We shouldn’t need football to open streets
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Humans, for thousands of years: This is a street, it’s where we live and work and play together.
Car companies: Um, no. It’s for moving cars! Get off the street, jaywalker!
GM is one of the most evil companies on the planet. The damage they alone have done to North American cities is staggering. The only thing they have ever cared about is making more money and actual human beings don’t even factor in a little bit.
Yes it does. I need my two ton steel emotional safety box to feel safe.
Yes, specifically to cars. It says so right there on the sign.
The road is closed, the street isn’t.
Yes it does. It’s purpose as a means for motorized vehicles to move from a to b is closed. It is now a pedestrian area. It is not a road for pedestrians, because it’s purpose is not to provide transport form a to b. It’s purpose is to house an event.
That’s a street. Streets have existed for millennia, and their purpose is to provide a common space within a city for human social and economic activity. This photo depicts that original purpose. Streets were only arrogated by motor vehicle manufactures about a century ago.
You’re discribing something else. A plaza or a patio or whatever. A street has always been a passage from one place to another. A century ago, there was room for human social and economic activity. That was not it’s purpose, it was a common side effect of free, public space. When cars came, so came the rules that banned people from those streets.
I hear ya, but various cities are re-thinking this to help revitalize their downtowns. For example, streets can be made pedestrian-only during the summer to create outdoor dining or event spaces then returned to car-focused during the winter. Businesses love this because it turns out if you have a lot of people just wandering around, more people come into your business. So next time the roads need major repairs, they are redesigned to be pedestrian-focused in summer and car-focused in winter.
