New York proposes pedestrianising a chunk of mid-town Broadway. This is a great idea from just about every perspective - the New York DOT even says it will improve traffic flows by eliminating a few of those acute-angle junctions, which makes sense.
The story reminded me that I’d like to see something similar done for quiet residential streets but on a much more informal basis. Lowman Road, where I live, is closed off one Sunday afternoon every year for a street party, featuring the usual elements of live music, outdoor drinking, weird tat-stalls, sun-stroke, and communist balloons for children. It gets crowded, partly because it is obviously a special occasion, but also because lots of people on the street come out and stay out, chatting to each other or playing footy with the local kids, etc. It’s all very nice, and each time I think “hey, we should do this more often”. Not the whole party rigmarole - just close the street (it’s about 100m long) to through traffic so that people can use it without fear of being run over without warning. It’s not as if there would be a massive impact on traffic - in half an hour last Sunday afternoon, I counted eight cars going past, two of them local residents coming or going. So the displacement onto the parallel Jackson Road would be about one extra car every five minutes, hardly enough to notice.
There are a lot of residential streets in London like mine, where the traffic flow is high enough to scare off children playing and other casual use but low enough that diverting it elsewhere every so often won’t make much difference. In policy terms, closing these streets off to through traffic once every fortnight or month in summer could do a great deal to promote outdoorsy fun, improve physical health, boost that kind of neighbourliness all politicians seem to be in favour of, and make the city a more pleasant place to raise children. It may also bring about a more subtle psychological shift, from the perception of streets as places where cars rule and people fear to tread, to places where people rule and cars go slowly.
If it was such a great idea people would be doing it already though, right? Maybe, or maybe it’s one of those things that people don’t do because they don’t see people doing it, a tipping-point sort of thing. I can also see councils treating it as more of a pain in the arse than an opportunity to improve local quality of life, so there’s a natural role there for any mayor who wanted to promote the idea, if he can be bothered.
