeks of picture perfect weather, there can be little doubt that the Summer Streets experiment was by most measures a rousing success. Still, the New York Times reports that the city will "study the effect on businesses closely" before deciding how, or if, it will continue with the program, and the question of how best to accommodate all human-powered modes remains an open one.