Streets are for People
February 18, 2022 1:33 PM   Subscribe

Paris has announced [fr][en] a through-traffic-free zone in the city center, to begin in 2024. Delivery drivers, local traffic, people with disabilities, and emergency vehicles will still be able to enter the "tranquil zone".

Meanwhile, in New York City, the city mysteriously removed and reinstated a popular "Open Street". NYC Open Streets are not closed to cars, but drivers must move barriers to access the street and must obey a speed limit of 5mph. The official explanation for the sudden dis- and reappearance was a "miscommunication". NYC DOT has announced they have begun installing concrete barriers to provide more protection than flex posts for "protected" bike lanes. A delivery cyclist recently died after a taxi passenger doored him in a paint-protected bike lane on 11th Avenue in Manhattan.

In Philadelphia, a plan to narrow Washington Avenue to three traffic lanes, previously deemed "the safest option", was scrapped. City officials cited equity concerns as part of their decision to not go forward with the plan.

In Berkeley, the city council will be debating a proposal to consider making Telegraph Avenue, a main thoroughfare, car free (see item 27 at the link).

And in San Francisco, hundreds of people came out to rally to keep JFK Drive, in Golden Gate Park, car-free, after members of the city's Board of Supervisors criticized it as "segregationist".

Finally, in Berlin, over 50,000 citizens have signed a petition to create a car-free zone bigger than Manhattan in the city centre. To succeed, they'll need to collect 170,000 signatures and, if the government refuses to implement the proposal at that point, win a public referendum.
posted by threementholsandafuneral (25 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
Also, in D.C., a commission is potentially going to give Pennsylvania Avenue a serious diet.
posted by General Malaise at 1:47 PM on February 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


For scale, the same area superimposed on Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Auckland and Brooklyn. For now, people are doing it manually, there's probably a site somewhere where you can automate this.
posted by Tom-B at 1:51 PM on February 18, 2022 [2 favorites]


More info on Berlin's efforts: Kiezblocks. It's an effort to get each neighborhood to organize its own local car-free plan and advocate for it. There's a lot of momentum for it.

I wish these plans weren't pitched as "ban cars"; I appreciate this post didn't frame it that way. The change is to make the areas people-first. Vehicles that need to enter still can, for a variety of reasons. But if it's anything like the European pedestrian zones that have existed for the last 50+ years the cars have to go slow and definitely do not have the right of way. It makes for remarkably livable neighborhoods.

(A hidden piece of this Americans often miss; our streets are also used as car storage. That's not such a problem in Paris or Berlin where parking in garages is already common. In the US if we closed all streets to cars we'd have a serious storage problem. We need to solve that along with the other challenges the change will create.)
posted by Nelson at 1:56 PM on February 18, 2022 [11 favorites]


That NYC open street they refer to is in my own neighborhood - which, coincidentally, is also Letitia James' home neighborhood. I'm going to pretend that the speed with which it was re-instated was because someone said "oh crap we're gonna have Tish James on our backs, aren't we."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:59 PM on February 18, 2022 [4 favorites]


Barcelona's Superblocks, too, I think?
posted by clew at 2:13 PM on February 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


The car storage issue Nelson notes is a fascinating one. Cars' spatial geometry dictates so much of what's wrong with cities and storage is a bit part of that -- a different storage approach is even why Japanese cities are so much more inviting. One particularly ironic wrinkle here is that free parking winds up under-funding other sources of change; it's a huge foregone revenue opportunity (as UCLA's Donald Shoup has been saying for years) as well as externalized cost. Imagine how much revenue we could pour into bike/ped work solely by pricing parking at market prices (less, of course, discounts to avoid regressivity for lower income folks).
posted by SandCounty at 2:30 PM on February 18, 2022 [8 favorites]


A hidden piece of this Americans often miss; our streets are also used as car storage.

America actually does have nationwide full employment and socialized housing programs, provided you're a car.
posted by mhoye at 3:53 PM on February 18, 2022 [13 favorites]


@ SandCounty, there is no legal on street parking in Japan. progress from a long time ago.
posted by wmo at 4:12 PM on February 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


94% of Parisians live less than 5 minutes [walk] from a bakery.

The things you can do when your cities aren't based around cars.
posted by meowzilla at 4:18 PM on February 18, 2022 [9 favorites]


Well also when your city subsidizes bakeries. But the best thing about that Paris map is that it's only a map of boulangeries. The patisseries are an entirely different kind of bakery.
posted by Nelson at 4:48 PM on February 18, 2022 [4 favorites]


And every year they have a city wide competition to decide which bakery makes the best baguette.

Since its Doubles Jubilee I thought this would be a great place to put a lovely reminder of a favourite 2012 FPP about the best pastries in Paris and where to find them. Unfortunately the links seem to have been hollowed out, so you will have to out up with this solitary link about 20 good patisseries in Paris.

I think its worth remembering that no one who went to Paris up to the lockdowns would have described the city as anything other than at least a bit car oriented, and they still had the bakeries. Its a bit more complicated than that.
posted by biffa at 4:48 PM on February 18, 2022


Another significant change in Paris is the investment in bike infrastructure. I first noticed this change after the really long Paris metro strike, what, 15 years ago? A bunch of Parisians started riding bikes to get around. Then they realized they liked bikes, then came the Vélib' street bike rentals (one of the first cities to treat those as transportation infrastructure), then came the bike lanes. Now a lot of Parisians bike. Berliners, too.

Unfortunately some of the bikers are fairly aggressive, I've been almost run down more than once crossing Rue du Rivoli despite clearly having the pedestrian crossing light. I've never had that experience with a car in Paris. OTOH I'd much rather be hit by a bike than a car. Anyway I worry a little bit about this car-free change in Paris that it might embolden the bikes to be even more aggressive. There's a balance to be struck here but no matter how you look at it, fewer cars is a good change for Paris IMHO.
posted by Nelson at 4:58 PM on February 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


Can someone local speak tot he SF JFK thing? Is this drivers using the disabled/POC as a club to get their way? Is this something that could be mitigated by preventing through transit of the park but still allowing people to drive into parking in the park or on the periphery?
posted by Mitheral at 5:32 PM on February 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


Another significant change in Paris is the investment in bike infrastructure. I first noticed this change after the really long Paris metro strike, what, 15 years ago? A bunch of Parisians started riding bikes to get around.

I lived in Paris for a brief stint, and rode bikes everywhere. Paris is friggin' small, and perhaps not something your realize if you just take the Métro everywhere. The only time I took the Métro was if I was going to a party and that was kinda dumb anyways, as I was always able to walk home half drunk in a reasonable amount of time in the morning.

Gaaaaawd I miss Paris!
posted by alex_skazat at 5:39 PM on February 18, 2022


I'm curious about the SF JFK thing as well, and I live there. I'm sure this is simplistic, but can it not be closed to traffic, but still allow people with disabilities' cars through? And maybe allow ride share service cars to pick up & drop off at specific locations along the periphery (but still within) the park?

I also assume that public transit is excluded from the ban - I'm not sure I understand how this is affecting neighborhoods that are far away more.
posted by wym at 6:12 PM on February 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


This is just a stealthy way to defang Parisian riots.

*taps side of head* Can't burn cars if there aren't any cars.
posted by JDHarper at 7:33 PM on February 18, 2022 [3 favorites]


I'm down for no cars/less cars and slow streets, but one thing I've not seen spoken about much at all (to be fair, I don't follow urban planning stuff as much as I used to) are the equity issues of concentrating traffic that would be dispersed more equally across a street grid onto what essentially becomes collector streets surrounding the slow street/no cars area. Here in SF my gut feeling is that most of the designated slow streets are streets with a higher than average percentage of owener-occupied housing such as Page Street in the Lower Haight (where the Mayor lives, I'm sure just coincidentally), Lake Street and Cabrillo in the Richmond, etc. So essentially all the thru traffic that would have gone down Page now gets squeezed onto parallel Haight and Oak/Fell (already traffic sewers) Streets and the thru traffic that would have gone down very tony Lake Street is shunted onto already busy much more diverse California Street. Since auto pollution (I think) is highly localized the burden of implementing Slow Streets would seem to fall on renters/less wealthy (who drive less, let's not forget) while car-driving homeowners reap the majority of the benefits while also getting full auto use of a now quasi private street with suddenly much more ample street parking available. Am I being too critical here?
posted by flamk at 10:51 PM on February 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


Regarding the JFK/GG Park thing... I think the argument is that working class folks in the outer neighborhoods (southeastern neighborhoods) rely on their cars much more than wealthier folks in the inner neighborhoods and crosstown Muni routes (especially in the weekends and especially during COVID and especially from the SE part of the city) are notoriously slow, inconvenient, etc. That said, there is an AMAZING very large park (McLaren) in the southeastern part of the city that is very car friendly so I think that article is honestly maybe a smidge over the top, but I'm not those people in that neighborhood so what do I know?
posted by flamk at 11:07 PM on February 18, 2022 [1 favorite]


So glad this was updated to allow people with disabilities to enter the traffic free zone, I was really worried about getting around!

Yes, Paris is tiny compared to other capital cities, and we have so many amenities within walking distance.

I’m hoping they bring back subsidies for electric bikes too.
posted by ellieBOA at 2:41 AM on February 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


*taps side of head* Can't burn cars if there aren't any cars.
Lol don't worry we'll find other stuff

Have to say I don't necessarily agree that on-sreet parking isn't an issue in Paris; depends I'm sure on what neighborhood you're in (€€€), but where I live and work fully half if not 2/3 of most streets are given over to parking. I'm somewhat optimistic about bike infrastructure, but the drivists are putting up one hell of a fight.
posted by peakes at 5:27 AM on February 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


one thing I've not seen spoken about much at all (to be fair, I don't follow urban planning stuff as much as I used to) are the equity issues of concentrating traffic that would be dispersed more equally across a street grid onto what essentially becomes collector streets surrounding the slow street/no cars area.

When opponents rally against car-free areas or congestion pricing, they predict a traffic apocalypse at the marginal neighborhoods. But actual traffic models show that it's a lot more complex than that, with restrictions leading to an overall drop in traffic volume. Which makes sense: if there's a restricted area, people don't keep trying to drive to it and then stopping at the edge. They replace that car trip with something else.

As the the rest of the equity issue, given the widespread benefits of restrictions on cars, and given who's most vulnerable to the many health threats of unchecked car traffic, I think it calls for making more of these zones outside of central business areas - in more localized neighborhood-downtowns throughout the rest of cities, perhaps, to ensure that not only the residents of the high-priced central business districts get the health, economic, and quality-of-life benefits from these measures.
posted by entropone at 5:47 AM on February 19, 2022 [7 favorites]


In dense areas car traffic expands to fill however much space has been allocated to it. The flip side of this is that if you reduce the number of streets available to cars, car traffic reduces by the same amount.

Various parts of London are putting in Low Traffic Neighbourhoods - closing a whole area to through car traffic - which require detailed traffic counts before and after, and the universal observation is that there is no discernible increase in overall car traffic on surrounding streets.
posted by grahamparks at 7:14 AM on February 19, 2022 [7 favorites]


More info on Berlin's efforts: Kiezblocks. It's an effort to get each neighborhood to organize its own local car-free plan and advocate for it. There's a lot of momentum for it.

I collected signatures for my neighborhood Kiezblock, and it's so great. It's exciting to see people brainstorming things like curb bump-outs and weekly play-hours (no cars allowed). My favorite technique in the Kiezblock arsenal is probably diagonal modal filters at 4-way intersections: drivers are forced to turn and rethink their life choices while people cycling or riding a moped go straight through. It's a dirt-cheap, high-impact intervention for a small residential street. I pass a couple in Graefekiez on my commute and I love them.

Berlin city planners are doing some ✨amazing✨ work outside of these citizen-led initiatives, too. The transformations are incredible at the newly pedestrianized Lausitzer Platz (between Görli and Markthalle 9), the calmed Bergmannstraße (which took a few failed experiments to get right), and the protected bike lanes along Bülowstraße (westward from Gleisdreieck park), Hasenheide/Karl-Marx-Straße, and Kottbusser Damm — the latter-most of which reduced emissions by 22%!

It's hard to overstate how powerful these improvements are. I used to be an Enthused and Confident cyclist, but after having experienced riding with a child, with less-confident friends, and with older family members who have mobility issues, I feel in my bones how these long stretches of protected lanes open up a whole new cityscape for the majority of people who are Interested but Concerned.
posted by daveliepmann at 1:00 AM on February 20, 2022 [4 favorites]


diagonal modal filters at 4-way intersections

Those can be SO GREAT. The flats of Berkeley have them, they were pleasant to live on and great to bike through and my neighborhoods had very very very uncertain bicyclists become more confident which was great to see.

And when I drove in that quadrant absentmindedly, I always wound up at a fire station; I think the diagonals leave a short route from the fire stations *to* everywhere and I was being channeled backwards.
posted by clew at 3:22 PM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]


94% of Parisians live less than 5 minutes [walk] from a bakery.

The things you can do when your cities aren't based around cars.


This is true in the US too, but it's a Subway.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on February 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


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