What We Mean By "Open Streets"

Public space should be multifaceted

Washington, D.C. and many other cities around the world participate in a program called “Open Streets.” That entails closing the streets temporarily—mostly on designated weekend days—to automobile traffic. Oh, so you close the street and then call it ‘open’? Nice anti-car propaganda! Not quite. The point is that by closing the street to cars—which, love them or hate them, do tend to dominate the spaces they’re in—you open it to all the other things streets can be used for. You turn them from places to move through to places to stop. You make them places.

The D.C. official page for the program describes it like this:

Open Streets is a global initiative that offers communities the opportunity to experience their streets in a whole new way. Open Streets events temporarily close roadways to vehicles to provide safe spaces for walking, biking, skating, and other social activities.

Open Streets events help users reimagine public space to prioritize people over cars, provide easy access to recreation and other health-oriented programming, and promote economic development by supporting local businesses.

Semi-relatedly, I saw this in Old Town Alexandria in late August:

If you think this is a scheme to lay the groundwork for taking our cars away, look at the partners:

I can promise you the state DOTs are not trying to take people’s cars away!

But I do wonder which of these is a better rhetorical way to get people to consider temporarily ditching their cars (and maybe realize that they like intentionally doing that once in awhile). I tend to think “Enjoy your streets in a new way!” is more enticing than literally saying “Hey, give up driving for a day, like it’s secular Lent and driving is a minor vice.” (I mean, I believe driving can be a vice, but I don’t think that’s very likely to be good communication.)

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A little bit below I’m going to show you a few more pictures from the street festival in D.C. that I wrote about the other day, where the world record was set for the largest pupusa ever cooked.

It was so cool to watch the traffic lights cycling, and yet to barely even be able to identify the intersection. It was so cool to see the Capitol rising over such a lively street scene—like seeing a deeply familiar place from a different perspective.

I have to say, it feels a little bit like you’re getting away with something—like the appeal isn’t enjoying the street life per se, but doing something you’re not quite allowed to do. It reminds me of the Sip & Stroll event I wrote about recently, a program in my hometown where one night a month you can walk around the street with a beer. I wonder how much of the appeal is just the sense of being able to take part in what feels like a light, harmless transgression?

But that’s the thing—walking around in the street, taking in the sights, engaging in commerce—these aren’t transgressive. There’s this sort of rarely quite articulated idea that cars are the normal, the baseline, and what we urbanists want is to overturn the normal—that urbanism isn’t about cities or land use or the built environment, but about a war on normalcy. That it’s a sort of special interest for a certain kind of unserious, dilettantish, immature person. I think a lot of people who know very little about all of this implicitly think something like that.

The point I’m always trying to make is that we today call “urbanism” is normalcy. The car overturned our relationship with public space. It changed our relationship with places. The car is excellent for traversing distances, but it is far less appropriate in cities. This newfangled “Open Streets” stuff is about reestablishing the full range of things that urban streets are for.

Let me show you a picture from the early 1900s, from this blog post. Where do you think it was taken?

This is Richmond, Virginia, during a market day.

Now tell me how that is fundamentally different from this:

I’m going to leave you with something else I wrote recently:

Even when they were bustling, people were there for specific reasons. We’re getting ice cream, we’re shopping, we’re in town to go to the bank but sure we can sit on the benches for a little bit.

“Americans feel like they need a reason to loiter,” my friend observed. There has to be a bar or a sports game or a street fair or a festival. It’s so difficult, mentally, to just let yourself sit and rest and take in the views. There’s this tendency to say, “Alright, let’s get going, can’t lounge around all day.” Americans travel to lovely walkable European cities and have fun and feel healthy, and then come back and make cracks about how Europeans don’t work.

“There’s a part of you that doesn’t really want to do something unless a part of you doesn’t want to do it,” I replied.

Maybe it’s the Catholic notion of sacrifice. Or maybe it’s the Protestant work ethic. Maybe it’s just the attitude you absorb by osmosis in a very market-driven country. But I can’t shake the impression that the American imperative to always be moving, working, hustling cuts against our ability to slow down and take in a place without a reason.

This is the reason. Being there, with people, in a place you know or are discovering, is the reason.

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Related Reading:

“Streets Closed to Vehicular Traffic”

Expressway Is As Expressway Does

Ban Pedestrians

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