Less than five months after announcing a plan to transform a San Francisco street into a pedestrian-only plaza, voila! The 7800 s.f. at 17th and Castro Streets, officially known as the 17th Street Plaza, opened on May 13, 2009 and as you can see has already been a success. There’s even a 17th Street Plaza Facebook group.

It’s the first of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Pavement to Parks Initiative to create car-free pedestrian plazas, “There are many challenges to providing residents with open spaces

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While it’s plenty viable in just about any other country, what’s the viability of communities going car-free in the U.S.?  Some experts way in via the NY Times’ Car-Free in America? article, and here’s their bottom lines.  In summary, transportation and planning experts agree going car-free in the suburbs isn’t really a viable option, but car-free districts, at least streets, in dense cities is.

- Witold Rybczynski, noted author and professor of urbanism at the School of Design at the

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Over two years ago we covered how a community of progressive people took it upon themselves to plan their own community in the outskirts of Freiburg, Germany, Beta community designs a neighborhood their way in Germany. Here’s an update on the 5500 resident neighborhood, known as Vauban.

One of the striking characteristics in Vauban is the focus on pedestrians and de-emphasis on cars.  70% of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57% sold a car to move here.  Streets are predominantly car

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Introduced almost a year ago, the NY Plaza Program (a CoolTown Top 20 post) promised to award eight projects in any of NYC’s five boroughs by funding the redesign and redevelopment of the street into a plaza. The winners have finally been announced, and there are nine of them. Check out detailed descriptions of the winners on the this New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) web page.

Brooklyn
1. Fulton Street & Marcy Avenue - Street narrowing to create 8000 s.f. of new

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New York City may be playing the lead tune when it comes to pedestrian-only/car-free placemaking, but San Francisco is following right along to the point it’s sounding like a duet.

In 2008, Manhattan closed several key streets to cars on Saturdays with Summer Streets, and San Francisco followed immediately with Sunday Streets. On February 25, The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the mayor is considering closing the city’s main thoroughfare to cars, and the next day Mayor Bloomberg

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I think we have definitely hit the pedestrian walk tipping point. First Wired Magazine publishes It’s Time for Cities to Favor People, Not Cars, then San Francisco’s mayor announces the possibility of closing the city’s main thoroughfare to cars. Now New York City Mayor Bloomberg announces on February 26, 2009 that Times Square and Herald Square will go completely vehicle-free, along with 36 blocks of Broadway adding a pedestrian promenade and bike lane while leaving a reduced number of car

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Fitting with the previous entry, ‘People over cars’ begins to hit mainstream media, the City of San Francisco revealed that they’re considering closing the busiest street in the city to cars.

Why?

Perhaps it has something to do with the success of its summer Sunday Streets where miles of downtown streets were opened only for pedestrians and bicyclists, which were all the rage in major cities last year.

Perhaps it’s a realization that U.S. cities need to better compete with

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It’s a 180-degree trend reversal in Japan, where emerging generations no longer find having a car as relevant to their daily lives. Automakers even have a name for it, “kuruma banare,“ or “demotorization”. No more car ownership as status symbol, where auto executives fear the nation’s love affair with the automobile is ending.

“Young people’s interest is shifting from cars to communication tools like personal computers, mobile phones and services,“ says Yoichiro Ichimaru of Toyota.

From a

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So if Copenhagen, Denmark is arguably the birthplace of the modern pedestrianization movement, what’s the leading city as far as a contemporary pedestrianization plan? It’d be difficult to beat what Hong Kong has done since 2000.

As you can see in the plans above, Hong Kong’s newly annointed pedestrian streets aren’t just extensive within city districts, but extensive in districts throughout the city. Streets in green are pedestrianized full-time, blue is part-time, and those in yellow are

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Quite often, a movement will have a starting point and a champion. If one had to at least nominate some credit in regard to the pedestrianization of streets, then Copenhagen, Denmark and resident architect Jan Gehl deserve some of the spotlight, especially in a city known for rainy cold weather where the common mantra was ‘this is the wrong city for this’.

Jan was a principal figure in transforming Copenhagen’s main downtown street, the Stroget, into a pedestrian zone. The traffic congested

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