Reply to Can we never do Open Streets again?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When I heard about it from WABA this summer, I was incredibly excited. As a cyclist, I really liked the idea of it as a concept - getting cars off the road and letting everyone see the great possibilities of car-less roads as a vision of the future. [b]But it totally failed in execution because people were walking all over the damn road.[/b] WTF? So you couldn’t ride down the street at any useful speed because some dumbass would just step right out in front of you like you weren’t there. Uh HELLO! It’s still a road people! Just because there aren’t cars doesn’t mean you can just walk where the hell you want. “Open streets” =/= “pedestrians don’t have to stay on the sidewalk”. So it was sort of a failure from the perspective of using the street for car-less travel, because it just resulted in mobs of people getting in the way. Next time they need to make it clear that walkers need to stay on the sidewalk. [/quote]

Yes, that was the whole point.

-a person who rides a bike a lot[/quote]

+1. It was a absolute mess with people walking around everywhere. Next time they do this they need to do a much better (and by "much better" I mean "at all") job explaining that open streets doesn't mean that crowds of people can just stroll down the middle of the road like it's a block party. The street is still reserved for [i]vehicles[/i], except in this case that means bicycles, not cars. People should still be walking on the sidewalk, not in the middle of the road. The point of this was to demonstrate that we could use our existing streets to allow use by bicycles-only, getting everyone out of their cars and on nonpolluting modes of transit. People won't realistically embrace a cycling commute if there's still the same hassles from crowds of pedestrians all over road as there were from cars.

Look at any urban area that has a significant road-use-by-cyclist factor, with fewer cars overall (Amsterdam for example).  If you examine their "traffic" patterns, you see that the roads in urban cores are more than 90% occupied by bicycle users in some areas. But pedestrians DON'T walk in the street simply because of an absence of motor vehicles. They stay on the sidewalks which were designed for them, while the streets belong to bike users as intended.

The same idea needs to be reinforced here next time they do open streets. Open streets doesn't mean "walk in the street" :roll:

[/quote]

It was actually to do anything but drive. So everyone had a right to be in the street. [/quote]

Dp before cars, streets used to be for people walking.  I think we should have a people first moto rather than a car first.[/quote]

Then what are sidewalks for  :roll: ?[/quote]

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