Maryland’s first pedestrian-only street in several decades, Ellsworth Drive, was profiled in the previous entry, but it’s not the only one.  In Bethesda, a town at the edge of Washington DC, Bethesda Lane opened in June 2008. If Ellsworth Drive reminds people of Downtown Disney, then Bethesda Lane conjures up Universal Studios. It features 44,000 s.f. of retail distributed through 16 shops and restaurants, mostly chains and luxury items, topped with 180 luxury apartments.

It obviously

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Ok, so those who’ve been down Silver Spring’s Ellsworth Drive in Downtown Silver Spring feel like they’re in Downtown Disney, but the takeaway here is that this is Maryland’s first successful pedestrian-only district (on weekends) in decades.

Ellsworth is the lone pedestrian-only street in the 22-acre mixed-use Downtown Silver Spring redevelopment, including 440,000 s.f. of retail. It’s more of a suburban shopping mall with its large-scale national retailers, but it does have a triangular

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A popular item on many a creatives‘ wishlist is to see a car-dominated commercial street transformed into a pedestrian-only plaza brimming with outdoor diners. Some fortunate residents in NYC may not have to wait much longer.

Following a rather astounding recent track record in prioritizing pedestrians over cars, the NYC DOT (Department of Transportation) presented its latest and greatest, the NYC Plaza Program. When was the last time a Department of Transportation issued a statement like

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Emerging generations want more pedestrian areas, less traffic-congested streets. In Manhattan, pedestrians are literally running out of sidewalk room. This August, New York City is conducting a ground-breaking historical experiment called Summer Streets, to provide a bold answer to this growing demand.

On August 9, 16, 23, three Saturdays between 7am - 1pm, the following streets will be pedestrian only, closed completely to auto traffic:

- Downtown Routes - 6.9 miles:  Park Avenue

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The pedestrian lanes of Melbourne [Streetfilms]

As we gradually evolve from an auto-oriented infrastructure to a more pedestrian-oriented one, other of visiting the best examples around the world, a video is the next best thing to experiencing and understanding the appeal of pedestrian-only streets.

Thanks to Streetfilms, a sort of YouTube meets Discovery Channel, you’ll get an excellent feel for Melbourne, Australia’s myriad pedestrian-only lanes in their film, A Pedestrian Paradise in

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Sign of things to come: Carfree conference comes to the U.S.

What’s a carfree conference? That’s probably what most U.S. citizens would wonder since the first six carfree conferences occurred only in Europe**. However, as you read through the list below, you’ll see that’s about to change…

Towards Carfree Cities I: Lyon, France; October 1997;
Organized by EYFA (European Youth for Action) and RVV (Regroupement pour une ville sans voiture, or Group for a Carfree City, Lyon), with 60-80

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NYC ‘Taking Back the Streets’

Anyone familiar with New York City, especially Manhattan knows that there simply isn’t enough room for the pedestrians. The NY Times takes a look at ten progressive pedestrian-oriented solutions that the city’s urban leaders are suggesting:

The Woonerf - Popular in the Netherlands (translates to ‘living street’), it’s a primarily residential street that does not distinguish between a sidewalk and road, designed to look and feel like an outdoor living

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Car free ‘natural cultural districts’ in the U.S.

While there are 41 entries on the list of car free places (presented in the previous entry) in the U.S., the number may be misleading. For instance, not many of us will ever hear of, say, golf-cart based Bald Head Island, North Carolina, population 173, much less ever visit it or know anyone who does.

However, many of us do live in or visit natural cultural districts, so here are the car free iterations of those you’d probably want to check

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‘The definitive list of car free places

...is on Wikipedia’s list of car free places.

Now the first thing to keep in mind is that a true list would literally consist of thousands of entries. So to present a more meaningful register, the following two criteria are applied:
- They are unusual for their country or region (which explains why there are so many entries from the U.S. and only two from Africa)
- They make up a sizeable fraction of a city, town, or island, though this seems to be

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Apparently that was the attitude of New York’s (DOT) Department of Transportation, a powerful entity in any state, when approached about turning this street into what you see above. According to Streetblog’s Ethan Kent,

“They’ve created a destination for downtown office workers, for people from all over Brooklyn, to come and spend some time in a way they hadn’t been able to before. They great thing about this is they just went ahead and did this. It wasn’t a lot of studies. It wasn’t a

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Speaking of closing down streets in the two previous entries, several months ago I profiled how El Paso, Texas began blocking off several miles of major roads to cars every Sunday, allowing only cyclists and pedestrians. Believe it or not, the primary reason was that the city wanted to shed its reputation as being one of the four fattest in the U.S.

The wildly popular event is known as Ciclovia, but the original Ciclovia and inspiration come from Bogotá, Colombia in South America, with 2

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Manhattan loses an intersection, gains a plaza

A year ago we profiled a neighborhood effort in Manhattan’s tony Meatpacking District to transform a congested, dangerous intersection into a peaceful urban square, A NYC ‘beta community’ to build a piazza. One year later, we present evidence that the process works. Keep in mind this is being referred to as an ‘interim’ plaza - it’ll become even more attractive.

You can even get there by what will be New York’s first ever physically separated

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crowdsourcing…

Realizing the need for a new generation of terms for pedestrian-only streets, what better process than to ask groups of creatives for suggestions, both virtually and in person. Here’s their starting list of informal creative class market driven terms that they feel communicate a shift in how we think about streets:

Slow streets - There’s the slow food movement, the anti-fast food campaign promoting taste,

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crowdsourcing), and more so, words that have taken on a

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El Paso, Texas is a big city (pop. 600,000) without much buzz outside of UTEP, and even worse, it had a less than envious reputation, according to one local representative, “City leaders were faced with a challenge: to get a poor city of overweight, sedentary people moving when there weren’t any parks or [bicycle] lanes. A national magazine declared the city one of the four fattest in the US, and that really got everyone’s attention.”

Welcome Ciclovia! Starting this month, the City will

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True piazzas (pedestrian-oriented plazas completely enclosed by buildings, ringed by restaurants and shops and offices and housing above) are everywhere in Europe, but nowhere to be found in the U.S.

Rockville in Maryland is doing their part with its upcoming Rockville Town Square, a new $360 million, 15-acre town center for their rather suburban town just north of Washington DC.  It’s not a true piazza in that there are auto-oriented streets on two sides, but if you take a look at the …

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What will the next generation of Manhattan look like?

No cars on 42nd Street, for starters, if Vision42 is executed, an initiative for a cross-city pedestrian mall with light rail backed by seven NY elected officials, the Hilton Times Square Hotel and numerous organizations.

This is not just another social cause, it’s a significant economic one.  With the overall economic trends of cities gaining in popularity and population, Vision42 recently completed a study concluding that business

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Why is it so important to know what a paseo is?  One key reason is that it’s tough creating a kind of place if people don’t even know what to call it… you know, those streets with no cars that only pedestrians are strolling along, lined with casual diners at outdoor cafes, bustling waiters, and an ever-changing diversity of sights, scents and sounds.  That’s what a paseo is.

At dictionary.com, a paseo is defined as:
1. a slow, idle, or leisurely walk or stroll.
2. a public place or path

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As profiled in the previous entry, the Temple Bar quarter is a wildly popular and economically successful multi-block pedestrian-only district in Dublin, Ireland.  The question is, how did a city begin to establish such a place to reap such fiscal and cultural benefits?

It starts with affordability and pedestrian-oriented urban fabric.  As late as the 1980s, the state began to buy up and demolish buildings in the area in favor of a major bus terminus. While the plans were delayed due to

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How can a city best create a strong identity for itself, provide that place one can count on for weekend entertainment, set the stage for public gatherings and pass the postcard test?

Project for Public Spaces (PPS) features an ideal solution: Beautiful central public squares, or for more progressive cities, a piazza.  If you’re looking to understand, design, or better yet, develop a square, there’s no better resource than their December newsletter on squares, which includes design

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Why is it that the most pedestrian-oriented streets in the U.S. are found in resorts? The reason being that people in second-home communities have no need to commute to work, so the car is de-emphazed. Plus, they’re looking to pay for a higher quality of life. Well, that sounds a lot like the lifestyle of minipreneurs, so expect to see these pedestrian-first principles in more everyday, urban neighborhoods.

Here’s a preview - just use your imagination and apply the following to urban

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How to do a pedestrian street right

For a vibrant, active, economically successful pedestrian street (paseo), it must have the following:

1. Unique, independent restaurants, cafes, coffeehouses, bars (preferably half the number of venues) so the area is worth visiting in the first place.
2. Outdoor seating for all of the above, providing a strong sense of street life.
3. Significant amounts of housing surrounding the district, ideally also above the first or second floors of the

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Is it time for the return of the pedestrian-only street?

Hundreds of pedestrian malls built in downtowns across the country in the 1970s and 80s failed.  However, downtowns overall failed during that time, as regional malls became all the rage in a time before people experienced traffic congestion.

Back to the future: However, regional malls are failing in the 2000s.  Cities and downtowns are regaining population for the first time in 30 to 50 years in the 2000s.  People are migrating

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The neighborhood piazza - the campo

Italians in the second millennium were all about socializing.  Not only does the city have a grand piazza upon where city-wide events, announcements and demonstrations took place, but every neighborhood had one, two or three of them for their own purposes as well.  In fact, the neighborhood piazza has its own name - the campo, or campi for plural.

There were probably fifty to sixty campi in Venice alone - the piazza capital of Italy.  Of course it has its

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Is there a true piazza in the United States?

No.  There will be one day, but right now there really isn’t anything close.  A true piazza is an urban square enclosed on all four sides by buildings to make a grand outdoor ballroom of sorts.

The closest new development resembling a piazza is Pentagon Row by Post Properties, image below.  It’s much better than what’s been developed over the last 50 years.  However, they’re calling it a piazza, and here’s why it’s not:

1. It’s only enclosed on

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