A newly revived proposal to turn New Orleans’s iconic street into an almost totally car-free space is sparking a conversation about an oddly controversial pedestrian safety solution: the pedestrian mall.
Following a New Year’s Day vehicle-ramming attack that claimed the lives of 14 revelers and injured nearly 60 more, officials in the Big Easy are reportedly gearing up for a hard fight: closing Bourbon Street to most car and truck traffic and turning it into a downtown pedestrian mall instead.
Mayor Latoya Cantrell says the final decision won’t be made until after Tuesday’s Mardi Gras celebration, but some skeptics are already voicing perennial concerns about emergency service workers, residents, and other drivers losing near-constant access to the popular tourist strip, as well as raising the specter of the many failed U.S. pedestrian malls in recent memory.
But supporters argue that pedestrianizing Bourbon Street would simply strengthen the temporary barriers that are already supposed to go up during periods of peak foot traffic but often don’t, immediately making the tourist Mecca safer from all manner of vehicular threats. Even some French Quarter business owners are creating petitions in support of the move, recognizing that their customers largely arrive on foot anyway, and national experts agree that the street’s mix of tourists, college students, residents from nearby dense neighborhoods make the corridor a strong candidate for the pedestrian mall treatment.
“If there’s any street in America that will thrive as a purely pedestrian street, it is Bourbon Street,” Jeff Speck, planner and author of “Walkable City,” told Streetsblog.
Speck makes that bold claim with a full awareness of the pedestrian mall’s troubled history in the United States — but said he still believes in its extraordinary potential if we learn from the mistakes of the past.
Once heralded as a panacea for ailing commercial districts — hence the arguably outdated name — city leaders blocked cars from entering more than 200 downtown pedestrian malls across America throughout the 1960s and ’70s, hoping to replicate the success of the shopping-oriented pedestrian plazas that are a fixture across much of Europe. But unlike those in Europe, many of those U.S. malls were isolated oases in an ocean of streets built explicitly for automobile travel, and they were often pushed onto populations with little testing or tweaking to ensure their success — and as a result, many cities soon opted to let the cars back in.
“It is not realistic to compare European pedestrian streets with American pedestrian malls because European cities often have higher density, good public transportation links, a high-quality city center with beautiful historic buildings, and a population with a cultural inclination to walking,” researcher Dorina Pojani wrote in a 2010 report. “In fact, traditionally most Europeans have been familiar with car-less city centers as central plazas, which date from the medieval era, often have such narrow streets that it is impossible to accommodate cars, while in many U.S. cities the automobile has determined the urban form.”
Even without the advantage of ancient urban street grids, though, pedestrian malls have shown massive benefits in the U.S. when they’re done right. In a recent op-ed for Next City, Bill Vitek argued that they can “not only yield social and economic benefits, but … also play a pivotal role in addressing environmental, health and equity issues within cities,” citing evidence that some have directly improved air quality, decreased stormwater runoff, and boosted local business revenues.
Speck argues that the French Quarter’s already-vibrant walking culture, coupled with Bourbon Street’s frequent closures for parades, the recent Super Bowl, and other special events, proves its potential as a full-time mall. But before New Orleans makes things permanent, it will need to give residents a clear vision for how those closures would actually work in their day-to-day lives – and how it will improve on a status quo that leaves many rubbing elbows on too-tight sidewalks.
Perhaps counterintuitively, he said the best contemporary pedestrian malls like the mile-long Lincoln Road in Miami or the eight-block Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Va. tend to offer frequent, slow-speed crossing points for vehicles, ideally with stop signs, but potentially with signals whose timing can be adjusted as walking volumes surge and wane.
And they often do let cars in sometimes — especially when streets lack alleys or obvious alternative side routes — by using removable bollards that can be unlocked with a key to allow EMS and delivery vehicles in and out. In the case of large pedestrianized areas like Cambridge, England, some cities even use retractable bollards that automatically sense an approaching bus or approved resident vehicle and recede into the ground; others with few residences simply dedicate a set hour or two out of of every day for things like trash pick up and street cleaning.
“Bourbon Street certainly has the economics such that, unlike other places, they can demand beer delivery early in the morning — and not worry about trucks demanding a welcome loading zone at 3 p.m.,” Speck added.
The political challenges of closing a street to cars are never easy, even in the wake of deadly tragedies like the one that rocked New Orleans early this year, Speck added. But if New Orleans can pick the low-hanging fruit, other U.S. cities can follow suit.
“Many, many American cities are poised to pedestrianize a shopping street right now — and it’s time for more experimentation,” Speck added.
