Open Streets: A Gateway to Better Cities
A car-choked urban street becomes a temporary public park. People walk, bicycle, hula-hoop and hopscotch. Musicians give impromptu concerts. Small children ride tricycles and push bikes down the center of the street. This is the genius of Open Streets: closing public space to cars and opening it to human activity.
“It is a very profound sight to see and to hear, or not hear, what a busy city street becomes when you take the cars away,” said Susan King, San Francisco’s Sunday Streets program manager at Livable City. “Standing in the middle of the street you can take in the architecture and notice things that you don’t have the opportunity to notice when there are cars around.”
In 2005, there were 11 Open Streets programs in North America. There are now more than 80. Gil Peñalosa, one of the organizers behind Bogota’s pioneering Ciclovía, which draws two million people to 70 miles (115 kilometers) of opened streets every Sunday, continues to inspire the movement as executive director of 8-80 Cities.